Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[WxTech]

It strikes me as excessive the way bomb blast has such a far reach. A big bomb on a town/city will take out a considerable number of dwellings to a rather surprising distance. Rather more extensive than really occurred, as far as I can discern. For instance, a V1 or even a V2 would fully collapse buildings only in a surprisingly confined radius. But in the game a similar weight of explosive will decimate an area of radius several times greater. And with area being a squared function, the acreage of destruction becomes massive.

From my perspective, the most egregious result is the huge number of effect particles emitting from the large number of destroyed structures and objects. It causes the annoying drop-out of whole areas of effect generation.

What to do? Obviously, I should lower the occurrence of fire and smoke from damaged objects of certain types. That is, impose a probability factor that will have fire/smoke be emitted for only some fraction of the destroyed objects. Say, 1 out of three. The objects of Body type "Wood" and "Rock" cover a lot of buildings. And my new "Flesh" type is now widely used in my static.ini for humans, animals and a good number of smaller objects like tents and scenery clutter. These three Body types could have such a reduction in a probability occurrence of destruction effects and not be too badly missed.

But the blast radii for a number of bombs might do well to be reduced.

I've done a preliminary analysis of the relationship between bomb mass and the power radius as set in each weapon class. I realize that mass alone is not the final arbiter on blast effectiveness, but it's a reasonably decent first order indicator. I listed all weapon class values of power radius in a spreadsheet, and used the stated mass as taken from the weapon name, where clear enough. There are a lot of unknown masses that would require to look at the mass value in the class. But I wasn't interested in completeness at this stage; a reasonable sampling suffices.

The spreadsheet below shows only the last small number of the more than 1200 entries in the list (includes guns, cannon, torpedos, etc.), with a chart for the entries having both a power radius and mass value. The huge scatter certainly reveals the significant departure of power radius by mass of bomb! To appreciate this, consider bombs of 500kg mass (that scale being on the vertical axis). Follow the horizontal line for "500", and note that there occur values for power radius ranging from 30 to 550 meters! That is a humongous range. Now, some smaller radii will result from armor piercing ordnance, for instance. But a 500kg bomb having a characteristic destruction distance out to a couple or few hundred meters? That just seems ridiculous.

Anyone else feel some kind of rationalizing might be in order? Or are things now so deeply entrenched in terms of established game play and scoring as make such a change unfeasible?

[larschance]

It depends how much realism players want. I believe there is an element who like the more spectacular explosions and wow factor that your effects have brought. The money shot as Sgt Fresh calls it. I am an historian and am torn between the real and the game.

The change to more realistic effect could be issued as a mod via jsgme so it can be switched on and off to suit players of both ilks.

[Dreamk]

Look at the data in my bomb packs - the radius has been corrected using real terminal ballistic data and formulas so as to get a coherency.
What needs indeed to be corrected is the visual effects - especially for incendiary, as they are absurd.

[WxTech]

larschance,
The graphical representation of an explosion is completely separate from any underlying calculations of damage. The visuals are a whole different matter, being a graphical element in isolation. One could assign the small explosion effects set for the 10kg class ordnance to a nuke detonation and the same vast damage for the multi kiloton blast would be incurred. Conversely, the nuke blast effects could be tied to a 10kg bomb and the minimal damage effected by that wee little Itty bitty explosive would obtain.

Visual effects are just that--visual. They are in no way determinative of the actual impact on object damage. The effect designer is responsible for trying to match the graphics to the 8ncurred damage.

My gripe is that the damage radius exceeds, to a fantastic degree, any sensible effect extent that remotely reflects reality. A blast cloud which extends to 200m in diameter is ridiculously tiny when surrounded by exploded buildings 2-3X farther away than the perimeter of said blast cloud.

Bomb blast effect is a cubic function, in that the filling factor of the overpressure is volume dependent. If we set a given pressure level at given distance for X mass of explosive, for 2X mass of explosive the volume enclosed at the same pressure level is 2X, meaning the radius for that pressure level scales as X^0.333. Doubling the explosive mass and hence the volumetric filling factor results in a radial increase for given pressure level of factor 1.26. A 10X increase in explosive mass brings the radius out to 2.15 times larger. A 50X increase in explosive mass has the radius expend to 3.68. A 100X increase in explosive mass has the radius grow to 4.64.

As can be seen, the blast radius scales decidedly non linearly with explosive mass, due to the dissipation of pressure as the cubic function of volume. Explosive mass must be increased enormously in order to work as desired for a given desired increase in distance.

[Epervier]

I am overwhelmed by your explanations... but one thing is certain... bombs do too much damage when they fall on villages or city districts. 

[larschance]

I understand your points. I too find it surprising when attacking a town that a 50kg bomb can destroy a whole row of houses for example. The multiple bomblets may have caused such effect but not necessarily a single bomb.

As for the napalm effect when you watch a film of say Vietnam bombing the napalm is quite widespread and spectacular but I wonder of it was so during the early use in WW2.

[tomoose]

I recently put together a mission for our little group (we use HSFX for online play) where P-38s attacked a "staff conference" in Normandy.  I used one of the smaller castle objects to simulate a chateau and placed AA and infantry around the area.
Thinking that the castle object would not be destroyed per se I placed a few Opel fuel trucks inside.

I hoped the mission would be a bit of a grind requiring at least a few runs from the group to completely destroy the target.  However, on the first run-in, one 500lb bomb which clearly fell short of the castle resulted in every fuel truck in the castle to explode.  Visually pleasing but realistically disappointing. 

All that to say, I agree with WxTech on the 'reach' of bomb-blasts.  They could do with a tweak.

[AirShark]

radius goes vertically as well and its completely absurd anything above 500kg will rip off the wings on low-bombing even with delay of 4-5 seconds, slower planes like the swordfish are near to impossible to be used for low bombing, when it becomes to structural damage it feels overpowerd but cant say the same for ships, warships specifically even destroyers can take a direct bomb hit while stand still with few flames.

[WxTech]

I adjusted a half dozen 2000 lb (1000 Kg) bomb classes, reducing the generally ~160m radius down to 75m. In a test dropping an American 2000 lb bomb on Ie Shima did indeed apparently halve the diameter of the area of destroyed houses. That's a reduction to 1/4 of the blasted area and hence 1/4 the number of destroyed objects.

The power remains the same; it's just that the effectiveness falls off more rapidly than before. I prefer it.

[WxTech]

Here's my first stab at a formula for determining blast radius. It's based on my selection of 75m for 1000kg. The formula takes the square root of the mass, then raises that to the power of 1.25. The graph plots this function, the results of which are in the 3rd column. (The first column is the mass, and the second column is the square root of the mass.)

[Epervier]

Very interesting!
Ok, now we just have to modify hundreds of Class...                 

[WxTech]

To give a sense of the potential changes, this chart plots the existing (OLD) blast radii versus the NEW radii as per my provisional formula, (mass^0.5)^1.25. The straight green line shows the position a datum would be found if the old and new values were the same. Some of the smaller bombs could have their radii actually increased, but the majority would have a reduction, and notably so for the larger ones. (Click for a full size image if too small on your screen.)

Note the Tallboy (at the upper right) would have its radius go from 1.5km (!) down to 230m (460m wide, which I would call plenty large enough.)