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Post by CdrPlatypus on Oct 2, 2014 7:45:36 GMT -5
I don't expect a help file in alpha. As testers we should play the game as wrong as possible and try to break it to fish out bugs. Will also help determine what should be in the help file.
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Post by resistor on Oct 2, 2014 12:31:11 GMT -5
What I guess small craft combat would be like: Having small fighter craft in a ship sounds like it would be less efficient in combat than having all the guns on the main ship hull, but I remember something about gun firing arcs being mentioned in a ST2 Kickstarter update, so having small craft get under or around the enemy firing arcs mean the small crafts can potentially do a lot of damage at close range. Also it sounds like small fighter craft could be used to shoot down enemy boarding shuttles.
In conclusion, small craft combat sounds like it could provide an alternative to boarding, and a good way to shoot down enemy boarders, although it would be better to spend money on other things if you are going to fight at medium/long range.
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Post by Cory Trese on Oct 2, 2014 12:34:08 GMT -5
What I guess small craft combat would be like: Having small fighter craft in a ship sounds like it would be less efficient in combat than having all the guns on the main ship hull, but I remember something about gun firing arcs being mentioned in a ST2 Kickstarter update, so having small craft get under or around the enemy firing arcs mean the small crafts can potentially do a lot of damage at close range. Also it sounds like small fighter craft could be used to shoot down enemy boarding shuttles. In conclusion, small craft combat sounds like it could provide an alternative to boarding, and a good way to shoot down enemy boarders, although it would be better to spend money on other things if you are going to fight at medium/long range. I agree with this assessment. I think the overall risk of using small craft in your combat design will be risk to your pilots, who will necessarily be officers and will be at risk of death (if their fighter is destroyed.) |
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Post by xdesperado on Oct 2, 2014 12:56:55 GMT -5
What I guess small craft combat would be like: Having small fighter craft in a ship sounds like it would be less efficient in combat than having all the guns on the main ship hull, but I remember something about gun firing arcs being mentioned in a ST2 Kickstarter update, so having small craft get under or around the enemy firing arcs mean the small crafts can potentially do a lot of damage at close range. Also it sounds like small fighter craft could be used to shoot down enemy boarding shuttles. In conclusion, small craft combat sounds like it could provide an alternative to boarding, and a good way to shoot down enemy boarders, although it would be better to spend money on other things if you are going to fight at medium/long range. I agree with this assessment. I think the overall risk of using small craft in your combat design will be risk to your pilots, who will necessarily be officers and will be at risk of death (if their fighter is destroyed.) Yeah thats why Apallo, Starbuck and the rest of the Viper pilots get paid the big bucks  Bring on the small craft! Used correctly they should be force extenders and multipliers not a detrimental upgrade. By the end of world war 2 the Aircraft carrier had replaced the battleship as central unit of naval power...why because they could greatly extend the engagement range and it was much cheaper and easier to replace fighter/torpedo/bomber planes and their crews than to repair/replace battleships. |
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Post by rabidbite on Oct 2, 2014 13:45:39 GMT -5
What I guess small craft combat would be like: Having small fighter craft in a ship sounds like it would be less efficient in combat than having all the guns on the main ship hull, but I remember something about gun firing arcs being mentioned in a ST2 Kickstarter update, so having small craft get under or around the enemy firing arcs mean the small crafts can potentially do a lot of damage at close range. Also it sounds like small fighter craft could be used to shoot down enemy boarding shuttles. In conclusion, small craft combat sounds like it could provide an alternative to boarding, and a good way to shoot down enemy boarders, although it would be better to spend money on other things if you are going to fight at medium/long range. Believe it or not, I've been giving this a TON of thought. Once my book (Cerberus) is published, I have 8 book ideas to write about. 1 of those ideas is a Military Space Opera involving small fighter combat. The big hurdle for space combat is relativistic speeds. How do you write a believable scenario where human coordination is relevant to the actual targeting of weapons? Where space jokeys can really shine as believable characters instead as inconsequential distractions? For the above to be realistic there must be: 1. A way to travel faster than the speed of light. 2. A reason for combat to happen BELOW the speed of light. 3. A reason why people are not smashing huge ships into planets at light speeds, thus theoretically voiding any possible defenses. (Trust me one Calamari Cruiser or 1 medical frigate at the speed of light is enough to destroy life on a planet. Extinction event.) 4. Space combat between space fighters will probably occur at upwards to Mach 23 (Probably Mach 30-35). Space shuttles at re-entry have been clocked at around Mach 22.7 or 28,000 KPH/17,500MPH. That's super impressive. Mind you, this was a manually controlled descent by pilot Joe H. Engle in 1981. Can we say, epic? If that's a DECELERATING controlled approach for a CIVILIAN SHUTTLE, imagine the speeds of a Military Grade Space Dominator Fighter. It gives me thrills just thinking about it. 5. Gravity Engines must -NOT- exist. Antigravity destroys worlds. Gravity = constant ACCELERATION, not velocity. That means that speed (velocity) increases CONSTANTLY. Gravity engines take us back to reason #3. That means we need 'reaction mass' engines, which limit the sublight speed of a vehicle, AND we need Hyperdrive engines which avoid the limits of relativity. 6. At the same time, there MUST be inertial dampeners or people in ships will die when involved in any sort of futuristic multiple gravity maneuvers. This goes back to #3, but we can fudge a little and say it only works within a structure and with a 'net' 0 acceleration equivalence. Example: If you move LEFT at 8.2 gravities (78.4 meters/second^2) your distributed dampeners create a counter force OF (78.4 meters/second^2), If one dampener fails, both dampeners fail. Why? Because if one dampener somehow is able to still work then you go back to #3 and perpetual gravity induced acceleration ... and worlds die. 7. At high speeds ALL vehicles must have dust and debris deflectors of some kind. Why? Because it only takes SPACE DUST to destroy a ship. Yes my friends, a grain of sand will cut through a ship like a hot knife through butter. You won't even see it coming. One second you're having coffee the next your pal is having convulsions ... an asteroid the size of a pinhead just went through the hull, and your buddy, at a quarter of the speed of light .. OUCH. Another possibility is to LET gravity engines exist and provide a reason why ships and structures cannot be moving too fast. Structural problems? Quantum mechanics fudge with the electronics? Critical cascade effects which cause EMPs? Maybe gravity polarity deflectors have been deployed around strategic and populated centers, with the sole purpose of adding energy to incoming structures so that they literally disintegrate before reaching their targets. Anyways, I have a ton of other thoughts on this which are too long to express here. Nevertheless, I have given this a lot of thought. rabid |
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Post by xdesperado on Oct 2, 2014 14:13:05 GMT -5
rabidbite read David Weber's Honor Harrington series 
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Post by Cory Trese on Oct 2, 2014 14:47:51 GMT -5
I agree with this assessment. I think the overall risk of using small craft in your combat design will be risk to your pilots, who will necessarily be officers and will be at risk of death (if their fighter is destroyed.) Yeah thats why Apallo, Starbuck and the rest of the Viper pilots get paid the big bucks Bring on the small craft! Used correctly they should be force extenders and multipliers not a detrimental upgrade. By the end of world war 2 the Aircraft carrier had replaced the battleship as central unit of naval power...why because they could greatly extend the engagement range and it was much cheaper and easier to replace fighter/torpedo/bomber planes and their crews than to repair/replace battleships. We wouldn't spend all the time and money on small craft as a game feature to leave it as a dead end or detrimental upgrade. However, in the overall design it is an optional feature and I believe that the game will function very well, stretch goal or not. One of the limiting factors in the ST 2 universe is the Gate Drive. There are upper and lower limits of the size of a Ship that can safely travel via hyperwarp. This requires that small craft stay relatively close to a ship capable of housing them internally for gate jumps. The upper limit makes what would effectively be a gate jumping aircraft carrier very difficult to design. The small craft stretch goal doesn't alter the overall concept of the game, but it does add some exciting new dimensions if we can afford it. |
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Post by xdesperado on Oct 2, 2014 15:11:12 GMT -5
Cory Trese just have to ask...have you read David Weber? The concept for ST2 you have as far as ships and movement reminds me a great deal of his works amongst others
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Post by rabidbite on Oct 2, 2014 15:49:13 GMT -5
rabidbite read David Weber's Honor Harrington series Been there, done that.  . I don't want to do it like David Weber. I think I like a mix between Star Wars (Gravity interdiction for the world baby), Star Trek (Impulse/sublight engines), the sensor limitations of the Parafaith War (Space is VAST and finding a ship in it, even in a solar system, is a pain in the ARSE which means a lot of small ships looking about hint hint .. fighters .. hint hint), and maybe Jump Engines from (about all Space Opera sci-fi books out there). I DO like the chained Jump Point scenarios as an ADDITION to all the other limitations. Anyways, I have a lot of thoughts on the matter which I need to review and organize. rabid |
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Post by grävling on Oct 5, 2014 1:22:15 GMT -5
One way to handle the problem is to make whatever magic lets you travel at the speed of light (or faster) also give you 0 mass while doing so. Things travelling at the speed of light cannot damage or indeed effect other things. You can pass your spaceships right through each other. The reason you want to fight at less than light speed is that it is the only way you can fight at all. Space battles then have a lot to do with
making sure that you don't drop out of FTL on top of something. If you do, *boom*. You could do a lot about the nature of 'cowardice' and
figuring out exactly what risks are/are not acceptable/mandatory in such a world.
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Post by qbspy on Oct 5, 2014 1:38:05 GMT -5
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Post by Cory Trese on Oct 5, 2014 10:20:56 GMT -5
One way to handle the problem is to make whatever magic lets you travel at the speed of light (or faster) also give you 0 mass while doing so. Things travelling at the speed of light cannot damage or indeed effect other things. You can pass your spaceships right through each other. The reason you want to fight at less than light speed is that it is the only way you can fight at all. Space battles then have a lot to do with making sure that you don't drop out of FTL on top of something. If you do, *boom*. You could do a lot about the nature of 'cowardice' and figuring out exactly what risks are/are not acceptable/mandatory in such a world. Great post by grävling and I think touches on some fantastic themes. Making your FTL travel system a non-combat space has good implications for the game's setting, and the defining the risks and fears characters would have. |
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Post by rabidbite on Oct 5, 2014 12:34:03 GMT -5
One way to handle the problem is to make whatever magic lets you travel at the speed of light (or faster) also give you 0 mass while doing so. Things travelling at the speed of light cannot damage or indeed effect other things. You can pass your spaceships right through each other. The reason you want to fight at less than light speed is that it is the only way you can fight at all. Space battles then have a lot to do with making sure that you don't drop out of FTL on top of something. If you do, *boom*. You could do a lot about the nature of 'cowardice' and figuring out exactly what risks are/are not acceptable/mandatory in such a world. This addresses unintentional collisions. Intentional collisions would be easier. Build a nuclear device the size of a building (can you think 1,000,000 Megatons?), add a simple protective device that pushes the liquid metal in the Earth's core away, detonate. Bye bye Earth. Or why think so small? Why not Phase a small moon? Or a small asteroid twice the size of the one that destroyed the dinosaurs? Make sure to speed it up before phasing so that when it phases back, it does so short of the atmosphere. Adios! Besides, adding Phase tech is a huge problem at so many levels. I think it is prudent to stick with the basic "large gravity fields disrupt FTL engines/jump points, etc...." or even to limit space travel to space gates. But ... I personally don't like limiting FTL to space gates. They become beach head points. I don't mind space gates as long as there is another way to do FTL. rabid PS: I am talking about a book story, not the Trese Brother games. I am going to have so much fun writing this one. |
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Post by CdrPlatypus on Oct 5, 2014 19:53:07 GMT -5
@rabid I think that most consumer lvl tech should be limited to space gates, but lets say "1st world" militaries and perhaps scientific/reasearch groups have some ships with a big enough energy source to use a jump/fold drive rather than travel through hyperspace. Such drives would still have the limit of not being able to initiate or finish too close to a large gravity well because that would increase the already immense energy requirements. Also there would logically be a charging time before the jump. You don't need a bazzillion gigawatts for cruising speed so you park, do your jump calculations, and charge up a bank of giant capacitors.
Re combat in ftl:
Jump/fold is near instantaneous so not an issue
Hyperspace can either be considered a zero dimension where nothing has mass or travel through a higher dimension where things are so weird too our perception that attempting combat would be suicidal. Navigation is hard enough.
Higher dimensional travel and incorrectly calculated fold travel bring in the opportunity for all kinds of horror stories into a story's lore as well.
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Post by rabidbite on Oct 6, 2014 0:13:16 GMT -5
I'm thinking of doing it more like in 'dimensional bands'. Imagine an oriental rock garden. Rocks in the garden have waves drawn around them on the sand.
That's how I see fold tech. You travel between the bands but those bands are affected by the 'rocks' in the garden. As I want to make travel very pilot intensive, (because I really want pilots and navigators to be important) The pilots will actively have to sense out the 'rocks' in the bands or ... well ... die. This means large ships must have multiple navigators to cover each shift when traveling in 'untested' space. <----- That part I take from Star Traders (think green zones versus red zones).
Still working on the glitches, but I have a good idea of what I want.
rabid
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