[Adderbane]

No he means the one in the tech room called BP Massive Battle.

Basically all the ships from WiH line up and starts shooting.  It is cool if your computer can handle everything going on (mine can't).

[AdmiralRalwood]

Oh, duh. Well, now I feel silly for forgetting that.

[Droid803]

That's not a mission. It's just...ctrl clicking a bunch of ships and telling them to go kill each other.
I don't understand what people find interesting about that, other than the fact that the sheer amount of entities that your computer is require to process makes it a fairly decent benchmarking tool.

[Spoon]

I tried a WoD 'massive battle' once but after 10 ships freespace would always crash due to hitting projectile limits and stuff. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[General Battuta]

That's not a mission. It's just...ctrl clicking a bunch of ships and telling them to go kill each other.
I don't understand what people find interesting about that, other than the fact that the sheer amount of entities that your computer is require to process makes it a fairly decent benchmarking tool.

It actually does have some armor settings and basic target priorities!

[AdmiralRalwood]

I tried a WoD 'massive battle' once but after 10 ships freespace would always crash due to hitting projectile limits and stuff. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Projectile limits shouldn't cause crashes. More likely filling up BMPMAN slots.

[Dragon]

Not even that. Filling BMPMAN slots borks textures and lags the game, not crashes it. Projectile limits cause new projectiles not to spawn (odd priorities, too, it's often the player ship that is first affected by it). There might be some other problems limits, though.

[Kestrellius]

You know, someone could have told me that if you right-click on an event, you get a list of operators and such. I thought I was going to have to manually figure out the exact name of each operator and type it in. Well, this makes things easier.

On the subject of special hit points: I dunno, for some reason it kind of struck me as...cheating? Bad form? Eh.

[General Battuta]

Do the tutorial, man.

[Kestrellius]

I think I did. Maybe I wasn't looking closely enough.

[Black Wolf]

Battuta means the walkthrough, not the tutorial. The walkthrough is a comprehensive and extremely detailed introduction to FREDding involving the creation of a mission around, IIRC, the NTF attacking an Arcadia? I don't precisely recall. Anyway, it takes a few hours, but once you've done it, you'll be very well equipped to start FREDding properly.

You might be getting confused with a much more basic tutorial that just involved chucking a few waves of ships down and building a dogfight. That one you could certainly have done and nit learned about events etc. But the walkthrough, you'd know if you'd done that.

I highly recommend it, it's more than worth the time for anyone who wants to us FRED.

[Lepanto]

Tutorial or no tutorial, don't be afraid to fiddle around with silly mission concepts in FRED. Come up with a cool mission idea, then try to use the FREDding tools at your disposal to pull it off. Even if you junk the whole thing as stupid, you'll probably have learned a lot just by trying.

Oh, and special-hits is a necessary balancing device. Sometimes, you need to keep ships alive longer, or kill them quickly. As long as you don't do anything too blatant (i.e. have a Fenris survive volleys from a Sath), your players shouldn't notice.

[General Battuta]

Just like with jump clocks, you can come up with rules to govern when you make ships more or less tough. Fighters get more or less hard to kill depending on how they allocate power. So can warships - even if you don't adopt crazy technofluff like this, you can think about World War II fighting ships, which had to make decisions like 'do we move ordnance now, or seal off these sections?' 'Do we run this generator, or move to a backup system, and shut that one off so it doesn't explode?' It makes some kind of logical sense that a ship can render itself more or less hardened to damage, at the cost of other functions.

Interestingly, damage control capabilities were a huge part of WW2 combat, but most games don't model them much if at all.

[karajorma]

If you have it, Diaspora also has a very comprehensive walkthrough built in. In both cases you just simply need to go to the help menu in FRED and look at the Help Topics. You might also want to checkout the Diaspora help here. It's much more comprehensive than the one for FS2 as it covers almost every single SCP addition to FRED (So some of you experienced FREDders might want to check it out too. Just in case there are any features you've ever wondered about).

[NGTM-1R]

Just like with jump clocks, you can come up with rules to govern when you make ships more or less tough. Fighters get more or less hard to kill depending on how they allocate power. So can warships - even if you don't adopt crazy technofluff like this, you can think about World War II fighting ships, which had to make decisions like 'do we move ordnance now, or seal off these sections?' 'Do we run this generator, or move to a backup system, and shut that one off so it doesn't explode?' It makes some kind of logical sense that a ship can render itself more or less hardened to damage, at the cost of other functions.

Interestingly, damage control capabilities were a huge part of WW2 combat, but most games don't model them much if at all.

Not...reaaaaally? One of the truisms of WW2 is that a ship doesn't come back from taking effective salvos. Damage control needs a space to work in where the ship is not being actively hit.

[General Battuta]

You got a lot of catastrophic hits that wouldn't have been catastrophic with better DC practices, and a lot of ships that stopped at 'mission kill' instead of 'hull loss' due to good DC. But you're right that in the latter case that was more strategically than tactically relevant.

[Phantom Hoover]

Interestingly, damage control capabilities were a huge part of WW2 combat, but most games don't model them much if at all.

FTL tho

[NGTM-1R]

You got a lot of catastrophic hits that wouldn't have been catastrophic with better DC practices, and a lot of ships that stopped at 'mission kill' instead of 'hull loss' due to good DC. But you're right that in the latter case that was more strategically than tactically relevant.

Catastrophic damage isn't really a matter for damage control; it's a matter of ship/weapon design and operational (as opposed to D/C) procedure. Poor magazine protection, excesses of flammable material, these are things dealt with in the design team or a refit. Draining your fuel lines in expectation of an attack helps prevent damage, but it is not a damage-control function as such. (Indeed, the man who first suggested it was actually a senior member of the ship's aviation maintenance crews.) Damage control is personnel, procedure, and related equipment that acts to repair damage or limit its spread after it has happened.

tl;dr: You're misusing the phraseology, in an understandable way, but still.

[General Battuta]

Whatever you want to call it, responding to an internal fire with 'let's turn on all the ventilators' proved to be a preeeetty bad call at least once, iirc.

[Kestrellius]

I tried to make a Great War-era engagement with a bunch of Demons and Orions and Fenrii and Cains armed only with blobs (and missiles).

The resulting abomination looked more like traffic than combat, really.