Arbitrary Maximum Range: Difference between revisions

 

== Film ==

* ''[[Judge Dredd (film)|Judge Dredd]]'': In the opening gunfight, the rookie cop is told by an amused Dredd that they are just outside the range of the street gang's guns and are perfectly safe. Despite the fact that the street gangs are using bullet-firing weapons and ''shooting straight down from multi-story buildings''. It seems that bullets in the Dredd-verse are immune to laws of physics concerning kinetic energy and gravity.

** The scene in question, Dredd states that "lethal" range for the flechette ammunition being used is 200 meters. He then adds that he and his two fellow Judges are on a street 300 meters from the firing point of origin, so this would probably fall until maximum effective range instead.

* Entirely averted in the ''[[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.

** [[Frickin' Laser Beams|Energy weapons]] has the beam divergence and on-the-way dispersion that tends to limit its effectiveness at the extreme ranges, but most significant problem is aiming. It's already a [[Rule of Cool|major miracle]] that laser cannons could aim at all, given that targets often move on relativistic speeds and the typical range is light seconds to light minutes, [[Shown Their Work|as Weber very consciously averts]] [[Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale]] trope. It doesn't matter how powerful your laser is (and how many gazillions of kilometers it can go) if you have a 99.99% chance of missing anyway.

*** The engagement range of the oldest, nuclear armed missiles is truly a lot less than energy weapons. The engagement range of modern, bomb pumped (X-Ray) laserheads? Not so. These missiles use a gravity-lensed nuclear shaped-charge to pump lasing rods and are therefore immensely powerful energy weapons. A lot cruder concept of this weapon, does exist in real life, though no working models have been created so far.

*** Except that since they were too far away to receive useful input from the firing ships targeting computers they were relatively ineffective anyway unless [[Macross Missile Massacre|launched in massed salvos]] {{spoiler|until the development of Project Apollo which gave the firing ship FTL control over them.}}

== Tabletop Games ==

* In ''[[Dungeons and Dragons|Dungeons & Dragons]]'', abilities clearly based on the victim's visual acuity, such as a Medusa's petrification or a nymph's blinding beauty, nonetheless will have a cutoff range of only 30 to 60 feet. Well, both of those are ''[[A Wizard Did It|magical]]''...

** Worse, your ''eyesight'' may have a cutoff range of 30' ... if you have infravision/darkvision/reviseforeditionvision - ''just about'' credible if it was some kind of active scanning sense, but the fluff generally makes clear that it isn't.

** The same was true for ranged weapons until d20 set a more flexible range limitation in given (but arbitrary) number of [http://www.d20srd.org/srd/equipment/weapons.htm#weaponQualities range increments].

** SFB also solves the Romulan plasma problem by noting that the plasma is actually an FTL torpedo weapon.

* Similarly, the FASA ''[[Renegade Legion]]'' series of board games has laser weapons attenuate at range. Although all weapons have an absolute maximum range of 30 hexes regardless of type, this is more of a game balancing factor than a realism issue.

* In ''[[GURPS]]'', missiles in space have unlimited range, they drift, but beams weapons do not. However the cut off ranges are high enough (the shortest in 20 miles) that probably represent effective range.

* The Sixth Edition Warhammer Fantasy rulebook discussed the relatively short ranges ascribed to its bows and cannons with words to the effect of, "Accept that these distances don't scale to real-world distances, or else go find an empty parking lot to stage your battles".

*** One White Dwarf article informed readers that distance in 40K telescopes as you go further, so 48" represents a distance way more than twice that represented by 24".

** [[Justified Trope]] in the [[Gaiden Game]] ''[[Battlefleet Gothic]]''. Since the model of a ship represents a microscopic particle in the middle of it's base, a maximum range of 12' (which is standard for most guns) is actually hundreds of thousands of kilometers of vacuum and is the maximum range at which the gunners bother to fire, since anything farther away than that would be long gone by the time the shells got there. [[Averted Trope|Completely averted]] with torpedoes however. Once fired they keep going until they are destroyed or hit something, be it the enemy, a celestial body or your own poorly placed ships.

* For what it's worth, to make an interesting game, there's also a meta rule - weapon ranges that are shorter than 1/3 of the distance a unit can move in a turn tend to be very frustrating, unless segmented movement is allowed. Weapon ranges that are longer than about 4x the maximum rate of movement (or 'whole turn of thrust' in momentum based games) tend to render movement decisions obsolete; this isn't so far fetched. It's an accurate description of modern day Naval tactical combat - in the amount of time it takes for a sea skimming missile to cover 200 nautical miles, its target will have covered about 300 yards, and if it's big enough to be worth throwing an anti-ship missile at, might have changed course by 10 degrees.

* In ''[[Rifts]]'' South America 2, this is justified in the case of the Megaversal Legion's Inerta-Beam weapony, in which the beam is used to accelerate a bullet/shell to incredible speeds. One the projectile leaves the beam's effective range, it suddenly loses ''all'' inertia and velocity and comes to a dead stop, dropping straight down to the ground.

** Ranges for all weapons in ''Rifts'' are listed as "maximum effective range," thus possibly averting this trope.

 

== Video Games ==

* In ''[[Master of Orion]] II'', lasers and almost all other energy weapons have range-based damage penalties due to bloom, but mass drivers, Gauss guns, Disruptors, and the [[Wave Motion Gun|Stellar Converter]] do not. However, all weapons in the ''Master of Orion'' series do have a maximum range that's not a direct function of ship's hit probability.

* Weapons in ''[[Freelancer]]'' have maximum ranges that are either ridiculously short or pretty reasonable, depending on your interpretation of the [[Units Not to Scale]]. That is, less than a kilometer in game units, but plausible if compared to the scale of planets and stars. The projectiles do still inexplicably vanish when they reach the limit.

* Both averted and played straight in ''[[Free Space]]''. Laser bolts (which more accurately would be plasma weapons) simply vanish a certain distance from the ship that fired them. Justified by the missiles, which explode automatically once they reach their maximum range (presumably after running out of fuel). But averted with the [[Badass]], ginormous energy beams used by the capital ships in the sequel, which can be seen going off into infinity (bonus points for them being true lasers: they strike the target instantaneously). The fact that these weapons still have a "range" setting makes very little sense (fans have attempted to explain this as the computer's effective targeting range: one campaign featured a ship attempting to fire a beam at an enemy outside that range and missing by about thirty degrees. The target jumps out before they have a chance to correct their aim). Then there's the fact that they are both visible in space and have a profound distortion/shimmer effect, but that's an [[Frickin' Laser Beams|entirely different trope]].

** 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.

** [[Gameplay Story Segregation]] does avert this in cutscenes as early as the first game. The Lucifer easily is able to bombard a planet with its beam cannons from a fairly high orbit.

* Somewhat averted in most of the ''[[Space Empires]]'' games. Numerous beam weapons have a gradually decreasing level of damage as the range increases. It is not consistently true, though, as many still have a nonsensical cutoff range, and missiles simply disappear after a certain distance.

* ''[[Gorf]]''. The range of a shot was limited by when you wanted to fire again. Your shot would last forever, or until the edge of the screen, or until you shoot next.

* Played straight in the ''[[Wing Commander (video game)|Wing Commander]]'' series of games. Not only do guns have a maximum range, but missiles just disappear if they don't hit anything by the end of their fuel.

** [[All There in the Manual]]: The Wing Commander manual justifies it in the case of self-propelled weapons (missiles, torpedoes), on the grounds that a space colony was once destroyed by a drifting derelict missile fired years earlier. Confed have taken to fitting their missiles with self-destruct systems that go off when the fuel is exhausted to avoid a similar incident.

** Worse yet, the game lets you zoom in on the 'clear hud' view. Attempting to utilize your plane as a sniping tool rarely works because the missiles will vanish long before they reach the target.

* ''[[Star Trek Online]]'' gives most weapons a measly 10-kilometer range. Thus enforcing [[Old School Dogfighting]]. It is needless to say quite annoying when your huge ship bristling with weapons is forced to try and keep a much smaller ship in it's firing arc.

** This is consistent with the visuals of the show (though a lot of episodes they call out ranges of much larger but such things can't easily be represented on screen), if not the expanded universe. Even in large-scale battles shots are only fired at extreme close range.

** Interestingly averted in the old Windows 95 [[Win Trek]] game and its clones. While beam power dissipates, photon torpedo power does not, and since it's grid-based accuracy doesn't have to be all that clear either. Just point in their general direction and fire. No matter how far, the torpedo averages 200-250 points of damage.

* ''[[Star Trek Bridge Commander]]'' is a little better about this. You can free-fire photon torpedoes and pulse weapons, but good luck hitting any target closer than 60 KM (or closer for faster ships or slower torpedoes). Phasers are most effective if fired at closer than 40KM, and won't fire on a target at all if it's further than 60KM.

* ''[[Steel Battalion]]'' not only has this for each weapon, but an armor modifier on all [[V Ts]] that further detracts from the effective range, depending on which side gets hit. This means that if a VT that would normally be within a weapon's range gets hit, but the armor modifier treats the weapon as out of range, NO damage is taken!

** Somewhat realistic, that.

* In [[Chrome Hounds]], made in part by those responsible for the [[Armored Core]] series, shots will go out to their respective ranges before simply falling to the ground in an abrupt arc. For some weapons, this tiny bit of extra range [[Improbable Aiming Skills|can be accounted for when aiming]] and extend the weapon's useful range.

* 4X game ''[[Sins of a Solar Empire]]'' has this for all ships, requiring that they move into range before engaging a target. However, it's averted for the arbitrary "Big Gun" of each faction: building a Novalith cannon, for example, means you can shoot it at any planet on the map, as long as you're willing to wait for the actual impact.