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I don't understand the difference between an Ion Mirror and an Ion Prism (as currently planned in the trello).

    Walt Their net effect on the game would be similar - you could focus multiple ion beams into a small space. However, I believe mirrors+lenses would leave more room for creativity, design, and unusual applications than prisms do. Prisms (as far as I understand it), would be a block that you shoot 2 ion beams into. The block combines the ion beams into a single more powerful one and shoots it back out. It only has one real function and only one main way to use the prism. It's also very simple to use - the same basic unit can be duplicated for every ship.

    Mirrors and lenses could be used for the same thing - focusing multiple ion beams into a small area. But there's a lot more mirrors and lenses could be used for as well. You could bounce ion beams at unusual angles around the edges of your ship, or use self-destruct to change where beams exit your ship mid-fight (hinge/piston synergy if those get added!). You could use lenses to create a pinpoint stream of small lasers, or use cleverly placed mirrors to focus a dozen ion beams onto a single focal point - better make sure your target isn't too close or too far from that point. You could cover the outside of your ship with mirrors to deflect ions and lasers back at your enemy (for a while, the mirrors would break eventually), or bounce your own ion beam off the enemy's internal ion mirrors to snipe otherwise well-protected reactors. Even if all you do with mirrors and lenses is combine ion beams like the prism on the trello (which would still take quite a bit of ship engineering), there's more design decisions than just aiming 2 ions at one prism.

    In terms of the actual mechanics of mirrors and lenses, they would work like their real-world counterparts. Mirrors would reflect and lenses would refract based on the beam's incident angle. Ion beams would never actually physically combine, but they could be manipulated into overlapping so heavily that the effect would be similar. The physics couldn't be exactly like real life (real life lenses, for example, would be very difficult for players to work with), but they could be similar enough that everything is completely intuitive.

    At least that's my take on it. It's possible that mirrors and lenses would just be too complicated for anyone to use effectively - and it's a spaceship building game after all, not an optics simulator. But overall I think that mirrors and lenses would be a good thing, and would be intuitive to understand but hard to perfect.

    Dalas120 So if I understand correctly, the trello version of the Ion Prism is basically just a "lens" with very simple refraction properties (a beam coming in from any of 3 sides gets redirected straight out the 4th).

    Dalas120 I feel like I still don't fully understand how the actual gameplay mechanics of your proposed mirrors and lenses would work, or how you'd design ships to utilize that. Perhaps a diagram would help?

    Dalas120 Walt

    Perhaps I see it as this:

    Beams that are REFLECTED:
    - Reduce damage
    - Can be hit by an ion emission from any angle
    - Could be used as defense against enemy ion beams
    - Probably more expensive than items that refract ion beams (Lenses)

    Beams that are REFRACTED:
    - Increase damage
    - Only allow Ion emissions from a certain direction
    - Do not prevent enemy ion weapons
    - Less expensive to place than items that reflect ion beams (Mirrors)

    That's how I see it. Dalas, correct me if I'm somehow wrong (I probably was at some point...)

      Walt So if I understand correctly, the trello version of the Ion Prism is basically just a "lens" with very simple refraction properties (a beam coming in from any of 3 sides gets redirected straight out the 4th).

      Yeah, I suppose so. Though if you want to get really physics-y it's nearly impossible for a single lens to refract in that way 🙂

      Walt I feel like I still don't fully understand how the actual gameplay mechanics of your proposed mirrors and lenses would work, or how you'd design ships to utilize that. Perhaps a diagram would help?

      image https://i.imgur.com/a9wsK37.gif

      The rays of light here represent ion beams. So ion beams passing through a convex lens would be angled inwards and ion beams passing through a convex lens would be angled outward. Beams could pass through a lens from either direction, and would have their damage reduced slightly for each lens they pass through.

      image https://i.imgur.com/Tf07dNm.jpg

      Again, the ray of light represents an ion beam. The beam will reflect off any mirror and continue onwards, though it would lose a small amount of damage for each mirror it reflects off. Changing the angle of the inbound beam or the mirror will change the angle of the reflected beam. So for example, you could do something like this with mirrors:

      image https://i.imgur.com/06dZ8wF.png

      With a combination of mirrors and lenses (a concave lens in this case) you could do something like this:

      image https://i.imgur.com/LMp0WNa.png

      Does that that help clarify?

      Dalas120 Yeah it does, thanks! So it seems like players would have to have pretty fine-grained control over mirror angle for them to work well, but it could certainly be interesting. The convex/concave lenses sound like they'd pretty hard to work with though.

      Currently I'm leaning towards keeping the original Ion Prism idea, but where the prisms can be rotated on-the-fly to output in any one of 8 directions. That would make building more flexible, make ions useful on diagonal ships, and open up some potentially cool strategies for redirecting ion beams during battle.

      Walt Being the stubborn guy I am, I still think that it wouldn't be too difficult to work with lenses - for example, you could make all the lenses refract at a fixed angle, and make sure the player has access to a mirror that reflects at exactly that angle too. If the lens always refracts at 30 degrees, and the player has 30 degree mirrors, then you don't have to worry so much about very fine control because the mirrors and lenses match perfectly every time.

      Example of the kind of lens I mean (which is technically called a prism!):

      image https://i.imgur.com/UXy2r8E.png

      I especially love the idea of using your own mirrors/lenses to interact with enemy ion beams (for example, you could reflect an opponent's ion beam right back at him, or accidentally reflect it at one of your allies), and I think that would be a really cool thing to have in the game. The ability to reflect and refract your enemy's ions is a lot of the reason why I'm so attached to the idea of mirrors and lenses.

      That being said, if it's too complicated it's too complicated. I also really like the idea of on-the-fly rotation, and I think that'll be really cool to have if you decide to do prisms only. Thanks for taking the time to read and respond!

        Dalas120

        The rays of light here represent ion beams. So ion beams passing through a convex lens would be angled inwards and ion beams passing through a convex lens would be angled outward. Beams could pass through a lens from either direction, and would have their damage reduced slightly for each lens they pass through.

        so death star lasers could be created using convex lenses?

          GoodMorningCosmoteer You'd need a concave lens too, or else the beams would pass right through each other. And technically even that wouldn't work right - combining lasers is very tricky business. Unfortunately there's more to a laser than just a narrow beam of light.

          If you're interested:
          http://www.iflscience.com/technology/its-now-possible-to-combine-lasers-like-in-the-death-star/
          https://www.rp-photonics.com/beam_combining.html (I don't understand half of this one)

          Dalas120 There's more to a laser than just a solid beam of light.

          yes i know that, still i would be amazed to see someone make a working laser combining system in cosmoteer.
          wonder how damaging that could be...

            Game currently balanced around predictable fixed beam direction; changing direction on the fly is a powerful option; I think it could be balanced if prism / mirror / lens takes damage over time. When destroyed after a while, you would be back to using ion beam in a fixed direction.

              Dalas120 Nice idea.
              I knew game where you have to enable lasedr beams to pass by putting mirroris, and i spen ages playing this logic game 😃
              And this is very super cool buf for players who like to deeply investigate game rules, mechanism and posibilities, as you see from now, most players have problem with 6 weapons, and thinks like this will make neccesary gape between noobbs and Cosmoteers.

                Dalas120 combining lasers is very tricky business

                I think what walt is trying with the prism-box is to make that business less tricky by assuming that all the prisms are inside that module.

                Then again combining or splitting lasers is not that complicated - you can do it with 2 lenses, oneway-mirrors or multiple prisms, the latter can look like cubes which makes walts design quite comprehensible.

                image https://i.imgur.com/M7tnm5i.jpg

                @Walt

                What i would change in the design how it is proposed right now is:

                That prismcubes can be "stacked" so that more then 2 ionbeams can be merged.

                Looking like this - assuming that storage is a prism and the 6x combined iON comes out at the top:

                image https://i.imgur.com/7H1qJgt.png

                guess i understood the concept so far?

                IF prisms can be stacked and rotated that could become an age of iON.
                (which i would enjoy more then the age of missiles - not hard to guess 😉 )
                [Though rotating them on the fly could be a bit complicated.]

                regards 🙂

                  And for mirrors; the idea certainly has coolness - but effectively where enemy beams go when they are reflected will be pretty erratic - as in unpredicrtable!

                    17 days later

                    Dalas120 yes, please! more parts like in from the depths

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