Ran another round of tests last night. For the most part, things went very well, but it seems I have a tendancy to overpower my weapons. Rate of fire was much too quick on several of them, although the adjusted beam I mentioned now works exactly as it should - as a disabling tool, not a one-hit kill. Shortening the beam's on-time to a few fractions of a second helped immensely, now that I can no longer sweep it in the general direction of my targets and hope to wipe out a whole wing.
Also of interest is the KVM-22 and -25S "Mauler" missile - basically a fast-lock version of the Morning Star (25S is Swarm variant - less damage, but a quartet of them). I can't tell you how much fun it was to watch a Mara coming at me head-on and suddenly bounce away like it was hit by a train. For a scouting fighter, these will buy plenty of time to get away. May have to up the cargo value though, or decrease the Tigris' load capacity.
It would seem some of my guns (primaries) are not showing their icons correctly - even when the $Icon and $Anim parameters are copied directly from the original weapons.tbl. For the flak, I've come to understand that this is due to the model being defined (and unfortunately, I don't see any way around that, aside from revising Flak to be a secondary ammo-dependant weapon... which may not be a bad choice... hm...) but my other machinations, namely a Maxim rework and some high-level kayser-esque weapons, are listing their name on the selection board and not showing icons. o.O;
In testing the new species entry and thrusters, I found that the engine glows worked fine again, but apparently I need to define some kind of subobject in order to have an actual thruster flame. Anyone know the MAX heiarchy for that?
