More weapons anyone?

I really gotta hope Cliff is reading this.

Same, i really hope he adds in a grapple. That could add a whole new level of play.

Hey, how about…

Boarding Parties! =D Think of it, a mass rush of fast frigates grapple onto a cruiser before it can kill them all, and little progress meter starts going across it’s health as the boarding parties start taking over, crippling or capturing the ship.

Oh, and there should be a random chance for a self destruct when the bridge would be captured. Just to make it Gratuitous. :smiley:

Missiles do fly directly towards their targets. You see a curve watching in god’s eye view. From the target’s POV, they move in X and Y only, The position in distance doesn’t matter except at extreme ranges where the flight time of light actually matters.

Evasion is only effective if they jink in X/Y (where Z is a radial from target to missile). None the less, such evasion is 100% limited by the physics for the missile to actually hit the target. In a Newtonian universe (obviously GSB doesn’t use Newtonian movement), the path of the missile aside from lateral jinking is 100% predictable. It is only marginally less so in GSB “reactionless” drives. The amount of jinking required, even in a non-Newtonian space is that the missile needs to move at least one missile radius in the time it takes a laser pulse to transit from the target to the missile to avoid a certain hit. If the missile is engaged at 3000km, that’s 0.01 seconds. If the missile is 0.2m in radius (~16 inch diameter, smaller than a modern naval torpedo), it needs to move 0.2m in 0.01 seconds. In order to do that, it needs a lateral acceleration os over 400 gs. If it cannot do this, the shot aimed at it 0.01 seconds ago WILL hit. At 300km it’s worse for the missile. A lot worse.

Trust me, we did the math (“we” meaning old-school Traveller gearheads). PD lasers cannot miss inside a certain range with any reasonable limits on missiles WRT acceleration.

I’m sure your math is fine, but your assumptions don’t necessarily hold true. They may have done so in the game universe you were working with.

You’ve assumed the missile only tries to evade after the shot has been fired, for starters. Supposing you want to dodge a laser in real life, you’d have to
(1) Move randomly enough that it can’t actually line up on you (tracking)
and/or
(2) Get out of the way once it does, fast enough that you don’t get zapped. This doesn’t mean you have to be out of the way when the leading edge of the beam catches you, it means you need to be out of the way before anything really important melts (i.e. something other than the missile’s countermeasures :slight_smile:

Also, this game universe doesn’t have a whole heap in common with ours. I mean, these guys can miss a cruiser, at spitting distance, with a laser? No wonder they need something as clumsy as a missile. And you want their PD to be perfectly accurate? Where’s the Gratuitous in things that all function perfectly? I want to see missiles avoiding defences to deal that fatal blow :slight_smile:

To me, that sounds really cheap. Like a weapon that could take out whole fleets.

But i do love the idea, so heres my idea of your idea.

First of all, the boarding party is a weapon. When your grappled onto your target ship, it fires out a boarding party every twenty seconds or so. The frigate can be killed still while its grappled onto its target. Every boarding party never misses, and has a randomess chance of how good it will be. If you get really lucky, your boarding troops shall take over the bridge and self-destruct the ship. Anything less shall damage modules and weapons.

hi,

boarding parties are an excellent idea.
but i don’t like the luck aspect, the outcome of the battle could be decided too randomly when spamming those things.

they could work like a missile, but break through shields and armor (obviously), then fight inside the ship to damage modules over time, but will certainly get overwhelmed by the crew.
this “weapon” should have very limited “ammo”.

greetings
driver

No I assume that the missile is constantly evading so that ANY time the PD weapon fires the missile is trying to “get out of the way” of any incoming shots.

On the second point, you are correct, speed of light weapons in game should not ever miss assuming the engagement ranges are not extreme (many light seconds).

Both points are not really relevant to GSB, I realize, it’s a game :slight_smile:

That said, it’s a good reality check—the closer to reality the better if for no other reason than consistency. Personally, I like systems from a gratuitous standpoint where it takes swarms of missiles to overwhelm PD systems. Swarm comes at you, many get knocked out by PD, but a few get through (if there was an “anime=1” option for a certain missile/rocket system I’d be using those :smiley: )

tater

Well, if a Cruiser or a Frigate had them, it would probably require a massive crew, (You know, to throw in those boarding pods. ) As well as the fact that a PD or Laser system could target them. I don’t think a Cruiser should have that ability to launch boarding pods, while a Frigate could attempt to board the cruiser itself. And a Boarding Pod, should have a ammo limit. Keep sending your crew over to board, and you’ll have no one to man the weapons or shields or anything.

Maybe a new race based upon this weapon dealing with high speed frigates? Space Pirates anyone? :smiley:

Boarding might be a cool later add-on. Oddly enough, back in my traveller days, I had a very “age of fighting sail” feel to space combat—not terribly gratuitous since the idea was that ships would strike colors rather than everyone being slaughtered to the last man as High Guard combats typically turned out (anyone who groks HG knows all about the statistical certainties of “fuel tanks shattered,” results, etc :smiley:

Boarding would be very hard to put into this game, however, I bet. The AI would need many more rules. You’d not want your own ships to attack any targets being boarded, about to be boarded, or potential boarding targets. It would be really hard to get right, frankly.

Commenting on someones post above this one, its a good idea that boarding partys should take from crew.

So therefor, you can fill up your ships with crew if you want to chance boarding partys, but then reduce on defences, engines, and other such things… Each boarding party launched takes 10-20 crew, and launches as a little extremely fast shuttle. Like the really fast fighters that always are spammed. These go right though shields and land on the other ship.

But, since war is a harsh place and these are suicide missions already, your ships can still fire at the enemy ship, and will. This does not kill your own troops aboard the enemy ship, and your troops will still slowly damage modules until they are all dead (maybe around a minute before they all die off).

These boarding party weapons require a shuttle tube (to launch the shuttle from the carrier on a fast-course for the target) that takes up a weapon slot. The more shuttle tubes you have, the faster you can launch your partys.

This weapon is extremely ineffective, if not worthless against frigates. This is because the little tiny shuttle, after being launched, does not have huge steering capabilitys. So if it misses, it will take a huge lazy turn back toward the target, and by that time it will probably already be shot down.
The only way this weapon could work against frigates if it was a slow, hunkering thing.

Definitly!
heres my idea of them:
Weak, but able to spam tons of ships on the battlefield. Its not the technology, its the numbers.
Also can use the knenetic weapons of the tribe.
cannot use beam weapons, they are too power-consuming and technological for them.

Their bonuses:
Huge armor bonus, weaker shields, weaker hitpoints.
The new race comes with more armor pieces for them, which are extremely strong, and have a less of a degrading rate. They can withstand massive amounts of punishment before breaking. Even their light-armor can withstand as much or more than the current best armor.

Also, grapples. exactly like my earlier weapon-design at the first post. This new race would be able to use them perfectly.
Another race-specific weapon for them will be chainguns.
Except futuristic.
And extremely short range (300-200, no minimum range)
And have a ridiculous rate of fire.
And are bad-ass.

Hmm, negative power bonus sounds like a way to direct the builds towards power-efficiency. You’d see lots of missiles, and not many big beams.

Big armour bonuses would break the game, I think. If you let someone easily take their armour high enough it reflected the Cruiser Beam Laser even after a few hit (thus a repair module could cope with the crits), you would see ships that were effectively invulnerable. It wouldn’t take much better armour than we have already, to do this.

The Cruiser Autocannon covers this, I think. Except the bad-ass part. It’s definately not bad-ass.

After seeing what kind of nonsense the Tribe can pull off, I’m a little afraid of these big universal bonus ideas being thrown about. Theoretically the Alliance is the armor race already.

I don’t want the races to get so different we have to equip entirely different sets of weapons to combat each one. At some point you stop feeling outplayed and more like you simply chose the wrong race.

Ooooo… assault boats would be loads of fun!! Crazy brave/suicidal troops boarding an enemy ship hoping to set off some explosives on important bits or generators.

True.

But i still like the numbers-over-power of the space-pirate idea. I think that could be really great.

Hmmm…
I never knew that a high enough level of armor would block everything…
Well what i am basically saying though is that the armor can be hit still by all-nearly all weapons, but it would just have a rediculous amount of damage it could take.

So basically the space pirates would be an extreme form of the alliance, but with better armor bonuses and worse hitpoints and shields than them.

I’d like to see a tachyon projector, fairly poor accuracy, but it can sometime explode inside of an ememy’s shields.

Because I’m a Renegade Legion fan, I’d love to see spinal mount rail guns of truly heinous proportions. Perhaps something that might take up multiple slots (rails + accelerator = one rail gun.)

A gravity net/mini singularity generator would make for a nice area effect tractor beam for anti-fighter work. Similarly, a replusion field that would keep fighters at bay and allow for better point defense would be neat.

A tactical jump drive that would teleport a ship around the map would make for the ultimate missile defense (as long as the jump capacitors are charged.)

For that matter, cloaked/armored missiles would be a hoot.

TAZ

If we’re going for multiple powerslots/overpowered weapons, I think we should have a good old fusion cannon from the original Descent. Just hook up a massive cannon directly to the powercore and fire a massive shot. This of course would leave the ship ripe for counter attack, no shields, only armor, and no auto repair for several seconds or minutes. So, to prevent (Walls of fusion cannons) the fusion cannon should just be a beam that only can hit one ship, and close range. So any comrade ship to the unlucky bastard could get piping hot revenge!

I like the idea!

But one problem, that weapon would only be good for Tribe. Everyone else couldnt use it or be screwed over.

See, if it takes down your shields for several seconds, then the game mechanics say your shields never go back.
Now if you changed that, then they would start next to 0 shield power and have to recharge. So even if they went back up again the shields would die instantly, then you would die.

But i am a huge fan for massive overpowered guns that have redicoulous concequences and long cooldown times.