cannot reproduce and missing track file Rockets kill radius seem REALLY under powered

[Frag]

Hi guys,

 

it was probably been talked about in the past, but the kill radius of rockets are nowhere close to reality in DCS. Eagle Dynamic really should do something about this.

 

As an example, the HUGE S-24, which as an explosive charge of 271 pounds and a proximity fuse that will make it explode a 10 feet over the ground has a kill RADIUS of 300-400 meters!!!! (984 to 1312 feet). If the stats in wikipedia are true, that makes that thing extremely powerful against soft target!

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-24_rocket

 

Playing around with that monster rocket this week made me realize how weak it is in the game ... barely scratching infantry that are close by. Because of this and their weight, it is a lost of time to carry these around.

 

Am I the only one who thinks that the rockets kill radius should be revised? It seems odd that such an important stat seems overlooked while so much efforts are put on corner case missile path trajectory.

 

 

 

Edited June 26, 2021 by Frag

[ddwg72]

That number is for casualty radius not kill radius.  There is as kill radius and casualty radius for weapons.  Kill radius is your are dead if you are that close if nothing is shielding you.  Casualty radius is that is "can" cause serious injury up to that range if nothing shielding you.  Not saying they don't need to be increased and really need it just that the kill radius is generally around 1/10th or so of casualty radius.

[GGTharos]

22 hours ago, Frag said:

As an example, the HUGE S-24, which as an explosive charge of 271 pounds and a proximity fuse that will make it explode a 10 feet over the ground has a kill RADIUS of 300-400 meters!!!! (984 to 1312 feet). If the stats in wikipedia are true, that makes that thing extremely powerful against soft target!

 

That's more like low-yield nuclear weapon kill radius.   Did you know that an Mk-82 has a 1km frag radius?   Should be just blow up everything in a 1km radius from an Mk-82?

 

22 hours ago, Frag said:

Am I the only one who thinks that the rockets kill radius should be revised? It seems odd that such an important stat seems overlooked while so much efforts are put on corner case missile path trajectory.

 

Pretty much yep.  Frag radius should be 300-400m, but the further away you are from the impact the less likely you are to be hit by any of these fragments - really unlikely beyond say 20-40m.  If you're behind any sort of cover you're probably flat out safe.

[Frederf]

MK82s have a dangerous radius of something like a 3000' semi-sphere for up to about 30s. This radius is based on flight safety when dropping bombs in terms of having a non-negligible risk of fragmentation between self or other airplanes. The risk analysis is something like 0.1% if I remember. It's possible to get a piece of hot metal shrapnel in your airplane following within 3000' behind the bombs of the guy in front of you. It isn't 50/50 odds. It's something like if you train or do combat operations regularly inside this risk envelope someone is going to get unlucky sooner or later. Outside this envelope the risk isn't zero but it's deemed acceptably low.

 

A MK82 is absolutely not lethal out nearly that far. You'd have to be very unlucky to be hit with a magic chunk. Blast against exposed infantry is more like 100'. Fragmentation varies based on exact model and fuzing. One analysis has a 10% chance of incapacitation at 250m.

 

Lethal effects of fragmentary weapons are highly statistical/probabilistic. You can be 200m away and be fine or 800m away and get your hat knocked off.

[Tippis]

I wrote up a big post about it that I now can't find, but I think a huge part of this problem is the way DCS handles its different damage states and how it ties them to the destruction events and triggers that define what happens in the game.

 

Basically, things don't “die” until they're at 0 HP, and only when they “die” do they count as neutralised for the purpose of counting points or triggering events. Even the very simple pile-of-HP system DCS uses could yield far more sensible results if those states — and the “death” state in particular — were shuffled around and/or redefined.

 

I wouldn't actually be shocked if there really was a 10% chance of incapacitation at 250m if you dump Mk82s on infantry. The problem is that infantry in this game don't care about being incapacitated. At most, they move at half speed, maybe they get a reduced rate of (still pinpoint accurate) fire, but nothing that you'd really notice when you zoom around them and definitely not anything that is reflected in the mission stats.

 

If, instead, ground units (or anything without complex system sims, really) were actually counted as incapacitated — as in, rendered incapable of combat — at, say, 70% HP (all these percentages are purely hypothetical and for illustration), the low damage of explosions would suddenly make a huge difference. You don't have to make truck explode (=100% destroyed) to make it completely useless, same as how you don't have to 100% kill a human to make them not matter any more. With a bit of finessing of the states, and in particular the way units transition from the final damage states (burning -> dead), you could make that infantry be a lot more reasonable in how it responds to things around it. Set it's “burning” (=bleeding out) state at, say, 80% — once it's bled out to below 70% HP, it triggers the equivalent of the current “unit dead” event (for scoring, unit alive counts etc), and then it sits around until its HP is reduced to 0 at which point it's dead dead.

 

This would even open up for interesting future additions where that HP and damage state could be tied to and manipulated by scripting. Oh no! Johnny is down out in the open in the field… but if you get your Medic Huey close enough to him, his HP will start ticking up again and soon he'll be fit for fight… Or something a bit more complex and realistic.  

[Fri13]

It is question do you get hit by fragment or not. 

 

Standing a 20 meters from a Mk.82 explosion with nose fuze on hard ground doesn't leave much changes that none of the fragments would hit you, and the noise, shock wave and all does their own thing. 

 

Standing 800 meters from a Mk.82 explosion will eliminate all the shock waves and heat, but that noise will be severe for such distance. But you can be hit by a fragment if you are unlucky. 

 

I think that for sake of simulation, those 800 m fragmentation could be left out from any calculations toward ground units. It could be performed against a air vehicles like helicopters or jets that dropped it etc, as it could be reasonable sometimes get hit by such. by some odd reason. 

 

But if we start to talk about distances like 50 meters and 150 meters, then we are in the radius of actually required to calculate effects. We could easily make off most of them if we have three stances for infantry, standing, crouched, and prone. If the soldier is standing, then perform calculation. If the soldier is crouched, you lower the probability and if the soldier is prone, then you don't do anything for damage, but you can distract and disturb, cause shock, fear etc. 

Then if the soldier is inside a 50 meters and is prone, you start to do some calculations for damage.

 

I have seen IRL enough Mk.82's to go off, that I wouldn't want to be anywhere near those things.

Seeing 80 mm mortars effects or 155 mm artillery impacts and then the target area doesn't leave much to guessing that what would happen to 100+ men in the area.

Even if you would stay alive dug in the foxhole, you would be so frighten that fighting is likely last thing you are thinking at that moment.

 

24 minutes ago, Tippis said:

This would even open up for interesting future additions where that HP and damage state could be tied to and manipulated by scripting. Oh no! Johnny is down out in the open in the field… but if you get your Medic Huey close enough to him, his HP will start ticking up again and soon he'll be fit for fight… Or something a bit more complex and realistic.  

 

Please, no "healing" in the field.

We need actual operation instead these game functions. Meaning you need to evacuate the personnel = transport them away. You need to move your troops away, recover the vehicles and if not possible then possibly destroy them etc. 

 

It is already enough arcade that we have 3 minute repair and refueling in the base for aircraft and infinite amount of planes, fuel, weapons etc. 

It would be far nicer to have the proper turn-around times for fighters, and then just have few of them on roadbases etc. So you need to then jump to another if you want to take-off from there - or wait the whole time. In SP it is possible to speed up the time, but in multiplayer it means you are out of luck. Having limited amount of planes in the airbase means that you do not want to crash or destroy them. As you are left with none.

The ground commanders should be there to protect their soldiers and vehicles, so they don't get damaged and injured - or worse, killed and destroyed. If those tasks would in RTS mode require micro management and get the medical rescue helicopter and recover vehicles etc for proper places, then be it. You learn to avoid them getting damaged. 

 

Rockets would alone become more effective when you could stress the enemy, cause them moral pressure, weaken their will and cause fear etc. Suppress them from fighting. As then you could utilize them far more as should when you don't need to kill targets. Coordinated attack with the ground forces would help to capture areas, get enemy withdraw and move them away is as effective method as trying to kill them. 

Now when every AI is like complete idiot that doesn't know what "death" means, they are causing all weapons too to become ineffective.  

[Silver_Dragon]

Recomended the chapter 2 Ballistic characteristics  of Wound agents and Annex. Wound Ballistics. United States. Army Medical Service, United States. Army Medical Service. Historical Unit, James C. Beyer

Very hard and not recomended to sensible personal. Can be found on google books.

Edited June 28, 2021 by Silver_Dragon

[Fri13]

14 minutes ago, Silver_Dragon said:

Recomended the chapter 2 Ballistic characteristics of Wound agents. Wound Ballistics. United States. Army Medical Service, United States. Army Medical Service. Historical Unit, James C. Beyer

Very hard and not recomended to sensible personal. Can be found on google books.

 

 

Light reading for bed....

 

I remember seeing that in the past, didn't leave a happy imagery. 

[Tippis]

2 hours ago, Fri13 said:

Please, no "healing" in the field.

We need actual operation instead these game functions. Meaning you need to evacuate the personnel = transport them away. You need to move your troops away, recover the vehicles and if not possible then possibly destroy them etc.

Pff! Chicken!  

 

But seriously, though, it was more of a silly example — the point is more that being able to manipulate HP and damage states would open up a lot of possibilities in terms of gameplay that could implemented, and in a pretty wide variety of ways. The way DCS handles units, moving troops (or vehicles, but that would be a bit more tricky) to somewhere where they can "recover" (think of it as an abstraction of being replaced if actual healing/repairs is too horrible — it helps cut down on the issues related to spawning and garbage-collecting new and old units).

 

But I do feel that a revamped and reordered damage state "catalogue" for different vehicles would be just as important to make near hits matter as fixing the fragmentation simulation. Otherwise, I feel the risk is that each fragment hit would have to be made unduly damaging to achieve the end-goal of killing a units.

 

Basically, if one frag hit is decided to be enough to kill an infantry unit, that means that 1 frag = 10 HP. But that now means that some other soft targets might die in far too few frag hits to make sense. The damage mitigation/armour sim can help to some extent, but it would be tricky to balance. If it was combined with a damage state revamp, it might only be 1–2 HP per frag, and this will then scale properly with when the same frags hit a truck or a light APC or a sky scraper.

[Nealius]

I see this marked as "cannot reproduce," yet Wags and Nineline say that improved ground damage modeling is in the works. It's well-known that lack of fragmentation damage and lack of simulating mobility kills is a large issue. But we're getting contradictory information on these issues, where the PR gang says something is being worked on and the Forum gang denies the existence of the same problem the PR gang says is being investigated.

[Flappie]

2 hours ago, Nealius said:

the Forum gang denies the existence of the same problem the PR gang says is being investigated.

 

First and foremost, the forum gang said no track could be found in this thread (still no track as I'm writing this).

Please create a track showing what you describe about the S-24 rocket. I'll be happy to test it.

[Nealius]

You should direct the track request towards Frag, as I am not the one who submitted the bug report/request. I simply pointed out the inconistency between what is told to us by the PR managers vs. what is told to us on the forums (or tagged in the forums), which is more complex than simply "no track." 

Edited June 30, 2021 by Nealius

[Flappie]

30 minutes ago, Nealius said:

I simply pointed out the inconistency between what is told to us by the PR managers vs. what is told to us on the forums (or tagged in the forums), which is more complex than simply "no track."

 

I assume the person who put the "cannot reproduce and missing track" tag simply had a go at blowing something up with S-24 rockets, and found it was efficient.

No need to try to read between the lines.

 

"A track or it didn't happen". Hell, that's gonna be my new sig.