Arbitrary Maximum Range: Difference between revisions

{{quote|''I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going till it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your damn targets! That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution! That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it!" This is a weapon of mass destruction! You are ''not'' a ''cowboy shooting from the hip!''''|The '''[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCoHT_cHPzY Gunnery Chief]''' from ''[[Mass Effect 2 (Video Game)|Mass Effect 2]]'' tells it like it is.}}

 

 

Of course, weapons having a maximum ''effective'' range makes sense. At great distances, lasers can't focus as sharply due to diffraction and may not be able to cut through enemy armor, particles beams bloom out due to thermal and/or electromagnetic effects and suffer the same problem, missiles could run out of fuel for course corrections and be dodged or intercepted, etc. Weapons using FTL drives or special force fields may also run out of energy after a while. If the sci-fi is particularly hard a maximum effective range may also be justified in that without FTL sensors, it becomes increasingly hard to tell where the target actually is as the range increases, due to the time taken for the light or other emissions being detected to reach. The fact that energy weapons would take the same amount of time again to reach the target, and projectile weapons would take longer, makes the situation worse. Guidance systems onboard the weapons would be limited by fuel, with better guidance systems reducing the size of warheads, or in the case of purely kinetic weapons, mass. And this is without considering the computational power needed to develop a firing solution for possibly relativistic battles.

This is one of the [[Acceptable Breaks From Reality]] in videogames. Imagine that your game engine takes into account velocity, momentum and other relevant factors of every single projectile fired in a battle. Now imagine you have, say, [[Stealth Pun|9,001]] [[Macross Missile Massacre|missiles]] flying. Add in [[More Dakka]], [[Beam Spam]], what-have-you. Then remember you need to keep track of the moving ships, the effects of successful hits, etc. Computer performance is going to crash and burn if you want to be hardcore realistic about it. Neither are computers typically capable of handling the sheer scale of engagements waged at the distance of tens of thousands of kilometers, and even assuming they would, such battles would probably boil down to [[Hot Sub On Sub Action]] [[Recycled in Space]], where the first ship to detect the enemy is likely to win the engagement by the virtue of shooting first, or a matter of who has more weapon throughput, [[Deflector Shields]] and better damage control, making the player's skills in either piloting or unit management a complete non-factor.

 

{{examples|Examples (and Aversions)}}

 

== Literature ==

* Entirely averted in the ''[[Honor Harrington (Literature)|Honor Harrington]]'' series. Although ''[[As You Know|every book]]'' will include some discussion about the range of energy weapons and missiles, it is clearly stated that the range discussed is an ''effective'' one, that is, the range from which it's still possible to ''hit'' the target.

*** The beam divergence problem is exacerbated by the fact that warships are protected against fire from the sides by gravity 'sidewalls' that weaken incoming fire. At ranges of over 500,000 km an energy beam would be too weakened to do any damage. In cases where the target is not protected by a side (which doesn't happen often against an awake enemy) the effective range is about double that.

** The missiles' engagement range is objectively much smaller, but the fact that they are homing made them the primary long-range weapon in Honorverse. They are, however, limited by their drive endurance -- the missile without fuel has no other choice than coast ballistically, and although much more stealthy, is both a sitting duck for [[Point Defenseless]], and has 99.9% chance of simply missing its actively maneuvering target -- at such distances even slightest inaccuracy translates into a huge miss. This was made especially apparent after the invention of the multi-drive missile, which could launch, coast until near the enemy (even if it takes literally hours to get that far) and then fire off their second drive to attack - giving them virtually unlimited range.

* Aversion of this trope (and how!) provides the punch line to the short story "The Gun That Shot Too Straight".

* "Starworld" by [[Harry Harrison]] has the first space battle in history taking place as part of [[The War of Earthly Aggression|a rebellion against Earth by its colonies]]. The rebel admiral points out to the protagonist how energy weapons don't work due to the energy diffusion problem. Although missiles are being used by both sides, the rebels use linear accelerators firing unguided ''cannon balls'' to gain the decisive edge, then finish them off with a [[Flechette Storm]] of rocket-propelled bullets (fired from the standard infantry weapons of the time) which work well over infinite ranges due to the lack of air resistance.

** Although the blast from said projectile hitting the atmosphere at near light-speed ought to make it worse than useless in any atmosphere more dense than true orbit.

* Averted in the ''[[Humanx Commonwealth]]'' series by [[Alan Dean Foster]], which presents a wide variety of space-based weaponry, some with effective ranges measured in intergalactic distances. Even a simple ship-mounted laser has light-second range; the major limiting factor is accuracy.

* Averted in ''[[Eve Online]]'', where weapon ranges are waved away as being, variously, a product of projectile velocity, the targeting computer being unable to hit a target that small, or the missile running out of fuel. For projectile and laser weapons, there is no hard cutoff distance, but as distance increases they miss more often. Part of the range limit is the maximum range a ship can target at, being a possible maximum of 250km with appropriate skills and modules - it is possible to get railguns and missiles to have a longer actual range than this, but they can still only be fired at a targeted ship (although the range over 250 is still useful on missiles if the target is moving away from you, but in that case they would have more then enough time to warp off before any missiles reached them).

* Semi-averted in ''[[Vega Strike]]'' (current version, at least). Each weapon has the maximum range property, but also property which controls dissipation, so arbitrary "range" ''could'' be avoided or set many orders of magnitude higher, it's needed only to conserve resources. Missiles are less limited -- torpedos even got [[FTL]] drives -- though lockable ranges are still relatively tame.

** The beam cannons have a 30 km cutoff range, you just don't normally see it because [[Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale|the ships are never that far]].

** The Kaiser, the one primary weapon that fires actual projectiles, technically has an arbitrary maximum range, but it is so large that it basically avoids the trope. There are few instances in missions where enemies are outside the range of the Kaiser and at long range it is nearly impossible to hit any ship due to accuracy issues.

 

== Real Life ==

* Anti-aircraft shells are designed to avert the trope as described in the top-of-page example. Because AA gunnery in the [[World War II]] fashion basically consists of firing large quantities of explosive-packed steel into the air ''over a major city'', something has to be done to make sure those quantities that miss their targets don't descend upon the people and things you are trying to protect. AA shells have a self-destruct mechanism, which triggers long after they should expect to have hit their target but before they have had a chance to fall to earth. The worst the people below suffer is a light rain of tiny fragments....in theory.