[blowfish]

Recently, I have seen a few suggestions by various people that someone make a campaign where you fly warships instead of fighters.  So I figured I should just say why this doesn't really work with the Freespace engine.

• Capships are big and slow.  This means that you cannot move/maneuver fast enough to evade enemy fire or focus your fire on anything smaller than yourself.  So a pilot's flying skills have very little effect on a battle.  If you see a bomb incoming that you know will kill you, there is almost nothing you can do about it, since you have no countermeasures and the bomb is almost certainly faster than you.  Also, you move at an excruciatingly slow pace, meaning you cannot really get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time.
• You have no control over what you shoot at.  You cannot designate targets to your turrets, they will target whatever they want.  This, also, means that you have very little control over the battle.
• In battle, the screen pulses red constantly.  Even though individual impacts do very little damage (for the most part), the red pulsing gets annoying and takes away from gameplay.
• When your turrets start to take damage, the subsystem damage list gets very long, often taking up half the screen.  Like the pulsing red thing, it very annoying.
• Your sense of space is probably not as good in a warship as in a fighter.  Fighters and bombers are small, fast, and manuverable.  Capships are big and slow and have ends swinging 1000m in each direction when you turn.  In a warship, it is much harder to keep track of your enemies.  (In my experience)

With some modifications, it might be possible, but it just wouldn't work very well as it is.

[Dark Hunter]

If there was a capship-flying option, it'd have to put you in the position of the captian/admiral/whoever's in command of the ship. The entire gameplay would be issuing orders to subordinates.

That sounds very fun to me, but also not very FSish. Don't think it would work in the FSO engine.

[Hellstryker]

It's about damn time... Thank you... This should even be posted IMO

[Jake2447]

maybe this will end the endless capship flying idea threads
the only ones i ever saw that would work wre nuke's replys to others' ideas

[ShadowGorrath]

Between some old un-finished stuff, when some guy released, there was a cap-ship mod where the player had to fly a Fenris. It was using events/trigers/sexps/whatever for everything to work out. Order where to shoot, what to use for shooting, etc.

[Titan]

neat-oh.

know that this is pointless, but i'm just asking because i woon't sleep without knowing:
If you, say, made all the turrets dock points, and had the turrets somehow stay docked, couldn't you order them what to do?

[Getter Robo G]

If you want to fly a cap ship may I suggest KLINGON ACADEMY
One of the greatest Trek games ever made (and way more enjoyable than Starfleet Academy)

Ironic since Interplay was involved...

I must warn you Sulu is quite a pilot, but I still managed to nuke Earth... 
(Kirk was way easier to outfly)

http://klingonacademy.3dactionplanet.gamespy.com/forum.php

[Nuke]

i can fix most of those with scripting. using a combination of track ir and some turret scripts. for best results its better to just have the turrets go where the mouse pointer points. this works on multiparts, still haven't figured out how to do this with singleparts. you may then use the track ir to look for targets, then when you spot one target it and use the mouse to aim the gun at one of the lead indicators in front of the ship (there are several, one for each turret). unfortunately beam cannons dont seem to work and flak guns dont go off at the range i specify. so its currently very difficult to shoot down a fast fighter. bombs and bombers should die rather quickly.

now i find that in a capship you need to be able to accurately hit targets at very long ranges. much longer than you'd want to do in a fighter since you cant go after the target. but as a capship your mission is to kill other capships. so fighters should be assigned to you to cover your ass from small stuff. they are in essence your shields. if you manage them well they will protect you, otherwise you are a corpse (or rather a bunch of corpses).

its ridiculous to think that a capship would be operated completely by one man. a few would be required. the same guy who manages the turrets is not the same one who steers the ship, and so on. so my freespacelancer approach is not the best solution. the whole hud would need to be replaced with a management oriented hud. a turret list to manage orders given to gunners, what they should be shooting at and how, possibly the ability to remotely control a turret or group of turrets if necessary.

management of multiple targets is also a must. my freespacelancer approach is still dependant that the target be targeted in order for the guns to converge on it properly. instead of having one target, everything would be targeted and properties assigned to each. like kill immediately or let the fighters deal with it. id also use a drag and drop tactical display, a big overzealous radar with ship icons, so you can drag and drop one of the targets on one of the turret groups and that would issue an attack command to those turrets. youd actually have several target queues to deal with as well, for examples targets allocated to a certain group of turrets would be stored in a list and would be taken care of as soon as possible.

anyway it would no longer be a space sim, it would be a warship simulator. so no it would not be like freespace since freespace is mostly about fighters. but that doesn't mean that you cant do a warship sim aspect of freespace with the freespace engine. that is entirely possible. but the question is, who wants to do it. cause its more than just controlling turrets.

im mostly only interested in small cruisers and gunships myself. ships that have some turrets but can still be operated like a heavy bomber.  a criuser is actually pretty dull to fly around in. takes you too long to turn and you're extremely vulnerable to fighters. it is nice to control a bunch of flak turrets though

[Jake2447]

i can fix most of those with scripting. using a combination of track ir and some turret scripts. for best results its better to just have the turrets go where the mouse pointer points. this works on multiparts, still haven't figured out how to do this with singleparts. you may then use the track ir to look for targets, then when you spot one target it and use the mouse to aim the gun at one of the lead indicators in front of the ship (there are several, one for each turret). unfortunately beam cannons dont seem to work and flak guns dont go off at the range i specify. so its currently very difficult to shoot down a fast fighter. bombs and bombers should die rather quickly.

now i find that in a capship you need to be able to accurately hit targets at very long ranges. much longer than you'd want to do in a fighter since you cant go after the target. but as a capship your mission is to kill other capships. so fighters should be assigned to you to cover your ass from small stuff. they are in essence your shields. if you manage them well they will protect you, otherwise you are a corpse (or rather a bunch of corpses).

its ridiculous to think that a capship would be operated completely by one man. a few would be required. the same guy who manages the turrets is not the same one who steers the ship, and so on. so my freespacelancer approach is not the best solution. the whole hud would need to be replaced with a management oriented hud. a turret list to manage orders given to gunners, what they should be shooting at and how, possibly the ability to remotely control a turret or group of turrets if necessary.

management of multiple targets is also a must. my freespacelancer approach is still dependant that the target be targeted in order for the guns to converge on it properly. instead of having one target, everything would be targeted and properties assigned to each. like kill immediately or let the fighters deal with it. id also use a drag and drop tactical display, a big overzealous radar with ship icons, so you can drag and drop one of the targets on one of the turret groups and that would issue an attack command to those turrets. youd actually have several target queues to deal with as well, for examples targets allocated to a certain group of turrets would be stored in a list and would be taken care of as soon as possible.

anyway it would no longer be a space sim, it would be a warship simulator. so no it would not be like freespace since freespace is mostly about fighters. but that doesn't mean that you cant do a warship sim aspect of freespace with the freespace engine. that is entirely possible. but the question is, who wants to do it. cause its more than just controlling turrets.

im mostly only interested in small cruisers and gunships myself. ships that have some turrets but can still be operated like a heavy bomber.  a criuser is actually pretty dull to fly around in. takes you too long to turn and you're extremely vulnerable to fighters. it is nice to control a bunch of flak turrets though

like i said, nuke was the only one who really thought it out
by the way, if someone wanted destroyer control, they would have to command ~25 turrets as well as at least 2 wings of fighters
can freespace even support that many ships under your command?

[blowfish]

My point is that its just not practical ATM.

[Nuke]

i admit my scripts are only maybe covering 5-10% of what needs to be done. other scripts, like the freespace rts, is hitting on new ground for dynamic missions and such. things like point and click targeting would be important as well. of course i just cant rip that out of the fsrts script and slap it into the new turret script, thats just bad coding. the number of loops that can be required at times can actually slow down the game. the first generation of the turret script for example (when flying an aeolus) dropped to less than 20 fps, just because of all the matrix ops required. i just want to point out that ive thought about this in great deal, and wouldn't write the idea off right away. however id have to agree. at the moment its not practical, but in the near future, we will see.

[Stormkeeper]

I eagerly await the day the whole of HLP participates in a Orion vs Orion battle XD

[Thor]

I'd rather fly gunboats/patrol boats then a full fledged Cap ship...get the best of both worlds.  make it a larger (bigger then the ursa), with a few auto turrets like on  the ursa, fairly slow and unwieldy, but not as bad as a cap ship, and a pair of forward firing beams.  mmmmm carnage awaits.

[Nuke]

i was just flying an aeolus with my new turret script just wish the beams and flaks would work with it.

[Stormkeeper]

Why don't they ? Convergence and range issues ?

[Nuke]

flak doesnt go off at the specified range and beams just don't fire as commanded. also ai likes to steal them from you if a target gets in range of them. i fond that setting +weapon range: 0 on the weapons usually solves the latter issue. i should probably mantis the other two. i dont have a feature at my disposal to disable or enable a turret's ai control. so i cant have the turrets go off to do their own thing if they cant hit whats in your firing arc.

[Alan Bolte]

Once you get past the listed technical problems, which it seems Nuke is partway past, an anti-fighter gunship, or multi-turret bomber should work okay. Also, your ship being slow and bulky really isn't any big deal as long as you can have fun with the turrets. The main problem I see with the larger ships isn't anything already mentioned, it's actually the enemy A.I. As it stands, you have to heavily script a mission if you want a capship battle to be interesting. Flying an Aeolus might be momentarily amusing, and multiplayer has potential, but the A.I. just won't offer much of a challenge on its own, because they can't respond to your maneuvers.

For a template of good capship combat, I suggest you download the demo of Starshatter. http://www.starshatter.com/downloads.htm
It does have one or two irritating AI bugs, namely friendly ships have a tendency to charge ahead on their own and get slaughtered. Also, fighters seem to crash into the carrier more often than they land safely.

[haloboy100]

I didn't bother myself to read the whole thread, but has it been mentioned how fun it wouldn't be to fly a cap ship?

Face it. Even if you could control your turrets, telling them what to shoot just doesn't seem appealing to me. Hell, it didn't work in Freelancer mods, why would it work here?

[Nuke]

flying capships would be more about tactics. it wont be like flying a fighter thats for damn sure. it goes beyond control of turrets as well. its more about managing a force. ordering fighters around would be just as important as managing turrets. the combat would be slower, slower. but when you look at mech games you find the same kind of slow paced combat. but those are really fun too. the fun comes from the challenge, not from how fast the gameplay is.

[Stormkeeper]

For a template of good capship combat, I suggest you download the demo of Starshatter. http://www.starshatter.com/downloads.htm
It does have one or two irritating AI bugs, namely friendly ships have a tendency to charge ahead on their own and get slaughtered. Also, fighters seem to crash into the carrier more often than they land safely namely ships pulling a Leeroy Jenkins.

Fixed.

Also, if this works, it could just revive multiplayer to new heights. A bunch of people man the cap ship, and others fly cover. But without a doubt, the pace of FS2 would get slowed down by lots. Cause to me FS2 has always been about quick and furious dogfights between fighters and less of a battle of relatively slow moving capital ships.

In 'MechWarrior, usually assault mechs stand back and hurl their shots from far away, with some exceptions (Kodiak, Victor), with the lighter mechs mixing in the ranges in between. Its also very possible for lighter mechs' to bring down assault mechs just by ringing them. So Mech games generally have a varied pace, depending on the mech you're riding and your opponents, of course.