[Llocape]

The ending to "Homesick".

It was a great campaign that I really enjoyed up until then.

Same here. The "Homesick" ending really peeved me more than it should have.

[Goober5000]

The ending to "Homesick".

It was a great campaign that I really enjoyed up until then.

Same here. The "Homesick" ending really peeved me more than it should have.

Yeah me too.  Blaise Russel said there would be a story or sequel follow-up to explain why, but that never happened.

[Megawolf492]

In the mission "Eve of Destruction", you are supposed to be on the "third watch" of guarding the GTC Orff. But then you get relieved after only TWO MINUTES (iirc). I get this is the first mission of the game, so it's supposed to be easy, but give some in-universe reason ("Hey Alpha, looks like you've seen a lot of action and are a bit beat up. We'll send Delta to finish your watch.").

[Mongoose]

I also like how a Fenris's armor is so paper-thin that pairs of Anubises constitute an existential threat to it.

[Cyborg17]

When command tells the second transport to dock with shivan cargo after the first transport blows up.  Why commmand, why????

[Crazy_Ivan80]

The Phoenicia being ordered to stay to hold off the Sathanas in Bearbaiting. It bought all of like 20 seconds, which seems like a terrible tradeoff for a whole destroyer and its crew.

Command not jumping in capships behind the Sathanas, out of the way of it's beams.

[Klaustrophobia]

First mission of the Silent Threat campaign, 'sanitizing' the area.  On a less philosophical level, the whole ST campaign being a giant pile of disorganized crap.  Thank god for ST:R.

[Cyborg17]

First mission of the Silent Threat campaign, 'sanitizing' the area.  On a less philosophical level, the whole ST campaign being a giant pile of disorganized crap.  Thank god for ST:R.

QFT

[SL1]

It doesn't make me feel "wrong" in a moral sense, but I have a hard time taking it seriously when a capship goes kamikaze in any campaign. They just move too slowly to make it seem like a legitimate threat. It would be a lot easier to take it seriously if you had the ship suddenly start going really fast and explain it by saying they're overcharging their engines way past the safety limits or something.

Fighter kamikazes are a little more believable, but even then, Freespace collision mechanics still occasionally make me wonder why the fighters are now exploding on impact instead of bouncing off like usual.

I guess the Bastion was supposed to jump to Sol just a moment after Lucy did. Which failed spectacularly with that one mis-jump. So the last mission was probably meant to be a capital ship duel but I guess  had some problems either with performance or explaining why wouldn't Lucy just use its main cannons in subspace to cut up Bastion into pieces.

Or they realized how underwhelming FS1 capship battles were with nothing but blob turrets that fire slow-moving projectiles at a slow rate of fire that don't even do that much damage. FS1 capships just didn't feel dangerous at all, except for the Lucifer, and even the Lucifer was sort of undercut by how awkward and hacked-together its "beams" looked in the vanilla game.

In the mission "Eve of Destruction", you are supposed to be on the "third watch" of guarding the GTC Orff. But then you get relieved after only TWO MINUTES (iirc). I get this is the first mission of the game, so it's supposed to be easy, but give some in-universe reason ("Hey Alpha, looks like you've seen a lot of action and are a bit beat up. We'll send Delta to finish your watch.").

What bothered me about that mission was how Lt. Harbison, the "seasoned veteran and top-notch pilot", says "We'd better get relieved soon. I can't take much more!" after only a couple waves of Anubises.

[Asteroth]

It doesn't make me feel "wrong" in a moral sense, but I have a hard time taking it seriously when a capship goes kamikaze in any campaign. They just move too slowly to make it seem like a legitimate threat. It would be a lot easier to take it seriously if you had the ship suddenly start going really fast and explain it by saying they're overcharging their engines way past the safety limits or something.

This is actually surprisingly difficult to do in the engine; the way that Silent Threat: Reborn handles it with the Hope attempting to jump out directly in front of it's target is pretty clever I think.

[X3N0-Life-Form]

If I were to do it, I'd either do a STR-style jump, or I would make a #kamikaze variant of the ship with the same acceleration but a huge top speed.

But yeah, in vanilla FS, that never made much sense. I think the most absurd is the Repulse going "imma gonna ram ya !", then getting vaporized within the following 5 seconds (granted, the front of the exploding destroyer does quite a bit of damage, but the Repulse is basically still standing still when it gets blasted).

[karajorma]

I know the ships are moving slowly but you have to remember that they are huge and very heavy. A modern-day aircraft carrier weighs somewhere around 50 - 100 thousand tonnes. The Repulse is probably 5 to 10 times that weight and is travelling at 20mph! Something that size and weight at that speed would tear through almost anything you can imagine.

If you've ever seen a video of what happens when something stalls on a level crossing and gets hit by a train, it's shouldn't be too hard to see why even at low speed that kind of mass is going to do a huge amount of damage.

[Iain Baker]

Why does everyone blockade a node by putting ships in the exit path? It's just asking for trouble from any cap ship with heavy forward facing guns. Why not place the ships to the flanks and rear. At least the Ancients worked this out when they tried to ambush Lucy by shooting her in the ass when she exited the node.

Also, why not just mine a node with a metric $h1t ton of nukes, antimatter or meson bombs? Anything that comes through get roasted, or at least the vanguard would. The mines could be set to only detonate when a specific ship comes through, or a ship of sufficient mass, to ensure they do not expend themselves on a cruiser. Fighters and cap ships can deal with the smaller vessels and prevent them from targeting the mines. If a destroyer or larger comes though the set off the mines. The destroyer etc. will be destroyed or severely damaged, and if using meson bombs, the node may collapse too, thus sealing off the entry point - for a while at least. If I were the GTVA this is what I would do to all nodes leading to non-gtva territory. I would ensure we had the capability to rapid deploy fresh mine fields at other strategic nodes should something get through too, perhaps via a destroyer sized mine layer. A conversion of the huge logistics ships from BP might suffice for this.

[Iain Baker]

From a gameplay perspective - lack of reverse thrust and glide functions. Once you have gotten used to using them, as you will if you play any of the Babylon Project campaigns for example, not having them feels like loosing a limb. Especially so when carrying out gun runs on cap ships. The 'glide-by-shooting' technique is awesome 

[SL1]

a #kamikaze variant of the ship with the same acceleration but a huge top speed.

I was actually going to ask about that as a possibility.

I know the ships are moving slowly but you have to remember that they are huge and very heavy. A modern-day aircraft carrier weighs somewhere around 50 - 100 thousand tonnes. The Repulse is probably 5 to 10 times that weight and is travelling at 20mph! Something that size and weight at that speed would tear through almost anything you can imagine.

If you've ever seen a video of what happens when something stalls on a level crossing and gets hit by a train, it's shouldn't be too hard to see why even at low speed that kind of mass is going to do a huge amount of damage.

I might be able to understand that on an intellectual level, but even if I do, it just doesn't feel that way in the game.

It also reminds me of another weird speed thing: Capships go into the 200/300 range when entering or exiting subspace, but fighters slow down when jumping. That always seemed odd to me. The fact that a fighter's jump drive seems to take a random amount of time to charge up has also killed me on more than one occasion. Area completely clear? Three seconds from pressing the button to actually jumping. Ten fighters on my tail, but far enough away that I can afford three seconds? Now it takes ten seconds for some reason, and I'm dead. And if nothing else, that proves that capships are capable of going much faster, if only for a few seconds. It's been a while since I last played STR, and I don't specifically remember the Hope doing what Asteroth mentioned, but that would be a good way of doing it, and it would make sense in-universe. Use regular engines to get close, then power up the jump drive when you're close enough and hit them even harder. You could even say that the destruction of an active subspace drive creates an even more powerful explosion.

From a gameplay perspective - lack of reverse thrust and glide functions. Once you have gotten used to using them, as you will if you play any of the Babylon Project campaigns for example, not having them feels like loosing a limb. Especially so when carrying out gun runs on cap ships. The 'glide-by-shooting' technique is awesome 

Glide is definitely very useful. I haven't played much of TBP, but I know I used it a lot in Wing Commander Saga, and not just for conserving afterburner fuel (though that is a very good feature). I don't have much experience with reverse thrust, so I can't really form an opinion on that either way. But one thing I wish I could get more use out of is lateral thrusters. I've played a few mods that had them (Diaspora, Dimensional Eclipse, and TBP), but they always seemed too slow to be of any real use. I guess I was hoping they'd be more like Descent. I'm certainly willing to be corrected about this, but that's how it looks to me right now.

[Destiny]

[...]Dimensional Eclipse, [...] but they always seemed too slow to be of any real use. I guess I was hoping they'd be more like Descent. I'm certainly willing to be corrected about this, but that's how it looks to me right now.

It's dangerous to go slow. Take this.

I recorded this in hope that it changes your perspective that DE is too slow [No guarantees...]. I pray that the bleeding YouTube link works if not this sentence will!


Forgive the lack of ETS management (fixed loadout doesn't let me run my preferred kinetic primaries...), terrible flying and whatnot other slipups like recording notifications...the EMP shockwave causing a notification from Windows to appear at just the right time...

[Spoon]

Take this but a working embeded version of it.  :p

[Asteroth]

The fact that a fighter's jump drive seems to take a random amount of time to charge up has also killed me on more than one occasion. Area completely clear? Three seconds from pressing the button to actually jumping. Ten fighters on my tail, but far enough away that I can afford three seconds?

It's consistent, but it is strongly affected by being shot at. You need to reach a particular speed and maintain your heading for several seconds, and being shot at at all will knock you around messing up your speed and direction and delaying the warp. This is obviously on purpose in order to encourage you not to jump out with hostiles still near you (and this might all be wrong if a coder wants to correct me, this is just based on my experience with it).

[Spoon]

As I learned today, the speed to reach is 40 with a 5% tolerance (So 38-42 range). The time it takes for you to warp out will depend heavily on the acceleration and deceleration of your fighter. The minimum warptime will be 3 seconds.
A WoD example; the Kaze has fast acceleration but slow deceleration. From stand still, it will take only roughly 4 seconds to warp out. But from max afterburner speed, it will take a wooping 13 seconds, and half of that time is waiting for the ship to decelerate from 50 to 40. Because of the exponential acceleration that freespace uses to adjust velocity.

DahBlount today added a feature to customize the '$Target warpout match percent' in game settings.tbl so a higher tolerance value can be set. Which is very nice indeed.

[Colonol Dekker]

A lack of Dark ships 18 years after his concept art for the apollo mk 2