Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: Gamma_Draconis on July 25, 2007, 04:18:36 pm
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I remember on one of the missions during the Neo Terran Front campaign where Command said they landed 250,000 ground troops on this 1 planet. How is that possible? I mean, how many Argo Transports do you need to carry such a large army? Are there even bigger space to land transports that Volition never included in the game itself? Even a Destroyer can only carry about 10,000 Crewmen. So how did they move such a vast army? Hundreds or even thousands of Elysiums Transports?
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They probably have landing crafts.
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Even a Destroyer can only carry about 10,000 Crewmen.
Thats it's STANDARD CREW COMPLEMENT. A batallion of marines ferried over for invasion wouldn't count in it.
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Still, how can they land 250,000 ground troops effectively? I doubt Destroyers can land on a planet. I am fairly certain they use some sort of modified Elysium Transport for this. I wonder if they have any armored vehicles along with ground infantry.
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They must have some kind of ground-support vehicles, certainly, I don't see human warfare changing enough in the next few 100 years to the point where we prefer risking our necks to shelling at range.
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They pack 'em in tight.
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Armed Infantry take up more space then simply Crewmen. So I'm assuming they can't fit more then 100 fully armed men into a single Elysium Transport. But there are 250,000 soldiers so would that equal 2,500 Transports... I still think they have some sort of large transport ship, maybe a Kilometer long ship. But it wouldn't make sense why those ships were never deployed in the front lines as a refugee transport.
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I remember on one of the missions during the Neo Terran Front campaign where Command said they landed 250,000 ground troops on this 1 planet.
250,000 troops? i thought it was 600,000...
We are talking about the first mission, right?
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transporters? nah. probably a large number of landing craft
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Probably a number of corvette-sized transports... I doubt they'll actually land, but more likely that they have numerous transport docks. A small group (5?) of the large transports can probably carry about 100,000 soldiers. Remember how much "used space" is involved in dedicated warships... so much space for weapons, armor, and supplies. A large transport could carry a barebone compliment of weaponry, poorly armored, and supplied for short treks to nearby systems. I don't see 2,500 Elysium transports that big of a deal--the US Navy's actual sea-going crew is much less then the US Army's land-going crew. Remember that we (the US) put half a million soldiers into Iraq alone--not to mention the number in Afghanistan.
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If you think about the ships' size, how many people could you cram into 100m of Argo or 300m of cruiser?
Probably 1000's at least
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We should have a campaign where Alpha 1 is a atmospheric pilot instead of spacefighter, then he provides cover for the PBI.
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A cruiser could definitely house maybe 2,000 people, prolly more.
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Ok, lets assume an Argo Transport can hold up to 2,500 fully armed soldiers along with their heavy weapons and armored vehicles. That's still 100 transports. But according to haloboy100, it was 600,000 soldiers.... So that makes it, 240 Argo Transports but yet you hardly ever see more then 2-3 Transports. It might be an engine limitation, but exactly how many Argo transports can the GTVA field?
Regarding to the atmospheric fighter idea, that would be pretty cool. I'd like to fly a new set of fighters. It'll be neat dodging anti-aircraft fire while dropping some missiles on a tank hampering troop progress. (That is if they use tanks anymore) But I think it would require a completely different engine. The FS2 engine does not support any gravity or actual land that you can crash on.
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Why not take something like stripped Orion - or who does even say there couldnt be ships even larger than the Orions... All heavy weapons and fighter bays and fighters swapped for dozen or so landing crafts and loads of troops (if possible in cryogenic freeze). Just rip them from freezers toss into the landing craft and off they go..
The FS2 engine does not support any gravity or actual land that you can crash on.
We shall see... :P
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There fore, let us all pay attention to Wanderer, for he may yet do it for us! And such that his victory will pave the way for campaigns and mods of such renown, that the world will forever know that it was Wanderer who stood against does who did not believe, and against great opposition did he craft a tool so powerful, that worlds tremble at its mention.
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Thou sure hast a way with words, Sir :lol:
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THey probably just use ships we haven't seen in game.
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One ground pounder packed into a MLT, Manned Landing Torpedo (think Quake 2 intro) would work fine :D
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perhaps drop pods? (i think that's what dekker is talking about), kind of like the thing the covenant do in halo, just drop them from orbit
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600,000 drop pods? seems a little impractical.
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but it would be a hell of a show
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yes, it would :D
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I wish halo had a Working Map maker. ;)
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I wish halo had a Working Map maker. ;)
Talk about a totally unrelated post...
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No its so i could make a map like that. ;) Were 900 pods are landing.Like whaat were talking agbout
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No its so i could make a map like that. ;) Were 900 pods are landing.Like whaat were talking agbout
Trust me, if it were possible, it would be done and over with by now.
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You really think there would stick troop transports so huge, thus expensive, in the same star system as Alpha 1?
Command isnt THAT dumb! Alpha 1 only goes into the most dangerous situations, and they would never risk a transport in the same star system!
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perhaps drop pods? (i think that's what dekker is talking about), kind of like the thing the covenant do in halo, just drop them from orbit
"It's rainign Men, alelujah! It's raining men....." :lol:
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I wish halo had a Working Map maker. ;)
i think halo 2 vista has one, i'm not certain though. any way, back to the main topic
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They do. And ya, back on topic, sending 600,000 pods down, some of them might not even make it to begin with, the rest would be blown up by AAA cannons and flak shells (since there is no reason flak cannons aren't used in atmospheric conditions, right?)
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That sounds like a horrible method of deploying your men. I'm pretty sure they'll have some air support to take our initial ground defenses and most likely have some sort of transport ship, maybe an Argo or Elysium, land on the surface. That brings me to the next question, how do they get fighters and bombers in the air? Are there such things as hybrid fighters?
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Is there any reason why you can't use space fighters in the air?
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Well first of all, Space Fighters don't really have a good surface to achieve lift in the atmosphere. They will have a very difficult time flying straight and its pretty much suicide. Leave the atmospheric flying to the atmospheric fighters.
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They probably use dropships similar to the ones in Starship Troopers. There were a lot of infantry on the ground in that movie.
You could make a hybrid fighter, it would most likely need two kinds of propulsion systems because i don't see something thats affective in space being efficient in the atmosphere and a jet engine wouldn't work in space. A pure space fighter or a pure atmospheric fighter would be much better in their respective environments.
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(http://users.tkk.fi/~lmiettun/Kuvat/HLPWELCOMEBEAM_2fast.gif)
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Wow, my post inspired someone to register! Can I have a cookie?
Can Argo and Elysium transports land and take off on a planet? It would be neat to see those blocky little ships land and dropping off a company of soldiers and tanks. Will atmospheric fighters be large or small? The space fighters on FS are huge.
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Well first of all, Space Fighters don't really have a good surface to achieve lift in the atmosphere. They will have a very difficult time flying straight and its pretty much suicide. Leave the atmospheric flying to the atmospheric fighters.
anti-grav drives....nuff said.
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How do you know there are anti-grav drives in the FS2 universe?
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Assumption...looking at the mina halls from FS1 and 2 I get the imporession of advanced tech.
First of all you can notice the figherbay doors are open and the ship is not depressurizing..some kind of bluish forcefield is keeping it "sealed".
Second, the whole fighterbay seems to have artificial gravity, yet huge bricks like Ursas land and take off without chrashing.
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Maybe the floor is just magnetic? There can be somekind of plasma window to keep the atmosphere in. It may also be artifical gravity that is generated by some unknown means.
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Assumption...looking at the mina halls from FS1 and 2 I get the imporession of advanced tech.
First of all you can notice the figherbay doors are open and the ship is not depressurizing..some kind of bluish forcefield is keeping it "sealed".
Second, the whole fighterbay seems to have artificial gravity, yet huge bricks like Ursas land and take off without chrashing.
The Shivans dont have anti-grav as evidenced by that FS1 cutscene.
But Humans seem to have anti-grav. or else, how does the main menu work? The captain is sitting with no visible restraints.
Then again. The marines who boarded the Shivan cruiser had magnetic boots and used them. Why pack magnetic boots if you assume there is anti-grav?
I think the GTVA fleets use magnetic boots and not artificial gravity.
The forcefield on the fighterbay is probably a shield like the kind of fighters. Shielding just the fighterbay cant be that hard!
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The Shivans dont have anti-grav as evidenced by that FS1 cutscene.
But Humans seem to have anti-grav. or else, how does the main menu work? The captain is sitting with no visible restraints.
Then again. The marines who boarded the Shivan cruiser had magnetic boots and used them. Why pack magnetic boots if you assume there is anti-grav?
I think the GTVA fleets use magnetic boots and not artificial gravity.
The forcefield on the fighterbay is probably a shield like the kind of fighters. Shielding just the fighterbay cant be that hard!
1, why would you want an anti gravity device in space?
2. Other than the tech room implying that the shivans were designed to live in zero gravity, there is no proof for or against them having the ability to employ artificial gravity.
3. "Why pack magnetic boots if you assume there is anti-grav?" This line doesnt even make sense. A, why would you have an anti-gravity device in space? and B, the ship was disabled and relatively low on power, else it wouldnt have been able to be captured.
4. If the GTVA fleets dont use artifical gravity, then why is it that the sparks in the FS1 main hall fall downwards?
5. How can the force field on the fighter bay be anything like the shields on fighters? There were no shields in FS1 when you first went aboard the bastion.
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the plot thickens! :rolleyes:
The Terrans and Vasudans both allready had shield tech but Command was too stupid to see it's worth anywhere else except the fighterbay doors!
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Well, I can see how you might be confusing anti-grav for artificial gravity, although in practice while antigrav tech leads to artificial gravity, the same is not true in reverse. We know the GTVA has artificial gravity, we do not know they have anti-gravity.
And anyone arguing the fighterbay 'shields' as an extension of fighter shield tech is missing the point. The 'shields' are there to keep (primarily) the bone-dead AI from getting stuck inside. Trust me, this is absolutely necessary. The invisible wall should not be translated to shield tech. As for the Bastion mainhall argument, remember that you don't get onboard the Bastion until shields are already deployed. That's not to say that shield tech wasn't retrofit to allow the bay to be accessable with hanger doors open after they were deployed on fighters, but you see no evidence for an invisible force field enclosing the hangerbay prior to shields being introduced.
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A somewhat weak argument...how did they launch fighters before that?
They didn't redesign the whole fighterbay in 5 minutes.
We see lots of doors leading into the fighterbay and other rooms - the briefing room, tech room. We see lots of people working among the craft down there...and no sign of any secondary door (like you have when you want to get out of a space shuttle or a submarine - you got that chamber between two hulls).
The only way they could launch was if EVERYONE leaves the fighterbay, they seal hermeticly all doors and then they open the main fighterbay door..sucking everything out in the process...but that would make a very ineffective fighterbay if no one can be in it untill all fighters/bombers land.
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Yea, but maybe thats why it takes so damn long to deploy any fighters. Command really needs to redesign their fighterbays. At least have launch tubes like on BSG. At the rate they launch fighters, by the time every single fighter and bomber is deployed, there would be nothing left to kill. Is anyone curious on how the Vasudans designed their fighterbay? Theres basicly a hole in the hull with no apparent doors and fighters are stored in a lower section of the ship and fighters are delivered one by one though an elevator shaft connecting the fighterbay hole and the actual fighterbay...
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It's a stronger argument than assuming the GTA knew how to hold a field much larger than a fighter in place and not think to strap it on to a fighter (or act suprised at the fact that the shivans had shields, not that they had them on fighters). The technology is called an airlock. You close one door, depressurize that area, and open a second door to space. That, combined with standby wings, is more than sufficient to explain the launch patterns seen in the handful of missions where you see fighters launched prior to shields. Note that you don't actually see the physical layout of the fighterbay on the Galatea, and there is no way to corroborate the design of the Bastion as seen to that.
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Well, I can see how you might be confusing anti-grav for artificial gravity,
1, why would you want an anti gravity device in space?
Sorry. I know the difference. They both are A. Grav, so i just got the names confused
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I'd assume that each destroyer of the same class has basically the same fighter-bay design, as well as internal design. I think the fighter-bay "shields" are force-fields... contain the gases inside the ship. Flying towards them, I think it's possible that your ship is negatively charged so a "bubble" can form--letting you leave the bay.
There is artificial-gravity on Terran ships at least and the reason it takes so long to launch support fighters is that they need to have the pilots wake up/be contacted, report to their correct area for suiting, suit-up, get briefed quickly, choose a ship, customize ordinance, and do the same for the wingmen (if applicable), have all ships properly set-up, get into the ship, strap in, do a system diagnosis (to make sure everything works), power up life-support, power up secondary systems, warm-up engines, receive launch clearance, launch, and possibly receive coordinates to jump to!
That entire task takes a long while when you are allowed to customize your ship to the extent allowed... if you had every pilot suited-up and ever ship powered up and ready, it would probably take 2 minutes. In the above example, more likely 10-15 minutes. If Command expects the need for support, they'll have other pilots and their respective ships ready. Remember that we've flown back-up occasionally... we jump in after the real mission has started, meaning we were the reinforcements.
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They should at least keep 2-3 extra wings on stand-by. I mean, they can spare 12 fighters right? And wow, have we gone off topic.
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The Bastion most definitely has shiedl technology to shield its fighter bays.
http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c234/Foolfromhell/fs2_open_3_6_92007-07-2621-14-26-16.jpg
Leave it to command to have shield technology, but not use it.
The hangar bay has loose objects like cargo containers etc.
De-pressuring the bay would send all that flying into space.
The shield exists since its the blueish hue and they cant stick advanced technology like that AND reconfigure the fighterbay in such short notice....
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If they sealed off the fighter bay and then gradually vented the atmosphere through a means other than opening the main hangar door, they wouldn't have to worry about all the heavier equipment flying around. Lighter things like boxes and tools could be strapped down or held to the deck with magnets (similar to the soldiers boots).
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Thing is, the entrance to a shield bay is not that large an area, and may well use a different type of shielding from weapon shielding. I suspect that shields drain power exponentially over area, so protecting a capital ship with shield technology in its current form would take far more power than a capship can produce, hence why the Bastion needed to be loaded with Meson bombs to make it's destruction equal to the Lucifers' reactors blowing.
If those shields are capable of acting as barriers to the effects of space as that picture shows, then the best idea would simply be two shields, one at the entrance to the 'launch area' and one at the exit (the one that is on in the picture). That way you could simply raise one, therefore isolating the ships that are going to launch, and then lower the other, kind of how a lock works on a river.
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Wait a second.
Why are those marines in pressurized suits?
Maybe there IS no forcefield and its a vacuum all the time?
It would be a LOT easier to just have workers and marines in pressurized suits instead of using an airlock or pressurizing and de pressurizing... You cant create a perfect vacuum manually and would lose some air each time fighters are deployed and received... and a destroyer cant drop into a planet to pick up more atmosphere. I think its a vacuum 24/7. No forcefield.
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The marines are the ones in combat gear. There are also regular crewmen without the armor who wear a tannish shirt and GTVA insignia on their chest. No gas mask or anything.
I dunno about having a subspace network on top of another subspace network. Wouldn't that mean there has to be stars that are in the same network that the GTVA can't reach? Hell, how do jump nodes exist in the first place?
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The marines are the ones in combat gear. There are also regular crewmen without the armor who wear a tannish shirt and GTVA insignia on their chest. No gas mask or anything.
I dunno about having a subspace network on top of another subspace network. Wouldn't that mean there has to be stars that are in the same network that the GTVA can't reach? Hell, how do jump nodes exist in the first place?
Yeah. You are right.
Plus. the smoke from the Medusa rises upwards instead of diffusing.
There is definitely Artificial Gravity.
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LOL, you guys are reading WAY too much into this.
Its Science Fiction for a reason.
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And it's no less fun to discuss than it is to create :p
After all, the entire game is science fiction, doesn't mean we don't enjoy getting lost in the story :D
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That's actually the first time i noticed the smoke rising from the medusa. I doubt its shield technology blocking the fighter bay, however. Its most likely some form of plasma/laser manipulated into a wall with opposing magnetic fields.
That's true flipside, its so true.
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Meh, thats true.
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If it makes you feel any better, I also have a suspicion that the opportunity to argue whilst using long complicated phrases play a role ;)
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How do you know there are anti-grav drives in the FS2 universe?
Vasuda Prime command brief when the two horus' escort a zod transport before zod capital gets toasted :p
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How do you know there are anti-grav drives in the FS2 universe?
Very easy... when you are flying with the Vasudans, take a look at their ship elevator... and tell me that isn't anti-grav. :p PWND!
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How do you know there are anti-grav drives in the FS2 universe?
Very easy... when you are flying with the Vasudans, take a look at their ship elevator... and tell me that isn't anti-grav. :p PWND!
Actually, it looks like it has little thrusters on them. And the fact that it takes an elevator to bring up a fighter mean it'll take forever to deploy fighters and bombers at that rate unless they have more of those elevators.
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They probably have fighter elevators, multiple, to handle rapid craft deployment.
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Those thrusters very obviously are just to nudge it up / down / side-to-side as needed... the anti-grav counters the gravity. Otherwise you'd see plumes of exhaust pouring from them.
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It's a stronger argument than assuming the GTA knew how to hold a field much larger than a fighter in place and not think to strap it on to a fighter (or act suprised at the fact that the shivans had shields, not that they had them on fighters). The technology is called an airlock. You close one door, depressurize that area, and open a second door to space. That, combined with standby wings, is more than sufficient to explain the launch patterns seen in the handful of missions where you see fighters launched prior to shields. Note that you don't actually see the physical layout of the fighterbay on the Galatea, and there is no way to corroborate the design of the Bastion as seen to that.
True...but do you really think the Bastion had time to go on a modification treatment? The thing that I don't see an airlock in the mainhall is what bugs me...but then again this is a game so WTF are we so anal about it? :wtf: Dammit guys, we're starting to losoe it here! :eek2:
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There is artificial-gravity on Terran ships at least and the reason it takes so long to launch support fighters is that they need to have the pilots wake up/be contacted, report to their correct area for suiting, suit-up, get briefed quickly, choose a ship, customize ordinance, and do the same for the wingmen (if applicable), have all ships properly set-up, get into the ship, strap in, do a system diagnosis (to make sure everything works), power up life-support, power up secondary systems, warm-up engines, receive launch clearance, launch, and possibly receive coordinates to jump to!
That entire task takes a long while when you are allowed to customize your ship to the extent allowed... if you had every pilot suited-up and ever ship powered up and ready, it would probably take 2 minutes. In the above example, more likely 10-15 minutes. If Command expects the need for support, they'll have other pilots and their respective ships ready. Remember that we've flown back-up occasionally... we jump in after the real mission has started, meaning we were the reinforcements.
Ah..your'e refering t0 the Ready-5, Ready-10 and Ready-15 status on curent carriers, right?
AFAIK, Ready-5 means wing is ready to launch in 5 minutes...Don't know how many wings are in what status at all times tough... I thnk 2 R5, 1 R10 and 1 R15
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Umm shouldnt there be some sort of constant cap and aditional fighters always ready to lauch? At least one wing armed fueled and ready to go in mere seconds?? especialy during wartime?
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About that shield thing, there is (IIRC) evidence supporting GTVA forcefield experiments in the blurb about the MX-50 (that bit about how it was ineffective against the Ross 128 energy array, or something). Maybe the hangar field is an ancestor or descendant of that particular line of tech. For all we know, the GTA might have been able to crack combat-effective energy shielding for small craft without Shivan technologies, via that tech. Could explain why they managed to pick up on shielding so quickly, they already had the fundamentals for it, they just couldn't build it strong enough to be viable for combat or so.
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As far as I know from Fs 1 some sort of shield tech was already available to the GTA I believe it said something like a batch of those shields was destroyed at some station that was blown to pieces by the Lucifer fleet. But i'm not all that sure about it. So do not take what I say for absolute truth.
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:shaking: Your apple stealth pie still makes me laugh, Umm RE: shields, GTA never had shields until it analysed the shivans and worked with the Zods to produce a prototype :cool:
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Then what was it that was destroyed along with that station? I'm sure that it said some sort of prototypes for.....errr......something were destroyed there.....! So....umm......what was it? Sorry I have not played FS1 in very very long time so mi memory is fuzzy as to some things that happen during FS1.
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Avenger prototypes maybe..........maybe the GTD somethingorother, It mentiones the escorts, a cruiser and fighters possibly.
:beams: :warp:
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beamzzzz
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I think we had the fundamentals of shield tech, though only "tuned" for our own test weaponry. We could likely deploy a "shield" but it could only take 1 or 2 hits of our own weaponry--useless because the bubble will take more hits off into space then onto the hull. Still--it would probably be quite useless as it is. The capture of Shivan fighters let us analyze their shielding tech and adapt it to our own and the Vasudans'. The Shivan tech let us tune and advance our own tech very quickly--that would let us retrofit the new shields into fighters meant to test the old shields, then put it into every other fighter and bomber we can.
I don't think we could deploy shields on anything larger then a medium-sized transport, at least until the end of FS2. We had Mara prototypes--theyhave immensely strong shields compared to our own, not to mention the incredible capacity for primary and secondary weapons...
Let's face it--the GTVA had to rely on the Shivans to beat the Shivans... we needed their tech to break even.
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If the fighterbays had a extremely vunerable sheild during the pre Great War era, then it wouldn't be very practical. Someone can just fly a fighter there and fire a few bursts and all of its content will come flying out.
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That sounds like a horrible method of deploying your men. I'm pretty sure they'll have some air support to take our initial ground defenses and most likely have some sort of transport ship, maybe an Argo or Elysium, land on the surface. That brings me to the next question, how do they get fighters and bombers in the air? Are there such things as hybrid fighters?
Perhaps GTVA fighters often have wings for a reason...
They probably use dropships similar to the ones in Starship Troopers. There were a lot of infantry on the ground in that movie.
You could make a hybrid fighter, it would most likely need two kinds of propulsion systems because i don't see something thats affective in space being efficient in the atmosphere and a jet engine wouldn't work in space. A pure space fighter or a pure atmospheric fighter would be much better in their respective environments.
Pretty much all space drives (except for Bussard ramjets and the like) work in atmosphere, but not all atmophere drives work in space. The GTA seems to use plasma rockets or something similar, which would work fine.
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Perhaps GTVA fighters often have wings for a reason...
Perhaps the wings are for heat dissipation?
It would make sense that spacecraft are built in space...
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Perhaps GTVA fighters often have wings for a reason...
Perhaps the wings are for heat dissipation?
It would make sense that spacecraft are built in space...
THey could be m ade on ground too.We don't know.
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Lifting a 2-mile bulk of metal (The Orion) is pretty hard if you do it from the ground...
The cutscene of the Collosus being built was in space. Why not use readily available instruments that are in space to build fighters?
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...
Were talking about fighters not Orions.The Fighters can go to space easy.