[Colonol Dekker]

BTA2 is deffo worth a look.
1st one also if you've not played it yet.

[CT27]

A minor correction to something Colt said in a comment on your recent JAD stream.

He said the upcoming campaigns (on your list) Incursion and Dawn Of Sol were more of a traditional Freespace experience.

The campaign that is the sequel to Incursion which you'll be playing is actually called "Return To Sol".


Dawn Of Sol isn't connected to either of those two campaigns at all; it's a totally different campaign.  "Dawn Of Sol" is also fairly buggy in its current state and I personally wouldn't recommend it.

[redmagejoe]

Plugging this here since I mentioned it on stream:

[Shivan Hunter]

Damn I missed the chad Leviathan, captained by the guy in the Osiris from Deneb III

3:47:10 I WILL TURN THIS PSAMTIK AROUND RIGHT NOW YOUNG MAN

[Renegade Paladin]

Hey, Joe.   

[Shivan Hunter]

Hey, Joe.   

lmao!

God I regret having to get some sleep. I should have just injected caffeine into my veins instead. That campaign imploded at the end harder than GoT season 8  :wakka:

Gonna play some Return to Sol just to see how much it'll break Joe's brain :D And some more BtA2 to cleanse my mind of the horrible writing. BtA is the new eyebleach

[Shivan Hunter]

Gonna play some Return to Sol

Oh wow I won't spoil but this is getting into some QUALITY ****

[CT27]

A somewhat important detail that you missed and I didn't see addressed in the chat thread on YT:

The Ultra Hercules is capable of carrying Cyclops bombs.  You can use the Ultra Hercules as a fighter and medium bomber.



I'll remind you of this again in a few days (just prior to starting Return To Sol).

[Shivan Hunter]

He was definitely using those in the Ultra Herc later on! But they're only marginally better than Trebs for killing Sath beams anyway (They're higher subsystem DPS if you spam them by switching banks, lower DPS if you wait out the full reload time)

The gold standard of course is the Helios, but those weren't available - due to a bug, maybe? Imma rip this open and check

The "Incursion" campaign does not include the Helios in its initial secondary list, and Sublime Text tells me there is no allow-weapon SEXP for the Helios anywhere in the campaign. (There seem to be allow-weapon SEXPs for weapons that are already in the default list? )

The "Return to Sol" campaign does include the Helios, and - funnily enough - so does the combined campaign that includes both in one. So if Joe had played using the "Incursion & Return to Sol" campaign file, he would have had Helios available from the start.

I'm don't think the combined campaign file is original - looks like it was added by Macfie for the FSCRP, so not having Helios available might have been the original intent. But it's a pretty dumb intent tbh

EDIT: also the Ultra Herc would not have been able to carry Helios

[Shivan Hunter]

Gonna play some Return to Sol

Oh wow I won't spoil but this is getting into some QUALITY ****

Well THAT was definitely one of the campaigns of all time

[0rph3u5]

I might be hurting Joe by saying this and if I recall this correctly, but the way that Sathanas rotated might be not be bug but as-designed.

Like other capital ships the Sathanas has a rotation time of 200 seconds for a full 360° rotation along each axis. However that is at the centre point of ship, which is shifted towards the read, I think. Meaning in that relation the effective rotation speed at the arms might be higher, in terms of meters per second, as distance travelled per degree of rotation is higher at the arms than at the centre point.

[redmagejoe]

Like other capital ships the Sathanas has a rotation time of 200 seconds for a full 360° rotation along each axis.

If that's intended design by the author, then that's even WORSE.  Also, this statement smacks of a lack of realism to me if I'm reading it correctly.  Are you saying that every capital ship, regardless of its size / mass rotates 360 degrees in the exact same amount of time?  That doesn't sound like that's how things should be, but I imagine it would only ever come up in an extreme situation such as this.

I am almost certain a Sath turned in FS2 when I was near it, and it sure as hell didn't whip around like that.  Then again, I could be wrong, as Bearbaiting has it flying in a straight line towards a jump node, and I think any other appearances it's either flying straight towards something or your fighter nowhere near it.  It was being surrounded in these missions and thus it would have a reason to try to aim at smaller ships buzzing around it, though if this is its intended movement behavior, I think the FreeSpace devs would have said "it may not make sense strategically, but we should force the Sath to not turn".

[Shivan Hunter]

Cruisers typically have a tabled rotation time of 100 seconds, destroyers are typically 150. Shivan destroyers as well as the Hades, Colossus, Sath are all 200 seconds. I suspect that the AI can physically turn faster than that though.

I think this is a failure of mission design more than tabling. Saths being positioned to make wide turns all mission long while you try to defang them, Saths with attack orders () causing the weird jerky movement, and of course you don't have the one bomb that would make it a lot easier to deal with.

FS2 does it properly, and Saths pretty much never turn in the main campaign, certainly not when the player needs to do something with them. The giant baseball bat Colossus does, though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr6SLCd7VvU&t=3115s (And really, does that look like it would take 3.333 minutes to do a full 360 degree turn? It turns about 90 degrees in about 15 seconds. Imagine trying to kill a beam turret on the front and it's like "NOPE, cya later suckers")

[CT27]

I can forgive some minor storyline issues if the gameplay is fun (for the most part I can overlook issues with "Incursion's" storyline for most of the campaign because most of the campaign gameplay wise is basic FS2 standard type of stuff IMO). 

However, I think the Sathanas missions (and the Sovereign class SD) need improvement.  The missions where you attack Sathanas juggernauts in Incursion are largely you launching weapons and rearming (hugging the support ship) repeat repeat repeat...it gets tiring and tedious (and I was using the combined campaign file so I at least had Helioses and it still took a while...I selected a heavy bomber instead of the Ultra Hercules).  I also think for gameplay purposes, the Sathanas shouldn't be able to turn that quickly. 

On another note though, one of the reasons Sathanas missions in Incursion can be so tedious is that the new Sovereign "super destroyers" that are introduced are heavily overrated in terms of firepower.  The anti capital firepower doesn't actually seem any better than the Hecate that it's based off of (I only remember the Sovereign having that one front primary beam).  The only improvements the Sovereign has it that it has a little better armor and better anti-fighter weaponry.  In terms of anti-capital firepower, it's really lacking IMO for a "super destroyer."  I've found the Sovereigns to be of relatively little help against the Sathanases (Sathani?) (the game tries to make it sound like they can take on a Sathanas but they still go down fairly easily with doing minimal damage to the Sathanas unless you rapidly defang the juggernaut).  A "super destroyer" in FS terms should be something that has heavy anti-capital firepower.
For gameplay purposes, here's what I'd do for the Sovereigns for this campaign:
-make the two forward facing cannons both heavy main beams (instead of having one slash in front)
-increase their power (superdestroyers should have more firepower than destroyers) and range
-add a regular anti-capital beam to the side (sometimes in Incursion Sathanas missions the Sovereign will just sit along side the Sathanas and not even be able to therefore use its one capital beam against the Sathanas...so even with time compression it takes a very long time to destroy the Sathanas).

[0rph3u5]

If that's intended design by the author, then that's even WORSE.  Also, this statement smacks of a lack of realism to me if I'm reading it correctly.  Are you saying that every capital ship, regardless of its size / mass rotates 360 degrees in the exact same amount of time?  That doesn't sound like that's how things should be, but I imagine it would only ever come up in an extreme situation such as this.

Their rate of rotation is defined in the tables as function of seconds for a 360° turn along one axis. That capital ships share certain value is an indication that dynamic capital ship combat (which is the one using orders like "Attack") were not considered in the initial design from
Also, these values appear to be applied at the models center point, so larger ships will have higher effective turn rates at elements further away from that centre point as they would match the rotation at the centre - as the measurement is degrees and the 1° of circle with radius of 5 meters is not the same at 1° of circle with a radius 5000 meters.

In FS a ship's mass is not considered. The closest thing that is considered in name is Density (Mass per Volume) for the effect of kinetic impact and collisions, not for accelleration or rotation.


For me it is a dead horse to say that inclusion of capital ships, esspecially ones exceed Corvette-size, in any mission for any purpose other scenery, is a undesirable design choice in itself. So I will not belabour the points about those "superdestroyers" (what a BS designation) and juggernaught crammed into those missions....

[CT27]

For what it's worth I enjoyed "Return To Sol" a little more than "Incursion".

[redmagejoe]

And many mooooooore

https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxmAT-3W9OlJIc2S_qwcNaeKmUVPyOCzQE

[Shivan Hunter]

Brooooooo happy birthday man!

And Return to Sol is QUALITY but IMO in a less-annoying way than Incursion. Turrets are never running away from you at 200m/s, but having enemy ships armed with the "ULTRA-AAA" gets old fast