As I said before, I'm experimenting in new areas. The guidelines I used are:Svengali wrote:@Maegil: Heh - so in fact you ARE talking about standalone OXPs (or fractions of OXPs which are only compatible to each other). It's not wrong (as in 'error'), only problematic for other OXPs and all users out there. I only wanted to show that placing global working mechanisms is not a walk in the park and needs a lot of thinking about possible problems and clashes. Often it needs a good knowledge of other OXPs as well. Probably it's just a question of limiters, either engineside restrictions or selfrestriction in OXPs, but in all cases it's worth to think about it before running into trouble.
- thermodynamics: every Joule accumulated on a capacitor (or used by any equipment included in the set) comes from the ship's energy banks.
- scale: an adder has one energy bank, the cobbie has 4, and the boa 2 has 8 - there is a progression of scale. If shielded, an adder would receive 128 to 256 shield cells (2 to 4 banks) but the cobby can have up to to 6 shield banks; therefore how many shield banks should the Boa 2 have? I reckoned that it depends on the predicted usage): to the 2+2+2 shield banks maximum we can now add from 0 to 16 more capacitor banks, up to an useless improbable absolute limit of 24.
- realism (or maybe grittiness): on vanilla, the player in a brand new cobra is 50% stronger than an NPC one; further equipped it can go up to 2.5 times stronger than them. Every so often we find a harder one, but rarely... I intend to make over-than average NPCs appear more often, or even redefine some averages... always aiming at a balance, of course.
The suite will arm the player, but still make the game generally harder against combat-roled ships (while changing little for the unsuspecting civilian trader masses), so it's not expected to be installed by novices. Pirates will have better equipment, and more often; all police will have shield boosters and capacitors, and extra speed; the military will always have military shields and everything else they can fit, and even some traders may decide to invest in extra security. Thargs must also be upgraded to rebalance them with the navy, serendipitously making them a menace again for the veteran spacer.
Other than this kind of adjustments, these OXPs aren't expected to break missions or other OXPs, but may unbalance them, so extensive testing and tweaking will be required.
(Afterwards I may even feel able to turn my Spartans vapourware into reality)
I really like them! Especially the R-Type-Style charge... Yeah!!! The only drawback is that it sounds like more work than simply replacing the weapon... 
