Hard(er) Science Total Conversion

[Blinzler]

Can you give me an idea of the fighting ranges, like what distances the ships are likely to be away from each other while fighting? That would weed out some countermeasures as well or open up oppurtunities for new ones.
And if you intent to use gas/ice clouds as defensive measures - is that possible? I mean given the size of ships, the speed and the weapon systems - is it possible to fill an large enough area of space with such a cloud to make it a reasonably effective defense? I honestly do not have a clue but I would imagine you'd need quite a lot of tonnage to build up a cloud like that. And then you'd need to be able to get it where you want in a really short time, too. I dunno how liquids exactly behave in the vacuum of space but I'd imagine they form balls of various sizes.
Now say we take a weapons grade laser - it would have to have enough power to punch through some basic hull shielding (against regular cosmic radiation & micro meteroids and stuff). How many bubbles of whatever material is forming the cloud would it need to lessen the beams power enough to make it ineffective?
I like the idea, just don't see it how it works.

Ideas:
Well, I was kind of thinking of using space rocks.
If you were able to stabilize some of those floating space debris and either rig it directly onto your ship or kind of mount it on an autonomous platform you could use them as a passive shielding that takes the punches for you. Of course they are more or less dead weight most of the time, they are probably structurally unstable and whatnot. But it's an idea.
Crazy thought - rig one of them like a humongous morningstar to your ship and try your piloting skills

[dvlenk6]

Sponge: I'm going to figure out how big they would be in relation to the new scale, if it;s not ridiculous. There will only be one star, perhaps two if it's a binary system (although traveling between the two stars is a large journey) and it will be huge (not able to fit on one screen), and will kill you if you even approach it. (I'm using a system like the particles in Heretic, hopefully)

Red Star
Blue Star
- - - - -
Is there going to be a max. speed?
You should be able to keep thrusting as long as you want (or your fuel supply permits) and reach any amount of speed that you like.
I had made a mod with a super high max. speed that you couldn't really ever reach within the system; but you could get moving very fast. It was difficult to maneuver at high speed (as it should be), and when moving along at a good clip, it took a lot (same as to accel.) fuel to come to docking if you overshot the target station.

I saw (in a hard sci-fi story...by Robert Heinlein, i believe) figures on solar system travel. Under constant thrust of 5G, it would take only 8 days to reach Pluto from Earth: 4 days accelleration and 4 days de-accelleration.
No human being could survive that, however (it was an alien ship), unless heavily drugged and securily strapped down, w/ a G-force suit.
The same story had calculations for travel from Sol to Beta Centauri under 5Gs, about 6 months. That isn't impractical amount of time (early circumnavigations of the Earth by sea took longer than that).

[OddBob]

[quote=dvlenk]You should be able to keep thrusting as long as you want (or your fuel supply permits) and reach any amount of speed that you like. [/quote]

I tried this once when I expanded the system sizes a long time ago, and it works beautifully. But since the AI thrusts all the time, it just flies off the edge of the screen and two minutes later, comes back going he other dircetion, only to repeat the process.

As for the gas cloud, it can reflect or dissipate the laser, reducing it's effectiveness (like lasers in atmosphere are reduced). I think it only works on visible wavelengths though, so it's not extremely practical.
I have no clue either as to how much you need. But it's not intended to follow the ship around, either.

[quote=Blinzler]Can you give me an idea of the fighting ranges, like what distances the ships are likely to be away from each other while fighting? That would weed out some countermeasures as well or open up oppurtunities for new ones. [/quote]

Hundreds to thousands of kilometers. In long range engagements (station assaults, which may for large station be one station controlling a whole system*) up to a few light-seconds (more than that and you're just wasting ammo, the exception is extreme long range missiles that fly from one end of the star system to another, and those are too long range to be represented in game)


*Programmers: Is it possible to have stations regenerate after time?

[Blinzler]

@OddBob
I understand the principle in atmospheres, my problem lies more that it's in the vacuum and you have to 'build it' (the cloud) there.
You need to have a measure to spread it out effective - effective meaning here a) fast and b) dense enough to be of use.
I'm going to check if I find some website with info on this. some info on gas/ liquid behavious in vaccum & zero gravity (would the ships mass have a gravitational effect on such a cloud?)

So hundreds of kilometers. How fast would an unguided projectile have to be to be an effective weapon under these circumstances? Doesn't that make any unguided systems pretty much ineffective other then for statinary targets (which are most likely to be heavily armored)?

[Karl]

So hundreds of kilometers. How fast would an unguided projectile have to be to be an effective weapon under these circumstances? Doesn't that make any unguided systems pretty much ineffective other then for statinary targets (which are most likely to be heavily armored)?

Reminds me of naval ships dodging torpedoes. It would be cool to have some slow moving missles in the game and your ship maneuverable enough to dodge them.

[dvlenk6]

How do you mean 'regenerate'?

After complete destruction? Not sure, though I think the station could be put on a timer to have the remains removed (destroyed) and a new station created in it's place. It could probably even be of a different stationtype (upgrade from outpost to fortress or something should work also).

Regenerate hitpoints? Certainly. repairRate="xx" will take care of that.

[Burzmali]

Personally, I would give ships particle-effect ICX weapons, that would allow them to deflect incoming fire without forcing Shields into the game. Think Sandcasters from Traveller.

[Sponge]

This is all sounding very cool. A bit of input:
I don't know if anyone's seen Battlestar Galactica (The new series, not the old one), but in my opinion, it's one of the best examples of science fiction out there. I've got nothing against Stargate/Startrek/etc, but shields and graviton repulsion matrices aren't "hard" science fiction, if you ask me. BSG has an interesting way of doing things. The big ships, Battlestars, have incredible plating, and numerous heavy, rapid fire weapons. Because all of the heavy ships are so heavily armored, they can take all take quite a beating from even the heaviest of guns.
The lighter ships, however, have a light rapid-fire gun, and maybe a few missile racks, with light armor. Although the super powerful plating may not be 100% realistic, it solves the problem of not having shields. Plus, there's nothing cooler than seeing hundreds of shells explode violently onto a ship's hull just before it jumps out of the system.

And that's another thing. The Stargates are cool and all, but what if they were removed, and all ships had modified versions of jumpdrives that, when used, opened up a dockscreen to input coordinates of a system to jump to? I’m not even sure if such a thing is possible, but I’m fairly confident that it could be fudged into working some way or another.

[OddBob]

After complete destruction? Not sure, though I think the station could be put on a timer to have the remains removed (destroyed) and a new station created in it's place. It could probably even be of a different stationtype (upgrade from outpost to fortress or something should work also).

This is what I meant. It won't come up for a while, though.

And that's another thing. The Stargates are cool and all, but what if they were removed, and all ships had modified versions of jumpdrives that, when used, opened up a dockscreen to input coordinates of a system to jump to? I’m not even sure if such a thing is possible, but I’m fairly confident that it could be fudged into working some way or another.

I like it, but what is to stop the player from using it to get out of a sticky situation? Perhaps a ring of "stargates" around the outside of the system that lead to this menu? However, I liked the idea of forcing the player through interplanetary space (an empty system the player has to cross where ambushes are more common and there may or may not be hidden cool stuff. Maybe the ring of gates leads there, from which the player picks a destination?

[Burzmali]

I like it, but what is to stop the player from using it to get out of a sticky situation? Perhaps a ring of "stargates" around the outside of the system that lead to this menu? However, I liked the idea of forcing the player through interplanetary space (an empty system the player has to cross where ambushes are more common and there may or may not be hidden cool stuff. Maybe the ring of gates leads there, from which the player picks a destination?

You could always put a 10 second delay on the activation, while hitting the player with a big power hit while it "charges".

[Blinzler]

Wasn't one of the old excuses always to do with gravity and such? So you could only jump outside a system/ far away from sun/planets/ gravity-activity.

[Sponge]

Burzmali pretty much said what I was thinking. A 5-10 second time delay would almost eliminate all chance of using it as an efficient defense device. However, you could activate it, fight through hoards of baddies, and then it could jump in the middle of the fight. If you ask me, that's more tactical than escape. You have to plan ahead of time. The main problem with this is that enemy AI would need some changes that I'm not sure are possible. The AI would have to know how to use their jump drives. It would enable them both to jump to you, and to jump out of a sticky situation. It would further add to the "fewer ships, harder to kill" feel you're going for.

[OddBob]

Does anyone know if there are certain things that Transcendence needs in it's XML to even start? I keep running into the error "unable to open XML stream" almost immediately, after deleting stuff and running Transcendence as I go along. No, I don't have a file, I deleted everything. Same error, which is what leads me to believe I wiped something important.

[dvlenk6]

SORRHY. LOTS of whiskey this evenng.
Just say what you want worked on, I'll do it.

Have some decent cruiser designes that should fit rather well with your ideas.

I'll work on them tomorrow.

Sorry again. 100% in favor of this mod. Wiill help in any way I can.

[Boris the Cat]

Alcohol + Internet =