Oolite Bulletins

Arexack_Heretic wrote:

however, I'd turn down the damage and up the heat-damage instead.
would be cool combined with increasing diameter + decreasing brightness over distance.
...more probably a rear firing weapon though...or very short range..

A kind of 'fart cannon of doom' then.....

Captain Hesperus

"A kind of 'fart cannon of doom' then..... "

i doubt putting that as a slogan on the sales literature would help.

Killer Wolf wrote:

"A kind of 'fart cannon of doom' then..... "

i doubt putting that as a slogan on the sales literature would help.

I don't know, it might appeal to some.....
"Buy the new XL-34 Plasmatic Stream Projector from ApocalyptiCo (R). Nine out of ten pirates agree, 'It's like the Fart Cannon of Doom'!"

Captain Hesperus

Arexack_Heretic wrote:

Can be done by creating arrays of subentity mounted lasers.
To vary recharge-time you can use mining lasers for longer pauses.
'combined' beams will always look like seperate beams though.
Subentity weapons can be only FORWARD thus can be considered 'spine-mounted.

Probably turret-firing rate can be altered by using weapon_energy and max_energy in the same range, combined with a low energy_recharge_rate.

Captain Hesperus wrote:

What about the rate at which the plasma turrets fire? If it were increased (and the damage energy amped up with the weapon heat turned down), then the turret fire would go from being a single bolt to something akin to a plasma stream. That'd be pretty scary to see, a lance of plasmatic death arcing towards your poor, defenceless Python....

You forget the difference between a capital ship's main weapon and its point defense. I'd tightly pack three rings (with 1, 6 and 12 units) of military lasers on a fixed front array and if possible make the beams wider to look like a single beam; for point defense the turrets are precisely 'it'.

That's to make a dent on a flagship (full-scale battles, yay!), but if some hapless fool decides to take on such a piece of military hardware head-on while flying an Anaconda (or Cobra III, or whatever really), he should expect to be vapourized at the first hit...

Precicely what happens if you attack one of the new Behemoths head on.

Only drawback of turrets in pointdefence is that they will try to attack the primary_target of the main-entity. So it will disregard missiles.
I don't think setting an alternative AI works. (As I tried with Gaundlet)

I have experimented with capital-ships and arrays of lasers.
The lack of maneuvring leads to the big ships almost never firing.
This is caused mainly by the ship tying to attack smallfry, loop de looping to get a bead on the more nimble craft.
To get around this, one should configure the AI in such a way that only ships of a certain size (by role) will be attacked.

How to attack targets of opportunity (flying into the arc of the frontal weapon) or get turrets to follow their own AI and target preference looks like a tough problem to me.

--
Even with only the big ships fichting each other, they tended to 'run' circles around each other....I now think reducing speed when going into combat would have helped.

or see if you can't rig a threshold sensitivity of a certain number of ships within a certain volume of space. so that it will fire into the approximate center of a large group.

what about the object-as-laser idea? dress up a big object to look like a big fat laser bolt. and then project it away at high speed. the collision should take care of any ships in the way.

thanks for the spelling correction-forgot to spell check. *^^* the idea is not for players to use these per se, not unless you are going to allow behemoth sized ships as players, but to allow epic-style battles. i want to see thargoid capital ships vs navy capital ships, with all the fighter units moving to fight in the middle of it all.

(and then once they get into a huge battle globe... cascade missle, baby!)

(just on the thardoid side, of course! ;D)

nijineko wrote:

(and then once they get into a huge battle globe... cascade missle, baby!)

Actually, the existence of Q-bombs is probably the best argument against giant capital ships. :-)

suppression fields, or core shutdown of the witchdrive engine! it can be worked around. ^^

Capital ships could work in the same way as the ones in the X-Wing / TIE Fighter games did - they didn't really have much more than point defences, relying on carrying lots of fighters for the offensive role (and providing an screen that the fighters could retreat to).

The Q-bomb issue is a little more problematic, because it makes defence of anything slow nigh upon impossible. Whereas they might not get much use from pirates (no point in destroying the cargo), it would be all too easy to wreck any military installation with them - in a war defence would be impossible. Either that or capital ships have space-station equivalent shielding (which is a fudge anyway). Much the same could be said for energy bombs.

hmm.

I think a solar-detonator would be a good target for a major battle.
And a much more likely space-age WMD.

A 'station' in low solar orbit, that has a scripted timer.
once the timer runs out, the sun goes nova.
defenders should destroy the weapon before this happens obviously.

In don't much like the E-bomb much either, just too easy (PLAYER-ONLY).
The QC-bomb is almost equally bad...actually it is worse if used properly. But it is just sooo pretty.

hmm, how about a new weapon : a Q-bomb jammer. Like an ECM, you fire it up when you get a warning, and it "does something" to try and deactivate/defuse/nullify the q-bomb before detonation.

say, it has to be toggled on/off like the cloak, while running it draws a fair chunk of energy, and to make it a bit more interesting it has say a 60% chance of tw@ing the q-bomb in every given second of activation. cap ships w/ bigger energy plants might have an 80% chance.

Arexack_Heretic wrote:

I think a solar-detonator would be a good target for a major battle.
And a much more likely space-age WMD.

Refer to my earlier comment about blowing up planets, and define “likely”. The best proposed way to blow up a star is to drop several large iron-rich planets in it (which would take many orders of magnitude more energy than all the weapons and propulsion systems in the eight galaxies), and it would take at least a few centuries to have a noticeable effect.

Edit: Also, if you could do that you could kill everyone on a planet cheaper, faster and easier by moving it closer to the sun, or just making its orbit more eccentric.

Arexack_Heretic wrote:

In don't much like the E-bomb much either, just too easy (PLAYER-ONLY).
The QC-bomb is almost equally bad...actually it is worse if used properly. But it is just sooo pretty.

The Oolite version is far to powerfull compared to the "original" versions of the E-bomb...

An E-bomb at least in the Commodore 64 version of Elite, was not that powerfull. For example it couldnt waste a Thargoid Invasion Ship in an instant. It could vaporize smaller craft like a Gecko, adder, moray and Kraits, Cobra MK-I/III..

I´m also convinced that the "original" e-bomb damage range was reduced the further away the ship was... at least that is how i remember it was working. This is ofcourse pure speculation, but it would make sense...

I know for a fact that in Witch-space, i could´nt kill the Thargiod invasion ships without having battered their shields first, and then using the E-bomb.

The MineSweeper Satilate from Assassins protects from Q-mines by frying active q-mines with an EMP burst. In play-terms, if you deploy a mine within the range of a satalite it turn white on the scanner and fails to detonate. In code its done with the mines AI looking for q-mines and then doing a script action on the target. Only trouble is this only works of the AI is doing nothing else, otherwise it is too slow on the draw, so the Satilites don't even move. If subentries could be given their own AI though, a defense against q-mines for ships could be done by giving a sub-entry minesweeperAI.

The AI is pretty simple:-
Pasting this into the behemothAI would give it some protection, but most times it would be too slow to react and really would need to be done by a deticated sub-entry (graphics could just be the dish from the satailte).[/code]

Frame wrote:

The Oolite version is far to powerfull compared to the "original" versions of the E-bomb...

An E-bomb at least in the Commodore 64 version of Elite, was not that powerfull. For example it couldnt waste a Thargoid Invasion Ship in an instant. It could vaporize smaller craft like a Gecko, adder, moray and Kraits, Cobra MK-I/III..

I´m also convinced that the "original" e-bomb damage range was reduced the further away the ship was... at least that is how i remember it was working. This is ofcourse pure speculation, but it would make sense...

Nope, the original E-bomb definitely wiped out every ship within range (i.e. every ship in the game in the original version, which didn't keep track of anything not in range), apart from the space station and possibly the Constrictor (I'd have to check on that one, but I think I energy bombed it the first time I ever encountered it). I suppose the C64 might've behaved differently, but it seems unlikely.