[TopAce]

Originally posted by TrashMan
...did some optimization and after that added more detail..around 720 polys now, and I really don't see a need for more....

Because there isn't a need.

[TrashMan]

Right then...anyone want ot texture it with areally cool SOC texture?
Don't have Photoshop on me now, so I can't do it...

[Eishtmo]

Originally posted by Zarax
Weapon refit costs are usually much less than building new stuff...
That's why there are still B52s and F4s flying around today...

However, the weapons of a B-52 and an F-4 aren't complex energy weapons, they're mostly bombs with advanced tracking devices.  The differences between an iron bomb and a smart one are inside the bomb, not the plane.

That's where the difference is.  The Athena, and many of the other FS1 craft, use energy weapons powered off of the ship's reactor.  If the recactor can't put out enough energy to power the weapon as well as all the other internal systems (including the newly developed shields and the engines), then either the ship or the weapon has to go.  Given the Shivan threat, the ship would go since you needed the weapon to actually win the battle, where the ship without the weapon would simply be a target to the Shivan hoards.  That might come in handy in some situations, but in the long run, not so much.

[Zarax]

Secondaries does not use energy... Also, Avenger and Maxim are supposed to be mass drivers, so no need of new reactor and stuff...

[ChronoReverse]

Maxim is a mass driver that uses a lot of energy though.  So the need for a new reactor is still plausible.

[Zarax]

Well, it's only for balance purposes imho... can't check the tables right now but i bet the Athena has better energy output/reserves than the erinyes...

[aldo_14]

Mass drivers use electromagnetic plates / coils (i.e. gauss cannon/coilgun, railgun) to accelerate the projectile anyways, IIRC, so they do need a decent amount of reactor power.

[Zarax]

Athena: $Power Output: 2.0
HL7: $Energy Consumed: 0.2
Akheton: $Energy Consumed:   1.6
Morning Star: $Energy Consumed: 0.8
Prom R: $Energy Consumed: 0.60
Prom S: $Energy Consumed: 1.0
Maxim: $Energy Consumed: 0.1
Kayser: $Energy Consumed: 1.2
With 4 gunpoints on the Athena you can use without overloading the reactor:
Subach
Maxim

Doesn't look that bad to me... i can live without kaysers on a bomber, with HL7 and Maxims you shouldn't have too many problems even if you need to dogfight...
I admit reactor power is below average for FS2 standards, but it's still reasonable enough to carry some decent firepower.

[TrashMan]

Is installing a new power plant so far fetched?

And you can actually use all weapons, only they would drain your energy reserves fast. Maxim and subach wouldn't drain them at all...

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Zarax
Athena: $Power Output: 2.0
HL7: $Energy Consumed: 0.2
Akheton: $Energy Consumed:   1.6
Morning Star: $Energy Consumed: 0.8
Prom R: $Energy Consumed: 0.60
Prom S: $Energy Consumed: 1.0
Maxim: $Energy Consumed: 0.1
Kayser: $Energy Consumed: 1.2
With 4 gunpoints on the Athena you can use without overloading the reactor:
Subach
Maxim

Doesn't look that bad to me... i can live without kaysers on a bomber, with HL7 and Maxims you shouldn't have too many problems even if you need to dogfight...
I admit reactor power is below average for FS2 standards, but it's still reasonable enough to carry some decent firepower.

what about engines & shields, though?  None of the old FS ships - Athena, Apollo, maybe the Valkyrie (can't remember) were made with shields or,indeed, inter system jump drives in mind.

Originally posted by TrashMan
Is installing a new power plant so far fetched?
.

Quite possibly... it may be that the size of the new reactor isn;t a problem, but the overload on the internal wiring would be too great.  

What you could regard it as being like, is the transition between propeller driver WW2 fighters to the jet era... i.e. the newer (still in use) FS1 ships could have been developed with a view towards inter-system drives & shields (with reactor space and wiring to anticipate this), whilst the older ships just couldn't be future proofed in the same way.

[Zarax]

FS1 ships could be upgraded with intersystem jump drive, the only drawback was that it was costly to do it...
If GTVA equipped oldies like the medusa with the various upgrades then it should be possible on Athena too...
Shields can be trickier, but given how fast they were installed fleet wide during FS1 i don't think they should be too much of a problem...
If you can explain why Medusa, Herc1 and Ursa were upgraded and why other stuff wasn't then you will have a solid point...
Given FSbible they all were aorund the same age old, so you need a tauthology to prove you're right... good luck.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Zarax
FS1 ships could be upgraded with intersystem jump drive, the only drawback was that it was costly to do it...
If GTVA equipped oldies like the medusa with the various upgrades then it should be possible on Athena too...
Shields can be trickier, but given how fast they were installed fleet wide during FS1 i don't think they should be too much of a problem...
If you can explain why Medusa, Herc1 and Ursa were upgraded and why other stuff wasn't then you will have a solid point...
Given FSbible they all were aorund the same age old, so you need a tauthology to prove you're right... good luck.

IIRC the FS Ref bible doesn't give the Medusa, Ursa, or Herc an exact age vs the Athena or Apollo (or indeed the Valkyrie, which is after all based upon the older Angel class).  Only the Apollo and Athena are stated as stalwarts of the TV-war.

The Apollo is the original Space Superiority Fighter of the Terran fleet. After years of faithful service, it is still the first ship granted to commissioned GTA pilots (Apollo)
Dubbed the "lightning bomber" by some of its pilots, this little wonder was the mainstay of the GTA fleet before it started developing its bigger warheads (Athena)

 It's possible that the newer FS1 ships were simply designed for future-upgrading, whereas the Athena & Apollo were not.

You've pretty much answered it with the cost thing there, though (which had never occured to me, actually) - the cost of shoe-horning in an inter-system drive in what was increasingly an outdated and cannon-fodder ship probably contributed a great deal to the retirement of the Athena, etc.  Eventually, the modifications required would become more expensive than building a new ship.

And, of course, the Medusa, Herc, Ulysses, etc are being retired by the time of FS2 - the Artemis, Boanerges, Myrmidon, et al entering mainstream service - and are largely (only?) used by rebel forces.

[Mad Bomber]

I believe it's said in the Subspace info, that intersystem drives for fighters are "prohibitively expensive to produce". From that I infer that not all fighters have intersystem drives -- it's too expensive to fit 'em all with them.

The Tsunami was a fat, unwieldy bomb, and the Medusa had to be designed with them in mind. Cyclops torpedoes, with their narrower fuselage, are more likely to be usable by Athenas, given a little shoehorning. Athenas probably used a lighter, thinner torpedo during their T-V War service. (the anti-hull precursor to the Stiletto, or something along those lines)


Finally, you must understand that corporate types, mercs, pirates and such can't always afford the newest stuff. Athenas and Apollos and such are bound to still be in use by someone.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Mad Bomber

Finally, you must understand that corporate types, mercs, pirates and such can't always afford the newest stuff. Athenas and Apollos and such are bound to still be in use by someone.

You don't see modern day criminals / pirates / civvies using mothballed WW1 destroyers and flying about in Spitfires though, do you?

[Zarax]

No, but you see plenty third world countries using korea/vietnam era stuff all the time...
Also, the medusa was still in use by GTVA in FS2, and you even fly it in a few missions IIRC...

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Zarax
No, but you see plenty third world countries using korea/vietnam era stuff all the time...
Also, the medusa was still in use by GTVA in FS2, and you even fly it in a few missions IIRC...

But a third world country is a hell of a far cry from a civvie organisation.  Especially if they are given/cheap-sold these (i.e. by US / USSR to stem the flow of Communism/Capitalism ala the Cold War).

Nor is there any mention of how prevalent civvie traffic is in FS, AFAIK we don't even know if there is any civvie traffic.

[Mad Bomber]

There has to be. Otherwise no one would have colonized anything outside the Sol system. If there's nothing profitable in space but the military, no one would have gone there.

Profitable spacebound industry means there'll be civvies. At the absolute minimum, there are the Naval contractors and food shipments.

It's likely that (in the FS universe) there are burgeoning industries in space. Mining guilds, random civilians going on cruises to exotic locales (Luyten or Aldebaren maybe?), various shipping companies all competing with each other, etc.

The Navy and SOC don't have a monopoly on all the ships in space. It'd be too much of an economic drain to run everything that way. Hell, most of the military ships and weapons in the game are made by private contractors! More likely the GTVA just commandeers ships in times of dire need, or near the front lines, where nearly all of FS and FS2 take place.

Or maybe civvies just avoid embattled areas like the plague.

(Ironic, innit, that all this talk of privatization in space is coming from a die-hard liberal. )

[Zarax]

BTW, even today there are mercenary organizations that uses military grade equipment...
Sukhoy even offers a complete service, they build an air force for you from aircrafts to pilots and generals...
And more important you are all forgetting NTF...
How come that a (well, it was GTVA until a couple of years before FS2) GTVA fleet is still pretty much armed with Great War era weaponry?

[NGTM-1R]

I think the 6th Fleet wasn't exactly trusted by GTVA command even before the rebellion, so they got lesser equipment. Also, it would appear the Herc II, Myrmidon, and Perseus are relatively new, less then three years old. The defecting NTF had minimal numbers of these to begin with, because deployment had begun only a few months before the rebellion, and what they did have has seen 18 months of combat, during which it has been damaged/destroyed/generally messed up. Also probably the NTF has very few spare parts left after 18 months of combat ops for those ships, so they aren't used much for fear they'll break and be unfixable.
There's also the matter that the NTF Rebellion actually helped the GTVA deploy the newer equipment more widely, in a sense, because they didn't have to deploy it to the fleets that had defected to the NTF. In all likelyhood, you wouldn't have had quite so much of the advanced hardware at your disposal in FS2 had the NTF Rebellion not occurred.
Of course, without the NTF Rebellion, there would be no FS2, because the NTF wouldn't exsist, and the Shivans would still be on the other side of a shut-down Knossos...

[TrashMan]

Whatever you say, it allways cheper to upgrade older stuff than to build new one.
Even if you have to dissasembe  the Athena piece by piece and put it back together with a few newer components, its still cheaper than designing, testing and producing a new fighter that will be finish god knows when..

Even if this wasn't hte case, who said that the Athena Hull can't be used for a new bomber? Everything is new - onyl hte hull is the same...