[Lorric]

I modified my above post, but even that might be interesting. The Shivan fighters with their weak hulls would be very destroyable. But the Cains and the like would be challenging.

I wonder how the fighter battles would balance out. The Shivans would have weak hulls, but the friendlies would have weak weapons.

EDIT: quote due to new page:

It would be interesting to see how the FS1 campaign would go if you took the shields away from both sides and left the allied side (and HOL) with basic weaponry...

Wait, scratch that. I just remembered how weak Shivan fighter hulls are.

[Rheyah]

Since a few people are discussing how to make capships useful, I eventually settled on a policy of making blob turrets a bit more effective while differentiating between different types of capships and drastically reducing the killing power of fighters against larger ships without using specialised weaponry.

This has a few effects:

1.  A wing of fighters has less than 10% of the usual effectiveness against cruisers.  I may play with the numbers but it is virtually impossible for a wing of fighters to kill a cruiser now without exceptional luck at low difficulties.  You get slaughtered.  You can equip all the Maxims and Trebuchets you want and you won't do squat without specialized weaponry.  This is the effect I wanted.

2.  The introduction of Hardened targets which represent specific, sub cruiser targets that are designed to be a threat in the field.  These necessitate the use of Impact weapons which are much more limited and reduce the amount of damage a group of fighters can do in the absence of these weapons.  They also allow a limited element of engagement for cruisers.

Further, weapons designed to knock out turrets will also carry huge energy drawbacks.  So knocking out turrets will be harder.

This was balanced by formalising the "strike bomber" role of the Athena, the Artemis and the Zeus against convoys and hardened targets as well as cruiser level targets through the introduction of an Impact class of weapon.  Impact weapons are designed to bridge the gap between bombs and normal missiles.  They are massable on bombers and allow even a small number of bombers to deliver devastating strikes to entire hardened convoys provided they are protected.  This will be a feature in missions

Finally, what I did to the cap ships themselves.

I seperated out the blob turrets into three different damage types:  Siege, Impact and NormalWeapon.

- Siege Weapons do substantial damage right the way up to destroyer class but fire fairly slowly and are limited to firing at larget targets.  They do virtually no shield damage so are not a threat to fighters.  They now resemble plasma artillery turrets.  Big blobs firing infrequently with long laser trials, impact shocks and explosions.

- Impact weapons are designed mainly to eliminate targets smaller than the cap ship and do some limited damage to fellow capships.  They are both big damage weapons so they can kill capships.  They fire much more rapidly but do substantially less damage to capships than the Siege weapons do.  Generally they are designed to pick off targets smaller than the capship itself.

- NormalWeapons are the small turrets and I've set them to be burst fire rapid shot turrets akin to flak.  They fire three low damage shots every recycle for low damage, all the time.  They are just about dodgable at the moment though I may slow them down a little if playtesting goes poorly.

All blobs have had their impact effects and sound effects changed to be more.. uh..  impactful.  You can now see the landing of blobs by small shockwaves that emanate from the impact spot as well as small explosions.  It looks pretty ****ing cool tbh.

This has necessitated one final change - to bombs.  I never felt the Freespace manner of bombs being launched from six feet above the target's hull and travelling immensely slowly was particularly fun.  So I'm going to be making bombs faster, harder to hit, smaller and easier to lock on with but the capital ships they are launching them at are much more capable of defending themselves.

I may also see if I can set a miss chance into the blob turrets.  Not sure if there's a table entry that will let me do it, I'm still learning.

They have been designed so beam weapons massively outdamage them against harder targets.  Beams are in their own weapon class, automatically on par with siege weapons.  Heavy beams (BGreen/SVas and above) are in the HvyBeam category and do 200% damage to civilian ships.  Set one to fire on a Triton and it instantly killed it.  I've also changed the beam penetration values so when a small ship is hit by a heavy beam, it looks like it is getting the numerical pummeling it is in the game.

So in conclusion I've tried to make things a bit more predictable, remove a few annoying immersion breaking mechanics that have stuck around for a while and tried to make weapons fit their description a bit more.    I hope people like what I've done when I release it

[Rheyah]

I should note that initially, player implementations of these weapon types will be suitably ductape esque.  One of the reasons I wanted to make blobs a bit more threatening is because it didn't seem realistic for me to have every single pirate and civilian convoy in GTVA space suddenly equipped with military grade beam cannons purely for defending against fighters.  Similarly, your opponents have run of the mill, bog standard weaponry.  I'm trying to add a bit of flavour to the guns that you use as well - types of weapon I haven't come across in mods before and make energy useage a key thing.

[Lorric]

This all sounds very nice.

[niffiwan]

I may also see if I can set a miss chance into the blob turrets.  Not sure if there's a table entry that will let me do it, I'm still learning.

This setting might be what you're looking for here:  http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Weapons.tbl#.24FOF:

[docfu]

Frozen bodies float in the void between worlds, their eyes lifeless and fixed upon stars they cannot see.  The dead of three wars mingle in their final rest.

Can we get this as a graphical and/or engine improvement?

I mean, I have a 1 in 10,000 chance of engine failure due to birds in DCS. Shouldn't there be something similar using frozen dead bodies in Freespace?

[An4ximandros]

You don't freeze in space... http://www.damninteresting.com/outer-space-exposure/ (I would normally bother getting this stuff from NASA, for example, bit it's 1 AM and i'm goin' to bed.) That said, artistic integrity can easily trump the case in your favor for such a small instance. Real Life is so much more horrific. Everything else here sounds interesting, I'll give it the read it deserves tomorrow.

[Rheyah]

On a serious note, frozen in space is a bit of a sci-fi trope to describe one of two likely end states for a corpse.  Depending on exposure to the sun, the corpse is either going to become superheated due to radiation exposure and will become dessicated as what little remaining water evaporates away or it will genuinely become frozen due to being too distant/occluded from whatever star the ship is orbiting.  In this case the water within the organism is locked into place as ice crystals and it will actually become slightly bloated as the temperature drops.  Most of the moisture in the body will boil away but a substantial percentage will remain locked in place due to local vacuum pressure gradients around the body.  This evaporation of water is itself a method of losing energy to the surrounding environment.

Part of the fun of being a RL scientist is you know when to use science for dramatic effect

[docfu]

Yeah, in all fairness if you want to play the "let's be realistic" card you'd really have to scrap the ideas of space flight combat altogether since FSO isn't anything like real physics: no sound, no momentum, no shivans...

(3 hours of listing unrealistic things about the game later...)

So yeah, I want dessicated bodies that clog up my engines and bounce off the windshield leaving bloodstains...

[Rheyah]

Never mind the pulsed "lasers".  I came up with an in universe explanation for that, too.  Bit of a dodge but it sounds technical enough

[docfu]

Hope this doesn't cause anyone to jump off a cliff but reality is you, sitting in front of a computer, dreaming up stuff and making it real via moving pictures, sound and math equations...

To be honest, I don't like/need explanations anymore for a lot of videogames I play. A lot of games recently had their plots ruined by having them explained. Doom 3 was bad enough until you starting reading the dissection reports of creatures captured from hell. It really ruined the idea of "things not of this earth" now being "biological organisms that survive in a hot environment." Suddenly "hell" isn't magical anymore, it's just another dimension where pissed off creatures that somehow have rocket launchers for arms live...but don't work, don't have society or hospitals or rocket launcher factories that make weapons for hell-wars...no...but they are biological and have skin and organs designed for high temperatures...

Yet they lack reproductive organs...thus breaking the circle of life...oh wait, but they have organs...needed for digestion...but they live in hell...where there isn't anything to eat...but other creatures with rocket launchers for arms...

Eventually I wonder what ID was thinking by hiring a writer for the game...they honestly didn't need one, not for text anyway.

Just remember, the best way to ruin a good story is to give it an explanation.

[MatthTheGeek]

Just remember, the best way to ruin a good story is to give it an explanation.

That's exactly how Bioware "ruined" the Reapers. Or at least didn't exploit them as well as they could have.

If the explanation isn't better than the mystery, then keep the mystery, at least until you can find a better explanation.

[Dragon]

Never mind the pulsed "lasers".  I came up with an in universe explanation for that, too.  Bit of a dodge but it sounds technical enough

Simply call them plasma weapons. That's what everybody's doing, more or less, even SW retconned their lasers to this (though an actual "plasma cannon" in SW is something different). Lasers are best done as beams.

[Phantom Hoover]

better still: ignore it completely and spend your time explaining things that the player hasn't already suspended disbelief over

[An4ximandros]

You can always say it something like a quantum contained time-matter pellet.

But yeah, I support not giving a dang and working on what actually matters.

[Rheyah]

The more technical stuff is just me having fun with physics.  Itll be in the tech room for anyone who wants to read it.

Thought I'd drop by and update.  The first mission was completed the other day.  Still squashing bugs in the mod files but that should go when I strip the tbl files.

Later on this week ill post a little history on where the FS universe is in this continuity and a bit of fiction showcasing some backstory.

[Lorric]

The first mission was completed the other day.

[Rheyah]

Oh and just to be a pedant,  most of our modern lasers have ultra short pulse lengths.  The continuous beam variants dont have anything like the power of the pulsed variants.

[Rheyah]

From the memoirs of Captain Stallon...


I was but a young child when the first rumours of dark ships and hellish weapons came leaking from the Net in Beta Aquilae.  The public had long lost interest in the slowly burning war between ourselves and the Vasudan people.  It had become a fact of life.  The military were disinterested enough to barely even consider the prospect of censorship on public debating regarding an inevitable settlement.

When the first news casts began to discuss it live on air, their response was a series of tepid Captains and Colonels who explained such drab military details as deployment schedules and potential Vasudan atrocities.  As ever, they were fought tooth and nail by the usual skeptics, rationalists and demagogues who drown the gory details of war with reason, skewering the concept with remarks regarding the cost per anti-matter bomb and better uses of the funding.

They were as correct this time as they were with every other slow burning war.  The threat, such as it was, had long since passed.  Vasudans viewed the war with as much disdain as did our populace.  The scientific establishment on both sides had already begun to unify their work despite fruitless threats by both governments.  It was no more a state of war than a state of terminal engagement.  The political and academic debate had already been settled.  Fringe elements of both powers had begun to trade.  Corporations in particular were keen to cease all conflict as soon as possible and expand into the other political association.

We may not have had the GTVA, but we would certainly have had something.  Maybe even something better.

So you will understand, dear reader, that the rumours of alien contact seemed far fetched at best.  The militaries of both powers had been slowly exhausted throughout the years and would have settled for any excuse to end what was ultimately a fruitless conflict.  It was only when Ross 128 went dark that we realised how wrong we were.

For fourteen years, the propaganda machine of the Galactic Terran Alliance had tried in vain to make a proud, philosophical people the enemy.  Some had believed it and they signed up to the military with glee, but most others had not.  Both sides lost most of their skirmishing elements in Ross 128 and Ikeya even before the Shivans had fully committed to an offensive.  The public were slow to respond.  My Vasudan pilots confirm that their own public were similarly skeptical, though their public debate was coloured by a prior knowledge of the Shivans through the discovery of ruins of the civilisation we have cunningly named The Ancients.

For those of you fortunate enough never to encounter a Shivan, you may only have knowledge of them from stories passed down by friends and family or what scant information you can derive from the Net.

When the Shivans attacked, both the Terrans and the Vasudans realised that their understanding and knowledge of war was influenced by an understanding of a fundamental morality behind the action.  Those tribes and groups foolish enough to consider genocide a viable tactic had been roundly condemned and thoroughly annihilated in return, for the preservation of the species.

This held throughout history, until the Shivans arrived.  Never before had we encountered an enemy so virulent, so singleminded and so sociopathic.  The Shivans waged war by their very nature.  How foolish are we to consider ourselves the masters of war compared to such creatures.  They did not care for conquering worlds or landing troops.  They did not care about territory other than to occupy it and sweep it clean.  They waged total war in a manner that no species reliant on reproducing could ever hope to match.

This mere fact alone leads me to believe one of two terrifying conclusions.  Either the Shivans do not have children, or the Shivans are more vast and more expansive and aggressive than any strategist has openly stated they have considered.  I believe I am far from alone in this conclusion.

We won the Great War.  It was far from a decisive victory but it was enough.  It bought us thirty years of peace.  We rebuilt without our blue planet and we stabilised and began to explore once again, bolstered by powerful new technology, new tactics, new strategies.  How foolish do I look, writing those words.  We should have learned from the first time.  We did not.  We went into the cosmos and we were burned, once again.  We barely saved ourselves from utter extinction and lost seventy eight million people in the process.

There are no more chances.  The calculus puts an absolute limit on the territory the GTVA is willing to defend while nodes remain uncharted, unsimulated and unsecured.  The Red Zones, as they are now called, are beyond those boundaries.  The GTVA thinks of them as a no-mans land as exploration efforts continue beyond, but people still live here.

For as long as humans and Vasudans have lived, there have been those that dwell on the cliff above the precipice.  Someone, somewhere has to look after them.  That is my duty and that is what I will die doing.  In my pilot days I blew Shivans out of the heavens in the hope of preventing the apocalypse.  Now I leave that duty to others.  The GTVA has abandoned these people.  I will not.

[Luis Dias]

Will Captain Stallon be a character in the campaign, or is he just an outsider giving us some wider context?