@Loki1950: I know; I said "pseudoscience" in terms of the details. First and foremost creating a "field" shaped like a scoop and extending for miles; but creating a "field" that extends in that way is pure fantasy. Bussards (the theory anyways) are physical scoops, and extending for
hundreds of miles. Secondly because even with scoops hundreds of miles in diameter you'd get minute quantities of hydrogen, and wouldn't impose much drag at all. Thirdly because Forstchen says these scoops allow the ships to fly as if they were inside an atmosphere... but even if we were able to produce enormous amounts of drag, it would help with decceleration, but not banking, like fighter planes do. But I wasn't trying to put down Forstchen in any way; he did the best he could to try and retcon WC's
anti-science and shape it up into some kind of pseudo-science. Merely wanted to say "this is not based on any realism, but might be good for gameplay; as well as canonical, novels-wise".
EDIT: Also, as my friend Nate was pondering, what happens in a dogfight when these Bussard scoops from the various ships cross or clash with each other?
@MO: Thanks! That should work in many cases.
If you like the modelled gun but still want gun purchases to make a visual difference, you can do what PR does with the stiletto. Military and player owned are different models. The military ship that one encounters in the game has its guns modelled on, while if a player should ever get ahold of one, it uses a model with no guns modelled on (so it can show whatever guns he might choose to mount).
This is a good idea too; in that it limits the the performance impact by having most ships of that class have the guns built into the mesh, but for the player's own ship.
@Dilloh: I think I'm leaning towards leaving the big guns in as they are, though; a military ship is like custom-made; you shouldn't be able to change the big guns on it. The smaller, front guns maybe, but the big guns use military standards for the mounts. The big guns look very similar to the Hornet's guns, as Dual Joe was pointing out at the new board, and maybe what we could do is model this gun separately and make it a new gun in units.csv; but if it cannot be changed, it's better to leave it into the mesh, as making it a subobject incurrs a hefty overhead graphics-wise. On the other hand, making it a subobject would make it targetable and destructible, which are good things...
EDIT:
Actually, targettable subobjects in capital ships are good things, but targeting a gun in a fighter wouldn't make too much sense. Then again, if you get into a really rough fight and lose one of your guns, it would be nice to see the loss reflected in what you see outside the cockpit. Maybe the solution is what MO was suggesting: Having one mesh for the player's ship and another mesh for all other ships of that model. The player's ship uses sub-units; the others are a single object.
EDIT2:
What about missiles? They should be subobjects too, so they disappear as you spend them.
EDIT3:
Actually, the best solution would be, --but this would take a big hack on the engine-- to be able to specify a mesh using subunits for the top LOD, and a mesh with weapons and missiles built in for the second and lower LOD's.
And while we're at it, we could add the ability to specify different textures to the different LOD's. This would be good for two reasons:
- The details of a higher LOD can be baked onto the normal map of a lower LOD, but not if the lower LOD uses the same (or a mipmap thereof) of the higher LOD's normal map. They need to be distinct normal maps; --one for each LOD; and each with its own mipmaps.
- Ships that are at the other end of a system and take up less than a pixel on the screen should not force their full size textures and all mipmaps to have to occupy space in video RAM. With a per-LOD texture system, we'd provide, say, 64x64 textures for the lowest LOD and that's all the texture space they'd need to take until we get closer.
But, for this, LOD's of a mesh should be in separate bfxm files, I suppose.