Sea Power · published
Hello from the Triassic Games team!
One of our major initiatives is reworking air combat and aircraft behavior, as this is consistently one of the areas most requested for improvement.
All of these initiatives are still Work in Progress, but the team is making progress on each:
Allowing drawable Patrol Zones to which aircraft can be assigned on the map,
Overhauling the aircraft control UI,
Updating the threat prioritization algorithm of AI aircraft,
Implementing kinematics, allowing use of real tactics in air combat, especially during BVR combat.
Today we would like to share an update on Missile Kinematics, which is currently in the final round of testing in the Public Beta Branch.
We expect to update the main release branch with these new mechanics in the next few weeks!
Kinematics is the study of objects in motion and how they move, accelerate, and decelerate. For us, this means a more accurate simulation of how missiles fly. Most missiles are rather simple - they are fired, they burn their motor for a short time, then they cruise towards the target, using the inertia built up from that motor burn to allow them to smash through the air that is between them and their target, as well as fight against gravity to get up to their target. Both of these things take energy, and so as the missile travels, it slows down. The faster it’s going, and the lower in the atmosphere it is, the more air it has to smash through to get where it wants to go, and the faster it slows down.
Currently, missiles all travel a flat distance before exploding, sometimes slowing down a bit along the path. But for the most part, missiles don’t actually act like that. They start off going extremely fast, then lose speed as they travel through the atmosphere. Atmospheric density, however, falls off quickly as you gain altitude, meaning missiles fired at high altitude, or at targets who are at higher altitude, have dramatically less air to go through, and as such, are slowed down much less, and can travel much further.
So the range for missiles isn’t constant any more. Rather, the range starts depending on many factors, which you can try to influence in your favor to make your missiles fly further, and enemy missiles fail sooner.
How fast are you going? The missile inherits the speed of the launch aircraft, and this can make a big difference in how fast it winds up going. A fast aircraft can fire a missile a lot further.
How high up are you? The air is thinner up high, so firing from high altitude reduces the amount of drag the missile gets.
How high up is your target? This is similar to the above point, a high altitude target has less air in the way to stop the missile.
And how is the target traveling relative to you? If the target is flying away from you, by the time the missile gets there it will have had to travel a lot further, so it will lose a lot more speed.
Is the missile limited by its seeker performance? IR missiles may have drastically reduced range if they can’t see the hot parts of your aircraft and you aren’t having significant body-heating via high speeds and drag, and radar missiles may have issues with small targets low down.
This means that the range a missile can fly is now no longer a constant, but able to be influenced by many different factors which you can utilize. Wanting to fire a long range strike at some bombers using the AIM-54A Phoenix? Get your F-14s up high and going fast before they fire to extend the range of the missile. Need to dodge a SAM that was fired at you? Dive down and turn away to make it dive into thicker air where it can’t maintain speed.
If you are interested in the technical implementation behind Kinematics, our developer Nick (Bluedot) will be putting together a detailed write up on this over on the MicroProse Discord. If you are not on our Discord, we highly recommend joining here: https://discord.gg/8YCeJekkNb
One of the most common requests we see is for more scenario and campaign content within Sea Power. The Triassic Games team is actively working in this direction, and we plan to release two new Linear Campaigns over the coming months.
In the meantime, we’d like to spotlight an excellent community-created campaign, Battle of the Atlantic by IlDuce-17, available now on the Steam Workshop. The campaign currently features 25+ missions, and if you’re looking for a challenging, story-driven experience, we highly recommend subscribing and giving it a try.
Each mission in the campaign is a separate Workshop item. Here is a link to the first mission:
nuclearstonk from the Triassic team has been busy reworking many of the game's weapon assets. These are available in Public Beta now, coming to the main branch in the next few weeks!
To wrap up this month’s update, here’s a quick look at a few things the team has been working on. These previews are shared in no particular order, and timelines vary, but we hope you enjoy this early glimpse at what’s coming.
Royal Navy Leander class frigate (Type 12I) Batch 1 with Ikara anti-submarine weapon
New Ikara launcher for Royal Navy units
Close up view of the Ikara anti-submarine weapon
USS Merrill DD-976 with Armored Box Launchers installed for Tomahawk missiles
Intro event for a new Linear Campaign being introduced
A-1 Skyraider early work in progress model
Thank you to everyone in the Sea Power community for your continued support and interest in the project. We appreciate your feedback, and we look forward to sharing more progress with you in the months ahead!
- The Triassic Games team