[Excalibur]

ok mr. frodo.

I think the retail beam thing was actually 2 turrets. 1 pulls the ship toward you the other stops it.
I think that's how it was.

I was actually about to suggest that--you beat me to it (by 2 hours). If you use two weapons, you should be able to negate the effects and use a "holding" beam. Another thing you might be able to do is set ranges on the "push" beam... if you have the "pull" effect at, say, 2km... you will pull the ship towards you. If you have the "push" effect at 1.5km, you can keep the target ship at ~1.5km. If you flag it as a beam and use no texture on said beam, you should have an effective weapon (as well as the ability to set refire to 0 and duration in seconds). If you want to add an effect, it should be more strait-forward to texture the beam. Don't forget to take off color flags.

What if the other ship has a tractor beam? It could use that to try and escape, couldn't it?

Or use its holding beam but set it on a larger range.

[akenbosch]

arent tractor beams cone-shaped?

well, and you have too implement a type "5" beam that continulous aims at its target until it dies out or the target is destroyed (TBP could use this for triad beams!)

and how would you get the "several beams hit eachother and create one big beam" effects for the death star?

[Black Wolf]

Easy. Seven (I think) small beam turrets arranged around the death star superlaer all target an invisible pof out where they're supposed to meet (with invisible impact explosions of course) and then the beam fires from a turret on the invisible pof.

[Herra Tohtori]

arent tractor beams cone-shaped?

well, and you have too implement a type "5" beam that continulous aims at its target until it dies out or the target is destroyed (TBP could use this for triad beams!)

You have obviously never been to Singapore. Just as obviously, you don't seem to have read or understood what this thread is about...

I dunno what shape the tractor beams are, but it since in SW they are seemingly invisibile, it doesn't really matter as far as effects are concerned. It just needs to move the target ship and that's it, you can call it a tractor beam.

And as I said before, you don't need to think of it as a FS2 beam weapon just because tractor beam has a beam on its name. Thus you really don't need to implement a new beam class either... My approach was to try and develope a primary/turret weapon that has the effective properties of a tractor beam.

and how would you get the "several beams hit eachother and create one big beam" effects for the death star?

Easy. Seven (I think) small beam turrets arranged around the death star superlaer all target an invisible pof out where they're supposed to meet (with invisible impact explosions of course) and then the beam fires from a turret on the invisible pof.

I think it would be wise to rather make it use a green shimmering light animation as explosion texture to mask the way the beam textures tend to have square ends, but that's really not this conversation's headache...

...

Making the turret consist of both pulling and repelling beam having different ranges was an interesting idea... If done right, it would indeed behave as a tractor beam on long distance and when the target closes by it would likely start behaving as a holding beam of sorts.

Also, I lol'ed a bit to "Mr. Frodo"... It wasn't really what I meant, but whatever. It's just that "Herra" is actually Finnish word for "Mister" or "sir" (more in military context) so it was almost like being called Mr. Sir or Mr. Mister.

Yes, there's a story behind my nick but I'll save it for another time, it's not especially interesting anyway.

[jr2]

  Have you watched "Holes" before?  If not, get ahold of it & watch it.  There is a reason... *snicker*

[G0atmaster]

huh?


Anyway, back on track:  Could you just make bombs invulnerable to this type of weapon and make all the missiles bombs?  IIRC, there are concussion missiles, proton torpedoes, I THINK an EMP torpedo, and few other types of secondary weapons in Star Wars, all of which can, canonically, be targeted and destroyed by shooting at them.  Therefore, I suggest making all missiles bombs. 

Speaking of which, there were a special kind of armored torpedo employed by the Remnant of the Empire, "Diamondbacks" I believe they were called.  Dash somethingorother shot at one of these in an attempt to destroy it before it hit a transport carrying a load of civilians.  it didn't blow up and it did kill the transport, and Dash was so torn apart, unable to believe he'd missed, that the distraction and stress caused him to hesitate and be killed on his next mission in one of the X-wing novels (all IIRC), so if we could have some bombs that are invulnerable, or just take multiple hits to destroy, that would be great.  Or maybe these could just be regular freespace-style missiles, effectively rendering them invulnerable.

We also (for ship-capture missions) need to make it so a ship under a tractor beam cannot jump to hyperspace.  Could we make a hyperspace subsystem that autorepairs, even from 0%, which gets destroyed by this specific weapon, or is that a little too complicated?

[chief1983]

I had the missiles-are-bombs idea already, it seems like the most logical way to handle this, since I don't think it would hinder anything else.  Even the nearest bomb key would work for the nearest missile.

I think it's the diamond boron, I've heard of it but it's nice to know a little more about it.  Now that I know what it is, it does sound like it would be interesting.  An indestructible bomb.  Hmm...

I think there's probably some flags in FRED to that easily now without actually destroying a subsystem.  Just a disable-warp flag or something.

[brandx0]

The problem with missiles as bombs is that bombs are used by the AI pretty much solely against capships, AFAIK

[jr2]

To test that, you could put some bombers in a mission with just other bombers, load them up with bombs and low powered primaries, and see if they'd shoot their bombs at each other.

[chief1983]

If not I think we can customize what the 'bomb' flag means for a weapon, IE a destroyable trait without the only used on capship trait.

[G0atmaster]

Oh, and you would have to do something about the capships focusing all guns on the nearest enemy bomb.

And I think that throws off the whole TAG system, because, just guessing here, I think it flags whatever ship gets hit with a TAG missile as a bomb.

But as for "targeting nearest bomb" becoming "targeting nearest missile," pilots in Star Wars are able to do that anyway.  So no biggie there as per canon.

[chief1983]

But as for "targeting nearest bomb" becoming "targeting nearest missile," pilots in Star Wars are able to do that anyway.  So no biggie there as per canon.

That's actually one of the main points of doing it that way.