[Devrous]

You could also make your corvette into a anti fighter/missile ship, with fewer plasma torpedoes but additional laser turrets. Against the missile heavy weaponry of the USNC that sounds like a resonable thing to do for the Covernant.

Very true. It would accent the design very well, as it is a very thin ship. This would give it a wide field of view for the turrets but could leave a 'blind spot' with fewer defenses, making using fighters against it more useful. Also another excuse for me to put it in...well, almost every mission

I like your first corvette: it was one of the models I feared most losing should the project fall inactive!

Also, I was wondering: what's your orbat? you have a frigate, cruiser and destroyer class correct? Followed possibly by the battlecruiser and the assault carrier, is that true?

Indeed, I loved the model too the moment it materialized on screen! And yes, I've got all those classes accounted for, though I'm not sure exactly what you mean by 'orbat.'

[starlord]

order of battle: do you follow a standard navy classification according to witch a corvette is smaller than a destroyer which is in turn smaller than a cruiser, or do you have a more fictionnal like orbat installed like the freespace one (cruiser, corvette, destroyer in that order)?

[Herra Tohtori]

Fighters can always fly under the capship shields to attack.

This is true. You could nuke em point blank but you'd, well, die 

Take a book from US plans for tactical nuclear device deployment methods?

In other words, make it so that the fighter/bomber travels through the shield, deploys its ordnance and extracts itself from the immediate vicinity.


Even better would be to use delayed fuses for the detonation of the warheads. You'd have to make the ordnance remain in close proximity to the target, and I can think of three different possibilities to achieve this:

-make the ordnance follow the target (I don't know how feasible this would be to execute in FSO)
-make the ordnance penetrate target armour and lodge itself in the structures and detonate with delay (kinetic delivery)
-make the ordnance stick to the surface of the target and detonate with delay (tagging)


However, I have to point out, if the fighters can travel through the shield, why can't relatively slow velocity warheads?

You could also always use mines...

[Devrous]

@starlord:

I've been adhering to standard navy classification, seeing how closely the UNSC is modeled after the modern structure. I think this was not mostly for simplicity but for recognition. If you look at the most successful sci-fi games (and indeed movies/books) they will have a lot in common with the present, more so than will ever probably happen in reality. This is because people can relate to things they find familiar, even if it's subtle, and it makes the player/viewer/reader much more likely to accept the fictional world as plausible and helps them imagine it in their minds based on things they know from reality. Halo takes place around 500 years in the future yet the weapons are, for the most part, no different at all from today's arsenal. But I digress...

@HT:

I've tried a lot of nuke ideas but abandoned most of them purely due to the AI being stupid with them. When I tagged it for trigger detonation they detonate it way to early and get the player killed half the time. Aspect-seeking seems best, but I've made the Covenant anti-fighter beams accurate to be true to books, so they rarely make it to their target unless fired from within a kilometer or so (resulting in the AI's demise because they don't run away for some reason). A delayed explosion would be a great fix to be honest, but I haven't researched it enough to know the tag to use (if there is one). Also, how does the game register damage if I could delay it? For instance I wear down the shields and fire the nuke, hitting the hull. I run like hell and the delay occurs. If the shield recharges before the damage kicks in where does it apply the damage?

I've also toyed with mines and have a pair of them in the game now. One of them is just a ship with crazy death damage, and the other is a missile with an insane lifetime but really slow movement speed. Both work well when I tag to hide them from the AI enemies, but if I leave them visible to them they dispatch them quickly.

So far as fighters travelling through the shields, I'm thinking of just using the "shield on the hull" tag to stop that, though I'm not sure what it would look like as I've been to lazy to test that yet    If not we'll just have to live with that little...inconsistency 

[-Norbert-]

So.... would it be possible to use a surface shields, that has no visible effect, for the actual damage calculations and put a shield mesh, purely for optics, over that?

Because if that was possible, you'd get shields you can't fly under, but still have the nice looks of meshed shields.
That way the only inconsistancy would be, that you wouldn't see the shield when you flew inside the "visual shield", but the damage would still be stopped, so no disabling a ship with intact shields by flying under.

[Devrous]

So.... would it be possible to use a surface shields, that has no visible effect, for the actual damage calculations and put a shield mesh, purely for optics, over that?

Because if that was possible, you'd get shields you can't fly under, but still have the nice looks of meshed shields.
That way the only inconsistancy would be, that you wouldn't see the shield when you flew inside the "visual shield", but the damage would still be stopped, so no disabling a ship with intact shields by flying under.

Would be nice! Currently, though, the tag for shields on the hull disables the shield mesh outside of the ship...I think.

[General Battuta]

So.... would it be possible to use a surface shields, that has no visible effect, for the actual damage calculations and put a shield mesh, purely for optics, over that?

Because if that was possible, you'd get shields you can't fly under, but still have the nice looks of meshed shields.
That way the only inconsistancy would be, that you wouldn't see the shield when you flew inside the "visual shield", but the damage would still be stopped, so no disabling a ship with intact shields by flying under.

Would be nice! Currently, though, the tag for shields on the hull disables the shield mesh outside of the ship...I think.

Nope, you can have surface shields and shield mesh at the same time.

[-Norbert-]

Nothing is as good for thinking outside the box as barely knowing anything about the matter at hand

Back to the actual point of this post:
Would it also be possible to tie the two shields together somehow, so that when the surface shield (which is the actual damage absorber) is depleted, the mesh shield doesn't flare up anymore, untill the surface shield is up again?

[Devrous]

So.... would it be possible to use a surface shields, that has no visible effect, for the actual damage calculations and put a shield mesh, purely for optics, over that?

Because if that was possible, you'd get shields you can't fly under, but still have the nice looks of meshed shields.
That way the only inconsistancy would be, that you wouldn't see the shield when you flew inside the "visual shield", but the damage would still be stopped, so no disabling a ship with intact shields by flying under.

Would be nice! Currently, though, the tag for shields on the hull disables the shield mesh outside of the ship...I think.

Nope, you can have surface shields and shield mesh at the same time.

w00t! +1 Norbert, by the way.

[MatthTheGeek]

IIRC, all fighters and bombers in BP use surface shields, simply because it prevents any hypothetical issue that might happen if there was a hole in the shield mesh.

[Felix 039]

Or, have multiple (number depends of size and type of ship) shields , each covering different area, some weaker, some stronger.
Weak shield located in regions where capital ships are unlikely to able to fire at (or at least accurately at) while being easy for fighter to fly in with point defence lazer emplacements defending it. Like under some sort of canopy.

[-Norbert-]

A nice idea for some sci-fi fanchises, but as far as I remember the Halo books, the shields of covernant ships either worked on the whole ship or failed completely all around the ship. I don't remember there being any gaps in the covernant shielding, except for the ones they intentionally open up themselfs, so their own weapons can shoot out of them.