First-person combat and dogfighting is visceral and personal, but in the real world you nuke them from orbit. Are there any plans for BVR (beyond-visual-range) combat in Star Citizen?
TL;DRThere are no plans for beyond-visual-range combat since it isn't personal or visceral, though longer-range scanning, long-range missiles and countermeasures are expected, and no bombing planets from orbit.
No. There aren't any plans for BVR combat because it's not personal and it's not visceral.
Well, that's why I phrased it that way.
I don't mean to be flippant, but let's face it, if we were doing a proper simulation of future space combat, you would probably never ever see your opponent, it would all be handled by computers, and they would tell you whether you won the fight or not, and it's not particularly fun.
But with countermeasures and things like that, you could defeat missiles, and like air combat today, once you've defeated the missiles, you would close to dogfighting range.
Well, we're definitely going to have, for instance, already the missiles have a longer range than guns do in Arena Commander. So we definitely will have longer range scanning when we move to the full 64-bit large world setup, which we're pretty close to being able to do. When we move to that, we're going to have further scanning. So there's different levels of your radar. Your radar at close range can keep constant contacts and update them all the time. But the further you go out, it's more about a pulse. And so in that case, you would be able to see contacts 10 kilometers, 20 kilometers, 30 kilometers out. And there may or may not be some long-range missile stuff that you can do some countermeasures for, but there's not ever going to be you bombing a planet from orbit or anything like that.