[General Battuta]

Yeah, some discussion of sentence level prose construction and how to build sentences actively. Not a big deal.

[Rheyah]

Hello!

I am aware that this project is disappearing interminably into the distance in some peoples minds and for good reason!  After all, while I love writing the fiction (and can only hope some people like reading it) ultimately the meat of a Freespace campaign is in the missions.

Further, three things have come to mind:

1.  I am never happy with the technical mechanisms present in my missions, particular the pacing.
2.  I have a lot of ideas but I want to prove I can execute them and thus, keep my own interest in the campaign up.
3.  I need feedback from people better than myself.

As such, I will be releasing a demo (MediaVPs 2014 required, sorry) on or before the 28th of February.  So why bother?  What's the point?

1.  There's a story to tell.  It will be 3 mission campaign exploring some of the history of the Shetland and how she came into her current ownership.
2.  It'll give me the chance to trial and show some of my FREDing skills and get critique on pacing and otherwise.
3.  I will be including modified weapon, armour and other tbms so there will be a limited exposition on my Blob Improvement Project. 

You will be taking a role of a pilot from the 349th Silent Banshees flying out of the GTD Ephesus.

[niffiwan]

sound cool - looking forward to seeing it

[Luis Dias]

[Black Wolf]

End of the month huh? Awesome - I'm guessing that there's still work to be done, so putting your cock on the block like that and picking a date is ballsy, but I really, really hope that you pull it off.

Remember too, people here are generally happy to help, so if you do need something done to make that date happen, don't hesitate to ask!

[Rheyah]

Brief update.  I'm still more or less hoping to get this out on time but I had some personal annoyance at how mission 1 of my demo was panning out so I had to rewrite that as well.

At present I am beginning to realize that my own perfectionism is getting in the way, so I plan to release as close to the 28th as possible just to get some feedback.

[Rheyah]

Well I did my best but it's unlikely I'm going to hit my self imposed deadline and release something worth playing.

A little frustrating for me seeing as I wanted to get this demo out, but I'll keep plugging away.

[Axem]

I wouldn't worry too much about it. I've blown across many a self imposed deadlines, the secret is just to keep making new ones. Eventually you'll hit one and it'll feel like a victory.

[Luis Dias]

exactly, self-imposed deadlines are great tools for self-motivation, if they start becoming depressing and unmotivating, then you're doing them wrong!

Take your time, make new deadlines, keep it up! There's nothing like finishing personal projects.

[Rheyah]

Decided the best way I can make myself feel better is to do an SVN commit of the day like on the BP forums so people know what I'm doing and why.  Especially since I now actually have a working SVN

- Fixed Ipu's asteroid pathing so it correctly evades the right asteroidal body while helping Shawcross search for the jamming source in all randomised positions.

[Rheyah]

- Corrected an event where the Carthage would veer off and smash into an asteroid.  Still don't know why she was doing this but now it doesn't seem to happen.

[Rheyah]

- Altered the ACO strike on the Qaa to be multi-stage.  Its previous iteration was too easy and straightforward for the player.

[Rheyah]

Okay so I took a little time off to write a voting system for a society I am involved with.  With that more or less over and done with I'm hoping to continue my push towards my new (secretive) deadline.    I am promising nothing seeing as every single time I try and promise screenshots or something I end up hating the ones I take.  However work is progressing and fairly rapidly at this point.

Ephesus (the prelude campaign) is more or less self contained and set around 4 months into the NTF rebellion.  It'll have 6 missions, the last of which is set in the time of Shetland.  in case you're wondering why it extended from 3 to 6 missions, I liked what I was writing and doing and felt it would serve me better as a more complete campaign with a beginning, middle and end rather than a 3 mission sortie where you barely have time to get attached to anyone.

Narrative wise, I'm fairly interested in exploring the strategic victories that lead to the NTF gaining control over three core systems and the hard military doctrine of the GTVA fighter corps with the effect this has on its pilots.

I am not trying to make these missions perfect or overly refined.  I am just going to do my best guess at what I think is entertaining and see what people make of it.  The whole point of releasing it is to get some critique and feedback.  It's not a demo of "what I can do" but more a chance to get some feedback

[Luis Dias]

"What I can do" is something that is constantly changing so don't worry no one will "evaluate" your campaign, at least if I play it I will merely contribute with opinionated feedback that I'll hope will be helpful for your creativity.

[Rheyah]

Hello!  It's been some time since I updated.  Since the last time I updated I dislocated my shoulder and got playing both Dark Souls II and XCOM EW The Long War.  However, I continue to make slow progress on each mission and continue to adjust both my little designs and write bits of history as they take my fancy.

I don't have an SVN on this machine at present so no fancy little SVN commits (it'll be one big commit I make when I get back to Belfast).  However, I thought I'd share a little bit of historical detail with you all.  It's not particularly major, but it is a bit of backstory, lore and helps set the scene for a lot of the later developments that occur in Shetland.


Vasudan And Terran Weapon Designs Over The Years

GTVA military historians have long argued over the eventual end state of the Terran Vasudan War, not just from a political or socio-economic perspective but also from a technological perspective.  It can be said that the T-V war was one in which the technological advancement of both species was heavily stunted in favour of military growth and there is some evidence to support that conclusion.  Weapons manufacturing was one of the few scientific regimes that suffered in neither organisation and both governments were in a constant arms race to find the advantage, right up until the moment the Shivans arrived.

There is an argument for a certain amount of technological convergence.  Both species realized early on that advancements in materials science brought about by subspace and zero gravity manufacturing techniques were beginning to greatly exceed the capabilities of kinetic action weapons.  As both species spread into space, the relative ease with which anti-matter could be produced through solar energy acceleration rigs made it an apparent weapon of choice, the difficulty of storing and producing anti-matter offset by the tremendous power storage capacity it allowed.  Both species fed their need for power with banks of ultra high energy fusion reactors, whose waste products were pumped through huge reactor baffles and used to drive the million ton machines both races used as warships.

The discovery of subspace advanced materials science by close to one thousand years inside of fifty.  Terrans and Vasudans first left their systems using small, unmanned rocket propellant launched spacecraft.  They now voyaged through the stars in indestructable titans, powered by fusion and anti-matter.

As warships became bigger and more powerful, new methods of inflicting damage on them were required.  Conventional explosives were hopelessly outmoded.  The battlefield of the Terran-Vasudan war was a nuclear one, where more firepower was exchanged in single capital ship duels than by the whole of human civilization up until that point combined.  The only effective way of delivering nuclear strikes was by projectile.

Here is where the two species diverged.

The Parliamentary Vasudan Navy rarely drifted from their initial approach to the war.  Dating back to the days of being a planet bound species, the Vasudan obsession with flexibility had always tempered their largely religious warfare with a respect for their body's natural durability.  Vasudan warfare was a brutal affair but it was not without its charm - the Vasudan's bony forearms and prodigeous strength allowed them to forgo the Terran innovation of the shield until late in their discovery of ranged combat.  As such, the standard Vasudan combat stance for generations was that of two weapons.  An old proverb amongst the Vasudan military goes, "foolish are those who see combat as a meeting of steel.  It is two such meetings."

PVN warships had an emphasis on point defense and deterring long range strikes through the prodigeous use of missiles.  Their warships were a battery of short range anti-capital ship plasma turrets, dedicated point defense platforms and then long range missile batteries designed to spew out vast numbers of self guiding missiles.  Terran vessels caught in duels with Vasudan warships had a matter of minutes to extracate themselves before the barrage of missiles became too much for their defense systems to withstand.  Those which employed fighter screens fared much better - Vasudan missiles had yet to reach the level of refinement where screening became impossible.

Early T-V era capital ships were equipped with heavy thruster driven torpedoes designed to spoof ECM and evade fighter detection.  These had extremely limited success against well drilled Vasudan CIWS technicians and crews.  Vessels would have to close to near ramming range simply to deliver their payloads.  GTA cruisers were typically overwhelmed in these early conflicts and often relied on numbers to survive.

Terran destroyers generally fared far better - their fighter crews quickly became skilled at screening ACGM volleys and even a small Terran cruiser could carry the lethal Hammershot PDMS, a micro-missile point defense system which could turn entire volumes of space into instant death zones for Vasudan pilots.

In a scramble, the GTA switched to unguided, single shot mortar-esque weapons with an extremely high exit velocity.  After close to eighteen months of losses, a form of countermeasure had been found to the remarkable Vasudan CIWS network.  This set the stage of the mid-war.  Vasudan warships outgunned Terran warships ton for ton, but a number of gifted non-flag officers (particularly the late Admiral Wolf) managed to convince GTA command to switch their approach in large scale conflicts.

Vasudan battlegroups, individually superior ship to ship, found themselves torn apart at range by massed mortar fire.  The Fenris cruiser made its debut appearance as a fast moving attack cruiser and provided one of the first true victories of the war.  A squadron of Fenris cruisers operating under the command of the then Commander Joseph Wolf cornered and crippled the PVD Tefnut as it resupplied at a forward base, forcing the Vasudans to withdraw the destroyer.

The war settled into a comfortable stalemate.  The Orion class destroyers were given a second refit equipping them with a full battery of the new Howitzer Fusion Mortar system.  The PVN fell back a system or two, fortifying their nodes and skirmishes went unanswered by both sides.  While destroyer  engagements were rare during this period, the Orion had a notable advantage on the Ramses attack carrier.

A number of historians claim the war never left the stalemate.  While this may not be as controversial a statement as it might have been closer to the foundation of the GTVA - certainly knowing as we do now, how uninterested both populaces had become in what was widely pilloried as a First Contact Gone Wrong - we would be remiss not to include four other major advances in our list.

The emergence of the Typhon class destroyer and its subsequent destruction of the Eisenhower gave GTA strategists collective pause for thought.  Unlike the Ramses, the Typhon was designed as a pure endurance platform.  Equipped with twelve of the newest Khopesh ACGM batteries, a vast fighter bay with construction facilities, phenomenal subspace mobility for a vessel of its size and the usual Vasudan attention to detail, the Typhon obliterated the majority of the 4th Fleet in Vega before retreating to hold the node.  While the Typhon itself was later destroyed in other circumstances, it represented a tremendous step forward in ship design which continues to resonate in modern GTVA ship design.  The Deimos class corvette in particular uses collapsed molybdenum alloys first prototyped in the Typhon.

It became obvious as time went on that Vasudan weapons technology continued to develop at a pace comparable to that of their rivals.  The advent of the FK series (unaffectionately known to Terran pilots as the FK-U missile) enabled Vasudans to finally compete with the Hammershot IV for fighter point defense.  The response to this by the Terran military came in the form of a projected plasma system breakthrough made late in the war.

Both sides had been struggling to keep plasma containment geometries stable past CIWS range.  While plasma weapons were drastically more powerful than any comparable missile delivery system, they were decidedly short ranged.  When physicists at the Rechenzentrum Garching announced the results of simulations of subspace field induced propagating plasma mirrors, the reponse was decisive.  A prototype was quickly produced and the result was the Deluge, the first long range plasma artillery ever developed by either race.

The effects of the Deluge were immediately felt in the PVN.  The first Orion to be equipped with Deluge weaponry was the GTD Galatea under the now Admiral Wolf.  Wolf launched an operation which destroyed the PVD Illahun and drove Vasudan forces back across half a system, ceding a volume that had been held for nearly four years.  The lukewarm response of the oppressed GTA citizens at the rolling back of this curtain is an enlightening one which is left for a more complete history of the war.

When the Shivans arrived, neither side were prepared.  Both civilizations were barely engaged in the slowly burning cold war with support on both sides of the divide at an all time low.  The Shivans came with advanced subspace based plasma weaponry and intimidating rapid fire plasma based CIWS systems which shredded entire fighter wings in seconds.  A single Shivan cruiser was capable of overwhelming entire fighter screens and their cruiser support by itself.  Worse, their fighters were shielded by a then unknown technology and it quickly became obvious just how ineffective the formerly superior missile based CIWS of both sides were against this new defence.

The development of countermeasures to the Shivan threat is well known and taught by military historians throughout the GTVA and thus will not be covered.  This includes the final stanza of this poem of warfare, the coda, the moment when both civilizations gave up their greivances with each other and chose to form the Alliance as we know it today.  The plasma beam weapon.

In many ways, the plasma beam weapon represents everything both races were striving to work towards.  That it required both Terran plasma physicists and Vasudan engine designers to finally reproduce the Lucifers' beam weaponry from readings taken at impact events on Vasuda Prime is a lesson for future generations.

[Rheyah]

The GTD Ephesus and her battlegroup stationed at the Bessel Repair and Refit Yards, Sirius IV.


The GVC Qaa engages an NTF Leviathan in defense of a fleeing loyalist convoy.

[Rheyah]

Small update.When you play Ephesus, you'll notice I have made substantial changes to virtually every capital ship, non-beam capital ship weapon and fighter weapon in the game.  Every capital ship is far stronger than it was and I have dealt with and removed a lot of the very silly tactics which lead to cruisers becoming virtually useless.  You can't kill capital ships (even cruisers) without specialised weaponry now.  Every single capital ship from cruiser upwards has an extensive point defense suite working in tandem with anti-capital ship weaponry.

I haven't done this out of some fetish for cruisers.  I've done it mainly so I can greatly diversify the range of ships which are viable in missions.  Even a modest Fenris can pose a severe threat to two wings of fighters.  When deployed in tandem with fighters, a cruiser can fortify a location enormously.  More importantly, it allowed me to begin to reform the bombing game, something that has annoyed me a lot.


The Bombing Game

Bombing in Ephesus and Shetland is a multi stage affair which in the in universe nomenclature is known as an Anti Capital Ordinance engagement or ACO run.  An ACO run consists of a two stage strike.  A wing of heavy fighters carrying disarm weaponry make a pinpoint strike on the close in weapons systems on the ship using either Stilletos or the new Anlace multi role anti-subsystem strike swarm missile.  This wing of heavy fighters engages the ships fighter screen and its CIWS turrets.

Once the CIWS turrets are down, a wing of rapid strike bombers will then use heavy bombing ordinance to destroy the ship.  Bombs reload much faster so if you are playing a strike mission, the bombs should feel more responsive.  Further, there's more to do.  Bombers have a wider range of anti-capital ship weaponry as well, including more effective primary weapons (like the Prometheus R, repurposed as a slow firing multi role anti-shipping weapon) but I also changed a few of their defenses.  I tried to emphasize the idea of a strike bomber, not a heavy bomber.

The idea is that once you are through a capital ships point defenses, you have already won.  The goal is then to get through its point defenses and anti-fighter weaponry.  As such, strike bombers are more nimble, faster and I think more enjoyable to fly.  The Zeus, the Athena (Shetland reintroduces the Athena as a legacy bomber) and the Artemis are ideal for this and have all received some love.  They fly like fighters now but are weapon restricted.

So what about heavy bombers?  Well, you won't get to fly them in Ephesus, but heavy bombers are not strike bombers.  I am -hoping- to remodel heavy bombers slightly along the lines of an ultra-heavy missile boat with multiple turrets as a kind of intermediate between patrol cruisers (gunboats) and strike bombers.  Essentially, a heavy bomber would fly like a mini capital ship with shields with its own point defenses and so on.

In a heavy bomber or missile boat, you sit in the centre of a formation of fighters and circle your target, picking off turrets and delivering heavy ordinance.  I am hoping to expand on this a lot in Shetland.


Anti-Subsystem Weapons

No longer suck.  They take the role of good anti-shield weapons.  This counts for all anti-subsystem weapons.

All torpedoes and bombs function as anti-subsystem weapons.  Trebuchets are great and all, but they don't manuever like they used to and they can be shot down.


I won't talk too much more about what I've done - I'll include a lot of it in the Journal and Tech Rooms.

The Fenris and Leviathan

The Fenris and Leviathan always felt very similar.  I really wanted to nail on this strike cruiser vs defensive cruiser idea.  Both are much more sturdy and much more powerful.  The Fenris now totes the newly buffed SGreen and cruises along at a nice and steady 35 mps along with its substantially buffed CIWS defenses.  The Leviathan retains its sluggish disposition but also now features a rear LTerSlash beam cannon, also slightly buffed.  It also features Flak.  All flak weapons now feature the CIWS weapon flag.  This is balanced by weapons that can be shot down being much, much more available.


Anti-Capital Ship Missile Weapons

Are much more common than they used to be.  This is a tactical concession as well - nearly all of them can be shot down.  You can even make it easier for your bombers by shooting at the capital ship from another angle using torpedoes or ASMs (Stilletos, Anlaces) and watching its turrets track your own missiles.  Or you can take advantage of the Vasudan's newly discovered predilication for mass missile volleys!


In Conclusion

I've spent a long time messing about with bits and pieces to get this feeling right and to change how Freespace combat feels in a positive and interesting way.  I hope people will enjoy it when I release it.  I'm on 4/6 missions at present.  Not sure when release will be, but the hardest missions are out of the way

[niffiwan]

That sounds interesting, I like the ideas you have for the capital/anti-capital dynamic

[The Dagger]

I love the depth of your universe and I really want to see how these rules play out.  Keep up the good work! 

[Black Wolf]

Sounds like some big changes to familiar weapons - just remember that your players wont have your in-depth knowledge of the new combat dynamic - have you considered a training mission to ease us newbies in?