[Sandwich]

How would you go about coding a dovin basal simulation?

For those who don't know what the heck this "dovin basal" thingy is, it's essentially a Yuuzhan Vong (the new Star Wars Baddies) ship-system (creature, actually) that can control gravity to such an extreme manner that it can project black holes outside the ship to intercept incoming weapons fire, missles, etc.

So: you have a definable number of black holes per dovin basal (I'd guess 2 or 3 BH's for each dovin basal ship system) per ship (multiple dovins per ship, with fighters usually having one) that can swallow up X amount of energy, and can reposition themselves to shield any portion of a ship's hull.

Other points of importance:

• They have a dual purpose of providing a ship with motive power in addition to defence. Therefore, the more a ship's dovin basals are actively defending the ship from attack, the slower and less maneuverable that ship would be.
• Energy from nearby explosions does not get completely sucked in, although some does.
• The repositioning of BHs from one area of a ship's hull to another area is not instantaneous. Neither is the formation of BHs once the "shields up" order is given - probably on the order of 1-3 seconds to form.
• They have a big effect on the trajectory of anything in their area, including energy weapons (bendy beams?), missiles, and even ships.
• They can be used offensively to  disable a ship's shields. This effect can be mostly countered by expanding the inertial compensator's radius of effect. Since FS doesn't have inertial compensators, we could make due with rerouting a significant amount of power to the shield system.... unless someone wants to code in an inertial compensator?
• In connection with the previous point, the more dovil basals lock on to a single ship's shields at once, the more energy would be needed to counter the effect. Speaking for a standard fighter, it is usually capable of negating a single dovin basal's shield-ripping power. Anything more than that would probably overpower the fighter's inertial compensator.

Coding in dovin basal simulation would be crucial to any attempt at including Yuuzhan Vong ships in a Star Wars conversion. As a matter of fact, it is the only main thing that such a conversion would need from the SCP.

The only other thing I can possibly think of would be IWAR2-like remote missiles, to simulate the Force-propelled shadow bombs. Because these are not self-propelled, they are indetectable to the Yuuzhan Vong, and therefore they can slip between BH's without the Vong knowing... But that's a very minor issue.

So... how feasible would this be?

[Nico]

just to *****, I think a ship that is able to carry black holes on its hull doesn't need any protection of any kind

[Galemp]

And, uh... we're kinda far away from any Yuuzhan Vong mods...

[Sandwich]

Originally posted by venom2506
just to *****, I think a ship that is able to carry black holes on its hull doesn't need any protection of any kind

You misunderstand - there are creatures - living ship systems - that control gravity. They can project a black hole anywhere; in this case, they project it a ways away from the hull, like a shield mesh.

And GE: Yes, I'm quite aware of that. But there's no telling how long something like this - which I think would be a pretty major modification -  would take.

[Terorist]

Second to *****ing... Thinking up ridiculously powerful ships like that - sheesh... Someone obviously didn't have the faintest idea how immensely powerful and extremely exotic things black holes are when he was brainstorming that ship. We're talking about singularities that tie the very fabric of space into a knot, stop time (relatively speaking), tear everything near them in pieces and blast the remains with radiation created by the dying matter that gets sucked in. They ain't (pardon the slang term...) some magical cutesy 'kewlc00L' stuff of meaningless babble fit for fanboy ship weapons, they are the monsters of our universe. I know I'm barking at the wrong tree here, it's not your fault, but I just had to blow some steam.

[Sandwich]

Mmmm-hmmm, as if the Death Star superlaser is realistic.

Ours is not to question "why?", ours is but to code and fly.

[Fineus]

No need to - if memory serves, these creatures aren't infinitelly powerful - significant shots in the direction of the target mean that the system is overloaded and the ship can take damage (because there is not enough free energy/dovin basals to absorb the incoming shots). The typical tactic used was to focus all attack on the dovin basal projectors (I'm sure I'm getting the names wrong...) and destroying them - thus the ship couldn't defend itself using that method and began to take damage.

It'd be a cool idea, perhaps a lot of work.... or not, perhaps having a great number of smaller shield sections with little life to them... they'd overlap but continued fire on the ship would of course force through the shields and hit the hull beneath - modified animation files would allow for the black hole effect...balance the tables properly and voila!

[Terorist]

Planetkillers are innocent fun for the whole family, nothing to moan about there!
Sure, their power levels seem out of reach for the current dreams of weapon developers, but they're literally nothing compared to the energy and forces of black holes.

[Sandwich]

Originally posted by Kalfireth
It'd be a cool idea, perhaps a lot of work.... or not, perhaps having a great number of smaller shield sections with little life to them... they'd overlap but continued fire on the ship would of course force through the shields and hit the hull beneath - modified animation files would allow for the black hole effect...balance the tables properly and voila!

THANK YOU Thunder! That's the kind of discussion I was hoping to generate - how would we be able to code it, etc.

There is already code for flak, laser and beam turrets to aim at incoming bombs - no reason that can't be modified a bit to that the BH projection can be a constant-fire (beam) projection of a black texture (or even better, a negative light source!) that weapons collide against without doing damage (actually they would, but the "damage" would be constantly repairing at a set rate - overwhelm that rate of repair and shots begin to sneak through) and without any explosion animations. Integrate it with the code that displays shield splashes on the shield mesh to control the location/position of the BH around any given ship. Add on top of that code to balance the constant rate of "repair" being applied to the projection against the damage levels incurred by the incoming weapon fire, and you have the basics set, I believe.

[Warlock]

Originally posted by Terorist
Planetkillers are innocent fun for the whole family, nothing to moan about there!
Sure, their power levels seem out of reach for the current dreams of weapon developers, but they're literally nothing compared to the energy and forces of black holes.

Ummm they're not actually TRUE blackholes. Just close enough to absorb incoming lasers.

And far as overpowering, mostly it was done at first by detonating Porton torps just before they would be sucked into the 'blackhole',...then they rigged a studder fire effect to disorient the dovin basals and then flip to full power shots.

Personally I still like the "shadow bomb" method, completely remove the propellent system from torps, fill it complety with explosives and force push them into the target

[Sandwich]

So... do any coders have any glimmerings of an inkling as to how one would go about coding this stuff in?

[Terorist]

Gravity lenses then... but then what could be 'absorbing' anything? Well, I won't touch this any longer, bashing fanboy physics can be a strain.

(And I have no idea what you are talking about, something to do with Star Wars, it seems, but completely unfamiliar to me...)

[CP5670]

wait but uh...if this ship made a black hole wouldn't it itself get sucked in immediately? I like the idea of some kind of active countermeasure system for larger ships, but black holes?

[Terorist]

(One last quick comment...)

Originally posted by CP5670
wait but uh...if this ship made a black hole wouldn't it itself get sucked in immediately? I like the idea of some kind of active countermeasure system for larger ships, but black holes?

Exactly... It's actually just magic, it has nothing whatsoever to do with actual science, they just like to borrow cool sounding terms like black holes, various particles and quantum blah blah and other names to appear more intelligent.
Just remember to slap them when they start to undermine real life wonders like black holes, supernovas and other wonders. These beat the crap out of made-up fantasies without ever even trying.

[Warlock]

Hmmm try reading the series if you would like to understand the concept

But if you want hard science to prove everything in fiction ... you must not play many games Especially since what .... 99% of our information on Blackholes is just conceptual.

[Sandwich]

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke

[Stryke 9]

Terorist: There's hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi. Hard sci-fi is more or less an attempt to guess what real life will be like at some point in the future (or present or past, with the whole altered-history genre), extrapolated from what we know and can do right now, with maybe the occasional thing that can't be disproven thrown in (look at The Stars My Destination, one of the best works of "hard science" out there- jaunting's got no modern parallels, but it hasn't been entirely ruled out as a possibility). Soft sci-fi equates the word "science" with "magic", and people who write it can do whatever the hell they like- science fiction doesn't REQUIRE a basic conception of science, it just makes it a better read for those who understand it, in the same sense as a good story set in Singapore will be dismissed (no matter how well-constructed) by the Singaporeans if the author's never been there and based his book on a postcard he got from a giftshop at the local airport. Star Wars SF is so soft that it practically deserves one of those little disturbingly cherubic infants advertising it. That doesn't make it inherently inferior necessarily- personally, I think it's intellectually lazy to take soft SF any more seriously than to enjoy it in whatever book/whatever it was made for, but that's fine. Let it rest.

Sandwich: Er... the multiple-shield system Thunder recommended would be far and awaythe best way of going about that, and would mean something that would be useful for more than just your Star Wars project besides. Beam cannons don't intercept plasma-type weapons (or other beam cannons), and would generate crossfire that'd be hard to explain. The shields could provide "shaped" coverage, would weaken with successive hits, would actually neutralize the target all of the time (I wouldn't trust a beam to hit a Harpoon going at 80mps), would allow for a better impact animation, and wouldn't provide the hard-to-explain phenomenon of fighters 600m away on the opposite side of a missile suddenly exploding. The explosions would probably remain, but there's not much you could do about those unless someone wanted to create special-impact surfaces, so I'd say you should probably learn to live with it.

[KARMA]

Originally posted by Terorist
Planetkillers are innocent fun for the whole family, nothing to moan about there!
Sure, their power levels seem out of reach for the current dreams of weapon developers, but they're literally nothing compared to the energy and forces of black holes.

"This battle station is nothing compared to the powers of the Force" (eh, don't know how the english version was:))

btw, it seem to me that most of these carachteristics are impossible to be realized (or at least they may require too much work for something that is less than a mere hypotesis) , but some specifics may be useful for other situations and the final result doesn't have to be "exact"..just "adapted" and "realistic".

for example i like the idea of a in game mini black hole. something that attract almost everything, energy weapons too (imagine a battle in a system with this mini BH: you will have to compensate all the shots, or maybe a multiplayer melee). this may be the first stage to have weapon and ships being attracted by specific areas of giant ships

i like also the idea of multiple contiguous shields, that can be very useful on very big ships, so you will have to concentrate your attacks on a specific region (where the shield generator is?)

[Sandwich]

Originally posted by Stryke 9
Sandwich: Er... the multiple-shield system Thunder recommended would be far and awaythe best way of going about that, and would mean something that would be useful for more than just your Star Wars project besides. Beam cannons don't intercept plasma-type weapons (or other beam cannons), and would generate crossfire that'd be hard to explain. The shields could provide "shaped" coverage, would weaken with successive hits, would actually neutralize the target all of the time (I wouldn't trust a beam to hit a Harpoon going at 80mps), would allow for a better impact animation, and wouldn't provide the hard-to-explain phenomenon of fighters 600m away on the opposite side of a missile suddenly exploding. The explosions would probably remain, but there's not much you could do about those unless someone wanted to create special-impact surfaces, so I'd say you should probably learn to live with it.

Multiple-shields wouldn't work, since the main counter to BH-shielding is spraying the ship with many small laser beams, forcing the BH to travel from one area to  another, and then sneaking in a few full-power shots somewhere the BH can't reach/reposition to in time.

Also, I didn't mean that it would actually be a beam, making fighters explode - give me a little credit. I equated it to the "interception" behavior of flak, laser, and AAA beam turrets towards incoming bombs.

[KARMA]

for multishields i was thinking about thunder's idea:
i think you will hardly see in game a BH that physically change position to intercept beams torps and other weapons, it will be probably easyer to have a shield ani that looks like a black hole that appear suddenly.
In this solution multiple shields will be somehow necessary to simulate different BH devices and realize some limitations that will probably not be exactly like the originals but will work for gaming balancing purposes
A good addition for these dovin basals could be to have them related with the BH ani in source code, something like:
if hitted play BH ani (that will be relatively long )
don't play a new ani if another ani is already playing
play a new ani only after x seconds the precedent one is finished
during this inactivity period shields are disabled
hitted shields does not consume energy proportionally to the hit strenght but will consume a predefined amount of energy for every ani play
ani will not start if avaiable energy is under this predefined amount

with an enough long inactivity period and play time of ani + a balanced energy drain + enough shields, this will be maybe not exactly what you described but probably close enough