[Droid803]

Vasudan Cruiser in a cargo depot.  Shortly after the Shivans appear.  Destroyed in part by the Tantalus.

That's the Ramses. The Taurus is the Aten cruiser that was supposed to attack the Plato, but was destroyed by the Shivans (or self-destructed by a SEXP).

Tantalus? The SD Tantalus is the Demon that ambushes the Bastion. The Ramses is killed by the Taranis.

And ty for that, kept thinking that Taurus is only used as a wing designation.

[jkalltheway]

in a similar vein of thought, what happens if you destroy one or more turrets on the sathanas in "a monster in the mist?"

[Galemp]

You get a medal!

[Droid803]

It's a bonus objective.
going afterr the main beams don't count for more and they're much harder to kill. Unless you want to do it just to prove how good your are.

[jkalltheway]

as long as we're talking about missions, A Flaming Sword seems to have a few issues. The dialogue states that there are two wings of Maras around the Knossos, but i find 2 wings of Astaroths instead. and when i engage the Astaroths and bring them back towards the Corvette Renetet, the Corvette fires its AA beams once, and then stops firing. Oh, and did i mention the beams hit my wingmen? Although that was probably more accidental than anything. I know this has been mentioned here before, but i don't know whether there has been a fix for it or not.

[Droid803]

I just kill them all at the Knossos. (screw the bonus)
Astaroths aren't exactly hard to kill, and I tend to lose my wingmen if I try and bait them.

The AA beams should keep firing - maybe they're just not in the firing arc.

[Thaeris]

If we're going on about bugs in general... I do have a problem. In the Main Campaign, the mission "Proving Grounds" puts some sort of miserable invulnerability flag on the Tiamat after the Aquitaine jumps out (or so it seems). Thus, although you should have the pleasure of killing the Shivan dirtbag, you'll have to settle for taking down all turrets and subsystems while leaving the hull at anywhere from 12-1%. If the FSUP would like to fix this, I'd be most obliged.

-Thaeris

[Hades]

If we're going on about bugs in general... I do have a problem. In the Main Campaign, the mission "Proving Grounds" puts some sort of miserable invulnerability flag on the Tiamat after the Aquitaine jumps out (or so it seems). Thus, although you should have the pleasure of killing the Shivan dirtbag, you'll have to settle for taking down all turrets and subsystems while leaving the hull at anywhere from 12-1%. If the FSUP would like to fix this, I'd be most obliged.

-Thaeris

It's not a case of an invulnerability flag being thrown on it after the Aquitaine leaves, as its hull still goes down. It's from a flag that is set on capital ships and the lack of a flag in the weapon(s) in Freespace 2 (corvettes and above) that will not allow primaries and missiles to kill capital ships.

And, there's no fix for this. It has been this way since retail and will most likely not change.

[Thaeris]

Thus, if I were to go into FRED, put a wing of Herc 2's vs. an enemy Deimos, the thing would just stick around at 1% hull strength forever? 

If that's NOT true, can you clarify your last statement a bit? I am quite curious to know the exact nature of this problem.

-Thaeris

[Locutus of Borg]

I only learned that when I tried to kill the Raksasha the first time you see it.

[Mongoose]

That's not a bug; it's simply the "big damage" flag at work.  In FS2, any ship bigger than a cruiser has that flag defined in its table entry, which prevents it from being destroyed by conventional fighter weapons; the damage applied by these weapons over the last 10% of hull integrity decreases exponentially, to the point where the ship just can't be destroyed. (Ships with the "supercap" flag, such as the Colossus and Sathanas, have a similar effect applied at 75%.)  Weapons with the "huge" flag defined in their table entries ignore the "big damage" effect and cause the last 10% of damage normally; the only player-usable weapons which have this flag are the Stiletto II, Trebuchet, Cyclops, and Helios.  The whole system essentially exists to prevent one fighter from taking down a huge capital ship with just a continuous stream of primary fire, such as the trick that everyone used to kill the Hades in the original Silent Threat.  I don't think you can equip a weapon with the "huge" flag in "Proving Grounds," and so the Tiamat is very difficult to kill on anything lower than Medium difficulty; even if you stick right next to it, the Aquitaine's beams just don't do enough damage quickly enough in order to take it out.

So yeah, if you put a bunch of Herc II's with a default loadout in-game, they wouldn't be able to take out a Deimos on their own.  It may not be the most realistic system ever, but I think it's somewhat more so than letting a Loki with a Subach be able to destroy an Orion.

(Yeah, someone else snuck in, but I extracted table entries to look this stuff up, dammit. )

[Thaeris]

That's actually a quite reasonable programming feature... to an extent. I recall putting well over 1000 Tempests into that hunk-O-crap after the damage threshold was reached. With the Tempest packing a 16kT warhead EVENTUALLY there would be serious hull breaches which would eventually lead to the thing being blasted apart. Perhaps it's just because I was disabling the corvette and the Aquitaine got out of range?

With what you'd just said, I assume no primary has "big" damage. I'd almost like to convince myself the Maxim/Kaiser are an exception, but that's probably wrong.

-Thaeris

[Androgeos Exeunt]

As far as I know, only the Trebuchet, Cyclops and Helios have the "huge" flag on them. "huge" negates the "big damage" flag.

[Kie99]

If damage decreases exponentially would the ship eventually go down to one remaining hit point, meaning it could be taken out simply by a player colliding with it?

[ssmit132]

I only learned that when I tried to kill the Raksasha the first time you see it.

You should be able to take out the Rakshasa, since you can destroy cruisers with any weapon that does hull damage.

Also, about the Tiamat, I recall someone saying they took it out using an EMP Adv. (apparently the shockwave actually damaged it enough for it to be destroyed).

[Kolgena]

I just remember that the Tiamat's destruction became a primary objective instead of a secondary one in the VPs. That screwed up the mission badly for me, since I couldn't manage to kill it even on insane. So, I turned off VPs and just let the tiamat live to pass the mission. I wonder if that's fixed in the new patch...

[Snail]

I still don't get why the FSU had to touch the missions except to make minor changes. That sounds like an entirely unnecessary change.

[NGTM-1R]

I still don't get why the FSU had to touch the missions except to make minor changes. That sounds like an entirely unnecessary change.

What he said.

[Locutus of Borg]

I only learned that when I tried to kill the Raksasha the first time you see it.

You should be able to take out the Rakshasa, since you can destroy cruisers with any weapon that does hull damage.

Also, about the Tiamat, I recall someone saying they took it out using an EMP Adv. (apparently the shockwave actually damaged it enough for it to be destroyed).

I set up my keyboard so something was holding down the primary key. I went out and watched some TV. It was stuck at 1% for a good long while and I just gave up.

[Droid803]

Well, it doesn't change the fact that if you disable the Tiamat, and the Aquitaine jumps out (on whatever version, you're stuck). It'll never go down past 1% HP.

The Aquitaine almost never does enough damage to kill it, even with every single fighter wailing on it.

It's supposed to escape after the Aquitaine leaves and you fail a bonus/secondary objective and still pass. It just doesn't reliably get killed often enough to justify it being a prerequisite to pass.