Remember when your Kent primaries failed in WiH ?
That's just one proof of concept for what you seem to be aiming at here.
I hope that if I play this I won't end up sat there helpless like you are if youSpoiler:linger around too long in that one mission in Silent Threat Reborn.
It would be interesting to see how the FS1 campaign would go if you took the shields away from both sides and left the allied side (and HOL) with basic weaponry...
Wait, scratch that. I just remembered how weak Shivan fighter hulls are.
I may also see if I can set a miss chance into the blob turrets. Not sure if there's a table entry that will let me do it, I'm still learning.
Frozen bodies float in the void between worlds, their eyes lifeless and fixed upon stars they cannot see. The dead of three wars mingle in their final rest.
Just remember, the best way to ruin a good story is to give it an explanation.That's exactly how Bioware "ruined" the Reapers. Or at least didn't exploit them as well as they could have.
Never mind the pulsed "lasers". I came up with an in universe explanation for that, too. Bit of a dodge but it sounds technical enough :)Simply call them plasma weapons. That's what everybody's doing, more or less, even SW retconned their lasers to this (though an actual "plasma cannon" in SW is something different). Lasers are best done as beams.
The first mission was completed the other day.:yes:
One of the models appears to have no useful physics which means it spins out of control .
One of the models appears to have no useful physics which means it spins out of control .
Have you tried opening that model in PCS2 and re-setting its moment of inertia?
y u no proper HUD? It looks normal to me. Aside from him using ship icons for the radar, but that's optional.
My main gameplay goal in this campaign is to reverse a bit of the bad ass decay cruisers suffer throughout the games and restore a bit of the "gnats around an elephant" feeling we got the first time we played Freespace.Wow, that's something I've been waiting to see for a long time!
...The little plucky Fenris you're with is going to be a proper weapons platform, considered a capital ship good and proper... Heavily armed transports are going to be a handful for a wing of fighters. Military grade weapons are going to be a godsend, IF you can get hold of them.YES!
... To that end I'm going to be playing with the tbms to try and achieve this kind of balance, where an extension of combat time between capital ships and a rebalancing of the relationship between fighters and cruisers is achievable without just inflating everything's hitpoints fifty fold and giving everything a big ship flag.OH YES!
My end goal on this is to allow missions time to tell the story of relatively small numbers of ships in interesting environments. Ships will have power outages. They will retreat from combat ala Blue Planet before they get too low and you will have to disable them by some means other than brute force. Armed military transports will be an existential threat and something you have to plan around. Cruisers will be proper capital ships capable of more than holding their own against a few pokey fighters.I'm pretty stoked!
:yes2: I like it, it's really whetting my appetite to play the campaign :)Watching with interest. :)
I've also had to replace the Spinning Claymore of Death fighter because it kept killing me on collision. I'll use that in later missions once I've sorted out why it is spinning in circles.Try to recalculate the moment of inertia in PCS2, or increase the mass of the ship in PCS2.
<Bosch talking>So is Bosch actually going to show up in this?
Not necessarily. Might well be just a background to Shetland's main story, and if it isn't I don't want to know until I see it. :)Hmmm. Yes, on second thoughts it might be best if my question goes unanswered. Let the intrigue build. :)
Thanks! You also mentioned HUD files. I've been looking for them but I'm not sure what I'm looking for. Any chance you could point me in the right direction? :)What Niffman said. BP, FSPort, Diaspora and BtA are examples on top of my head of mods you can find HUD tables in.
Sorted the HUD now. It scales properly. Only thing I need to figure out now is how to get it to do what Blue Planet does - warble text in a readable font, other text in BankGothic.You can find the BP fonts in bp2-core.vp/fonts
Why do you use the exact same code authorization for every piece of intel you have (the same as the colly obviously...)?
I am also beta testing another Axem script and hope to be able to show this off soon with his permission :)
Update.:lol:
FREDing is bloody hard work!
For the love of God, I'd have posted it if I thought it was useful advice rather than pointless low-level nitpicking.
For the love of God, I'd have posted it if I thought it was useful advice rather than pointless low-level nitpicking.
That was extremely good ****.I really need to echo this. If this writing is any indication, this will be one hell of an interesting campaign!
That was extremely good ****. The sentence structure is a little rough in places, but it grabs and holds and pays off, and that's what counts.
And... who is *they*? The Shivans, using Capella as some sort of node to Sol?
making node siege tactics an extraordinarily powerful of projecting power into enemy territory.
(http://i.imgur.com/PkXsJyS.jpg)
I literally got a chill in my spine reading that. That has never happened to me while reading science fiction.(http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/7c/7c75373b2d15f84e8494d9c2dbf59cd0b121cc8251613380f6712be588f23d6c.jpg)
What models will you be using to full the patrol cruiser/niche?
A Short Primer to Subspace Warfare: Strategy and Tactics
Delivered to OCS tranche 4-b, 2381 as part of OCS Strategic Talent Terran Fast Track Initiative
Lt. Cmdr. L. Shawcross
Chief Strategy Officer, GTCv Archon
IRF Second Strand
Thanks for coming.
There are two things a good commander should know about subspace. The first is that subspace is fickle. The second is that it exists at all. The second is the harder of the two to appreciate. I will try and elaborate to the best of my talent, but I'm going to offer an apology first.
GTVA Sci Ops sends a number of candidates to OCS every year. I know a number of you are in this room. To you poor sods, I send my apologies because this is going to seem outrageously basic if you have any understanding of spatial compression theory. You know as well as I do that there are reasons why subspace geometries grow languid away from gravitional fields and why nodes form and collapse, but they aren't important to this lecture.
Simply put, subspace makes interplanetary travel possible. It also makes interstellar travel possible, but the mechanics of interstellar travel are ironically far easier than interplanetery travel. It also places substantial technical and energetic constraints on interplanetary travel which must be considered by any strategist worth their salt. To be an effective strategist in an era of subspace combat, there are three important concepts which you must understand.
The first: subspace travel is energetically expensive with drive size determining drive effectiveness. To expand upon this; the size of the drive determines how far you are able to tunnel and how difficult it is to open a valid geometry. This has an obvious and immediate consequence - ships with a lot of drive power and space dedicated to drive power move a lot faster than ships which don't. To counter act this - they also take much longer to move. A block 3 Orion refit charges its drive assembly in Code Blue e-jump conditions in eight minutes. A Hecate clocks in around six point five. That's an eternity in a heated battle. You can imagine how long it takes under normal operating conditions without burning clean through your heat sinks and any em-ractor modules you have installed.
The result is that most of your subspace mobility varies from platform to platform. A number of IRF outfits use sub-skimmers, which are literally light freighter platforms with c-moly plating designed solely to get in and out of deep interplanetary space in extremely short time spans. We use them as SAR platforms but also as strike platforms as well. They jump in, disperse a cargo of two or three wings of fighters and jump out within fourty seconds to a safe distance, awaiting a response. Those of you who did your reading for Advanced Subsystems Maintainence will be aware that the design specifications for the old Argo military transport included a corvette class drive motivator. Guess why that was there. The Deimos in all its guises and the venerable Fenris had a staggering amount of subspace mobility for their size.
Vasudan engineering tends to favour a more progressive and measured approach. Those of you fortunate enough to serve under Vasudan engineering staff will realize that they consistently get a good twenty percent faster recharge ton for ton out of their engine systems. This comes at a consistent range cost. Keep this in mind when planning for cross fleet deployments. As always, Vasudan ships show an individuality we don't really appreciate in Terran deployments, but it is rare to find a Vasudan engineering crew chief who doesn't have a full up to date spec of his ship ready to hand. They usually take pride in it. Do not be afraid to ask.
All but the most advanced prototype fighters are utterly immobile as far as subspace travel goes. Sure, SoC and other spook outfits have advanced drive motivators which allow for deep insertion tactics, but as far as I know, those motivators involve rather expensive materials and precision engineering and maintainence. They simply aren't cost effective for most materiel. Most fighter engagements will happen within a tenth of a light minute of their source and only if they have direct line of sight. Orbital battles should be planned with this in mind.
Secondly: subspace travel is unpredictable and is stabilised by the presence of strong gravity wells at coupling ends. The calculations involved in a subspace jump are handled almost entirely in fifth and sixth order differential calculus using five coupled tensor equations and involve subspace probing methods which have never been perfected. nyone who has read the reports of the tactical nightmare the Shivans presented to the GTA and the PVN will be well aware of just how devastating an advantage the ability to send entire swarms of fighters halfway across a system at whim can be.
However, we are not Shivans, so we must accept that the coupled equations we have at best are just good guesswork and our field theory and implementation involves a stabilising constant which accounts for gravitational effects. When spatial curvature is present and thus gravitons curtail the nascent tendency of subspace to flip a weakly applied subspace field gradient, subspace fields behave predictably and a direct A to B path is easy to apply. These calculations take time even for modern computers, which must simulate and account for graviton probing in higher order dimensions. To simplify further, the actual co-ordinates entered into a computer are merely a reference point. The computer then has to calculate the actual path of the field between those two points, find a stable, none collapsing solution and then finally generate the field geometry required.
That we can do this at all is a miracle of modern engineering! With that said, it still takes time. Ships can jump without pre-calculated field geometries using a best guess approach but the results are often catastrophic. The PVD Damascus incident from the Great War indicates the risk of crash jumping when they jumped twenty kilometers over a Vasudan desert trying to escape from the SD Lucifer. The automatically ejected black box indicates they dumped a full drive charge into an unstable jump configuration. The jump was less than four hundred thousand kilometers and it dumped the ship out with an opposite orbital velocity to Vasudan Prime itself, meaning it slammed into the desert at nearly 40 million ms. Crash jumps are an emergency measure. The tendency for poorly managed subspace field geometries to invert and slam you into a sun or a planet is not one to be trifled with.
Further, subspace travel is safer and faster if you are able to compute those geometries and do so in the presence of a gravitational field. There is no actual difference between the distance travelled, but if you care enough to look the coupled equations themselves up, it becomes obvious that the fields grow more unstable the deeper into subspace they propagate. Larger ships can counteract this with sheer drive power and improved computation, but there are limits even to this. A local gravity well - even a large asteroid or a small moon - can mean a great deal of time and energy can be saved on relatively short jumps. Use this to your advantage in the module war games. Controlling the gravity well around any population centre can mean you have a tremendous amount of mobility the enemy cannot match - unless they are Shivans in which case, I wish you the best of luck.
As a rule of thumb. Your fighters will be limited to short jumps. Your destroyers, a military risk worth taking, move slowly but purposefully over large distances. Use your cruisers and corvettes to hem in opposition and make deep strikes with the support of your fighters. Subspace windows remain open for several moments and synced drive configurations can open the same window multiple times. Use this to move fleets as units or sentry or strike fighters with a larger unit. Keep to that and remember that Shivans don't follow those rules and you should have enough to pass this module.
Thirdly and finally: subspace control is everything. We have always had an understanding of subspace tracking built into our drive technologies, but subspace drive technology towards the end of the Great War was beginning to surpass the ability of all but the most dedicated arrays to track superluminal movement in a solar system. Drives got bigger and more powerful with each passing year and we simply did not have the condensed space research on either side to advance it. The discovery of the Precursor tracking artifacts changed all of this. Now, a properly equipped fleet dispersed effectively can institute at least a two jump net around their forces and prevent all but the most dedicated of surprise attacks. As a result, attacks on sensor facilities, comms buoys and even the modern AWACs are the key to allowing an entirely new dimension of warfare. Protect your eyes, ladies and gentlemen. They are your best weapon in modern war.
That concludes my primer. I hand you back to the Captain, who will take you through the capabilities of the Chary-"
Vasudan engineering tends to favour a more progressive and measured approach. Those of you fortunate enough to serve under Vasudan engineering staff will realize that they consistently get a good twenty percent faster recharge ton for ton out of their engine systems. This comes at a consistent range cost. Keep this in mind when planning for cross fleet deployments. As always, Vasudan ships show an individuality we don't really appreciate in Terran deployments, but it is rare to find a Vasudan engineering crew chief who doesn't have a full up to date spec of his ship ready to hand. They usually take pride in it. Do not be afraid to ask.
The PVD Damascus incident from the Great War indicates the risk of crash jumping when they jumped twenty kilometers over a Vasudan desert trying to escape from the SD Lucifer. The automatically ejected black box indicates they dumped a full drive charge into an unstable jump configuration. The jump was less than four hundred thousand kilometers and it dumped the ship out with an opposite orbital velocity to Vasudan Prime itself, meaning it slammed into the desert at nearly 40 million ms.
I have this beautiful image of a Vasudan Scotty, synthesized brogue and all, waxing poetic about how he's managed to squeeze an extra 50 kJ out of his dilithium matrix.
Will release something one day. Promise.
QuoteWill release something one day. Promise.
So that promise is alive? ;7
Good luck with that! :nod: :yes: