[Mike_A36]

Hi everybody,
I was just over at the BTRL forums and there was a thread joking about an undersea mod. I remebered a similar thread here at Hard Light some ages ago about an attempted undersea mod.

My interest in this is that several years ago I read some SCI-FI books by an author named Bill Keith who wrote 2 books called Sharuq and Stingray. They were about the U.S. Navy having some experimental undersea fighters or mini-subs that flew(sailed?) from a retrofitted Typhoon class submarine bought from the Russian Navy. The ships employed a silent drive system, A blue-green laser/ sonar imaging system. The reason for the experiment was that the Japanese had put orbital bombardment satelites in orbit that had pin-point accuracy and could target any surface ship and kill it thus making the conventional navy ships obsolete. In the book the Japanese had sunk the Aircraft Carrier Lincoln and had allied with a unified Islamic military to destroy the West. It was a good read if anyone is interested.

But my point is that Freespace already has most of the elements that could make a great mod of these books. Now being completely incompetent in the areas of modeling, texturing, etc. I would have to depend completly on someone else doing the mod. I just thought it would be so cool to be able to play something in that universe.

The mini-sub fighters were described as being shaped like an A6-Intruder with stubby wings and tail. They flew like a conventional aircraft in that they didn't use ballast to float. They had to be moving to create lift on the wings.

Any way just thought I would throw it out there for discussion, flaming, or ignoring.

[Getter Robo G]

Well I have no skills, but I could maybe throw a few ideas at you (I'm an idea guy, it's in my siggy!)

For clear water you just use nebula backgrounds of appropriate tint.

For "cloudy" water you use a full nebula (minus the lightning of course)

All missions would probably use a large ground model.
We have one made by Venom/Nico you can use for testing.

In fact the dome/skybox that was released in same modpack you can remove the background sky image and use a water one...

This is the ground and sky look, (use your imagination) I'm not motivated enough to try it myself, I'm still trying to get the energy to make it the arctic for SG-1 and have the f-302's attacking gliders for a demo pic...

Please forgive the ships in the way, I don't have a pic of just the lanscape...



That sounds like an interesting book, I'll have to check it out sometime.

Anyway I thought subfighter were first mentioned in SEAQUEST? For more info or just ideas on them you can also look up a property called DEEP ANGEL.

I also think they renamed to EMPIRE. Lots of cool concept art on subfighters (most of them can also go into the lower atmosphere as well)...


Good luck with your project!

[Mike_A36]

Thanks for the feedback. I looked on the web for anyone who has modeled an A6-intruder belive it or not one is out there but they want $145.00 for it I don't blame them I just do not have any skills in 3d modeling.

[Nuke]

its possible. what i would do is the opposite of what btrl has done, rather than increase the damp and the speeds, you would actually want to drop them. i think the fastest nuclear sub will do roughly 30 knots (around 15.5 m/sec). as i understand it submersibles are actually slower as they lack the power to defeat the high drag of the water. thats not to say a streamlined ship with a big power plant and a low drag coefficient wouldnt work.

freespace's physics here would be somewhat convincing. my atmospheric flight script could easily account for buoyancy and the density of water (which is essentially constant). it would also make surfacing dynamics work well. at slower speeds i can imagine it not borking collision code as bad. you would probibly want to run an auto leveling system to make the gameplay feel more terrestrial.

for weapons id use slow moving torpedoes, dumb fire or otherwise. so sci-fi universes may have other weapons, lasers, micro torpedoe cannons, ect. id probibly put all the smaller faster dumbfire torps as primarys, and the bigger sonar or wire guided torps as secondaries. freespace is well suited to all of this.

then comes the environment. freespace is surely capable to allow seafloor to surface missions. im not sure how you would handel surfacing. differences in lighting and visibility would probibly be impossible. you could probibly simulate a calm surface with an animated normal map. this can be avoided all together if the plot dictates that surfacing would be fatal, the orbital bombardment system you mentioned. a fully submerged mod would work well. you could simulate a surface with an animated normal mapped plane, throw in some glow maps and maybe even some bloom for a convincing effect. from the underside it would be fairly convincing. the game could be set up to auto-kill anyone who got close to it. nebular effects might not be 100% convincing as water. maybe by applying a blur and caustics shader to the poofs would make it feel more accurate. you probibly also want some bubble effects on things like torpedoes and engines ect. thic could be done well with particle scripts.

i personally think its a damn good idea.

[Wanderer]

Using standard issue particle thrusters with self-made (well self-edited at least) shockwave eff... Weapons can use particles as well so those would fine already

Besides as we all know vasudans wuv fishes...

[NGTM-1R]

Underwater-type effects have been accidentally simulated before. It was more of a bug, but it might still be possible. Nebula-style detection ranges would be usable, and deeper depths can be simulated via black nebula poofs and a black nebula (black poofs don't show). Submarines don't like going deeper than 500-600 feet without a good reason, and they usually fight above that depth so they can launch torpedos more easily. (At least until swimout becomes standard...) Still at that depth you'd not be seeing very much before you ran into it. LADAR is a workable solution and it might introduce occasional missions where you'd do most of your fighting via instruments rather than visual contact. Simulating passive sonar is totally out of the question, I think.

The official record-holder for fastest combat submarine is the Russian Alfa-class at 45+ knots. To this day the USN won't admit having a submarine that can go faster than 30 knots, but it's fairly certain the Los Angeles can do 35, and the Seawolf might top out at 40+. Since these would be smaller ships with more weight devoted to their powerplants proportionally ('cuz they're not designed for the range the bigger ones are) you might get 60-70 knots out of them. They're not going to be quiet about it though. Steerageway is going to be fairly high for them, 5 knots or up, and their hulls will be probably too small and too thin to contain the sound their powerplants generate. (Unless they have a battery-operated alternate electrical propulsion mode and can run with their reactors[?] off? Stealth/unsteal via keypress and sexp, but time-tracking it somehow would be needed...)

[Wanderer]

Well.. supercavitation - like in the newish Russian/Iran torpedo (Shkval/Hoot respectively) - would enable speeds of which modern day submarines and mariners just dream about, over 200 knots, and some weapons are reported to be a lot faster like 400+ knots. So weapons - as well as submarines - could be really fast.

[Mike_A36]

I tried to post a reply on a different pc and it did not come through. Anyway the jist of the post was that the subs used MAGNETOHYDRODYNAMIC (MHD) propusion. In the books it was silent as it had no moving parts. the subs power supply came from high efficency, high output fuel cells.

The blue green lasers for lidar or ladar were coupled with both acive and passive sonars and routed through an advanced mini-cray supercomputer (this was 1993) to produce realistic images of the surrounding ocean on some high resolution monitors inside the cockpit of the sub. The cockpit was really just a carbon-fiber bubble with no windows or ports to see out of. It was to handle the pressure of the depths that they would be in. 

The only real weapon was a rocket-torpedo carried in a bay under the sub. The only time the ships used active sonar was when they were targeting another ship. The lasers scanned in a 360 around the ship and the returns was what was used to make the view in the monitor. The laser was also used for sub to sub communications the pilots were able to talk just like on a regular radio but he did mention that the voices were distorted (kinda like btrl).

I do agree about the max speed and dampning of the tables. However the subs were talked about as being the fastest thing under the water they just had limited range.

But again I just thought it was a cool idea when someone mentioned it on BTRL. Me I have not the faintest clue about how to do it. I would like to learn someday but at the moment I have several RL issues staring me in the face. Namely work (uggh!) and I am trying to sell a house and build a new one.

I have mentioned before that I am a draftsman and can use Autocad so I designed and drew my own house. I can even do 3D stuff in Autocad (somewhat) but get me in truespace and blender and I haven't a clue as to how to start.

[Admiral_Stones]

Magnetohydrodynamic propulsion is also developed/being developed in RL...

[Nuke]

what you can do is use autocad to design your ships with and export for uv and texturing in a modeling program. its not as good as designing it in one program only, but it is a good way to get models out since you already know the cad program.

Magnetohydrodynamic propulsion is also developed/being developed in RL...

they actually had it working in the 60s, it was just really, really, slow.

[Wanderer]

AFAIK minor little caveat is that MHD is not silent - that is in reality...

[Mike_A36]

A few years ago the Japanese had a full size prototype boat powered by MHD. It was in Popular Science or Popular Mechanics. It too was sloooowww, like 1 knot. But it was just to prove that it could be done. Get this the power plant was something like 8 turbo diesel engines to create the electricity and magnetic field. There Theory was that it could make sea travel cheaper not necessarily faster because you do not have impellers, propellers, shafts, gears, etc. The article if I remember stated that they would next work on some sort of superconductivity for the electricty, and magnetic fields. 8 turbo diesels are not silent by any means.

In the books they had the Typhoon retrofited as a carrier sub with the blue green lasers and MHD drive but they used the nuclear reactor to create the electricity. The 32 missle tubes of the sub were were retrofitted to launch the mini-subs. Landing or retrival of the mini-subs was accomplished by extending a net between two poles, the subs flew at the poles and at the last minute you cut your engines pulled verticle and drifted into the net. The net was magnatized so the subs stuck to it. The stubby wings of the subs folded up. and it was drawn back into the carrier. where the water was pumped out of the tubes so they could pull the pilots out. The character mentioned that from the time you caught the net unitl you could get out was something like an hour and you had to sit in this dark bubble all that time. Many pilots washed out cause they couldn't handle the claustrophobia.

Since the aircraft carrier was obsolete the navy had tried to use ex-fighter jocks and retrain them for these mini-subs. Like I said before it was an interesting read. I wish he had kept going with the series.

Oh the japanese had stolen the MHD, and blue-green laser technology (I think it was called SUBVIEW) and in the second book they had their own sub-fighters and carriers. The Japanese had built the carrier sub specifically for carrier ops and they had what I imagine would be like a flight deck from Wing Commander. As a matter of fact the Japanese mini-subs from the cover of the book looked almost like the Kilrathi Dralthi from Wing Commander. They were decsribed as disk shaped where the pilot layed on his stomach to pilot the little subs. They wore helmets with the SUBVIEW in them.

About using autocad for modeling how would i export it to truespace for hierarchy stuff as a DXF file?

[Nuke]

yea, people have used imported dxfs before. truespace can open them, as can pretty much any other modeling program. uv mapping in any truspace before 4 is impossible without another util, in 4 its manageable, and in newer versions it can be done in truespace entirely. i used truespace 6 up till i got used to working with 3d studio max.

[RangerKarl]

There were actually a few games that covered this theme back in the day. Particle System's  Subwar 2050, and Archimedean Dynasty/Aquanox from some German developer that I can't remember. Both games had subs capable of pushing 100 knots easy. We don't need to be limited to current submersible performance numbers, now do we? Supercavitation would go a long way to explaining that.

[Getter Robo G]

He's got his own propulsion system. I was leaning toward Super Cav myself when I made the resource recommendations. (don't know if he looked at them yet).