Sounding rocket as weapons platform?

[NFunky]

Hey all, first off, I apologize if I've posted this in the wrong forum.  It seemed like the best place to me.

I am playing around with BD Armory in career mode with the 5dim pack.  I've built a nice little low tech floating weapons platform with a Mk1 Pod, an RT-10 solid booster, Mk16 chute + four Mk2R radials, and landing legs.  At this point in the tech tree, I only have the chain gun unlocked, so that's all I can use for the first training mission, which consists of a bunch of unarmed, unmoving targets to the north of the runway.  Since I can barely fly planes, I figured I'd just put guns on a slowly falling platform and shoot down at the targets.  So I put four chain guns facing downward on the sides of the RT-10, as well as eight boxes of 30mm rounds.

My contraption flies up to about 5,000m, then floats back down at around 6m/s (which reduces to more like 4m/s once I use up all the ammo).  After it reaches full chute deployment (5k), I arm the weapons and the mouse becomes that nice litte targeting thing.  I also see four littler targeting things that try to follow the mouse, which I assume are the aimpoints for the guns.  Everything works perfectly!  Except that I can't hit a damn thing.

I'm visually impaired, but I have enough vision that I can easily put the targeting circle on the selected target (it has a little box around it).  I will let myself drift down to 2.5km and open fire for two minutes or so, but nothing goes boom.  BTW, the recoil of the guns slows my decent rate quite a bit and, to a much smaller extent, pushes me away from the target.  This drift is the only thing I can think of that must be throwing off the aim enough to prevent any hits.

I just don't understand how I can pour two minutes worth of 30mm explosive rounds at an unarmored target and not even scratch it.  Am I just too far away?  I can't seem to find a range number for the chain gun, or for many BD Armory guns actually.  It is range?  Is it my poor aiming skills?  Or is it the recoil on a light vehicle suspended under chutes thowing off the aim?  Is this vehicle just a really dumb idea?

Thanks!

[bewing]

Well, there is a concept of a "physics bubble." Damage, or anything else, is not modeled outside the physics bubble. The thing that makes it complicated is that the size of the bubble depends on whether your ship is landed, flying, suborbital, or orbital. I also think it depends on the landed/flying/etc status of your target, but I'm not sure.

In any case, a physics bubble tends to be about 2km for historical reasons that are no longer really valid. So I'm pretty sure that's your problem. Your targets are outside your physics bubble, so they are invulnerable. Fortunately, NathanKell recently made the size of the physics bubble editable, and it's very easy.

In your main game directory, if you look at your physics.cfg file, at the very end are a bunch of VesselRange values.

The Unload value should be bigger than the load value, which should be bigger than the pack value, which should be bigger than the unpack value. But the pack and unpack values are the important ones. Boost your flying and landed pack/unpack values into the 5 to 6 km range -- and I bet you'll be able to destroy your targets.

 

 

[NFunky]

Thank you, you were right, but it turns out it was a combinsation of factors.  BD Armory also lets you change physics range from in game, so I set it all the way up to 100km.  I was very disappointed when I still couldn't blow anything up.  Then I repositioned the guns so they had a less virtical and more spread out field of fire, and it worked like a charm.  I also used "guard moce" instead of trying to manually aim, and even with the guns range setting all the way up, they didn't seem to want to engage until I was closer than about 1.5km, but that also might have had to do with the field of fire again.

Thanks again for the advice on the physics bubble.

[Spricigo]

 

Curious if the rounds shoot are affected by gravity, in this case aiming higher to compensate the effect may be required.