[TrashMan]

About that engine thing - I jsut tested in 3.6.7. - doesn' t work

I took out the Molochs main engine - it was still glowing and the ship was still going at 30m/s.
Who's hte one who said that engine damage was properly implemented?

[CaptJosh]

Um, if it's going at top speed already, taking out a single engine, assuming it has more than one, isn't going to slow it down. Engines are for acceleration. Technically, I shouldn't slow down when I throttle down in space. I should just coast, and for a long time. Virtually no friction.

Of course, that would mean that there's no real top speed for fighters. THey'd just keep going faster the longer you have the engines throttled up. To do what happens in Freespace and Freespace 2, retros have to be built in and tied in to the throttle control, logically. Well, at least for the throttle down behavior. It doesn't explain the top speed thing.

Really, the physics model in this game isn't right, but the fun is great, so who cares? The only thing I can think of that needs an accurate physics model right now is The Babylon Project, and they're making do without it.

[StratComm]

Originally posted by TrashMan
About that engine thing - I jsut tested in 3.6.7. - doesn' t work

I took out the Molochs main engine - it was still glowing and the ship was still going at 30m/s.
Who's hte one who said that engine damage was properly implemented?

Then it's broken and needs to be addressed.

[Bobboau]

I think there may have been a ship flag or something.

[karajorma]

I don't think it's broken. AFAIK that kind of behaviour wasn't seen in retail and as such shouldn't be the default in SCP either.

[Goober5000]

Taylor was working on it (the engine stuff) but there were still a few more problems last I heard.

As for Newtonian physics, FS is an arcade game, not a physics game.  Nevertheless, the physics module is there and pretty well compartmentlized if anyone wants to take a crack at it.

[CaptJosh]

Well, it would be needed if anyone ever wanted to do a mod for combat with atmosphere fighters. And like I said. TBP would probably appreciate it if there was a newtonian physics mod as well. So I do hope someone takes a crack at it. I would, but it's beyond me right now. Maybe when I can actually take the time to study coding, I'll have a go at some work of my own on this game. Until then, I just have to hope someone else will like an idea and run with it.

[karajorma]

Continually asking for newtonian physics as if we're retards who never thought of it is unlikely to gain you support though.

[StratComm]

Originally posted by karajorma
I don't think it's broken. AFAIK that kind of behaviour wasn't seen in retail and as such shouldn't be the default in SCP either.

Actually, if ANY of you had run an actual test, you'd see that it does work.  Just not in the way Trashman expects.  If a ship has three engines, blowing one out doesn't slow it down.  However, blowing the second out reduces speed by 1/3.  Speed then drops for any additional damage you do to the third engine.  If the ship's only got two engines, again there's no speed reduction for destroying one, but as the second engine takes damage speed gets reduced.  If the ship only has one engine, slowdown begins to incur at 50% damage or so.  It's scaled like this so average combat damage doesn't actually effect mission timing, only specific attempts to disable a target (or really weak engines) will let you observe the slowdown.  Don't believe me?  Go disable one of the corvettes in The Great Hunt and watch their speed as you do damage to their engines.

[Goober5000]

I thought Trashman was referring to when the engine glow is still present even if the engine's destroyed.  AFAIK taylor hasn't finished the code for that yet.

As for the speed issue, that's been the same since FS1 (as StratComm says) and we don't intend to change it.  If it has changed, it's a bug.

[StratComm]

Yeah that's been my point as Trashman wants it changed.  The engine glow issue is still inconsistant (it works on the Deimos in the build I'm using) but that's not the concern I was trying to get across anyway.

[TrashMan]

Erm..why such a strange engine system? For mission timing?

If you tie your evenets with proposed ship speeds than that's bad FREDing in my oppinion...

so by what I gather, in order to actually slow the Sath down even a bit you have to blow 5 engines totaly and damage the sixth?
Rubbish!

[CaptJosh]

Hrmm...I wonder what would happen if you disabled the Sathanas in "Bearbaiting" (assuming it's even possible). I bet the mission wouldn't end.

[FireCrack]

Just try and disable 5 juggernaut class engines, even flying an eryinies wilth all guns switched to bfreds you'd be hard pressed.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by StratComm
If the ship's only got two engines, again there's no speed reduction for destroying one, but as the second engine takes damage speed gets reduced.  

Now re-read how Trashman tested this feature. Blowing up one engine on a ship with two engines.

As I said that wouldn't have had any effect in retail and shouldn't have any effect in FS2_Open either.

[TrashMan]

You know what? F*** retail!

This is FSO! Retail didn't have armor. It didn't have ballistic primaries! It didn't have a lot of stuff.

At leat make it a turn on/off feature if you fear it might break some campaigns (alltough that must be some sloppy campaign if they can be broken so easilly)

[StratComm]

The mandate of FSO is to not break backwards compatability.  If you've never timed a mission so that a ship arrives at a designated point at a designated time, then you obviously have not FREDed many good missions.  Mission timing is a fairly fundamental concept of making it, you know, playable.

Hell, it would break half the retail campaign to do it in such a way.  And I sure don't consider the FS2 retail missions "sloppy" (well, I can think of one that is.  But not the ones that this would break).  That's reason enough alone to not do it.

[WMCoolmon]

It was definitely in CVS at a certain point.

[StratComm]

It's still there.  The Moloch does not work correctly, but the Deimos works fine.  And the Moloch is never going to work unless someone splits the engine glows; right now it's got two engine subsystems but only one engine glowbank.  There's absolutely no way to resolve that.

[Wanderer]

If you want new features, how about making armor system that would enable different armor to different submodels (turrets / radars / etc.) or even to different subystems (sensors etc.). This would make possible to table heavily armored capships with weakly armored turrets (that player can destroy) or to enable 'weak' points in the design.

As an added extra: As these (subsystems) are also cpu targettable even the AI 'could use' this feature, well atleast to some extent...