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Re: Fighters and how to make capital ships feel big, Wake Fi

#46
If a fighter cuts it's engines in very near proximity of a capital ship, the fighter will be moved at the same speed / vector as the capital ship.
So stationary "small debris" will not go splat on the battleship's windshield.

That does not mean that a fighter could not move towards or away from said battleship.
It just means it's much, much easier to fly around a capital ship without crashing into it because the "surface" beneath you does not pitch, yaw, roll, and accelerate every which way.
There is no "I" in Tea. That would be gross.
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Re: Fighters and how to make capital ships feel big, Wake Fi

#48
If it's mainly about the easiness of docking, there are alternative ways: for instance, in Oolite you can make your docking computer request docking permission on a capital ship. If permission is granted, the capital ship stops until you're in. Of course, no permission is granted while the capital ship is in a fight. They won't cease fire and come to a dead stop just to accommodate you, if that means a risk for themselves. Also, they can rescind the permission and move again, if they happen to get attacked while you're still approaching.
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Re: Fighters and how to make capital ships feel big, Wake Fi

#49
Love the idea. There's that other bit of annoying space object though - asteroids. Notably, asteroid debris.

Again, X3 has a profoundly poor time handling these, and other games handle it by ignoring the asteroids / treating them as invisible. Will the "wake field" affect these objects as well? If so, how will mining work? If not, what are you going to do about cap ships in asteroid fields full of debris? Go around / pulverize them / etc?

Another interesting component - mines. They could be programmed to accelerate towards any object with a wakefield greater than X, allowing anti-cap mines to be distinguished from anti-fighter mines. That also opens up more interesting possibilities, like minesweepers that intentionally generate large wakefields to trigger mines, stealthed ships evading mines, sacrificial fighters with huge wakefields as kamikaze weapons to detonate mines, etc. Blow up a freighter carrying wakefield mines near a station, and watch the chaos ensue. :D
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Re: Fighters and how to make capital ships feel big, Wake Fi

#50
I'm guessing we'll have to see how it goes.

How these systems will interact is... fiddly bits.
If something sounds nice in theory but the gameplay is dumb, it'll be apparent when there is a playable game. Right now, Josh is still poking and prodding innocent little vertices. So far PETA hasn't become involved. (People for the Ethical Treatment of Art)


PS: This is kind of a hunch but... you do like mines, do you?
There is no "I" in Tea. That would be gross.
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Re: Fighters and how to make capital ships feel big, Wake Fi

#51
How about inertial bubbles for the name.
If your drive generates a bubble smaller than that of any other craft, your bubble is "absorbed" by the larger craft's and you are essentially under the effect of its bubble. Ships with similar bubble sizes equal out, so no affect on either ship, except that they push apart like to north poles in a magnet.
THUS, if you are a ship with a small bubble inside two intersecting larger bubbles, they are nullified, and you act as if in open space.

Furthuremore if a ship is launching fighters, you can disrupt this by essentially attempting to intersect its bubble with another of similar size.

That being said. I think an inertial bubble/wake field's size should be a factor of a couple things. Mass is a small portion of the equation.

Mass. Multilpied by velocity is inertia, yes? This should be half if the equation. The next part should be the ships drives. The larger the drive to push the ship, the larger the bubble, thus speedy little drives wont have large fields. Than, there could be special modules to modify bubble size. Stealth ops ships may want to decrease their bubble size to avoid detection and to protect from. Interference. While industrial ships may want larger bubble to make cargo handling easier, and to avoid collisions.

And what about ramming tactics? Get a large ship with a bubble nullifier to reduce bubble size. Throw on plenty of armor plating to increase mass. Use weapon hardpoints for sheild strength mods.

Than the collision detection could factor in the mass and energy of collisions, putting collisions through damage formulas. Then throw on some close range but strong ECM to deactivate enemy ships weapons, throw on a couple fighter bays, and you could litteraly replicate battlestar galacticas last fight scene.

Endless possibillities
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Re: Fighters and how to make capital ships feel big, Wake Fi

#52
Another tactic i just thought up with modifiable bubbles.

Get a capital or large ship. Throw on tons of mass through armor plating, safrice sheilds for armor. Throw on an oversized drive. Throw on anti fighter point defense. Throw on an inertial bubble expander. This ship is essentially a heavy interdictor. With dps support ships inside its bubble, this system is a death trap for fighters trapped in the large bubble, they slow down much farther from the ship, making easy pickings. This system also slows down ramming ships. Its would be an expensive fleet, BUT it would force your enemy to engage at range. All your support ships are fitted with long range setups with some point defence. This ould be an awesome defence fleet.

Laugh at enemy carriers. Laugh harder at sub cap fleets. Fear capital ships who can engage the heavy interdictor.

????

Profit
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Re: Fighters and how to make capital ships feel big, Wake Fi

#53
Neo160 wrote:Another tactic i just thought up with modifiable bubbles.

Get a capital or large ship. Throw on tons of mass through armor plating, safrice sheilds for armor. Throw on an oversized drive. Throw on anti fighter point defense. Throw on an inertial bubble expander. This ship is essentially a heavy interdictor. With dps support ships inside its bubble, this system is a death trap for fighters trapped in the large bubble, they slow down much farther from the ship, making easy pickings. This system also slows down ramming ships. Its would be an expensive fleet, BUT it would force your enemy to engage at range. All your support ships are fitted with long range setups with some point defence. This ould be an awesome defence fleet.

Laugh at enemy carriers. Laugh harder at sub cap fleets. Fear capital ships who can engage the heavy interdictor.

????

Profit
Fly sacrificial cargo ship loaded with fastest drive possible into interdictor wake field. Dump several hundred mines at once. Profit.

(No, I don't expect the AI to do this, BTW. Or want it to).
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Re: Fighters and how to make capital ships feel big, Wake Fi

#54
The idea is cool for simplicity and ease of landing, but I'm a little skeptical about actually slowing down the fighters within the field simply to make ships feel bigger. It's just one of those things that could really trash fighters, like some people were suggesting, make a massive wake field, get a ton of anti-fighter weaponry and devastate them before they really got close enough to threaten you. Or even if you couldn't expand the field, making a ship move slower at its most vulnerable point, (close to the enemy flak and fighter escorts) seems like a good way to lose a lot of fighters. Personally I don't care much for fighters beyond having a ton of them to protect my cap ships from other fighters, harass their carriers and target the engines and gun emplacements of cap ships, but I know other people are big on them which is cool. I just don't want this turning into something people use to say capital ships should have a size limit because others they'll get so big fighters will get too slow or whatever.

Rather than physically slow down a fighter because it is in proximity to a cap ship to make it feel bigger, one, let capital ships just be gargantuan, maybe have a tonnage or length cap you can put on prior to starting the game if you don't want huge ones, and two, have different thrusters for fighters. Have a intercept thruster you use to close on a destination, one that's a fair bit faster, but you couldn't maneuver with in combat without splattering your pilot with the g-force, then have combat thrusters which you can switch to mid combat allowing for rapid maneuvering, and if you want to gain some ground or get away you can switch between during combat, allowing you to charge in towards capital ships with a ton of fighters at massive speed making tracking hard, switch thrusters as you fire weapons, maneuver in close to the ship and essentially slingshot around the hull then switch back and jet out of there, hit and run style?
The enemy of my enemy dies next.
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Re: Fighters and how to make capital ships feel big, Wake Fi

#55
I am terribly, terribly sorry for necro-posting, I've seen the reference to this thread in some other thread and just felt the need to add some valuable (I hope) thoughts.

This 'wake field' everybody was talking about - could it just be ships's defensive shields? If you remember the IV episode of Star Wars, fighters attacking the Death Star were going through some sort of 'turbulence' when going through the Death Star's shields (not that it makes any scientific sense, but then it's not science we are talking about).

Big capital ships should have big defensive shields (kind of magnetic in nature); this would make incoming fighters, missiles and plasma slow down and provide this 'wake' effect, also making for a nice game-play feature of getting easier-to-penetrate shields and faster moving speed when shields are weakened.
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Survivor of the Josh Parnell Blackout of 2015.
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Re: Fighters and how to make capital ships feel big, Wake Fi

#57
Cornflakes_91 wrote:the problem is that it also should work if the ship has no shields, or if they are down
If a fighter has shields, why a capital ship can't have them? This was bugging me immensely in Freelancer. And if shields are down, the ship is probably going down as well, so there won't be that much time to enjoy whizzing past it at high speed. Well, I'm just to say an idea that seems very logical to me :)
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Survivor of the Josh Parnell Blackout of 2015.
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Re: Fighters and how to make capital ships feel big, Wake Fi

#59
The wakefield effect is explained for already in Heisenberg Drive:
ThymineC wrote:Unlike reaction-based thrusters, the efficiency of the Heisenberg Drive depends on its local environment. The drive operates at higher efficiency the further away it is from sources of mass. This means that vessels will tend to move slowly close to planets, stations and large ships. This gives a plausible justification for implementing Gazz's "wakefield" concept in A Request For Fighters. Nearby mass distorts the space-time manifold in the local region forcing the ship's navigation computer to accommodate for this, increasing the cycle time per jump and consequently reducing apparent motion. The efficiency of the drive is also affected by the presence of other vessels' Heisenberg fields and the traces they leave, and this will be discused below under Drafting.
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Re: Fighters and how to make capital ships feel big, Wake Fi

#60
Cornflakes_91 wrote:the problem is that it also should work if the ship has no shields, or if they are down
Actually, this spawns an interesting thought. What would happen if it didn't work while the shields were down?

This would make both logistical and tactical plans for attack / defense. This intrigues me.

Also, don't worry about necro posting. We encourage it! :thumbup:
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Early Spring - 1055: Well, I made it to Boatmurdered, and my initial impressions can be set forth in three words: What. The. F*ck.

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