[DIO]

Originally posted by TrashMan


Freelancer...

Starlancer was for instance very realistic.

Ahh, WHAT?!

[StratComm]

Originally posted by TrashMan


You know, a wise person is never 100% sure in thing one hasn't proved correct.

Trashman, give it up.  There's like a 0.00001% chance that the Maxim's range is a bug.  It's far too easy to notice.

Originally posted by TrashMan
That has nothing to do with WW2 mentality. Both carriers and battleships were vulnerable to fighter attacks in WW2, but battleships were a lot tougher.

When I say battleship, immgine a Orion with heavier beams and two Aeoulus cruisers glued to it's sides.

And you Babylon 5 argument has no real value, since how tough capships are to take out depends on the weaponry, armor and shieldsing of the fighters/bombers attacking and the capship itself.

And Freespace fighters are not heavily shielded/armed compared to their capital ship counterparts?  If anything, it makes the B5 argument stronger to bring that up, since the limitations of aircraft in WWII, namely range and paper-thin protection from projectile weaponry, has been eliminated in Freespace.  Besides, a ship like you're describing is closing fast on an uber-ship, which is never a valid argument for everything.  If the terrans had been able to build a ship so armed, wouldn't they have done it a long time ago?

[Ghostavo]

I searched a bit and I found that Star Destroyers do have tons of fighters, and given the argument at hand I can't help but ask...

Why hasn't TrashMan proposed the same thing to the Star Wars universe (carrier and battleship seperate fleets instead of a unique star destroyer design)?

[Woolie Wool]

Originally posted by ngtm1r


Yes. On the highest difficulty I took down an ISD with my X-Wing. ALONE.

The ship you propose would eat a lone fighter alive. Hell, I can take on a Sathanas alone at mid-level difficulty and stand a reasonable chance of living to tell about it. Not so this...thing.

If I can take on the biggest, toughest, meanest ship in the game with nothing more then an Artemis D.H. and some Cyclops bombs, and win, that should tell you something. FS capital ships ALL need fighter support to work effectively. They are combined-arms weapons for a combined-arms environment. Making them otherwise is a complete and utter lack of respect for the canon.

Don't worry. You won't have even a glimmer of hope of destroying even a light cruiser alone in Starforce.:devil:

Of course, you won't be taking on caps alone. Even the transports have AAA beams (in the case of a transport, one and ONLY one). However, you cannot just let a cap fend for itself. The enemy will have plenty of bombers, and nine times out of ten, some caps of their own. On the flip side, fighters will not be able to stand alone either. If you're attacking a corvette or larger ship, fire support from a capship is essential.

(Things are a bit different in the actual Starforce sci-fi universe. In Starforce stories and fluff, caps can kill a fighter with one hit from even their weakest weapons, bombs are a lot weaker relative to capship main guns, and bombers and fighters attack in huge hordes. A typical battle may have 10,000 caps and over 500,000 fighters and bombers involved at any one time.)

[Jal-18]

Originally posted by TrashMan
As for the ship movement - ships can move like that in space in real life. Think computer controled thrusters spread out across the fighter (and if you look at the FS2 concept art, you'll see they are there). Those thrusters are used to simulate in-atmosphere like movement.

Which you better hope to god they don't teach our pilots to do.  In short: if you limit our pilots to manuevers and tactics that work well in atmosphereic like enviroments, the first truely space-adapted race that comes along will slaughter us.

[Woolie Wool]

Such a maneuvering system would be so clumsy and impractical that no engineer would ever consider it. Besides, unless an FTL system were discovered, fighting an interstellar war would be completely impossible.

[SadisticSid]

Originally posted by Woolie Wool
Don't worry. You won't have even a glimmer of hope of destroying even a light cruiser alone in Starforce.:devil:
 

Yes you will. All you need to do is find a blind spot, and on the mods I've seen you using in your screenshots, there are plenty.

[Black Wolf]

Originally posted by Woolie Wool

A typical battle may have 10,000 caps and over 500,000 fighters and bombers involved at any one time.)

Oh, phew. For a second there, it was sounding utterly ridiculous...

[karajorma]

Originally posted by TrashMan
You know, a wise person is never 100% sure in thing one hasn't proved correct.

Give it up Trashman. Anything over 99.5% gets rounded up to 100% in general conversation unless you're a complete nerd. The chance that the maxim is a mistake is vanishingly small

Originally posted by TrashMan
When I say battleship, immgine a Orion with heavier beams and two Aeoulus cruisers glued to it's sides.

Uber ship! Well maybe not but certainly heavier than anything I'd put into the game.

Originally posted by TrashMan
And you Babylon 5 argument has no real value, since how tough capships are to take out depends on the weaponry, armor and shieldsing of the fighters/bombers attacking and the capship itself.

I was simply saying that you might as well pick a different frame of reference. The WWII one isn't serving you well.  

Originally posted by TrashMan
FS2 has a realistic FEEL to it..more realistic than most other space sims I've seen. More realistic than Star Wars and Freelancer...

I didn't find the maxim one iota less believable than anything else in the game. On top of which if the Maxim was as unbelievable as you claimed it is surely you would have noticed that fact before?

[Woolie Wool]

Originally posted by Black Wolf


Oh, phew. For a second there, it was sounding utterly ridiculous...

My sarcasm detector is beeping.

[Woolie Wool]

Originally posted by SadisticSid


Yes you will. All you need to do is find a blind spot, and on the mods I've seen you using in your screenshots, there are plenty.

The Dainishi is the exception. It's the ****tiest cruiser in the game, and is basically a bulk transport with a medium anti-cap beam and an AAA beam tacked to the bow. I'm talking about something like the SIC Eurus (an Eclipse with a different name and even better armament), or the EFC Aegis (like the Aegis from OTT but with my own tables. It has pulse cannons EVERYWHERE, and three AAA beams as well).

In case you think I'm crazy for uprating the Eclipse's armament, fighters move a lot faster than they do even in Inferno. An EFF Raziel, the closest thing to the Vesuvius from Inferno that exists in Starforce, has a top speed of 100 m/s and can do 175 with the burners on.

The pulse cannons that replace the EA blob turrets have a projectile velocity of 650, a damage of 90 (which is double against unshielded hulls), and a fire wait of 0.2. Not a nice weapon to get shot at by, even with the stronger shields and hull in Starforce (580 shields and 380 hull for the Raziel).

[Mav]

Originally posted by Woolie Wool


My sarcasm detector is beeping.

I quite like this thread (lots of ideas+arguments, as well as some fun) - keep on!


And to contribute:

I don't think the Helios on the Myrmidon to be a bug, especially no problematic one. For a succesor of the Ulysses it's pretty sluggish I think, and I think I remember that in the description an extreme payload compatibility was mentioned.

And for the Maxim... I don't really think it is a bug, but I do have to admit that I don't really like it.

About FS carriers - dunno.

About battleships - well, imagining them to be esentially destroyers without fighterbays and instead more armor and weapons (maybe 1 cruiser worth of weapons more?), I think for backup for the destroyers in very hard battles, they might be an idea (maybe 2 Dest + 1 BB ambushing a Sathanas - of course not from front up [remember I said "ambush"]). They would however be much rarer than the normal destroyers, seen that way.

And if the Shivans had a battleship, it might even have shields, rendering those Maxims next to useless. :devil:


[edit] And for the post-Capella-thing:

Maybe none of the ships hit by the supernova survived. But still the leftover of the SN might only be a (very hot + dense) nebula, maybe with a neutron star or white dwarf, that the Shivans would have no trouble travelling through, taking into account their advanced shield tech and all (and hell, they created that SN-remnant, so they might just as well have created it to whatever specifications they liked) .

And for new GTVA military concepts - as they really can't compare with the Shivans concerning large ships (remember that fleet of Sathanii?) maybe the often-mumbled-about-gunship-class (or what it was) might be the best idea; i.e. something mounting a small anti-cap-beam (maybe also some small antifighter turrets), yet maneuverable enough (maybe like a Medusa) so  if a Sathanas suddenly shows up, most of them would manage to get out of its front arc without being destroyed.
If it was to have shields or not would be a question - it would be on the very edge of what I'd imagine GTVA being technologically capable of.
[/edit]

[Ghostavo]

Isn't a battleship in essence a Super Destroyer class ship (which exist ingame by the way)?

[Mav]

Depends on how you see it. You could cal the Colossus and Sathanas battleships. But they aren't called so in-game and from what I understood, the idea discussed here is something like what I stated above.

[StratComm]

Well by the definition proposed by most people, a FS battleship would have no fighters.  A superdestroyer is just that, a large destroyer; battleships would be somehow fundamentally different.

[Mav]

Somewhat like that?

Originally posted by Mav
About battleships - well, imagining them to be esentially destroyers without fighterbays and instead more armor and weapons (maybe 1 cruiser worth of weapons more?), I think for backup for the destroyers in very hard battles, they might be an idea (maybe 2 Dest + 1 BB ambushing a Sathanas - of course not from front up [remember I said "ambush"]). They would however be much rarer than the normal destroyers, seen that way.

And if the Shivans had a battleship, it might even have shields, rendering those Maxims next to useless. :devil:

[Nuclear1]

Have any of you ever tried Sandwich's FS CapShip Turret Upgrade? That tends to render Maxims useless, as those little "Terran Turrets" or "Terran Huge Turrets" get a huge boost in fire rate and range, at least up to 3000 meters.

[TrashMan]

Originally posted by Woolie Wool
Such a maneuvering system would be so clumsy and impractical that no engineer would ever consider it. Besides, unless an FTL system were discovered, fighting an interstellar war would be completely impossible.

Clumsy and impractical? Works well for our fighters here.

Ever seen what a fighter with variable thrusters can do? Those are some crazy maneuvers. and the atmospehre gets in the way and slows them down. In space, they would turn even faster and more precise.

Such a system is what we humans are fammiliar with. No one sez we can't learn to do it another way, but is it really that much better?
In the long run it all depends on the pilots I guess.

[TrashMan]

Originally posted by karajorma


Give it up Trashman. Anything over 99.5% gets rounded up to 100% in general conversation unless you're a complete nerd. The chance that the maxim is a mistake is vanishingly small

//////// What makes you so sure that it's 99,5? Who measured it?

Uber ship! Well maybe not but certainly heavier than anything I'd put into the game.

////// and what is teh Colossus?

[NGTM-1R]

Such a system has been used as an excuse before; Robotech does according to the novels. It's simpler to train the pilots to fly in one environment. Of course, in Robotech you go to Battloid mode and all bets are off.

But the expense and difficulty of training a pilot to fly and fight in two totally dissimilar settings might warrant such a system.