[Solatar]

I was creating a little recon mission just for fun the other day and I realized that there is very little to do other than put the pilot in an enemy/stealth/small fighter and have him scan some subsystems. I thought it might be a good idea to have a little brainstorming thread for people to post some ideas on how to improve these missions; whether it be by in-game things or by something that would require a SCP addition.

I like the idea of cameras (displaying the camera view on the bottom-left of the HUD where the ship display is) but I'm not sure how it could be implemented into a mission if it were implemented into the SCP. In real life, pictures are brought back and looked at. In the game, it'd be pretty hard I think to make the game check to see you took a picture of something.

Anybody else have ideas?

[haloboy100]

Have an infiltration in an enemy system and go undercover to listen to radio broadcasts?

Or maybe follow a convoy containing an important enemy leader to a hidden base/other object in a nebula?

I wouldn't mind that. I love the feeling of being right near somebody, hearing everything they say, and they don't even know you're there.

[blowfish]

Have an infiltration in an enemy system and go undercover to listen to radio broadcasts?

Or maybe follow a convoy containing an important enemy leader to a hidden base/other object in a nebula?

Sounds like PI.

EDIT: You don't go undercover in PI thought.

[haloboy100]

I never played that.

[blowfish]

Go play it now.  Its good (but hard).

[haloboy100]

Go play it now.  Its good (but hard).

I actually did play it a little, but I stopped because it was repetitive and way too hard.

[blowfish]

Go play it now.  Its good (but hard).

I actually did play it a little, but I stopped because it was repetitive and way too hard.

The first few missions are a bit boring.  It gets better though.  And turn down the difficulty.

[Flaming_Sword]

I managed to finish it on medium apart from one mission (wingmen kept getting busted and failing a stealth mission), but it took me a lot of retries.

Meanwhile, there's an example of a recon mission in the released version of my shivan mod. There's the scanning of subsystems, but you're under fire the whole time and you have the option of doing the rambo thing (ie. killing everything) as a bonus goal.

[Herra Tohtori]

I was creating a little recon mission just for fun the other day and I realized that there is very little to do other than put the pilot in an enemy/stealth/small fighter and have him scan some subsystems. I thought it might be a good idea to have a little brainstorming thread for people to post some ideas on how to improve these missions; whether it be by in-game things or by something that would require a SCP addition.

I like the idea of cameras (displaying the camera view on the bottom-left of the HUD where the ship display is) but I'm not sure how it could be implemented into a mission if it were implemented into the SCP. In real life, pictures are brought back and looked at. In the game, it'd be pretty hard I think to make the game check to see you took a picture of something.

Anybody else have ideas?

Well, in recon missions by nature your mission is to gather information and avoid being detected. Aside from making the detection system more complex (either with better AI or scripting some events to trigger being detected), I don't see what more than fly in undetected, scan things undetected, jump out undetected could be done just in pure recon missions.

I always thought that simply being detected by getting too close to an enemy fighter is frustrating as hell. There should be some more degrees of things. Like if you have a stealth fighter, you can do whatever you want aside from firing your lazer at distance of, say, 1000 metres. If you have enemies at 500-1000 metre range, using afterburners triggers detection. Inside 500 metre radius, using engines at more than 1/3 power gets you detected. If an enemy is at 250 metres, you need to play dead, stand still and hope he doesn't get any closer because then they'll sure as hell notice you with mark 1 eyeball recognition.

Distances for implementation should be tested but I think it would be possible to spice things up this way.

Also, some cloak and dagger ops aside from just reconnaissance missions would be possible. Special Operations does a lot more than reconnaissance. Sabotage, guerrilla warfare, supporting friendly governments against terrorist forces, supporting terrorist forces against hostile governments, assassinations...

Planting bombs on enemy installations and cap ships could be an interesting alternative to scanning things.

Getting hauled to the battlezone inside containers in order to ambush an enemy convoy arriving at installation/supply depot.

FS2 already did infiltration, but it was mostly plot-based and the only thing the player needed to do was to shoot hostiles and scan friendlies, so it wasn't that complex in terms of mission design I think. There isn't that much to be done infiltrated than gather information, it's when you need to be extracted the things get interesting. Of course, if someone were to model the insides of a hangar bay (like in Wing Commander Saga and apparently BtRL ships as well) you could get into a space suit model and go and plant detonators onto fighter (remember to follow instructions!), bombers or hangar bays, or other critical components like water tanks, engines and stuff.

Assisting friendly rebels in hit&run assaults against unfriendly factions. Participating in training of said rebels.

Assisting friendly governments against unfriendly rebels.

Said rebels might be the same ones depending on the timeline...

Assassinations might be interesting too - you would need to work your way up in the organization, have a mole pulling strings and getting you chose on guard duty on the target, then strike during an escort mission before the rest of the guard wing realizes what is going on. Possibly by planting a detonator on the target's transport during a distraction attack from friendly forces to draw the rest of the guard wing/s away so you could avoid the fight and could blame it on sabotage from the ground crew... then get extracted safely during some remote patrol mission where you got yourself demoted to.

<modspeak>
Also, guys, can we keep the specific campaign reviews and critique on somewhere else and keep this a brainstorming thread? References from campaigns are fine as examples of what types of stealth missions there have been, but I don't really see how discussing about PI's difficulty and alleged repetitiveness here is relevant to the topic.

Thank you for your time.
</modspeak>

[Getter Robo G]

Solatar,

  You can simulate picture taking by having the player target the object/area (subsystem) and hit an unused key (mapped for the "camera". When the picture is taken, that mission goal is completed.

[blowfish]

I personally don't like the idea of having those weird distances for detection.  Radiation travels amazing distances in space with no obstructions.  I think the best system is that when an enemy fighter is ~1000m from you AND facing you, then you get detected (I'm not sure if there is a SEXP for this though).  Whether you want afterburners and weapons to trigger detection is entirely up to the mission designer.

[ShadowGorrath]

In SAH you have to track a cruiser through an asteroid field, while enemy fighters zoom around.

[BengalTiger]

What I noticed in a few mods is that the enemies are just waiting there, flying in ghey patterns, as if they were expecting a shipload of recon ships to appear, while in missions where there is a full scale attack, the defenses are weaker and poorly organised, which is somewhat strange.

And my idea for a recon mission:
A wing of detectable friendly fighters strikes a cargo depot, and among the dogfighting ships a single stealth one needs to scan the containers, watching out not to be run over by someone that didn't notice the sneaky unit.
That would be realistic, with a diversion and dogfight keeping the 'real' mission hidden between laser bolts, and entertaining, since there could be a limited time and the fighting ships would never do any predictable patterns.

[Mobius]

Some of my concept ideas...

1) Scan subsystems to transfer a virus and compromise the effectiveness of a ship/subsystem of a ship;

2) Using an event with play-sound and repeat count you can represent some sort of acustical sensors telling you the distance to an apparently invisible object. Different events trigger different sounds, depending on the distance;

3) In mission cutscenes can give the impression of a formidably coordinated mission. A cutscene showing an AWACS communicating with the player from another sector is what I used but I'm planning to go well beyond;

4) Something similar to CP5670's concept used in PI(secondary with TAG flag used to listen at transmissions) with the difference that the player has to face the ship in order to listen at the transmissions. The messages won't be sent if the player points elsewhere of if his distance's too high. The number of detected transmissions will be stored in a variable. Each transmission will add a different value depending on the importance(Ex. "Orders received, X" will add 1 while "The supplies will be sent at these coordinates..." will add 4 or even more);


Maybe I have something else I forgot...

[Herra Tohtori]

I personally don't like the idea of having those weird distances for detection.  Radiation travels amazing distances in space with no obstructions.  I think the best system is that when an enemy fighter is ~1000m from you AND facing you, then you get detected (I'm not sure if there is a SEXP for this though).  Whether you want afterburners and weapons to trigger detection is entirely up to the mission designer.

Yeah, but the amount of detected radiation from a point source is reduced to quarter when the distance is doubled. Which means that when distance is reduced from 2000 metres to 1000 metres, the chances of detection basically quadruple. Or, you need to reduce your energy emitting profile to a quarter to keep the risk of detection same. Also, it was just one concept and the distances would probably need to be balanced by playtesting anyway. Possibly affected by mission difficulty setting, too.

The facing-thing would be pretty cool though, to simulate visual detection... I'm sure a vector angle match could be scripted to launch some ship-detected-sexp or sumthing.

Ability to cut the main energy switch to turn into a space junk could be pretty cool too. Essentially turn into a debris piece for a limited time (life support would still need energy, and it would get it from independent emergency energy source or something, and that would be detectable from minimum distance.


Also. What would be seriously cool is to have decoys, kinda like the crybaby in Firefly, or the decoys used in BSG (if you don't know what I'm talking about, I'm not gonna spoil it for you). Basically it could be a countermeasure or a missile that looks like the player's fighter to the enemy's sensors and moves to some direction. It would make it hell to try using the targeting only to discern actual targets from decoys.

[Mobius]

Another thing...

Speed in relation to engine reactors and following capacity to be detected. It's worth a try.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Model the inside of an alien ship and fly around in it (SW6-style). Or visit a shipyard, that would be interesting as well.

[nvsblmnc]

You could always try the Mechcommander style:

While a larger attack force creates a diversion near a hostile base, a small force sneaks in undetected and scans some structures to 'capture' them. 

When the enemy fighters/capships get back from the skirmish in their own base defences open fire on them.

[Solatar]

Does anybody remember what happened to that old cloaking code?

[NGTM-1R]

The pictures idea has some merit, but on the other hand, I imagine GTVA fightercraft already record most of their sensor data. And pictures won't really tell you much. Not everyone has nameplates, and nobody says you have to paint the correct name on the side either. The main use for an image like that would be to confirm class, and if you hit it recently, assess its damage.

If you want positive ID you'd need to close within a couple of klicks and stay there, preferably with your own engines stopped, and record his emissions for a minute or two. It's surprisingly difficult to make a radar or an engine with exactly the same characteristics, but the differences are subtle and it takes time to spot them. A fighter probably wouldn't have the gear necessary for that kind of signals processing work. But it could record the information and bring it back to base.