Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: NGTM-1R on July 12, 2009, 10:05:39 am
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Okay folks, out with it. Present your version here if you're going to.
My vision of it is based on mainly on the existence of subspace travel. Subspace changes all the rules, providing mobility undreamed-of. Concepts such as secured areas or front lines are dangerous anachronisms in the face of subspace drive. Forces can be concentrated or wildly dispersed in a couple of minutes. This is a world where total mobility has shaped the battlefield in a way usually reserved for weapons.
This is actually a terribly limiting factor. In less-mobile forms of warfare, it is possible to force your opponent to accept battle when he does not think he can win. The subspace drive takes that all away. Employing overwhelming force just isn't a viable option anymore because the enemy doesn't need to stand there and take it. In fact, it's extremely easy for an opponent to simply deny you combat if all you're interested in is destroying his ships.
In this world of horribly mobile spacecraft, the only objects of intrinsic value become those that can't actually move. Jump nodes, installations, and planets can be used to force combat on an opponent who might otherwise simply jump away. Even here an opponent will probably simply concede the area without a fight if things look too grim going in. This is doubly damaging, because now it must be defended, requiring some force to be detached; in effect inflicting a loss on the attacking fleet without even trying.
Combat thus becomes a pyschological guessing game about how much force to employ, with the ideal manuver being multiple small battles across the system. This prevents enemy forces from being mutually supporting. If your opponent decides to go "all in" at one of these, you can do likewise or simply disappear like smoke in the wind. Escalating engagements are going to be the order of the day, and most of the time fleets will have to be whittled down a few ships at a time because any battle obviously going badly will simply be abandoned.
And thus, perversely, it turns out that the version of warfare presented in the FS games is not insane, but rather represents the tentative, guessing-game sort of battle one would expect.
Except when dealing with the Shivans, but that's another story...
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This is the vision we've been following in BP. Parallel lines of genius, I can only imagine!
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Of course, all the points presented here really make you scratch your head regarding the standard FS2 convoy escort mission, the very first non-training mission for example. Assuming that civilian subspace drives are fundamentally equally capable of jumping in and out wherever they choose, why should a convoy travel any distance at all in realspace, if it could just jump from one protected area to the next?
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Jumping may be easy but navigation is probably hard.
And maybe some areas of the system are more hazardous to transit than others. Possibly easier/safer/faster to take a multi-leg journey than to compute and run a jump through a rough patch.
*shrug* Best I can come up with.
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Yeah, I completely agree. I've always found certain campaigns where ships just sit there and let themselves get killed (like the Eva somewhat in Evangelist) kinda retarded (though in the Eva's case it's excusable since they're Shivans, and kinda illogical that way).
I think the main focus of any campaign should be Jump Nodes. Securing a Jump Node if you're invading allows you to bring in supplies and reinforcements, blockading a Jump Node if you're defending stops them from coming in and contains the threat. Sure it would probably just cause a stalemate until one side makes the big push, but it's still a good tactic.
Then someone creates blockade smashers with intersystem Meson Bombs or something... Meh.
Of course, all the points presented here really make you scratch your head regarding the standard FS2 convoy escort mission, the very first non-training mission for example. Assuming that civilian subspace drives are fundamentally equally capable of jumping in and out wherever they choose, why should a convoy travel any distance at all in realspace, if it could just jump from one protected area to the next?
Read the Briefing again. Those freighters didn't have subspace drives.
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Oh. OK, that explains that one. What about the Colossus resupply mission (Into the Maelstrom, Mission 9)? Why didn't the Transports jump directly to the Collys' location?
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Oh. OK, that explains that one. What about the Colossus resupply mission (Into the Maelstrom, Mission 9)? Why didn't the Transports jump directly to the Collys' location?
Because Asteroid Fields are an excellent place to resupply!
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Maybe some jump drives aren't as efficient as others? That seems to be the only explanation. As different ships have different capabilities, it seems safe to assume that different ships also have different levels of jump drives. Oh and also, navigation.
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I've often observed there's no reason for FS combat to take place where it actually does, usually, but in the absence of further information on the function of subspace drives, this is more or less what you're left with.
It's also been postulated that direct arrival at a jump node is not possible based on what happened to the Pstamik and a number of escort missions. (And possibly in contravention of what the Carthage and Dashor do...)
The Shivans are a whole different story. Because they more or less don't care about fixed objects, they are on one level incredibly dangerous. Shorn of things to make them stand and fight, you end up with a dispersed, unpredictable, very powerful enemy who is also shorn of the apparent need for logistics. (Though the Shivans can and will fight for jump nodes, just why is never clear; the GTA went to a lot of trouble to interdict Shivan logistics in FS1, think of all those times you saw Shivan cans! But it never seemed to matter, and in the end the GTA couldn't locate any Shivan source of supply.) Their disadvantage is they basically seem to go into frothing xenocidal rage when they encounter hostiles usually and will typically stand their ground and fight. However absent any other worthwhile targets using overwhelming force against the Shivans is basically the way to go; you want to jump in and annihilate them instantly before they get a chance to turn their more powerful beam weaponry on you or call for backup and start dumping Rakshasas in your rear arc.
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I've always assumed that subspace drives on non-miltary vessels had a sort of macimum distance they could jump, between which they needed to wait until they recharged/cooled down before they could do another little hop, cool down/recharge, and over and over again until they got to their destination. Along with little excuses like "Can't jump through obstacles like planets or asteroid fields", "Can't jump out too close to a planet" etc. etc. there are plenty of reasons for convoy escorts, along with standard ones like "no jump drives".
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Ships take time to recharge their drives, simple as that.
NGTM-1R's got it right on the head. Rather than targeting individual ships, you have to target positions of strategic importance, such as jump nodes and installations. If you want to draw out a ship, then you assault an installation or what not. As far as strategy goes, Jump nodes allows you to progress between systems, destroying other ships for the sake of it does not.
Basic strategy (in my eyes), would be to take a jump node, consolidate it, neutralise enemy command positions (installations) to incapacitate the enemy's ability to maintain tactical and strategic awareness, and after severing their supply lines and wearing them down, rinse, repeat until you get to your objective.
As far as the Shivans go, we don't know what their home system is, and where to nip them in the bud. So we have to resort to hitting them where we see them, cutting off their supplies if we see them, and taking the nodes/planets. Until we find a way to eliminate or (properly) communicate, we're on the backfoot. However sealing their entry through the meson bomb use is a reasonable solution for the time being.
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no one considers time in subspace travel a factor?
I mean, is it the same to jump from Earth to Jupiter or Mars in time scale? I mean time in subspace... obviously the more distance the more length of the travel as evidenced in FS1 when alpha is sent to destroy the Lucy on the corridor, that mission took 10 minutes? 5 minutes?
IMO, the concept of instant travel is kinda badly used in FS campaigns, even if time invested in travel on the same system being infinitesimal, the actual time it takes to make a wing/ship ready to combat and deployment should take more than just a mere 5 second delay.
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Intrasystem jumps are almost instantaneous IIRC.
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Says so in the Intel description
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If jump drives take a while to recharge, the Iceni should not have been able to evade the Colossus even if it hadn't been sabotaged.
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If jump drives take a while to recharge, the Iceni should not have been able to evade the Colossus even if it hadn't been sabotaged.
That's very true, but who says the Iceni had a single jump drive.........obscure i know but *shrug*
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I think they were diverting power from weapons to make it recharge faster (it has SGreens instead of BGreens that mission).
Also, the Iceni is pretty much a purpose-built blockade runner, so redundant jump drives wouldn't be out of the question.
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Thing about the shivans is that there is a remarkable lack of intel on the shivans. There's no true idea behind their total numbers, tactics, goals. Imagine fighting a battle blindfolded, with your mouth taped shut and ears blocked. And the only sense you have is your hands to touch and feel around you. That's pretty much what fighting the shivan's is like.
The key to destroying ships would pretty much have to be attacking points of interest and forcing them to defend the planet. Much harder would be to attack a specific target, ex. Iceni. To chase down a ship that knows you are after it, would require some tactic that involved destroying their engines.
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Bosch cetrainly took into account possiblity of disabling Iceni, as he commanded to install multiple engines on it, thus greatly increasing time needed to fully disable it and giving himself more time to recharge drives and escape. Also, multiple jumpdrives are something I would take into consideration when planning a ship that's task is to evade entire GTVA.
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Locations of strategic or tactical importance:
-Jump nodes (inter-system mobility)
-Lagrangian points in systems; good places to put installations, shipyards, sensor arrays, communications outposts and other assorted stuff like that at.
-Geocentric orbit altitude around the equators of planets. Also, following speculation assumes that subspace jumps from low gravity potential to high gravity potential (ie. from low orbit to high orbit) require more energy than simply jumps from "deep space" to another location in "deep space" (meaning, reasonably far from any significant gravity sources). Intersystem jumps seem to be a bit different because the nodes seem more like natural phenomenons than the intra-system jump nodes that are (again based on my assumption) temporarily generated by the jump drives of the ships using them.
Hence it would make sense that capital ships would be fairly reluctant to settle on low orbital altitude - getting away from there would require a lot of energy, and while possible, it would also likely mean longer recharge time for the jump drives. And for the practicality of geocentric orbits, it's unlikely anyone would willingly sacrifice such an energy advantage.
Based on these assumptions, it would be very rare to see capital ship combat below geocentric orbital altitude (which depends of course of individual planets' mass and rotational period). Transportation from surface to geocentric orbits could be done either via space elevators, or transport space craft. Escorts of important transports would be most sensible to manage with atmospheric fighter forces based on the planet, and the actual space fighters that we are all so fond of; most likely these fighter squadrons would be based on installations positioned on the geosynchronous orbits.
These installations would be the main port of goods from planets to the capital ships (and other planets of course). Food, water, recruits, munitions, maybe some fuels, spare parts and very likely smaller-than-cruiser sized ships would most likely arrive to your fleet via this route, and any meaningful volumes of this sort of stuff require space elevators - hence geosynchronous orbital isntallations are a necessity. Losing control of these installations would be equal to losing the planet as a source of resources, as you would be cut off from the space elevators and using transport ships would be a logistical nightmare beyond any hope of success as far as I can see.
For a capital ship to go below the geosynch orbital plane there would need to be a pretty good reason for it. Accurate surface bombardment for example would actually be easier from geosynchronous orbit despite the distance (although you would need to take the coriolis-effect into account) than from low orbit where you can only make passes at any given target during fairly limited window of opportunity. Related to this, polar regions would be easiest to defend on a planetary surface and also likely to be the last strongholds against an invasion force.
-Off-planet resources. These would include iron asteroids, comets with significant heavy water concentration, rare elements and other miscellaneous stuff that can be found in the space. The major advantage in these is that they are already in space, so you don't need to haul them there from the planet surface. Which pretty much means if you have a nice huge iron asteroid, you would likely build a shipyard next to it and start making ships out of it rather than ship the iron somewhere else.
Or whatever the ships are made of, although I would still hazard a guess that capital ship frameworks are built of steel/iron. Fighters might have composite, titanium or aluminium hulls, but capital ships most likely have iron frameworks. Or maybe steel concrete, although making concrete in vacuum would likely be... difficult (what with the water doing funny stuff based on nonexistent pressure and very variable temperatures).
So, this sort of resources would likely be on the list of things you would want to keep in order to replenish your fleet.
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on the flipside of the coin, a warship made to evade combat seems quite redundant... and yet the iceni seems capable in battle as well
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If you want to engage a ship, jump out in front of it so it can't escape. (Feint! Parry! Riposte!) Maneuvering in FS usually takes too long to evade some serious beam volleys.
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Then someone creates blockade smashers with intersystem Meson Bombs or something... Meh.
Sathanas = Lots of armour, fast, huge forward firepower, able to jump through a node, available in large quantity's... Sounds like an ideal blocade runner. It can jump through a node, it's armour soaks up pretty much whatever you can throw at it and certainly more then enough for your usual blocade, it fires it's forward beams, which can take out a destroyer straight up. If things get difficult, it can jump back out. If it just wants to get to a node, it's engines will get it there in no-time, you'll have a huge amount of trouble disabling it, and finally, their expendable. Sounds like a blocade smasher to me, oh, and you won't lose it if it's successful, unlike a meson bomb.
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If you've got an enemy, and you know where his home system is, with subspace it'd be fairly easy to defeat that enemy, even in the FS1 era. All you would need to do would be to slap a ****load of amour an engine, and a subsace drive onto an Orion sized vessel, fill any room left onboard with your most potent nukes, then have it run blockades until it gets to the enemy system, and career into the enemy's planet. In FS1 this would have been particularly easy, given that Vasuda and Sol are only 3 jumps away from each other.
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Except there's the whole matter of deterrence - if you do that, so does she.
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Except there's the whole matter of deterrence - if you do that, so does she.
Ah, good point, the ultimate in MAD. With such a massive threat though, you wouldn't expect war to break out in the first place as each side would be too scared of the others doing exactly that.
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here are some assumptions I make about jumping
Nobody has discussed energy. I would imagine that jumping would take a comparatively high amount of energy (why else would conventional travel be preferred to jumping if no other factors). If that's the case then more fuel would be used jumping (the game makes several references to ships using deuterium based fusion reactors.) so you then go into fuel supply's on board do civilian craft carry large enough for many jumps also what is the cost of deuterium high/low? what is the energy demand in system jumping compared to inter system jumps
accuracy of navigation systems/drives, Knossos devices are known to disrupt transit, does gravity (Star Wars), is matter density in real space a factor?
Transit times, System-System transit can take many mins (destruction of Lucifer) many briefings mention arrival times and transit times how long does in system jumps take, does physical distance have an affect.
warm up / cool down times, this is again hinted at but applied inconsistently, if you know your enemy just jumped then you know you can ambush them while the recharge their engines, if your recharge cycle is faster than the enemy then you can still whittle down ships by perusing, a tactic made available with subspace tracking, does length of time in subspace affect this
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here are some assumptions I make about jumping
Nobody has discussed energy. I would imagine that jumping would take a comparatively high amount of energy (why else would conventional travel be preferred to jumping if no other factors). If that's the case then more fuel would be used jumping (the game makes several references to ships using deuterium based fusion reactors.) so you then go into fuel supply's on board do civilian craft carry large enough for many jumps also what is the cost of deuterium high/low? what is the energy demand in system jumping compared to inter system jumps
accuracy of navigation systems/drives, Knossos devices are known to disrupt transit, does gravity (Star Wars), is matter density in real space a factor?
Transit times, System-System transit can take many mins (destruction of Lucifer) many briefings mention arrival times and transit times how long does in system jumps take, does physical distance have an affect.
warm up / cool down times, this is again hinted at but applied inconsistently, if you know your enemy just jumped then you know you can ambush them while the recharge their engines, if your recharge cycle is faster than the enemy then you can still whittle down ships by perusing, a tactic made available with subspace tracking, does length of time in subspace affect this
I'd also assume, if i hasn't already been stated, that keeping the subspace engines charged or ready would take a lot of energy to do. That would explain why a lot of ships near death don't just jump away. There's a lot of mention to charging jump engines and such, maybe keeping them charged for a length of time is dangerous, and maybe its a process that requires an exertion of that energy at the end of the process (such as going into subspace).
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The problem is, for the stuff not touched on, the only truly safe assumption is that it doesn't matter or we would have heard about it. Similar the discussion about charging/keeping charged is mainly a fan one; FS2 present two situations where rapid succession jumps are made, the blockade and that of the Iceni a couple missions later.
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Similar the discussion about charging/keeping charged is mainly a fan one
As opposed to what other kind of discussion?
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An in-game one. :p
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How accurate are the jumpdrives over long distances anyway?
I think the idea of a ship jumping across a system and ending up exactly where it wants to be seems a bit odd.
Perhaps there is a certain degree of error that would be expected of really long in-system jumps.
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Well, we know that command was able to 'vector' the course the Belisarius was taking. That means it took a bit of time between when it entered subspace and when it exited, and also means that they could get a good enough estimate about where it was headed.
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Perhaps although each vortex looks the same, it may emit varying energy / higher frequncy wavelengths dependant on the range of the tunnel its generating? :nerd hypothesis:
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So in other words, technobabble for the sake of technobabble?
You are now my enemy.
Just kidding
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Not technobabble ;-)a vortex would have to be big enough for the ship creating it to pass through, but making it larger would be a waste. But making the subspace tunnels different lengths would emit varying handwavium amounts . . . . Or some crap. :lol:
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Well you should have just said it that way the first time ;)
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Then someone creates blockade smashers with intersystem Meson Bombs or something... Meh.
Sathanas = Lots of armour, fast, huge forward firepower, able to jump through a node, available in large quantity's... Sounds like an ideal blocade runner. It can jump through a node, it's armour soaks up pretty much whatever you can throw at it and certainly more then enough for your usual blocade, it fires it's forward beams, which can take out a destroyer straight up. If things get difficult, it can jump back out. If it just wants to get to a node, it's engines will get it there in no-time, you'll have a huge amount of trouble disabling it, and finally, their expendable. Sounds like a blocade smasher to me, oh, and you won't lose it if it's successful, unlike a meson bomb.
No, a real blockade smasher would be the Collossuss or an Orion. Having all the firepower position forward is limiting.
After all, how do you know the blockading ship will be in front of the node?
Why not one the sides? Or behind, to shoot at your engines the second you jump in?
No, the best blockade runners have weapons spread around.
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I also pictured blockade runners being smaller, Cruiser length, like the one of of Star Wars.
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In freespace, all blocades IIRC are in front of the node. No-one is on the sides, or behind. Which is really stupid.
wistler: Perhaps sathanases are small.
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JAD 2 solves that with pork and apples.
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In freespace, all blocades IIRC are in front of the node. No-one is on the sides, or behind. Which is really stupid.
wistler: Perhaps sathanases are small.
When have blockades ever been in front of the node in Freespace? In Endgame the Monitor is slightly to the side, in the first Raptors mission the destroyer is down to the left.
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In freespace, all blocades IIRC are in front of the node. No-one is on the sides, or behind. Which is really stupid.
wistler: Perhaps sathanases are small.
It's true that the blockades are in front of the node, but not directly in front of it; they are placed on the sides to bring maximum firepower and survivability when catching an enemy ship when it jumps in-system.
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Thinking back to the first Artemis mission...the blockading ships are in front and off to the side/bottom/ect.
Because of the way subspace works, if you were behind the node, you're targets would be out of range of most weapons a couple of seconds.
Capital ships have to coast in, unlike fighters and bombers which have less mass and less inertia.
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In a war like FS, any force sufficiently large and coordinated becomes de facto invulnerable if they are more concentrated than the enemy: they can jump in and out at ease, assault nodes at will, and depart before any retaliation is possible. They apparently cannot drop out of hyperspace at will either, making them extremely vulnerable to ambushes and something FS neglects at its peril: passive defences. A single destroyer, aware of it's surroundings, can jump in, destroy a target craft and jump out in a matter of minutes, the only thing limiting that being the defences of the target and response time.
They are also dependant (maybe on supplies and) reconnaisance because otherwise they would be flying blind, extremely vulnerable to similar mass assault tactics, almost noncapable of stopping any major force in the same system sans a complete blockade of a node (all or nothing is never something a military commander wants) and slow. Two forces of a similar size wouldn't probably risk destruction if they can choose. Because: the enemy can jump in anytime at anyplace, you can only counter them either with numbers or superior technology, losing ships in one system would probably doom the entire system etc.
It's an impossible war that is only fought the way it is because we're talking about a computer game. Why not use long-range missiles? Why to have the most powerful ships carry fighters which have inter-system jump capabilities? Why no mines? Why not to build a cruise missile with hyperdrive to bombard enemy planets? Why...
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It's an impossible war that is only fought the way it is because we're talking about a computer game. Why not use long-range missiles? Why to have the most powerful ships carry fighters which have inter-system jump capabilities? Why no mines? Why not to build a cruise missile with hyperdrive to bombard enemy planets? Why...
Long range missiles, easily intercepted
Fighter pilots need to take a piss at times ya know.
Mines have already been discussed before and since space is VAST, it's kinda hard to lay down an effective mine field
Because hyperdrive cruise missiles would be very costly to produce most likely. Also, the shivans have their own method of glassing a planet and the GTVA doesn't know if the shivans even Have planets.
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Since when do nodes have a definite front, anyway?
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Since when do nodes have a definite front, anyway?
since in missions always have ships come through in the same direction, but theoretically there isnt a defined "front".
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Why not to build a cruise missile with hyperdrive to bombard enemy planets?
Such a missile will be the size, and expense, of a fightercraft. Fightercraft are therefore more cost-effective, being able to strike numerous times as compared to a missile's only once.
Since when do nodes have a definite front, anyway?
Since they've never been depicted otherwise ingame. Entry is possible from any angle, exit from only one.
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Since they've never been depicted otherwise ingame. Entry is possible from any angle, exit from only one.
This might go a long way in preventing subspace-node traffic accidents abeit in the ones depicted in Homesick and Sync.
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Mines have already been discussed before and since space is VAST, it's kinda hard to lay down an effective mine field
actually mining a jump node would work nicely, but i think that would be the only regularly feasible application.
In a war like FS, any force sufficiently large and coordinated becomes de facto invulnerable if they are more concentrated than the enemy: they can jump in and out at ease, assault nodes at will, and depart before any retaliation is possible. They apparently cannot drop out of hyperspace at will either, making them extremely vulnerable to ambushes and something FS neglects at its peril: passive defences. A single destroyer, aware of it's surroundings, can jump in, destroy a target craft and jump out in a matter of minutes, the only thing limiting that being the defences of the target and response time.
I disagree, All this is based around the missions in the "End Game" period
smaller groupings would probably be able to remain undetected longer based on two things
1 Bosh uses several rallying points
2 it took a "Recon" flight to locate the rallying point the player hits
Also freespace tactics are mostly guerrilla based, although each fleet has a small number of large ships mostly battles are fought with fighters and bombers, jumping in, assaulting target ships, and jumping out. Big ship combat seems very rare and only mentioned occasionally. also battles resolved by fighters I believe are often credited to the carrier ship.
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Quite right. As evidenced in command briefings. Can't remember which but meh.
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In freespace, all blocades IIRC are in front of the node. No-one is on the sides, or behind. Which is really stupid.
wistler: Perhaps sathanases are small.
When have blockades ever been in front of the node in Freespace? In Endgame the Monitor is slightly to the side, in the first Raptors mission the destroyer is down to the left.
Off to one side slightly, but not (in relation to the node) 90 degrees off, which is what I meant by the side. And a sath can fire at pretty much any of the positions they put their blocade ships at in FS2.
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Jump nodes are obviously the most important element in a FS universe. If you're defending, its a choke point you know the enemy have to brave to try and deploy in the system, or if you're attacking, you need to have it secured, or you will be cut off.
In a real solar system, planets move, and assumably so do installations, due to a suns gravity. This makes front lines redundant, as the 'front' rotates around a star. Also, subspace travel, as discussed, further removes the theory of a 'front' from a FS system battle.
So, it's safe to say that a fleets first priority on attack/defence is to secure the nodes leading into/out of the system. After that, secure planets and infrastructure that can support/hinder you; shipyards, supply depots, communication arrays, etc. Throughout this, you would be want captial ship superiorty - if you've secured/defending a supply depot with a cruiser or two, and a destroyer drops in you're up the creek without a paddle. This could be gained either through straight combat - destroying the enemies ships, or tying up the enemies resources with harassing tactics, forcing them to spread out and defend as much of their 'territory' as possible.
As for subspace travel within a system, you'd have to scout most positional movements with recon fighters to make sure you weren't jumping into an ambush. Lead scouts seems an obvious choice.
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Yeah, jump nodes are definitely the way to go on a system-wide scale.
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If you want to engage a ship, jump out in front of it so it can't escape. (Feint! Parry! Riposte!) Maneuvering in FS usually takes too long to evade some serious beam volleys.
You mean like what the Phoenecia did in bearbaiting? you know... the one that stood in front of a sath to block/delay its escape? the DESTROYER that lasted a total of ONE beam volley from said sath? :P I agree with your tactic if and only if the ship you are trying to block isnt incredibly front-gun-heavy like a ravana or sath, or doesnt have a significant mass and structural advantage on the blocking ship (ie orion blocking a collie (feint parry riposte post-collision: "damage is minimal here command") although large ship jump speed tends to be really fast so the mass/size advatage would probably be a bit bigger, maybe like deimos vs collie.
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In all honesty, you'd really expect most every jump node in high value systems to have 2-4 defense platforms with multiple heavy beams cannons for capital ship destruction and lots of room for anti-small craft action as well, perhaps something corvette sized, possibly even destroyer sized. The Mjolinir strikes me as a proto-type weapon that was undergoing field trials during the first Artemis mission, and isn't really ready for prime time, it's too soft and way too easy to spot.
Granted such a platform would be vulnerable to massed fighter/bomber attack or multiple capital ships from standoff ranges, but that's not what it would be in place for, it would be in place to interdict incoming and outgoing hostiles who would be more interested in escaping the node to strike high value targets deeper within the system. I honestly wonder why there is a "customs" station at each entry and exit point also.
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The problem is that jump node defenses like that are more or less useless. In addition to being a logisitical drain, they are of no practical use if that particular node is not the one being assaulted; in that case they actually become a liablity because they aren't designed to defend against assault except from the node and can be siezed to deny your forces access.
The final nail in the coffin is the Shivan ability to use routes of which the GTVA may not even be aware. Such things are just not flexible enough to be of use. The Mjolnir, which is a considerably more flexible, transportable, can be put away when not in use sort of thing, is a vastly more rational approach.
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I agree completely of course, perhaps a purpose built transport that can jump in and move it to a different location. That's the GTVA's failing, they have great small craft/transport of same, but they really lack the ability to project the kind of fire power you'd think they'd expect in the face of even the Great War era Shivans. But, Pride go-eth before the Fall. Hmm, I just had the sinking feeling that if FS3 were to come about, we'd probably see a "proper" falling of Mankind somehow, not just the loss of the Homeworld.
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The problem is that jump node defenses like that are more or less useless. In addition to being a logisitical drain, they are of no practical use if that particular node is not the one being assaulted; in that case they actually become a liablity because they aren't designed to defend against assault except from the node and can be siezed to deny your forces access.
The final nail in the coffin is the Shivan ability to use routes of which the GTVA may not even be aware. Such things are just not flexible enough to be of use. The Mjolnir, which is a considerably more flexible, transportable, can be put away when not in use sort of thing, is a vastly more rational approach.
I agree, mass deployment of SW Goliath style deference platforms at every node would be a wast of resources but placing them along choke points in galactic transit routes it gives the alliance strong points to mount defenses from
The Mjolinir strikes me as a proto-type weapon that was undergoing field trials during the first Artemis mission
I believe the command brief states the platform as a prototype. the advantage the Mjolinir has over the fixed station is that with two Tritons you can set up a testing defense screen anywhere probably in a an hour or two so you have the flexibility in your blockade strategy. if you give the platform engines you might as well position a corvette or destroyer there anyway
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I've always wondered whether jump nodes move or not. I don't recall any canon evidence for either possibility, but for sure they can't be static relative to absolute space. (Stars spin about the center of the galaxy at varying rates, but Sol is about 220km/s, not to mention the entire galaxy is going about 600km/s in a linear fashion).
So, it seems to me that jump nodes move (they kinda have to). And if they move, why would they have to remain static relative to the star they're associated with? Perhaps the reason that it's so hard to plant blockades on jump nodes is because it's hard to keep up with something that accelerates (the jump node must follow a curved path of some sort if it's to stay with its star system) but also doesn't have its own gravitational field that can be piggybacked on. So, Mjolnirs make sense because you drop them for a very short amount of time (probably a day or two tops) before their position begins to be offset from the position of the node. The mobility might be more of a necessity rather than a perk.
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I'd imaging a nodes drift rate to be on par with continental shift if not more simply due to the scale of a star system. So sentry gun mobility would seem to be a bonus rather than a requirement. Again as you say, there's no canon evidence to support or deny that though. . .
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Some like to think that they form at the system's La Grange points, so they wouldn't move relative to the local star(s) and planets.
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I've always wondered whether jump nodes move or not.
One of the jump nodes in FS1 is actually in the middle of an asteroid field, and thus rarely used, implying it had been there for a while. Now does that mean it moves relative to the field or within the field, I don't know.
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Since when do nodes have a definite front, anyway?
One reason could be that if you treat the node as an exit to a corridor which points in-between the two nodes you would always exit facing away from the direction in real space that you came from. (Just thinking aloud.) and would also explain why the Knossos gates always seem to face exactly the way ships arrive from them.
As for the nodes not moving within a system "IE. the node in the asteroid field" what if the node was fixed by the forces exerted in that place. IE the effects of near by stars/planets/asteroids, act as an anchor to hold it stable, and so it would always be "X" km from the planet no matter how far around it's orbit the planet was.
both these would mean that the corridor would only slightly change exit angle as systems move, and so reasonable spread of ships in the exit area would be able to cover exiting ships. If two systems nodes shift a lot between cycles this would increase the angle needed to be covered, and may explain why fixed platforms are not always used.
Currently looking into a system to explain this better but I hope you get the basic idea.
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Ok, here's an idea I just had after reading the last post.
What if the Subspace Nodes always "point" in the same direction and are in the same place, not because they are in planetary La Grange points, but stellar La Grange points, IE the Node between Sol and Delta Serpentis formed because of some relationship between the stars gravity wells in subspace. The nodes seem to remain stationary because of the immense time scales involved.
Oh man, this throws a whole new slant on why the Shivans blew up Capella. Maybe they did it, at the expense of millions of they're own personnel to preserve us against a foe from elsewhere that would have emerged from a node that was in the process of stabilizing that we couldn't detect yet as the stars were coming into alignment, and the only way to stop it would be to explode one of the stars involved, maybe there's something so nasty the Shivans are trying to box it in by exploding stars to close off points of egress from where they have they closed off at.
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maybe there's something so nasty the Shivans are trying to box it in by exploding stars
Yes, the GTVA.
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maybe there's something so nasty the Shivans are trying to box it in by exploding stars
Yes, the GTVA.
Sure, but the fact that it's the GTVA means that it likely wouldn't start conquering every other race it came upon. As the benifits of alliance have already been proven.
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I was just going for a "what a tweest" kind of thing there. :D
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I'd play a campaign like that as long as it involved uber models on par with BP. (Just kidding. That's a stupidly large request).
However, your plot twist does make sense when considering that the shivans are a "symptom of something far bigger". Except, if they were trying to seal off stars, why are they nuking GTVA in the process?
Anyways, back to nodes... It'd be neat if nodes were actually formed in lagrange points around stars, except that would put them exceptionally far away from any one star system, and that's not what we see in the game.
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...why are they nuking GTVA in the process?
Because we're in the way, probably like the Ancients were. But, it should be noted that during the Second Encounter, the Shivan's seemed less interested in wiping out the GTVA, they seemed more interested in keeping us out of the Nebula and later, in exploding Capella. This leads to the idea that the Lucifer fleet was perhaps a remnant of the force that wiped out the ancients and perhaps mistook the Terran and Vasudan forces as Ancient. I remember that Vasuda particularly seemed to be part of the Ancients empire as some point.
It's also possible the Ancients were perceived to be aligned with the Shivans true enemy and that's why they were wiped out.
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IE the Node between Sol and Delta Serpentis formed because of some relationship between the stars gravity wells in subspace. The nodes seem to remain stationary because of the immense time scales involved.
I agree it would be a factor in making the link possable, but this...
It'd be neat if nodes were actually formed in lagrange points around stars, except that would put them exceptionally far away from any one star system, and that's not what we see in the game.
So I was thinking that, planets/asteroids or even spectacular events (star creation/death/nebulae etc) would provide some sort of gravitational anchor to focus this relationship and cause the node to be created (this would have to happen at both systems) as tying down one end would not form the corridor but may increase the forces at the other system possibly forcing it to form the node in the most likely mathematical (gravity/subspace distrotion etc) place.
This process of increased force could be what the Knossos gates does when reopening nodes, and interestingly if you knew the math very very precisely you could work out exactly where other potential nodes are to new systems. (did the ancients do this?)
As for nodes that work after a massive system event "Capella", you could say that links could become "more perminent" over time/use and so will hold after such an event but over time "with no real anchor" they would drift until collected by a different body/force/Knossos or slowly loose their link as they drift away from the system and go dead.
On a lighter note, glad you liked the idea :)
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Heh. So if nodes are based on the spacial geometry of the universe, solving Einstein's field equations would provide us with a nice extra perk, wouldn't it?
But seriously: It makes sense that nodes must be anchored to things with mass, or else they wouldn't be following the galaxy as it zooms around and around in circles at mindbreaking speeds. The only force we know of that is a direct result of the presence of mass, so it isn't too far of a stretch to believe that subspace is related to gravity.
That said, what does this have to do with tactics? I guess that you can argue that one can blow up massive objects like suns, moons, or planets to form/destroy/move nodes to make situations that favor you. Regardless, it could be a cool plot device to use in a campaign, as long as the means to blow stuff up like that isn't ridiculous.
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Blowing up suns and moons? Just leave that to Inferno.
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Heh. So if nodes are based on the spacial geometry of the universe, solving Einstein's field equations would provide us with a nice extra perk, wouldn't it?
That said, what does this have to do with tactics?
I was thinking that with this understanding and the Knossos technology it would be possable to create campaigns in which you could undo nodes "IE deactivate" and research positions of possible nodes and activate them. This way you could find: new systems/races/ possible back door routes to Shavian systems that you could open and close for hit and run attacks/reconnaissance (The Hunted Becomes the Hunter?) "good name eh"
Also you could have lots of fun opening up nodes to................... (add imagination here....)
So as for tactics the ability to appear unannounced in system, direct from another system, race for your objectives and get out before your enemy has time to react, and close the door behind you.
Obviously this would take the GTVA some time to make work (as you would need some form of mobile Knossos device/ship and a large amount of energy to force the unformed node open/shut) and this would have to be considered in any campaign, but it would be good to see an outnumbered/outgunned GTVA get some payback, and maybe some useful Intel. And may open up some new and exciting storylines.
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I always thought that everything in freespace was locked in orbit around the star. The planets, asteroids and jump nodes all had a pretty much constant speed if they're along the same orbital path. The speed you see in m/s is actually how far from the orbital speed they are at. eg. your ship is travelling... say... 30000 m/s around the sun, as is the jump nodes, planets, asteroids, other ships, plus the speed you see, say 100 m/s while afterburning. If you move closer to to the star, orbital speed increases, but the speed you see stays the same. The speed of a ship is relative to the orbit speed required for objects orbiting the sun. Make sense?
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I always thought that everything in freespace was locked in orbit around the star. The planets, asteroids and jump nodes all had a pretty much constant speed if they're along the same orbital path. The speed you see in m/s is actually how far from the orbital speed they are at. eg. your ship is travelling... say... 30000 m/s around the sun, as is the jump nodes, planets, asteroids, other ships, plus the speed you see, say 100 m/s while afterburning. If you move closer to to the star, orbital speed increases, but the speed you see stays the same. The speed of a ship is relative to the orbit speed required for objects orbiting the sun. Make sense?
There's nothing canon that states it, but that's the same way I've always rationalized the speeds we see in-game for myself. Even if you look past the non-Newtonian-ness of ships' motion as a necessity for the sort of gameplay that :v: was going for, it's hard to rationalize why a bomber would be limited to the same speed as a city bus. :p
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Considering the Lucifer was not actually under weigh in the last mission of FS1, I've always figured that speed is speed in relation to a fixed, large reference object. The Lucifer was the biggest thing in the subspace tunnel, so it was the reference object.
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Or maybe that was just a hack to make it easier to keep up with.
I am playing Devil's advocate here, just to get you to think about it... I personally don't have a strong opinion on the matter.
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Or maybe that was just a hack to make it easier to keep up with.
I am playing Devil's advocate here, just to get you to think about it... I personally don't have a strong opinion on the matter.
How dare you make me squint!
:D