Besides, the idea of Fs1 lucifer "beams" is a good idea, however, the beam charge and noises is something I would like to keep with the "pseudo beams", also one thing I loved with real beams is that they scoured the target's armour, while the lucy's didn't do visible damage (just the sexp stipulating the galatea's huul should go down to 32, then to 1 then to 0).
Hmmn, I don't think you can get a beam charge and cooldown sound with these guns. Normal guns don't really charge and cool down. Unless it's possible to add those sounds to normal weapons? Usually a gun like a flak cannon, or another gun just fires. What a person could do is make a sound that has both the "shooting sound" and the "cooldown" sound. So that every time a beam fired it would have the beam fire and the cooldown sound attached to the end. A firing sound can be as long as a person wants I think.
Similarly I'm sure the gun can be given any sort of impact explosion a person wants, and at any size as well. The beams won't sort of slash the target like the Terran and Vasudan beams, but they will hit the target like in a row of 10 explosions sorta thing (same as how they fire).
Hmmn, when I threw a third ship in there. There did seem to be some slowdown . . . so maybe animated missile trails would be a little out of the question. Who knows, would have to see. The sound would be definately doable I think.
And of course, the fact of having bays being consisted of 10 "mini" bays (careful, there are 25 gun bays), is a good idea, but bays plus spinal mount plus turrets (the missiles will simply be one subsystem spawning missiles aroud the ship): Are we not going to go past the FS engine limit?
Oh making some "half" bays/turrets of 5 shouldn't be a problem.
The game seems to have a limit of about 100 turrets. For most ships, this shouldnt be a problem . . . the Venatrix is a notable exception as it has 12 bays of 100 guns each (120 turrets) not including AF defenses. For that, well a person could potentially basically combine bays . . . it wouldnt be ideal, but a person could say just give it bays that fire twice instead of once. Same firepower, but it'll look a little less impressive perhaps. For the Venatrix in particular, the basically 80 of those guns could be turned into 40 since the aft 20 are identical calibre, the front are identical calibre, etcetera . .. .
I think a person would definately want to re-create every laser mount. Give them different ranges, different damages. Higher diameter give them broader beams sorta thing.
And for turrets . . honestly I would ignore what the book says and for turrets their application should be a lot more liberal. As it is, each class of ship has EXACTLY the same anti-fighter defenses. That's honestly really boring. Imagine if in Freespace 2, the Fenris, Leviathan, Cain, Lilith, Aten, Mentu and Aeolus all had exactly the same fighter defenses. Anti-fighter defenses are basically the biggest interaction the player has with capital ships, I would certainly look at making some ships good anti-fighter ships and have some ships as fairly crappy. And base that largely on whatever information a person can get out of their description or the ship's intended role.
About using missiles...give them a homing ability and it would make a greate anime like FX ^_^
I know its not what you want but would still look interesting.
Eh . . anime? Bah. Save it for a Gunbuster mod.
The Gunbuster's "homing laser" was one of the low points of the OVA for me to be honest. Whereas I thought the "main barrage" from the fleet was more of a camera effect or something rather than having them home in on the fleet (in the first large engagement, when the lasers sorta curve around the planet at the alien fleet). Also, since they're going to be primarily anti-ship weapons . . I think homing lasers would mean that they would basically never miss. Maybe kinda boring?? I dunno. But they'd definitely read/look more like missile barrages than laser fire that's for sure.
I attached the ship in a zip file. It's a piece of crap to be honest. The model's a little screwed up . . . the textures are just from the Deimos and I don't know how to tile them so it's stretched all over the place. The port side has 6 turrets/bays, the stbd has 1, the front has 1 spinal mount sorta thing (with some dink gun in there). Also the turrets are messed up, for some reason the turrets all register in flight as being at the same point in the hull. I think this in turn causes no more than 4 of the turrets to work at any one time (by work I mean fire). I added engines but I couldnt seem to add thrusters, I dunno what the heck. Maybe MODView isn't ideal.
But basically, all you had to do is make a new folder in your FSOpen directory (ie RL) then extract the zip there and it'll release a data folder, etcetera. I included some crap test mission with three of the ships fighting a Deimos. One of them I gave a slightly different gun. It fires
harbingers Fusion Mortar-models instead, and in volleys of 20 . .. with that ship there, it can slowdown a bit on my computer. Obviously the lasers shouldn't fire missiles but what I do like about that is that from a distance it looks like the lasers have a bright head to them. I think that's sorta cool.
I'm not sure about velocity limits in FS2. Obviously the lasers should be pretty fast. And the missile trails life should last at least as long as the weapon's range. If the trail starts to dissappear before the laser reaches its target it wont look like a beam imo.
Hmmn, like what I see for capital ships in RL:
Personally I'd like the engagement distances to be a lot bigger . . for like 37.5 . . .the longest range, make it like 10-20kms range.
Think about it, you've got like a Shiva and an Ultor class (ie the Kraken), circling eachother at like 10 kms. Each of them firing broadsides of 250 lasers from their 37.5 bays. Meanwhile the player is caught inbetween, doing whatever they're doing while the two behemoths whittle eachother down at extreme range. Maybe give the "lasers" like velocity 2-3000 or something, at 10km they reach their target in like 3-5 seconds. I like the look of large glowing laser heads . . . the player's flying around, suddenly 10-20 lasers fly right past him in front of him. That'd be cool.
20km might be a little long . . . .15 might be ideal for the extreme range of 37.5. This doesnt mean that every battle would take place at the range, not at all. You don't want a bunch of missions where the player spends half the time going places. That would get old pretty fast. But the higher ranges would allow ships to really exploit their roles. The TOG Morkanium for example has no spinal mount but carries nothing but 37.5 bays as a destroyer. Throw it up against something like the RL Exeter which has 22.5 guns which have half the range. And the Morkanium can actually act like it ought to . .. maybe the player is based on the Exeter, the Morkanium comes in and is staying at like 9km. The player has rush over and disable it's guns before his own ship is torn apart. Or maybe disable the engines, so the Exeter can move in and with its lower-ranged but more numerous weapons deliver a killing blow.
Looking at laser length, this is how it might translate in different possible scales.
Boardgame 1:1 4:3 2:1 (hexes to km)
37.5 20 20km 15km 10km
30 15 15 11.25 7.5
22.5 10 10 7.5 5
15 6 6 4.5 3
7.5 3 3 2.25 1.5
|
1:1 might be a little much. But 4:3 or 2:1 would be cool I think.
So there's basically 5 range brackets of weapons, and in each of those weapon there's 6 calibres (30cm, 25cm, 20cm, 15cm, 10cm, 5-6cm)
Which translates into basically 30 weapons. Plus 5 spinal mounts is like 35 types of ship weapons (not including AA turrets). That's not too too many, not sure what the limit is for the weapons.tbl
6 calibres also means 6 types of bay turret models/meshes. Which again isnt that many. A person could potentially even uh . . . diversify it a bit more and have them look different for each faction (slightly?). Kessrith might be a bit different, not really sure who they are yet.
EDIT And actually, that range conversion of 4:3 or 2:1 would work well for the fighters too. Fighters have a max range in Leviathan of 3 hexes . . . which is as it says about 2.25km or 1.5 (2250 meters of 1500 meters). This is comparable to the fighter ranges in Freespace 2. So it seems like a good fit. (basic subach is about 1000 metres, Prometheus-S is around 1500-2000 I think).
Anyway, this post is too damn long already so that's enough for now.
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