DEVS: Does "Firing Arc" describe the radius or diameter of the aiming circle?

[Kuciwalker]

Yes, the circle for a particular firing arc can be only one size for a given field of view. And we can estimate what proportion of the field of view the firing arc circle takes up. But as we do not know the game's field of view (measured in degrees), we cannot know the size of the firing arc in degrees. This is what I meant when I said the circle could be drawn at any size, though I admit I put it poorly and put the cart before the horse in some respects.

 

1. That's not what you said. You claimed we needed to know something about the distance to the circle. No we don't. In fact, the circle needn't have a distance, it can be purely an apparent circle. It is in fact the projection/intersection of a cone whose origin is at the camera origin onto/with the screen.
   
2. Irrelevant anyway. I see two objects at opposite edges of the reticle. I can tell the distance between those two objects. I can tell the distance from myself to those two objects. All of these abilities are approximate but still precise enough to give me angles within an order of magnitude. To do this I needed to know nothing about the field of view.
   

Edited May 21, 2014 by Kuciwalker

[Nemarus]

1. That's not what you said. You claimed we needed to know something about the distance to the circle. No we don't. In fact, the circle needn't have a distance, it can be purely an apparent circle. It is in fact the projection/intersection of a cone whose origin is at the camera origin onto/with the screen.
   
2. Irrelevant anyway. I see two objects at opposite edges of the reticle. I can tell the distance between those two objects. I can tell the distance from myself to those two objects. All of these abilities are approximate but still precise enough to give me angles within an order of magnitude. To do this I needed to know nothing about the field of view.
   

 

On #1, yes you're right. I was incorrectly thinking of the circle as a projected object at some point in front of the camera--it is in fact pasted onto the camera lens at zero distance, so to speak.

 

On #2, while I can quickly intuit the distance between myself and a ship, I wouldn't say I've got the knack of swiftly judging the distance between two objects that aren't me in GSF--especially for very close objects in the peripheral or very distant objects whose models are hard to see. Medium distance objects? Maybe a bit better. It doesn't help that a GSF "meter" is tiny (such that ships are a few hundred meters tall).

 

With that in mind, I have less confidence in my ability mentally to draw the triangle, translate my perspective above/below it, and eyeball the angle at my vertex.

 

And when I do try, I still feel like BLC's seem like ~76 degrees and not ~38. I would expect 38 to feel far more narrow, considering it's not only acute, but below 45 degrees. But again, whether something feels "narrow" relative to the rest of the view all depends on how many degrees the field of view actually is.

 

I looked at some old threads about people discussing SWTOR FoV, and it sounds like on the ground, the Fov is ~90, though changes when you get in a speeder to something more like ~110-120.

 

And I still want to see you draw a 90 degree firing arc

Edited May 22, 2014 by Nemarus

[Kuciwalker]

And I still want to see you draw a 90 degree firing arc

 

Well here you go: http://i.imgur.com/WuTn5Kd.jpg

 

Note that we know, for a certainty, that it is wider than the screen. This is because we know that the line from the leftmost edge of the satellite to the point on the satellite just in front of me forms a right angle with the line from the the rightmost edge to the same point. And yet the left and right edges are not visible, but must be contained within the circle, which means the circle must be bigger than the screen.

 

We can get a lower bound on 30 degrees radius / 60 degree diameter as well by using the two "fins" opposite my ship. They form an equilateral triangle with the "fin" in front of me.

 

Silly ryuku and atheran for bothering with actual trig

Edited May 22, 2014 by Kuciwalker

[Nemarus]

Well here you go: http://i.imgur.com/WuTn5Kd.jpg

 

Note that we know, for a certainty, that it is wider than the screen. This is because we know that the line from the leftmost edge of the satellite to the point on the satellite just in front of me forms a right angle with the line from the the rightmost edge to the same point. And yet the left and right edges are not visible, but must be contained within the circle, which means the circle must be bigger than the screen.

 

We can get a lower bound on 30 degrees radius / 60 degree diameter as well by using the two "fins" opposite my ship. They form an equilateral triangle with the "fin" in front of me.

 

Silly ryuku and atheran for bothering with actual trig

 

Satellites will now be called space-protractors. Very clever solution Kuci.

 

With regard to the fins though, what side of them are you looking at? Your ship is closest to the outer edge of the front fin. So if you want to view yourself as being at one vertex of an equilateral triangle, you have to look at the far/back sides of the other two fins. And they do not fit in your firing arc. Or is that the point you're making--that we can see the fring arc is not big enough to represent a 60 degree angle, and thus must be diameter?

 

You may be okay at trig after all I apologize for saying otherwise (though that was mainly a play on your other reply to me elsethread).

 

I just got irked because I thought you were saying you could eyeball an angle from its vertex without any points of reference. Like, "Oh that circle is clearly 34 degrees. I can tell because I'm a wizard." Then when you started talking about street intersections, I again assumed you were missing the bit about being inside the vertex in the same plane as the streets, rather than slightly above it.

 

Then I rat-holed too much on my "cone" metaphor (which was me trying to explain the need to find some lateral distance to measure) and then ended up mixing up talking about that distance and the actual circles. I blame it on trying to post between tasks and meetings at work

 

Anyway, it seems to be we can confirm Firing Arc is diameter.

Edited May 22, 2014 by Nemarus

[Kuciwalker]

Satellites will now be called space-protractors. Very clever solution Kuci.

 

With regard to the fins though, what side of them are you looking at? Your ship is closest to the outer edge of the front fin. So if you want to view yourself as being at one vertex of an equilateral triangle, you have to look at the far/back sides of the other two fins. And they do not fit in your firing arc. Or is that the point you're making--that we can see the fring arc is not big enough to represent a 60 degree angle, and thus must be diameter?

 

Yes.

 

You may be okay at trig after all

 

Yes, I would hope that a BS in math would confer on me some level of proficiency.

 

I apologize for saying otherwise (though that was mainly a play on your other reply to me elsethread).

 

 

I just got irked because I thought you were saying you could eyeball an angle from its vertex without any points of reference. Like, "Oh that circle is clearly 34 degrees. I can tell because I'm a wizard." Then when you started talking about street intersections, I again assumed you were missing the bit about being inside the vertex in the same plane as the streets, rather than slightly above it.

 

The thing is, you can do this sort of thing without an ideal test like the one I set up. When you are actually in motion, the human eye and brain are astonishingly good at the reverse rendering problem, even with monocular vision. If you are actually proficient at reorienting geometric objects in your mind (which I am, and which I imagine most good pilots must be) then you can absolutely just imagine "what if I were standing over there? what would my firing arc look like?".

 

The firing arc in my screenshot is 32 degrees (BLC). If that were radius, it would be a 64 degree total arc. Think about how wide 64 degrees is! That's enormous! That's an entire third of the space in front of your ship (measured within the plane)! Does it really look like BLCs can hit things within that wide of an arc? No way.

[Kuciwalker]

By the way, to tie this in with the LLC discussion: at the edge of the LLC firing arc at 3000m its accuracy is 86%. BLC's is 90.5% in the same conditions. There is no way that 4.5% actually matters for balance.