[esarai]

    I see one big problem with hangars you can fly into. The player will fly into them. That's the problem. They'll fly into them and blast the ships apart from the outside while nothing can touch him. Which is pretty lame imo.

Well, why not follow Star Wars' example? They have point defense turrets all over the insides of their ships (remember the Jedi transport in Ep. I? Got shot to hell by in-ship guns), and they seem to have one hell of an anti-fighter screen for the docking bays (look at the Battle Over Coruscant ending. Only a Jedi could have gotten past that much AAA).

Perhaps use a very short-ranged yet powerful beam laser or pulse laser for defense. It'd be in a heavily armored turret, have a high rate of fire and a high damage capacity. Make it hard for the player to get in.

[Spicious]

Why put turrets inside when you can put them on the outside and shut the doors?

[Rodo]

someone proposed that already, a door for the hangars with an animation, it was a good idea but I dont remember if it got done at some point.

[ssmit132]

If you don't want a turret in there, you could try the armour plate thing they suggested a few pages ago. Have the fighterbay interior as a separate submodel, give it armour that makes it indestructible, and make sure the damage doesn't carry. Also, if you want a seperate 'fighterbay' subsystem from the interior, make it untargetable too. (I don't know if this'll work, it's just theory.)

Hang on, would making the fighterbay interior indestructible in the table (no armor.tbl) and having no carried damage have the same effect?

[Snail]

I always thought that the Edjo looked like a turret that you would put inside of a ship. I mean its got those window thingies...

[esarai]

Why put turrets inside when you can put them on the outside and shut the doors?

Well... these ships are large enough to have one **** of a battle inside them. I could imagine a need for internal defense systems--ones that can't be picked off by skilled gunnery crews in preparation for a boarding.

Also, who said all the guns are going to be on the absolute inside of the ship? Some could be mounted at the entrance to the superstructure and used as an anti-spacecraft screen.

[General Battuta]

Doesn't this seem somehow...silly?

All the scenarios that would justify this kind of combat seem like they could be terminated by a big hangar door.

[Akalabeth Angel]

Doesn't this seem somehow...silly?

All the scenarios that would justify this kind of combat seem like they could be terminated by a big hangar door.

      Tell that to George Lucas.

[Stormkeeper]

      Tell that to George Lucas.

QFT.

[Droid803]

You c an blast open a door...its generally easier than punching through hull armor.

[General Battuta]

If the ship started maneuvering while you were inside, that wouldn't go well.

[Snail]

If the ship started maneuvering while you were inside, that wouldn't go well.

I did that with TrashMan's asteroid base thing. It was a copied Fenris table so it moved pretty damn fast...

[esarai]

If the ship started maneuvering while you were inside, that wouldn't go well.

Yeah. Kinda like getting smashed up when a ship does the jumpy-jumpy thing... That's why you make sure the ship has a path. Has anyone else noticed that a lot of the capships in FS have turning times that are incredibly unrealistic?

Doesn't this seem somehow...silly?

All the scenarios that would justify this kind of combat seem like they could be terminated by a big hangar door.

Well, remember, the door does have to open, so it can't be as heavily armored as the ship's hull. If I remember correctly, the terrans have systems they can use to drill through ships' hulls, so a less-armored door would be no exception, and easy prey.

Also, the systems required to make a door as powerful as the hull would be abominably large and require lots and lots of energy, else they would move unbelievably slowly. In Star Wars III, those emergency doors on General Grievous' Command Ship were either extremely thin, or the rails used to close them took most of the ship's reactor output and stopped all the guns.

[General Battuta]

That all seems based rather heavily on speculation. (And as for the Star Wars example -- I doubt that closing some doors would really tax a Star Wars reactor, those things are crazy.)

[Droid803]

No. Doors are generally weaker than the walls.
They have to move, and if you're moving the whole armor plate out of the way, its hardly efficient. Even if you do, the door will still only be held in place by relatively weak supports compared to solid hull. Its not worth it. Just put a damn gun turret inside the hangar.

It also makes it faster to scramble against an ambush. When you've got a wing of bombers unloading Helios onto your destroyer, you don't have time to open a damn hangar door. You want to shove the pilots into the fighters and launch them ASAP.

[Spicious]

It also makes it faster to scramble against an ambush. When you've got a wing of bombers unloading Helios onto your destroyer, you don't have time to open a damn hangar door. You want to shove the pilots into the fighters and launch them ASAP.

Instead you have the Helios going straight into the hanger.

[Droid803]

which gets intercepted by the gun inside well before it enters the hangar bay.

[General Battuta]

Doors certainly are generally weaker than walls, but I hardly think that's an argument for fighter attacks on ship internals as a common combat tactic.

My comment about speculation was more on the specifics of the materials and energies in question -- as with most things regarding FS canon, we don't really have information to speculate accurately. If you wanted to pull it off in a mod, cool, but I'm not sure it fits with the FS2 'verse.

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.

[Spicious]

In that case, all the torpedos get shot down and you don't need to launch fighters at all?

[Droid803]

Then at the very least there should be gun turrets right outside the bay to ward off any craft that might use the opportunity that the door is open to fly inside.

Also, the reason FS caps don't have doors is because there's no way to make ships coming out or returning in to the hangar without making it look fugly. Animation doesn't handle sliding.

If something doesn't work, settle for the next best.
Its better than having nothing at all.