[Marcov]

Not sure if this is the correct place to post this topic in, but how can you alter the limit wherein a capital ship's turrets stop firing faster? I remember in the Procyon Insurgency they were able to make those lasers fire REALLY fast, how exactly do they do it? (I changed the THT's fire rate to 0.01 and the Orion fires it at a faster rate than normal, but not that fast).

[Qent]

PI only changed the refire delay, IIRC.

However, the weapon flag "same turret cooldown" removes the random delay, making turrets fire faster.

[Sushi]

You should also set "$Autoscale by AI Class Index: NO" for each AI.tbl entry. This turns off some AI-class based fire rate nerfing for turrets, and allows for a much faster fire rate.

[Marcov]

BTW, how can I increase the HP of a ship's subsystem so it doesn't get destroyed so easily?

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Can't believe no one said turn time compression on.  Cap ships will fire really fast

Anyway back to the topic.  Ship subsystem hit points are defined in the ships.tbl or -shp.tbm file under the $subsystem property.  It's a percentage of the ships hit points.  Just increase that.  You can find it in the wiki.  Yes the total can exceed that of the ship itself. 

[General Battuta]

Use armor.tbl too.

[Droid803]

Armor.tbl would be more work that needed if he just wants to make the subsystem be able to take more of every type of damage.
I feel its a solid strategy to stick to the most simple solution that achieves the effect you want.

Sure, I could give every single weapon a damage type, and make a specific armor type for the subsystem and reduce all damage taken by it to 0.1, or I can just go into ships.tbl and add a zero after the hitpoints. Both make the subsystem 10 times more resistant to all weapons.

The former would take me twenty minutes to table, the latter 5 seconds.

[Fury]

You're failing to see the use of armor.tbl from fredder's perspective. Changes what you do in shp or wep tbl/tbm, are always in effect. Armor types you can create as many as you want for different purposes and use them whenever you want in missions via sexps. Armor types are far more versatile despite requiring more effort to set up.

But yes, editing tbl's directly is better choice if you want those changes to take effect always.

[Nuke]

i solved the problem using scripting. if you've seen the gatling turrets ive implemented into the cockpit demo, theyre really impressive. what i did is let the turrets do as they please, as soona s they fire i start an animation and fire at specific keyframes. the barrels accelerate to max rpm and the fire rate is linked to the rotations*number of barrels so it behaves like a real gatling gun. the result is epic awesome. the game's difficulty settings can then change the frequency of the firing bursts.

[General Battuta]

Armor.tbl would be more work that needed if he just wants to make the subsystem be able to take more of every type of damage.
I feel its a solid strategy to stick to the most simple solution that achieves the effect you want.

Sure, I could give every single weapon a damage type, and make a specific armor type for the subsystem and reduce all damage taken by it to 0.1, or I can just go into ships.tbl and add a zero after the hitpoints. Both make the subsystem 10 times more resistant to all weapons.

The former would take me twenty minutes to table, the latter 5 seconds.

Armor.tbl allows you to modify subsystem resistance on the fly. Which is wonderful.

Plus, you can avoid messing with retail tables.

[Droid803]

You're going to need to modify retail tables to assign the said subsystem an armor type to begin with (well, to the same extent as just changing the HP) - a -shp.tbm, unless you seriously plan on setting it for every single mission it appears in.

As Fury noted, if you ALWAYS want the effect on, there's no reason to mess with setting up an Armor.tbl, especially if you don't need to modify subsystem resistance on the fly.

I'm not against using armor.tbl (hell, I'm using it in my own mods because I want to have different resistances to different weapons an I love it), but to set up the whole thing just to toughen up a subsystem or two is severe overkill if you don't plan on using anything else.

[General Battuta]

You can assign the subsystem an armor class via the change-armor-type SEXP, which is a beautiful thing indeed. This is useful if you don't want to use it across the board or you want to preserve retail compatibility in your mod (which BP does).

[Droid803]

Won't some of the models in BP kinda...kill Retail builds?
or do you mean, "still be able to play the retail campaign with the BP mod on".

[Fury]

Still able to play the mediavps edition of FS2 campaign with BP1 or BP2 mod enabled. Mission balance won't be 100% identical, but I'm not aware of any issues that would prevent finishing the missions or degrade experience.

[Dragon]

Actaully, changes we made will (hopefully) actually enhance the experience.