[CaptainX]

Greetings everyone.

I am trying to figure out the best way to do a certain mission, so I figured I would ask here and see what suggestions you guys had about how I can get it done in FRED 2 Open.

The mission: A large civilian space station has been destroyed, leaving behind a massive debris field. Some survivors managed to leave the station aboard escape pods right before the explosion. However, the explosion damaged these pods and ships, and now they're drifting through the debris field and time is running short. Alpha Wing is assigned to find the survivors and protect the area while the pods are recovered.

The mission takes place in a large debris field, the standard one you can set up in FRED.

Aside from the basics, which I already know, here are my primary questions:

1. Can I make the pods and ships hidden from sensors until the player gets very close to them (say about 1000 meters or so). Once the player gets close enough, the pod or ship becomes visible and targetable. Can this be done?

2. Is there a way to have a rescue ship (like a transport or SAR vessel) in the area, and when a pod is detected, have it dock with or retrieve the pod and remove it, either by of the player ordering the rescue ship to pick it up, or tagging it with missiles, or something similar?

3. I am considering having this mission take place inside a nebula, a gas cloud created by the explosion. This question is mostly opinion: Would a creation of a nebula like this be plausible? I'm trying to make the story as believeable as possible... what do you guys think?


Any help would be greatly appreciated 


P.S. I might be looking for some people to help me test the missions I'm creating. Just food for thought right now... I'll post a separate thread asking for volunteers in a few days, in the Missions and Campaigns forum. If you might be interested, watch for the thread.

- CaptainX

[Shade]

1) Yes. The ship-invisible/ship visible or ship-stealthy/ship-unstealthy SEXPs combined with a distance check will do exactly that, depending on whether you want a weak radar signal to show the general direction or not.

2) Yes. You can use is-tagged as part of the trigger for a SEXP that includes the docking order with the pod. Also, if you set the rescue transports as reinforcements, the player can call them in themselves using the comms menu (As Lightning Fall in the FS2 main campaign is an example of this in action, by the way). Of course, then you'd also have to check that the transports have actually arrived before letting the docking event trigger or the docking event will be wasted if the player tags before calling in a transport.

3) About as plausible as FS2 nebulae are in any case No real space nebulae have the kind of density we see in the game, in the real world you probably wouldn't even know if you were in the middle of a nebula as the gas is so diffused. My advice? If it aids the mission, ie. makes it more fun and interesting, do it.

[CaptainX]

Thank you for your answer.

If a transport docks with the pod, will the pod disappear? I plan to have 10 or 15 pods out there, and a single SAR ship won't hold them all if they are just docking to the external ports.

Is there some way to have a larger ship out there that can dock the pods into a hangar bay? Or have a transport pick them up and take them to a larger ship?

[Shade]

The pod will not disappear on its own after docking, but you can FRED that in if you want. Simply set the departure cue for each pod so that they depart once they have undocked from the transport, and then check the "no warp effect" box. That way, the pod will disappear from the mission the moment the transport undocks from it and you can argue that the transport simply scooped them up.

As for the large ship, that's not possible in exactly the way you describe it. You can't, as far as I know, make the hangar bay come to the pod. What you can do instead is have the transport "repair" the pod and then have the pods themselves fly to the hangar bay of the large ship. In reality of course there doesn't need to be any repairing (though you could disable the pods to back that excuse up and then fix the engine as the transport is docked), it's just a matter of issuing the right ai-goal as the right time.

It would probably be possible to have the transport take them to the large ship (never actually tried having a ship land while having something docked though, so not 100% sure it will work), but that means the transport lands as well and is gone from the mission. You can get around this by using multiple transports with the same name, only seperated by special characters, as special characters are not disaplayed in-mission. So "Aquitaine€", "Aquitaine&" and "Aquitaine§" will all show as simply "Aquitaine". What you then do is have each consecutive version of the same transport launch from the big ship shortly after the previous version has landed.

[CaptainX]

That's an interesting idea.

I actually thought about having all the engines on the pods set to 0, then automatically repair them when the player scans the pod.

Basically, have the player approach the pod and scan it. Then have some mission chatter where the player "talks" to the pod occupants, who then receive coordinates for a larger ship. Then they "start up" the pod's engines and head to the rescue ship.

Of course, I need to some up with an excuse for why the people in the pods were just sitting there hoping for rescue, without attempting to fly somewhere for help instead of waiting for a ship to show up.

Maybe a good explanation is that escape pods have a very limited navigational system, and they would need a specific route downloaded into the navigation system in order to get out of the debris field without hitting anything.

Any ideas, feel free to throw them my way 

- CaptainX

[Shade]

Maybe the pods have no subspace drive. At sublight speeds it would take forever to get anywhere, so their best bet is to stay near the wreckage and hope for rescue.

[CaptainX]

That's not bad. I think I'll use that.

Thank you for your help.

- CaptainX

[CaptainX]

Well, that idea kinda backfired.

I originally decided to have the player's mothership there along with the player, to collect the escape pods. Everything works fine until a certain point.

The player scans the pod. The pod's engines power up and it heads over and docks with the carrier. Unfortunately, it doesn't disappear... and if I use the ship-vanish or order it to warp out, it takes the damn carrier with it. I don't want to have the thing dock with the carrier only to undock again in order to vanish.

Has anyone else created any search and rescue missions? My basic idea for this mission is to find and rescue survivors, naturally with the player assuming an important role.

Any ideas?

[karajorma]

Don't have it dock. Have it depart from the ships hanger bay.

1) Yes. The ship-invisible/ship visible or ship-stealthy/ship-unstealthy SEXPs combined with a distance check will do exactly that, depending on whether you want a weak radar signal to show the general direction or not.

In this case you'd have to remember to also use the friendly-stealth-invisible option or else you'd still be able to detect them. 

[Shade]

The player scans the pod. The pod's engines power up and it heads over and docks with the carrier. Unfortunately, it doesn't disappear... and if I use the ship-vanish or order it to warp out, it takes the damn carrier with it. I don't want to have the thing dock with the carrier only to undock again in order to vanish.

Don't order them to dock - That's for the transport when getting the pods if you had gone for that option. Order them to depart, with the departure location set to a hangar bay on the mothership instead of hyperspace.

[CaptainX]

Don't order them to dock - That's for the transport when getting the pods if you had gone for that option. Order them to depart, with the departure location set to a hangar bay on the mothership instead of hyperspace.

Oh, hell.... I should've KNOWN that!!

That's what I get for designing missions at 4:30am 

- CaptainX