Targ Collective's Autotracking Turrets Pack! Near Release...

Discuss the Wing Commander Series and find the latest information on the Wing Commander Universe privateer mod as well as the standalone mod Wasteland Incident project.
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Post by targ collective »

Thanks for your help with ship variants, Dilloh. I'll try that out as soon as I have time to return to Vegastrike.

The turrets pack has now been released in a separate thread. "If there are bugs I have failed you; if there are none then I have served you well." Enjoy!
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Post by Melonhead »

Just a thought on naming, but the discussion of how big a light carrier is led me to Wikipedia.

Light carriers (CVL) and escort carriers (CVE) both had several dozen fighters, both in RL and WC cannon. But, paraphrasing Wikipedia, there is another category that the British and Netherlands used in WWII until escort carriers became available--the "merchant aircraft carrier," cargo ships converted to add a small flight deck and carrying 3 to 4 aircraft! I think that practically defines the DraymanCVL in size, origin, and purpose. Those ships were identified with the prefix MAC, but we could just as easily use it as a suffix: DraymanMAC.

I love Wikipedia.
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Post by targ collective »

chuck_starchaser wrote:Heavy turrets should also have lower angular acceleration rates (NOT lower angular speeds, necessarily) than smaller, lighter ones; and therefore should take a lot longer to aim, and be good only against slow moving, bigger ships.
This is another thing that desperately needs rebalancing and realism-izing: At least, the last time I played WCU, I gave myself a caernaven, which is supposed to be about twice the size of a drayman. I was calculating by eye the size of the turrets on it, and they were basically the size of a 5-story building; yet they turned around at such high speeds that they looked like toys, --and made the whole ship look like a toy... Same with the Paradigm, which has a turret with guns so big they must be like 50 to 100 meters long, but they move around like they are maybe half a meter long, and made of styrofoam... (And I've no idea why a destroyer would have such a huge turret, anyways; that would be a cruiser...)
Been sitting on this idea for a couple of days and can't resist. Don't take this seriously.

Admiral Terrel: So, Lieutenant, you tell me that this new technology will allow us to move even the heaviest turrets at great speed? This could give us a great advantage against the Kilrathi - how does it work?

Lieutenant: Well, Admiral, we've been researching new lightweight technology for construction and have come up with some new triangle-based technology - Polygons. Polygons have interesting properties - zero mass; built from pure geometric data; like all turrets they are also completely indestructible.

Terrel: This sounds very exciting. This could win us this war... Lieutenant, tell me about the new armanent.

Lieutenant: We are still researching weapon_list.xml Admiral. We believe we can combine this with units.csv and master_part_list.csv to create lightweight weapons with literally unlimited power - I'm talking infinite velocity, infinite damage weaponry here; technology capable of taking out entire planets in one shot...

Terrel: Incredible! What would the production costs be?

Lieutenant: At the moment the balance routines are proving very difficult to circumvent - there are guardian forces which identify themselves as the Devteam forestalling us at every turn. They still have control over the pricing routines, although progress is being made in sidestepping them, but for now at least this is all theoretical. Infinite damage = infinite price. We're trying to circumvent that law but it seems as difficult to overcome as G-Forces were in the late 2500s. As it is we're unable to gain true instantaneous motion on the turrets - this unpleasant Devteam claims it's unrealistic...

Terrel: [sigh]... Very well. Continue the research.

Lieutenant: Very well Admiral.
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Post by Shissui »

Physicist: Lieutenant, what is your problem? We have had frictionless surfaces & massless springs since the Terran Renaissance. All you need is to get me a flux capacitor.
I want to live in Theory. Everything works in Theory.
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Post by targ collective »

Lieutenant: [Sighs with hearing the same old argument] McKay, you're forgetting inertia. These Devteam people seem to have set themselves up as some sort of gods; they're insisting on slow acceleration/deceleration on account of inertia. You're an idiot McKay, I thought you knew your physics!

McKay: [Turns red; prepares for a volcanic outburst]

Terrel: Enough! It's bad enough with the Kilrathi attacking us without us attacking ouselves! You will co-operate and show each other respect! That is an order!
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Sorry, I forgot about this thread, it seems. I see we got some dialogue talents around here... :D
Dilloh wrote:
chuck wrote:Taking out a capship should be a lot harder even at equal armor and shield levels
I simply agree, but this'd mean that you need to fight the capship longer - so you need to survive longer - so the capships turrets need to be weaker. Otherwised, it doesn't matter if you destroy the capship or the escorts first - you're dead anyway.
I agree, but then again, we could ask if I shouldn't be dead the moment I think of fighting a capship in a Hornet, or if it makes any sense for a small fighter to be able to take out a capship. Let's take an example from RL: Most people think the Sheffield was sunk by a single plane; but the operation involved a total of 13 planes, IIRC; one that originally spotted the Sheffield and stayed in the area, a couple more recons that were sent to provide triangulation data, a refueler, a bunch of unarmed lear jets that kept making runs for the ship to keep the radar people distracted, plus the two superetendarts that carried the exocets. And the Sheffield was a "small capship" :)
We had this discussion at WC0, and we all seemed to agree; the only problem being, coming up with a retcon to explain why capships become so easy to take out, later in WC1/2. But I heard Origin themselves tried to fix this problem, and there was a game they put out where capships got involved in capship to capship fighting; but players hated it because they wanted to take them out themselves. I think though there's one loud minority of players that ruin things for all the rest... Like the macho players that, no matter how hard a game is, they complain it's "too easy"; --they probably do so without even trying it...
I wrote:Indeed, cargo volumes were arrived at by tossing dice. If that's where the idea comes from that a drayman can fit ten cents, I'd urge all parties involved to take a look of the dimensions of the crafts; NOT the cargo volume numbers...
You mean to resize the ships?
No, I wasn't saying that. That'd be something I'd say, too; but not what I was trying to say. What I was trying to say is that 7 drunken monkeys sat at a keyboard and came up with cargo hold volume numbers. If you consider official ship sizes, the Drayman is 80 meters long, and many fighters are supposedly 20 meters long. Just to have two internal launch and recovery dockings in a Drayman would probably take up most of the ship's cargo volume; and to put four fighters in the space that's left you'd probably have to fold their wings and then pack them like sardines in a can, olive oil and all. If we add external dockings on the Drayman, that should help. So basically I was saying "look at the actual dimensions" --of the ships you're trying to fit, NOT at raw figures of cargo volume and how much cargo volume fighter such and so takes. Those 7 monkeys were spies for the enemy :D
And since you mention the subject of ship sizes, yes, at some point, a bunch of us should roll up our sleeves and go through everything in units.csv.
Fireskull was doing just that, a year ago or so, for WCU's units.csv. I'm not sure how far he got, but I suggested to him to get all scales to produce correct figures in meters. That is, take measurements from the mesh, compute mesh units length, then divide that into the official ship size, to get an exact scaling; but he thought that was too much work or something. So he was doing the scaling corrections by eye. But that, IMO, is the hard way, not the easy way. You need to do visual comparisons in-game, which takes time.
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Post by targ collective »

Well, PU is too easy for starters. You're absolutely right that a fighter should not be able to take out a capship ordinarily, but take a look at Vegastrike's Goddard. That craft was designed with this purpose in mind (and load it up with AdvTorps for extra fun!).

Right now PU is more a flight sim than a space sim. I suggest we ditch the whole autopilot concept and take Vegastrike's lead - real-scale systems with SPEC to navigate. More ship classes.

Small fighters for skirmishes are, if anything, over-represented. But where are the true bombers? A real bomber should have enough high-damage ammo-reliant ordinance to cripple a capship. Depending on how we scale things five to ten bombers could be required to deal the final blow. A real bomber would take out maybe a fifth of a capship's hp before needing to reload, while an experimental or elite bomber craft (unlocked as a reward) might be capable of taking out a whole capship single-handedly.

On torpedoes we again need to take Vegastrike's lead. Protontorps are such low damage that they are not effective in their current implementation. I personally think bombers should be given a real buff in terms of capacity for those things. Either that or they need to be more powerful.

Vegastrike uses low-velocity, high-damage torps, where a dozen are easily enough to take out a capship. Suggestion: Protontorps are 'suppressing fire'; true torps are hammerblows.

Let's agree, for now, that Origin didn't take the serious, scientific approach to this that we are now taking. We have already immortalised (well, others have immortalised) their excellent game in the form of Gemini Gold. It's time to cut ourselves free of that legacy, and, free, create a game to end all games! Let there be more ship classes! Let there be systems true to scale! Let us rise above the base limits Origin set us many years ago, let us abandon our humble beginnings, and, free, create a gameplay experience of such perfect balance, realism and playability that makes us weep to think of!

*Starts handing out leaflets*

(Yeah, I know. ISO's loss is PU's gain...)
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Post by Dilloh »

there was a game they put out where capships got involved in capship to capship fighting; but players hated it because they wanted to take them out themselves.
I always loved it in X-Wing when two frigates met each other - the battle wasn't too spectacular, but you could fly around for 20 minutes, take care of the escorts, or draw fire to yourself. I like cap vs. cap, though in PR it is quite unbalanced.
What I was trying to say is that 7 drunken monkeys sat at a keyboard and came up with cargo hold volume numbers.
Do you mean the guys at Origin or at VS? :lol:
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

@Dilloh:

I just meant 7 spy monkeys... I've no idea who calculated those cargo volume figures, but I figured they are wrong no matter how they were calculated. Actually, 10,000 cubic meters for the Drayman doesn't sound implausible at all, but how much volume does a Ferret occupy? Who calclulated those figures? And are they actual hull volume? or packing volume? Because the big problem with escort fighters is that they are not a fluid. They are solid, and have a shape... unless we invent "liquid metal" fighters... :D

@Targ:
Right now PU is more a flight sim than a space sim. I suggest we ditch the whole autopilot concept and take Vegastrike's lead - real-scale systems with SPEC to navigate.
Thing is, that's where Vegastrike comes from: Hellcat and his brother and the other guys in the dev team were Privateer fans that wanted to make a "better Privateer". I was a big fan of Vegastrike, but it didn't, in the end, go the way I wanted it to go: Towards more realism. There's basically two opposing camps, or, there *were* I should say. I was fighting for realism, and a couple other people joined my camp; but there were certainly more people of the "this is just a game", "a game should be fun" -type persuation; and my camp was outnumbered at least 2:1. Anyways, I broke up with Vegastrike; and here I'm sitting on both sides of a fence: I have my own engine and game project, Tadpole, which will be total realism as far as can be realistically done (pun intended), while working on WCU which takes place in the (totally UNrealistic) WC universe. But I'm happier sitting on the two sides of the fence than I was in Vegastrike, sitting ON the fence itself... :D
SPEC is pretty neat. The best feature of Vegastrike, I'd say; but I wanted to make an autopilot SPEC that would work somewhat more similar to time-compression. I had a whole pseudoscientific theory to go with it, about the nature of mass and how it could be altered without reducing gravitational attraction, so as to justify sling-shot maneuvers at relativistic velocities; but there was no interest in it; I even wrote the code, but couldn't get help putting it into the engine. Bitter memories...
Anyhow, my mod won't have SPEC at all, but I have VASIMR drive ships with nuclear power plants. The fastest cargo ship in the game is called Tadpole, the game's namesake, and it will be able to accelerate continuously at 1/3 G for half the trip; then it turns around to deccelerate at 1/3 G for the second half of the trip. To Mars in 5 days. To Pluto in 30-some days.
http://deeplayer.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=16
Of course, ships will be autopiloted; and there will be a lot of work to do around the ship, inside as well as maintenance on EVA, plus the work of arranging cargo contracts and planning the next trip or two in advance. So you'll go to sleep, have the computer wake you up the moment there's a cargo contract posted, read magazines and whatnot. Fighting will be totally different from the way it's in WC or VS.

But I'm getting side-tracked. What I wanted to say, basically, is that there's a long way from WC to realism, and when you take that road, it is pretty difficult to get consensus as to where to stop and settle.

But I agree that canonicity's rightful extent is mostly characters and story, and wherever there's doubt, like with weapons' ranges or whatever, something that makes more sense, whether scientifically, or just logically, should take precedence over what Origin did one infamous morning when the coffee machine broke. ;-)
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Post by targ collective »

In brief, if you can come up with a plausible excuse for cutting journey time (SPEC, perception-altering drugs, 'hops' through sequential wormholes) then it won't hurt realism to use it. Put bluntly, interstellar travel is is pointless without FTL speeds - but I can see you limiting things to in-system work there.

I like slow-burning games, though - you could make a whole game out of being limited to sub-light speeds, and having to save masses of cash for engine upgrades to push closer and closer to the speed of light. Encounters could be pre-generated; transit should be based on system clock so you can dip into it for a couple of hours each day (in which you perform those tasks you mentioned, remember to make them fun) and an extended leave of absence would damage your ship and cut profits when you dock. Real time scales and compatible with RL.

Eventually (as part of campaign?) you are able to obtain an FTL drive. Profit/time starts to shoot up.

Next tier is intersystem hops.

Next you could be given a choice - Militia? Merchant? Diplomat? Bounty Hunter? Privateer? (You remain unaffiliated but can't access the best stuff of any faction).

Sublight starts should be under Impossible and Hard gameplay modes, for the real gameplayers determined to live the whole experience. Everyone else should have access to the instant gratification that seems such a hallmark of gameplay today...

EDIT: Don't get too bitter; I can see the value in your efforts. You just didn't convince them such realism could be fun, that's all. And it's a stretch away from the 'safe base' gameplay model; there's always a risk when trying to introduce something new.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Tadpole has no FTL, no "factions" per se, flight and weapons are automated, and it's become a totally different kind of game during the months of brainstorming. And I don't really want to discuss it here, anyways. I was just citing it as an example of where the pursuit of realism may lead. I believe in realism, and wherever it wants to take me, I follow; but I don't believe in pursuing realism with limits and constraints and too many other considerations; that's a recipy for frustration. IOW, what I was trying to say is, it is hopeless to try to make WC/Priv "more" realistic, because the result would be neither realistic ***nor WC***. But I'm totally with you about making things more "rational". For example: We don't know how a tractor beam works, and probably it doesn't and never will. It is totally unrealistic. BUT, if we see that a small ship is tractoring in a carrier, we can fix that. Not that a small tractor beam that is unable to tractor a carrier is any more "realistic" than any other tractor beam; but it does, somehow, make more sense.
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Post by targ collective »

Hmm... Come to think of it, the Steltek fighter did that.

Tech such as tractoring and antigravity would theoretically become possible over time, once a universal theory of the four forces is developed.

If space truly is a fabric and is warped by mass, as observation tells us should be the case, then tech such as antigravity and tractoring may be impossible. As I never bought the graviton concept, I think that is most likely.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Yes, actually, tugs, in general, are small ships that push big ships around. Could be modelled physically just fine.
LOL, the graviton concept is more complicated than it's usually made out to be, though; like some current theories have it being a free floating particle not bound to any "branes". But how about WC's "anti-gravitons"? :D Seems they assumed the graviton to have electric charge ... :D :D :D
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Post by targ collective »

WC has an anti-graviton concept? I didn't think WC had anti-gravity at all!
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