[Grimper]

Also, um, I don't think 'a gun turret inside the hangar bay' is going to be the default defense against into-the-bay attacks when that requires putting a huge, unwieldy armored weapons system into the middle of your launch system. Easier to make the bay difficult to access and rely on some good external defenses.

Or you could just have smaller guns but more of them. This would also prevent fighters from camping the inside of the ship because there would be too many turrets to take down before you got shot up.

That way you force pilots to only make a couple of flybys in it before their hull is too weak to do it any more.

It also seems just a bit more realistic, because you wouldn't want big guns tearing up the inside of your own ship, you would use smaller ones that do less damage to the capship itself.

Also the fly in parts of the ship don't necessarily have to be hangar bays. They could be service corridors or such which brings to mind the Death Star scene with the falcon flying inside it.

[General Battuta]

Also, um, I don't think 'a gun turret inside the hangar bay' is going to be the default defense against into-the-bay attacks when that requires putting a huge, unwieldy armored weapons system into the middle of your launch system. Easier to make the bay difficult to access and rely on some good external defenses.

Or you could just have smaller guns but more of them. This would also prevent fighters from camping the inside of the ship because there would be too many turrets to take down before you got shot up.

That way you force pilots to only make a couple of flybys in it before their hull is too weak to do it any more.

It also seems just a bit more realistic, because you wouldn't want big guns tearing up the inside of your own ship, you would use smaller ones that do less damage to the capship itself.

Also the fly in parts of the ship don't necessarily have to be hangar bays. They could be service corridors or such which brings to mind the Death Star scene with the falcon flying inside it.

My main problem with this whole idea is that it seems consistently absurd, whether in Star Wars or in other fiction. It reeks of designer stupidity on the part of the ship being attacked. The vessels have artificial gravity -- a minor adjustment could screw up a pilot's day. I am fully in support of well-guarded hangar apertures, though.

[esarai]

My main problem with this whole idea is that it seems consistently absurd, whether in Star Wars or in other fiction. It reeks of designer stupidity on the part of the ship being attacked. The vessels have artificial gravity -- a minor adjustment could screw up a pilot's day. I am fully in support of well-guarded hangar apertures, though.

Well, from a design standpoint, non-hangar apertures might come in real handy for much larger vessels. On cruisers though, they serve no purpose. But for a juggernaut they could potentially make repairs go a lot more quickly and smoothly; they allow for subsystems to be installed in a modular manner that a hull lacking a service corridor wouldn't allow, and prevents having to dig through other systems just to reach the damaged/out-dated/whatever-happened-to-it one. And based on how fast massive amounts of cargo seem to get transferred in FS, the probability of having a corridor like this is really high. Although since most ships only dock... there might be a completely internal system, handled by internal shuttles.

Either that or they use intra-ship subspace jumps.

I will admit though that if the corridors expose vitals directly to heavy fire, the designer should be shot. Some sort of corner-entrance to buffer incoming fire would make it a lot more survivable in combat, and make the designer not a complete wanker.

Twitch out the gravity and the crew's gonna have one hell of a fun time, too.

Also, um, I don't think 'a gun turret inside the hangar bay' is going to be the default defense against into-the-bay attacks when that requires putting a huge, unwieldy armored weapons system into the middle of your launch system. Easier to make the bay difficult to access and rely on some good external defenses.

Or you could just have smaller guns but more of them. This would also prevent fighters from camping the inside of the ship because there would be too many turrets to take down before you got shot up.

That way you force pilots to only make a couple of flybys in it before their hull is too weak to do it any more.

It also seems just a bit more realistic, because you wouldn't want big guns tearing up the inside of your own ship, you would use smaller ones that do less damage to the capship itself.

Also the fly in parts of the ship don't necessarily have to be hangar bays. They could be service corridors or such which brings to mind the Death Star scene with the falcon flying inside it.

I agree with Grimper. You're not going to put an assault weapon in the fighter bay, you're most likely going to use a much smaller but still potent weapon system against landing parties. Don't want to punch out a reactor on accident, now do we?

And these corridors should go in large ships where docking bays can be obscenely large, allowing for weapons to be added without much interference with the launch system.

Albeit the turrets at the bay's mouth are probably more feasible (No chance of blasting up some friendly fighters) and more widely used, you want some backup system, just in case.

[Grimper]

My main problem with this whole idea is that it seems consistently absurd, whether in Star Wars or in other fiction. It reeks of designer stupidity on the part of the ship being attacked. The vessels have artificial gravity -- a minor adjustment could screw up a pilot's day. I am fully in support of well-guarded hangar apertures, though.

Realism takes a back seat when it comes down to the fact that its just plain fun to be able to fly through a ship and let off a couple of bombs with lasers chasing after you.

Also, there wouldn't be artificial gravity in service corridors that are exposed to space. To enable that they would have to have doors over the end of it, which have already been ruled out in previous posts.

[Spicious]

Realism takes a back seat when it comes down to the fact that its just plain fun to be able to fly through a ship and let off a couple of bombs with lasers chasing after you.

I'd call that realism and plausibility getting brutally mauled.

Also, there wouldn't be artificial gravity in service corridors that are exposed to space.

And you base this on what?

[Akalabeth Angel]

Damn the Phantom Menace. Damn it to hell.

[General Battuta]

My main problem with this whole idea is that it seems consistently absurd, whether in Star Wars or in other fiction. It reeks of designer stupidity on the part of the ship being attacked. The vessels have artificial gravity -- a minor adjustment could screw up a pilot's day. I am fully in support of well-guarded hangar apertures, though.

Realism takes a back seat when it comes down to the fact that its just plain fun to be able to fly through a ship and let off a couple of bombs with lasers chasing after you.

Also, there wouldn't be artificial gravity in service corridors that are exposed to space. To enable that they would have to have doors over the end of it, which have already been ruled out in previous posts.

It might work in a mod, but not in vanilla Freespace, I think. It's so contrary to the gritty, semi-realistic ethos of the setting. This isn't a place for trench runs of the DSI or DSII variety, let alone Anakin's groan-inducing attack on the droid control ship.

Nobody has 'ruled out' doors at all. Nor do we have any idea that artificial gravity requires doors, or any kind of contained continuous space -- it's not a fluid, after all. Gravity won't leak into space! This is all very specious fan-wanking.

[esarai]

I think that enclosed flying is beneficial in that it provides for a change of scenery. I've known these games for a long time, and after a while, you kinda want something new.

[Grimper]

Fan wanking.... 

I was just using Star Wars as an example because everyone else was.

And as for the artificial gravity i had thought that you would need some sort of enclosed space to focus the effects of it.

It might work in a mod, but not in vanilla Freespace, I think. It's so contrary to the gritty, semi-realistic ethos of the setting. This isn't a place for trench runs of the DSI or DSII variety, let alone Anakin's groan-inducing attack on the droid control ship.

The Droid Control ship scene involved taking out a ship using its weak points on the inside, and that would be drifting far away from the Freespace universe.

But say someone made a mission where you had to take out a particular subsystem that was INSIDE the ship. This wouldn't be a mortal blow to the ship but it would add another dimension to your classic Freespace missions.

And like i said in a previous post you wouldn't be able to do this often because of the defences, but it would give you the occasional break from the norm in missions before you got too damaged to fly back in.

[General Battuta]

Sure, that could be cool.

[Akalabeth Angel]

But say someone made a mission where you had to take out a particular subsystem that was INSIDE the ship. This wouldn't be a mortal blow to the ship but it would add another dimension to your classic Freespace missions.

     But realistically aren't all subsystems inside the ship?

[Grimper]

Think of a subsystem as a box within a rectangle (don't quote me on this, in know there isn't any rectangular ships or square subsystems).
While most of the subsystem is inside the ship, at least one facing of the subsystem is on the outside because of the need to keep the precious crew compartments as deep inside the ship as possible.

If the ship was big enough it could have subsystems embedded deeper within the ship and so hard to damage with anything smaller than a beam cannon. But because the ship is so big, it may have some sort of service corridor which would expose one of the facings of the subsystem.
And that is why ships of destroyer class and above have such tough subsystems. They have a lot more armor between them and the outside.

                 /-------------------------------------------------------
             /---    |            |               |              |                         |      <-- Subsystems
         --------------------------------------------------------------
____/                                                                                       |        <-- Crew Compartments
        \ -------------------------------------------------------------
          ---\       |            |               |              |                         |     <-- Subsystems
               --\  -----------------------------------------------------

I know it looks retarded, but meh.

It might work in a mod, but not in vanilla Freespace, I think. It's so contrary to the gritty, semi-realistic ethos of the setting. This isn't a place for trench runs of the DSI or DSII variety, let alone Anakin's groan-inducing attack on the droid control ship.

Nobody has 'ruled out' doors at all. Nor do we have any idea that artificial gravity requires doors, or any kind of contained continuous space -- it's not a fluid, after all. Gravity won't leak into space! This is all very specious fan-wanking.

Sure, that could be cool.

         ^^^
        I converted Battuta 

[General Battuta]

No, you absolutely didn't.

But say someone made a mission where you had to take out a particular subsystem that was INSIDE the ship. This wouldn't be a mortal blow to the ship but it would add another dimension to your classic Freespace missions.

And like i said in a previous post you wouldn't be able to do this often because of the defences, but it would give you the occasional break from the norm in missions before you got too damaged to fly back in.

I agreed with that.

Outside of those specific one-time-use constraints I think it breaks suspension of disbelief.

[Grimper]

Fine, partial conversion.

But this whole project isn't going anywhere until we hear back from Aardwolf. I'll PM him.

[General Battuta]

No 'conversion'. This is not a faith. We have reached a sensible middle ground, as one would hope from a vigorous debate.

[Grimper]

Awww. 

I wanted to start my rise to the top by toppling giants as a newb.

Meh i'll get over it.

[Grimper]

Outside of those specific one-time-use constraints I think it breaks suspension of disbelief.

Well not one time. It always helps to take out subsystems......does it?

I've never really figured out what taking out sub-systems does, if anything.

Im guessing comms won't do anything. And nav doesn't effect the subspace drive.
Does taking out sensors and weapons make you harder to track and to hit?



And even if the subsystem thing doesn't make a difference except to mission objectives, it's still fun to fly inside.

[Spicious]

And even if the subsystem thing doesn't make a difference except to mission objectives, it's still fun to fly inside.

And it still mauls plausibility.

Taking out weapons stops turrets targeting bombs.

[General Battuta]

Precisely -- it mauls plausibility. That's why I'm against its general use. You'd have to work really hard to make it credible in even just one mission, but if you did it right, then it might be cool.

Taking out engines disables the ship. Taking out nav will, on some missions -- when the designer has FREDded it -- prevent the ship from jumping out. Taking out weapons, as Spicious pointed out, prevents the targeting of bombs and makes the ship's weapons wildly inaccurate.

[Aardwolf]

You called?

When I was talking about moving the fighter bays, that was really more about weapons than fighters going into it.

Supposing that the game engine worked basically the same way, but that the hangars were filled with subsystems that looked and took damage like (probably unshielded) fighters (and that their desctruction were somehow made significant in the mission), anti-cap beam weapons would be able to do serious damage if they hit inside. Other weapons, like the Fusion Mortar or Maxim, would also be able to cause big problems for the fighters.

The thing about sending a fighter into an enemy fighter bay is that it is full of fighters, and some of them are probably ready or very nearly ready to launch. You don't need to build a Terran Huge Turret or whatever, because you've already got a dozen or so fighters with several fighter-grade primary weapon systems (and some missiles, if the pilots don't mind a little collateral damage).

Of course, anyone who's seen that scene in Independence Day where the base gets raided (or heck, even in Tora! Tora! Tora!) knows that fighters can't respond at a moment's notice. If they got a fighter in, it would probably be able to take out a bunch of your fighters, and whatever defense you made (either with fighters or turrets) would not be able to save every last fighter. But it's probably more cost-effective to just shoot the things from a safe distance. Beams, 'lasers', and missiles--basically anything without the 'Bomb' flag--can't be shot down (although anything can be blocked by a bit of hull/asteroid/debris, in which case the beam has the slight advantage of not being an all-or-nothing weapon).

Really it's up to the person using the ship how to handle that potential vulnerability, if they even care about it. Fighter bays can be made destructible in the FSO engine, and it would definitely be possible to put little destructible fighters in the bays as well. Making the launching fighters replace the subsystem fighters, however, would be difficult. A shield mesh (or just a part of one, covering the front of the ship and any other crucial areas) could also be used to solve this problem.

As for hangar doors, I am sure they could be done. An easy way would be to just use a simple rotation (like window shutters (except just about all window shutters nowadays don't actually do anything, they just sit there and can't be closed if you wanted to)). If you're set on a translation, you could do something more like this:

   |
   |         (hull)
   |
   \
    \        (invisible subsystem, rotates around an axis where it touches the hull)
     \
     /
    /        (another invisible subsystem, rotates around an axis at the end of the previous one,
   /         same amount (or maybe doubled, not sure), but in the opposite direction)
   |
   |         (hangar door)
   |