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Post by slayernz on Jul 7, 2011 17:38:43 GMT -5
You would kind of expect ships here to have inner bulkheads so that if one part of the hull is breached, then you will be safe. However, perhaps that is factored in as if your remaining hull is 12 out of a max 22, then there should almost certainly be a few holes venting ship atmosphere. You do mention that cars don't blow up when you riddle them with bullets, but if you have a large caliber weapon (.50 cal+) hitting the engine block, the engine will almost certainly function a lot less efficiently It's good that the engine doesn't explode in the game too as then there'd be nothing to salvage. Finally, given the fact that this game is effectively a dice-rolling game, blowing up a ship in a few shots is all about rolling critical hits several times. Challenging but not impossible. Military ships should not have so many locations that are vulnerable to critical hits .. unless you have a large space station the size of a moon and enough firepower to take out a entire planet. There you need to have at least one multi-meter exhaust port that a photon torpedo or heavily modified YT-1300 freighter can navigate through.
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Post by phantum on Jul 13, 2011 8:54:31 GMT -5
Explosions even rarer in space with no O2. I think disabling a ship is easily possible with critical hits, just the blowing up bit... Repairing an engine to avoid boarding does not mean everything working, even jury rigging docking thrusters would offer significant resistance to boarding. Skill in gunning should increase the chance of disabling the ship, rather than base just base damage. I would also think that the most vulnerable things to damage would be engines affecting thrust, given the advantage of external components to maximise moment of thrust off axis in particular, and the exhaust velocities.
Anyhow the idea was aiming for results more in the middle between blowing up ship, and blow up engines and walk on in. Not necessarily justifying the mechanics scientifically.
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taatuu25
Exemplar
I'm back. (for now)
Posts: 398
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Post by taatuu25 on Jul 14, 2011 3:39:40 GMT -5
What engines are they,actually? And why dont they use any fuel?
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Post by phantum on Jul 14, 2011 9:15:33 GMT -5
Engines convert potential energy into directed motion, or 'work' to be precise. Most engines will use fuel, but there are other forms not usually thought of as fuel. Fuel in this case is a special heavy water, which was not conducive to explosions due to it having one of the highest heat capacities known to exist. From what I remember reading the water fuel is tritium oxide, which is at the moment exceedingly difficult to extract useful energy out of, since most of the energy goes into the neutrinos. I am guessing that in star traders engines there is some process to control the neutrino oscillations and exploit the mass ratio between different flavours to produce thrust. This would be the most efficient form of thrust since their velocity is as near the speed of light as you can go. The remaining energy generated in the reactor would power everything on the ship from the electronic countermeasures to the toilets. There would be considerable left over energy which would need to be vented, or directed into smaller thrusters, although what mass they would use for thrust would have to be unspent super heavy water I guess, which ingested in it's pure form would currently be just about one of the most carcinogenic substances known, but in storage would be safe enough from causing radiation damage and a damn good way to regulate and shield the crew from heat from the engines.
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Post by Cory Trese on Jul 15, 2011 13:07:06 GMT -5
phantum -- very interesting commentary. Modern manufacture of Void Engines reuse / repurpose existing reactor cores. Unfortunately much of the technology used to construct the Faction fleets has been lost / destroyed during the migration and civil wars that followed. There are rumors that there are Templar Commanders who are still in possession of the knowledge necessary to design new tritium oxide reactor cores. Probably just a legend tho.
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Post by Cory Trese on Jul 15, 2011 13:08:42 GMT -5
Also, Bulkheads are specifically supposed to be part of the Armor statistic.
Armor (even a few points) can greatly reduce Crew damage from Hull hits.
I'm working on improving engine defeat and some of the rules here.
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