[Meatball]

As the title says..
Mass Effect 3 Freespace campaign plausible?

If anyone has played Mass Effect 3, I think they have done quite the job with space ship and battles. A little cheap but still a huge job.
Maybe this could be modded to a campaign? Is that information even available?

[QuantumDelta]

Well... ME style space combat would be kinda boring in FS...
You could certainly do it.
Or you could try a take on it that would give you more than basically a mobile turret-style gameplay, but getting the models together would be the hard part atm

[Meatball]

Storywise, I think it just have to be improvised.. You could have the ending something like everyone against the reapers haha xD
Modelwise, maybe hard to get models right now..
ME Style Combat. It looks pretty awesome in ME3. ME1 and ME2 its boring but ME3 pretty awesome. They have all sizes of space ships

A little funny, cuz you can't include Sheperd in this really xD

[General Battuta]

Ironically, they did a pretty awful job of depicting Mass Effect space combat in Mass Effect. If you read the codex it's a pretty grim, mechanistic affair. Fighter pilots get swatted out of the sky en masse in human wave attacks, just trying to get torpedoes through (as they should; fighter craft don't have much of a role in 'realistic' space combat beyond serving as missile buses.)

Mass Effect 3 was the worst about this because by and large it simply rendered the space combat as Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off.

The best way to handle this in FreeSpace would be to give the player control of a warship. Unfortunately it's hard to get the AI to cooperate well with most mission structures in this paradigm.

[Dark Hunter]

That said, it would be ****ing awesome to see a Reaper in Freespace.

Ironically, they wouldn't be that big compared to most FS ships. About the size of an Orion.

[Thaeris]

Actually, I wonder if you couldn't do what you want to do here better with the Starshatter engine, which supports large ship combat and carrier warfare quite well, dspite its current flaws.

[qwadtep]

(as they should; fighter craft don't have much of a role in 'realistic' space combat beyond serving as missile buses.)

They aren't even good as that, fighters are just extra mass you have to spend fuel to accelerate. Better off just letting missiles take care of themselves.
But that's boring and gameplay comes first, so there's no harm in fighters not being useless even in the Mass effect universe.

[Thaeris]

(as they should; fighter craft don't have much of a role in 'realistic' space combat beyond serving as missile buses.)

They aren't even good as that, fighters are just extra mass you have to spend fuel to accelerate. Better off just letting missiles take care of themselves.
But that's boring and gameplay comes first, so there's no harm in fighters not being useless even in the Mass effect universe.

Even if nostalgia is a factor here, that statement is pretty silly with respect to the usefulness of fighters. Even in a large, open combat environment, a fighter acts as a mobile weapons platform that is more flexible with respect to weapons delivery than a large vessel. This allows you to deliver your warload directly upon your target of interest, which may not be accessable in your line of fire with a single large craft bearing only missile ordnance. Furthermore, multiple points of fire creates a nasty scenario to the target vessel, which must not only contend with the principle combat craft which launched the fighter platforms, but must deal with the fighters themselves. The fighter, though it fires ordnance and burns fuel, is also reusable, and thus if it survives the engagement can be used again to get into those tight spots and exploit vulnerabilities on ships which would otherwise position themselves in such a manner as to mask those weaknesses.

[General Battuta]

Even if nostalgia is a factor here, that statement is pretty silly with respect to the usefulness of fighters. Even in a large, open combat environment, a fighter acts as a mobile weapons platform that is more flexible with respect to weapons delivery than a large vessel. This allows you to deliver your warload directly upon your target of interest, which may not be accessable in your line of fire with a single large craft bearing only missile ordnance. Furthermore, multiple points of fire creates a nasty scenario to the target vessel, which must not only contend with the principle combat craft which launched the fighter platforms, but must deal with the fighters themselves. The fighter, though it fires ordnance and burns fuel, is also reusable, and thus if it survives the engagement can be used again to get into those tight spots and exploit vulnerabilities on ships which would otherwise position themselves in such a manner as to mask those weaknesses.

You're missing qwadtep's point here. Think about the implications of what you've just said.

[starlord]

actually, the trident design is gorgeous! I say go for it! however, there are many vacant things when it comes to the ships of mass effect: For instance, we know the alliance uses an interceptor class, yet we never actually see it!

Also, who knew: the reapers themselves use fighters/drones...

[Thaeris]

You're missing qwadtep's point here. Think about the implications of what you've just said.

I realize that - I was merely offering a counterpoint to the statement:

They aren't even good as that, fighters are just extra mass you have to spend fuel to accelerate. Better off just letting missiles take care of themselves.

And you're right, the second line of his statement contrasts from that with respect to gameplay, but there you go.

[General Battuta]

I think the big takeaway is that a missile could take care of itself. A missile can even be reusable. At best you'd want drone missile buses...but in any quasi-realistic setting, I'm skeptical about the amount of delta-V you could pack into them.

[Thaeris]

I suppose you could have a multi-stage missile that could return the primary drive back to the ship, but at that point it's a drone anyway. I think with a typical missile system, the only way it would be reusable is if it was unable to engage its target, and thus could propel itself to recovery. So, not so much reuseable as a drone, but retrievable.

That said, deploy the Scourges!

[LordPomposity]

The best way to handle this in FreeSpace would be to give the player control of a warship. Unfortunately it's hard to get the AI to cooperate well with most mission structures in this paradigm.

Give the player the Normandy, maybe? It's small and fast enough to handle like a fighter (and be challenged by fighters), and its weapons are forward-facing rather than turret-mounted. It would be a lot like the Prometheus Frame missions from WoD, albeit probably a lot less OTT.

[starlord]

however, I'm sure gameplay rules could be...softened enough to give fighters like the trident a proper role and appearance...

[Quanto]

And this is why Hard-SciFi is boring.

I'll stick with my uber fantastic StarWars Fantasy SciFi thankyouverymuch.

[General Battuta]

And this is why Hard-SciFi is boring.

I'll stick with my uber fantastic StarWars Fantasy SciFi thankyouverymuch.

Kerbal Space Program is a really fun game

[KyadCK]

And this is why Hard-SciFi is boring.

I'll stick with my uber fantastic StarWars Fantasy SciFi thankyouverymuch.

Kerbal Space Program is a really fun game

KSP isnt really Sci-Fi when its made to emulate real life.

See: getting something into orbit, following the laws of physics, fuel consumption and overheat, etc.

[Dragon]

Kerbal Space Program is a really fun game

Yup. Though hard science is only half of the fun. The other half is volatile science.
Though, being a realism freak like I am, I'm currently deep in the business of making RL rocket replicas in KSP. It doesn't help that most real rockets look really cool, especially soviet ones.

KSP isnt really Sci-Fi when its made to emulate real life.

See: getting something into orbit, following the laws of physics, fuel consumption and overheat, etc.

KSP emulating real life? Even if you forget about the small mass Kerbin has (which is necessary due to how PhysX works) and the general scale of the game, there's nothing aside from physics that emulates real life. You can make rocket replicas, at which I'm quite good at, but they only look like the real thing. There's one Soyuz and an Apollo 13 that have realistic burn times (I'm also planning to have this with my Titan mod), but that's about it.

[General Battuta]

I'm just saying that you can have a really fun game or a really cool narrative using semi-realistic physics. I'm not arguing all games or all stories need to be hard SF, but I think there's room for cool factor on every level of hardness.