First thing I noticed about the Beta...a little contribution

[quantum_dragon]

First and foremost, fantastic job on the mod, very indepth textures, modeling, and effects. Really grade A work you guys have going here.

 

Now I am not sure how far you guys have gotten considering I played the 1.0E which you guys released over 6 months ago, and this being my first time here, I wasn't sure where to post this, or if it is even needed. So I apologize if this is a redundant rule breaking post.

 

Now I didn't play the 1.0E for very long (I know what your thinking but hear me out!) because the first thing I noticed was the fighter movements and ship speeds. I am sure you guys have heard a lot of this, or know it already, so I went ahead and did a little work on my end. I figured if everybody critisizes, who's left to fix the problems right? And since from what little I have read, you guys are busy, and like me don't have a lot of free time on your hands.

 

Anyhow, first let me explain my basis for the speeds I chose and why I didn't like the speeds you have. Also I apologize again as this will be a very long winded post. Now what I was able to come up with was fairly easy to achieve because of your guy's excellent scaling of ships. With that being said, even though you guys are going for a total conversion mod, the ship movement and fighter movement still felt very much like regular sins, with the inherent overly fast caps and the proportionally but unlogically faster fighters. I also hope no one is offended by my liberal modding of your ship speeds, I did it mainly to contribute to this awesome mod.

 

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO SKIP PASSED A LOT OF THE TECHNICAL BABEL ON SHIPS SPEEDS AND WOULD LIKE TO GET TO THE CHANGES, SCROLL DOWN TO GREEN SENTENCE.

 

Now I will start with your overall speed choices for both capital ships (capital includes frigates and cruisers) and fighters. You have your fighters set for double the speed of your capital ships, with fighters having a much higher acceleration and maneuverability than capitals. This isn't too far off the beaten path since if you watch Star Wars: A new hope you see an ISD chasing a YT-1300 (Millenium Falcon) and keeping up. However most fighters are easily twice as fast as a YT-1300. I know that a yt-1300 is probably faster than an ISD, especially if you haved played any of the x-wing, tie-fighter, or Xwing alliance games and accept them as canon. The argument is mostly to justify the capital ships speeds being higher than 0 when compared to fighters.

 

However, their speed is much to high especially when you add fighter speeds in on top of that. Taking a squad of fighters, I set them still in a gravity well and then told a Star Destroyer to fly by them. The star destroyer blew passed them like a bullet. You may respond with, but didn't you say in the previous paragraph that capital ships should have some speed? Well yes thats true, but considering that a Star Destroyer is a mile long... a MILE long ( http://www.theforce.net/swtc/isd.html ), it shouldn't just speed by like Sonic the Hedgehog.

 

Using my experience from the x-wing/tie and x-wing alliance games as well as a few others, including movie scenes (Empire Strikes back when millenium falcon floats away with trash), I adjusted the speed of capitals to more correctly match how fast they should pass a non-moving object. Now this speed is probably still a bit higher than what you find in SOME of the games, but I feel it still reflects the speeds depicted in the movies. If you feel it should be even slower still, at the speeds I selected it already takes a good while crossing a gravity well, (which is fairly realistic and star wars like to me) any slower and well, nap time between engagements.

 

Now onto the fighters. Even with a capital ship not moving, the fighters fly by them in a blink of an eye. At first that would make sense considering that capitals are slow lumbering hulks and fighters fly by them on strafing runs. Again however, take in the scale of these ships. An ISD is about a mile long ( http://www.theforce.net/swtc/isd.html ) if you fly a mile in a flash, your going pretty stinking fast. You might think, "well yea that makes sense, fighters would fly a mile pretty quickly." But take the following into consideration:

 

A car traveling at 60mph would take 60 seconds ( a minute ) to drive the length of a Star Destroyer. Now you might think thats fast, (or slow) but take a picture of a side profile of a ISD on you computer, now run you finger across it at a speed that would take 1 minute to do. 1....2....3....4....5....6.... you shouldn't even be passed the first tenth of the ship yet (you get the picture). So now if you think of flying by an ISD in an instant, your going way to fast, like trying to hit a mail box with one shot while flying a Jet Fighter.

 

In the games, and the movies, it takes typically about 2-3 long seconds for a tie fighter at full speed to fly by a Star Destroyer (I may be slightly off, been a while since I watched the movies). This actually works out rather well. If you take that same car:

 

60mph takes 1 minute to drive the distance of a Star Destroyer

than doubling it's speed:

120mph = 30 seconds

240mph = 15 seconds

480mph = 7.5 seconds

960mph = 3.75 seconds

 

or cheating and using ( http://www.machinehead-software.co.uk/bike/speed_distance_time_calc.html )

1440mph = 2.5 seconds

 

At the speed you have the fighters moving it takes about half a second, or less, which equivalates to about 7200mph at the least. Thats not including the ship flying towards the fighters at the already high speed you have set for them, which altogether would probably be over 10,000mph relative to each other. Now try hitting a fighter flying by that fast with a slower moving turret, Impossible. It would be close to (if not) impossible for a fighter to shoot at a capital ship that is in visual range and out by the time you blink. Not to mention even trying to shoot at smaller ships like correllian corvettes, or (EEK) other fighters.

 

Now onto the changes I have made. With a ISD not moving, it now takes around 2.5 seconds for a Tie Fighter to fly from nose to stern in game. The Tie Fighter speed is now 2.5 times greater than that of a capital ship. Where as before it was only double. However different fighter speeds, such as bombers and interceptors (for all races) range no less than 2.25 times the speed of caps, and no greater than 2.8 times the speed of caps. This of course allows the persuit of bombers, and of course retain some of the balancing (and canon) of faster fighters still being faster.

 

 

Another thing I changed on the fighters is linear acceleration and strafe speed. Before the fighter would instantly accelerate to top speed, thus making it feel very unrealistic and old school game like. Now they gradually accelerate, albeit still very quickly but not instantly like little sperm looking fighters. I also changed the linear deceleration as well. Since instantly stopping from going 1440mph even with the G-force compensators would still liquify the pilot as well as damage the ship. (its still pretty close to instant for the Ai's sake, but a little better). I thought about lowering the deceleration to near zero to see if the fighters, being unable to stop in the right spot would fly around looking like a 'patrol' like they did in the first homeworld game. Will have to experiment on this. Bad effect would be higher system resource usage unless could be set to always fly back in hangar.

 

Changes on the capital ships. They have about 1 tenth of the speed that they did. I maintained the balancing of course, with all capitals flying the same max speed. Now this makes getting across the gravity well a bit of a caveat since it takes a heck of a lot longer than it used too, but it "Feels" way more Star Wars like. Not to mention since you don't have starbases, this allows you to mount a good counter attack force, or setup a defensive line. In otherwords, it would be more beneficial to have more planets with production capabilities as a responding fleet for defense would take a while to move in. One could also lower the damage orbital bombardment does so it takes longer, but not too long. You just wouldn't want it too short so you dont end up with a cat and mouse game of running planet to planet killing everything with a opposing fleet chasing you. Another solution to this would be to lower grav well size by about 25%, so its still big enough for Star Dreadnaughts (SSDs) but doesn't take forever to reach hyperspace points. The longer travel could also be somewhat good in the sense that the Empires problem was responding to the Rebel Alliances ability to hit and run before the empire could respond, thus one could employ gurilla tactics against an enemy.

 

I also changed the acceleration on capitals as well. With Super Capitals and Standard Capitals having the lowest acceleration taking about 10 to 13 seconds to reach full speed, and cruiser and frigates accelerating faster; taking 6 to 2 seconds to reach max speed with the exception of cruisers that were ISD size or so. As with the fighters I also lowered the deceleration, instant stop being only viable for dropping out of hyperspace but not for sublight travel. Good example to support this would be the scene in the movie where the Millenium Falcon has the ISD chasing it, dives down, and two ISDs hit each other, and you see the crew bracing themselves from hitting and sliding against the other ISD.

 

If any of you are interested in the modified game info files please feel free to respond and I will gladly give you a link. (not posted as to not mess up with any sort of workflow system they have setup right now.) If you guys do decide to use some of my work please let me know. Also if you are interested I am willing to help balance fighter usage in game as well. From damange caused by fighters to caps, to their strength and damage they cause to each other as well as balancing of numbers, IE 1 squadron x-wings vs 2 squads of ties. I don't have a lot of time on my hands but I can do what I can, when I can.

 

As to the future use of changes, obviously it will not work well if you guys have changed the scaling of the ships since 1.0E. Since a star destroyer would be longer or shorter and thus no longer proportionate to the time it would take for a fighter to pass by. I would ask that you guys at least give it a try as I feel strongly that it would make the mod feel much more Star Warsy XD.

 

Sory for the long post, and thanks for the mod, hope to help out!

 

Quantum_Dragon

[Evaders99]

Sounds like a good idea - talk to Eville Jedi and see if we can get this implemented

[quantum_dragon]

Fantastic, I will send him a message shortly. First however, I am refining fighter movement a bit more.

 

I had to lower angular acceleration and deceleration as they were too high and causing them to wiggle in flight and when sitting still. I also completely removed strafing accel as well for better and more realistic "canon" movement.

 

I also think that his correction will improve system performance with use of fighters as the accel was so high the fighters were constantly trying to correct them selves because they would "turn" passed correct facing and would try to compensate.

 

I will do some more combat runs and then I will contact evillejedi

[NovaCameron]

Nice, I can give you the exact speeds for the ships if you want. Then you could use the base speeds to modify the ones that don't have them. Is there any way to seperate the jump speeds with normal speed?

[quantum_dragon]

I appreciate the offer Nova, if you have sources that post the actual speeds of the fighters in space then fantastic! Please post them as I can work out a generalized speed off them. I will point out that there are several problems that may arise from trying to follow exact statistics on this stuff:

 

Getting perfectly exact speeds. To achieve this you would have to probably have a software that makes a recorded video to watch in slow motion the precise moment when the fighter passes the stern and bow of the ship, as even differences of a few tenths of a second (easily within realm of human error when watching in real time) would make a several hundred mile an hour difference, and honestly, I don't have the time to do that.

 

First main problem (assuming your using the same sources as me) is the only speeds available that I know of for starfighters is Kilomters per Hour in atmosphere or MGLT in space. The KpH speeds are about equal too or slower than modern day jetfighters. Given however they are STAR-fighters and are not aerodynamic, this makes perfect sense. Unfortuantely KpH information doesn't translate well for speeds in space where there is no resistance from atmosphere, and reaching greater speeds would be easier for starfighters.

 

With MGLT, there is no base information if this is provided as a constance of acceleration or as a unit of measure. You could go crazy and use MGLT to find out the percentages of speed differences between fighters, however, given the limitation of the AI and game engine in Sins, going this detailed is a mute point. Not too mention the balancing issues since all CIS and republic fighters would have to be slower given they are older tech.

 

The Second problem is if we were to accept the speeds in atmospher as acceptable speeds in space, then (forgive me as I like Mile per hour over KPH) that would mean the fighters are only going a little over 700Mph, which is half what I have them set out now (roughly 1440mph relative to ship scale). Which mean that the fighters need to be moving half the speed they are now, and that means halving capital ships speeds. (otherwise fighters would have a hard time catching up to capital ships which would be lame and non canon.)

 

I don't mind redoing my work, its just if that is the case, then the Capital ships would be even slower than they already are. Currently it already takes capital ships several minutes to cross a grav well. Having them even slower would be insane. We would be reaching a point of canon vs playability. With that being said, right now I am working on possibilities of resolving how long it would take cap ships to go from grav well to grave well (more on that at the end of my post.)

 

Lastly, as I touched a little on earlier, would be maintaining balancing issues. If we tried to go with the the "real speed" of the fighters, you will end up with slower fighters from the old republic and CIS factions since it is older tech. In retro-spect I am not too familair with the ep 1-3 tech so I don't know for sure if it is indeed slower, but it makes sense since it is older. Now balancing could be done to compensate for this, with certain factions having stronger fighters or more of them, but I was mostly wanting to make it just "feel" more like star wars, not mess with their balancing. If it comes to pass that I am asked to do some balancing with fighters I will gladly do so with a passion.

 

Another thing to just point out here real fast, is the limitation of the AI in the game. Fighters only have two speeds that they seem to go. Stopped, and full speed. Which is why when you set fighters to follow capital ships they "bounce" back and forth from going full speed to stop. This can be resolved by adjusting deceleration and acceleration, but as far as the AI is concerned its either stopped, or pedal to the metal. From this, going through all the trouble of getting every fighter's speed fine tuned is a mute point since it provides no real combat advantage in fighter vs fighter combat. I did keep the fact that interceptors are faster than fighters, and fighters faster than bombers. Mostly for "if they decided to run," and minimal canon purposes. Plus bombers are supposed to be slower.

 

Sorry If I rambled on, I didn't a get a lot of sleep due to work. I will post some more information on my solution for slow travel time for capital ships going grav well to grav well.

[NovaCameron]

I have the vacuum speeds in G form which for gaming purposes we'll state as being the acceleration but use it as the max speed, which it is..., in kph form, which we'll use in game. This will be the 'slow' speed in the game. Unless you can make the hyperspace travel much faster. (It really does need it...) I also have the hyperdrive ratings for the ships. (Lower class hyperdrive is better.)

 

Gallofree transport: 900G/Class 4

Nebulon-B frigate: 1200G/Class2

B-Wing: 2390G

Corellian Corvette: 2100G/Class 2

MC80: 1550G/Class 1

Y-Wing: 2700G

X-Wing: 3700G

Z-95: 2780G

K-Wing: 2700G

A-Wing: 5100G

Yorik-Et (Coralskipper): 3700G

Lucrehulk: 300G

Xi Char Droid Fighter: 3900G

Eclipse: 940G

E-Wing: 4200G

Executor: 1230G

Nantex Geonosian fighter: 4500G

Enforcer/Immobilizer Cruiser: 1210G

K-wing: 2700G

Acclamator Cruiser: 3500G

Consular Cruiser: 2040G

Imperitor Star Destroyer: 2,300G

Tie Bomber: 2380G

Tie Fighter: 4100G

Tie Interceptor: 4240G

Miid Ro'ik: 2340G

 

Keep in mind the speeds maybe need to be adjusted by ship class. But since we're using these as top speeds acceleration could be done by ship class.

Edited June 16, 2010 by NovaCameron

[quantum_dragon]

The problem with G is that we don't really know what "G" is in the Star Wars Universe. Unless of course someone can tell me.

 

From what I can find in WookiePedia, and from listing of ship stats in XWA, is that G is a unit of acceleration. In some some of the books, you read about pulling high "G" manuevers making g-force compensators stressed, which also supports that Gs in the Star Sars universe is a unit of acceleration. Unfortunately we don't know how one of "their" G's is, in respect to "ours".

 

G in "our" Physics is a also measure of acceleration. Then assuming a G from Star Wars is the same as a G from "Our" physics, that would mean that just the y-wing (2700G) after one second of acceleration would be travelling at 54,357 miles an hour. While useful for crossing great distances in space, in combat this would be utterly way too fast for any human being to even SEE a star destoyer while passing it, nevermind shoot it. However I am not a physics major so I could be off on some of my calculations, but it should be fairly close.

 

This of course could be their "Cruising" speed for interplanetary travel and not their "Combat" speed. In either case however, we can't really use that information unless I know exactly what their G is. This leaves me back to using dead reckoning on how long it takes a fighter to cross from bow to stern of a Star Destroyer as reference. Then use the percentage of differences in the numbers to calculate the difference of speeds in game.

 

I swear for some of this Sci-Fi stuff, people just come up with numbers that sound good without ever actually thinking about what they are putting . Star Wars for the most part does pretty good on this, sublight speeds being one of the few exceptions. Just don't get me started on how much of Star Trek's numbers on things don't make sense at all with what you see in the TV shows or movies.

 

To answer you question on hyperspace speed Nova, from what I understand, you can only change the speed for all ships for all factions going from between planets globally, or between stars globally. No seperate hyperspace speeds for different ships. You could however give certain ships a special ability thats always active that gives them a percentage jump speed increase, thus making them faster than other ships. However then you would have a fleet of ships all arriving at different times which would be bad; both tactically and as a gameplay mechanic IMOP. This could be useful for making a "scout" ship like the Millenium Facon that has really fast jump speeds though.

[NovaCameron]

We'll use G as Kph, like I said. Even though those very fast speeds would be good for cruising, It doesn't fit well into the game. So G will be Kph just to give the ships a bit more accuracy, but not at the expense of gameplay. I'll expand the list soon. Plus I really don't have the room for 500Km grav wells.

It would look insane... (I could technically do it. the game dose everything in meters, but a planet with a 6000000m radius would be... too big. lol though I'll test it out....)

 

G = Kph for this game.

[quantum_dragon]

"I have the vacuum speeds in G form which for gaming purposes we'll state as being the acceleration but use it as the max speed, which it is..., in kph form, which we'll use in game."

Lol ok, I totally misread that post. I thought you wanted what would cause that many G as a base KPH... I was thinking you wanted a y-wing to go 87,000 Kph

 

I understand now...

 

I just want to double check though:

 

Given G = Kph / that would make an x-wing pass the length of an ISD in about 1.55 seconds at full speed. A Tie which is 4100G (from what I found) would pass in about 1.41.

 

I can work with that. I will have two sets of Game Info files then; one that stays true to the balancing the mod currently has (my first post) and one that will have all the differing ship speeds using Nova's provided stats.

[quantum_dragon]

Ok while waiting to hear back from EvilleJedi, I have been working on the issue of inter-planetary travel. With the capital ships moving so slow and having to fly through a grav well before re-entering hyperspace, its painstakingly slow to travel through multiple systems. If anyone would have any of their own ideas please feel free to post them. Below are a few of my own ideas:

 

Idea 1: Make it so Empires could build "Nav Bouys" or HyperSpace lane stations or something along these lines that use a logistics slot. These Navigation Bouys would act as instant travel between other established Nav Bouys or Hyperspace lane stations. Thus Allowing empires to instantly travel to distant established planets.

 

GAMEPLAY: Now a fleet would still have to fly to the edge of the grav well of the current planet they were in, but then could jump to several planets away in a single jump. Thus eliminating the time consuming process of having to fly all the way through multiple grav wells and then jump multiple planets, but still take a while on initial colonization and exploration.

 

TACTICS: This would also allow interesting tactics. Such as launching a smaller fleet to do a faint to attract a fleet someone might have standing by the edge of a gravewell in a "staging" area. Once attracting that fleet and getting it to fly far into a grav well, someone could then launch their main fleet at another planet, while their smaller fleet runs. Thus taking a while for the defending fleet to flyback to the end of the grave well and engage the main fleet. Keep in mind it would still take a bit for an attacking fleet to reach the planet its attacking itself too. This would involve Strategic thinking as well as tactical now when dealing with attack and defense of planets.

 

 

Idea 2: Essentially the same as idea 1, but somehow incorporating it as a planetary bonus for all planets instead of an actual structure that has to be built. This way if you lose the planet and take it back, you wouldn't have to rebuild anything. This way also makes more sense giving another actual reason to explore a planet. Gameplay and Tactics would be the same.

 

Idea 3: (currently experimenting with) Seeing if modifying jump angle would allow a capital ship to jump into a grav well, then only have to change facing and jump to the next planet without having to travel all the way through the grav well. Exception would be if the destination grav well is directly on the other side of the planet of the current grav well. In this case a capital ship would have to fly to edge of the grav well that has LOS to the next planet.

 

I will continue experimenting. If I find that I can use the planetary bonus then I might need your help Nova Cameron since I know your making a galaxy mod, and have more experience with editing planetary bonuses and knowing how they work than I do.

[NovaCameron]

lol don't worry. I have the jump angles at 60 right now and they work fine. I might bump it up to 90 but it seems that the damn ships take the shortest route. add in the fact that the wells are so big a fleet can sneak past a planet.... plus the fact I'm going to push the build radius down a lot... We might need a jump inhibitor or interdiction satellite to keep fleets from sneaking past EVERY planet. Wouldn't be too much fun if you can be attacked anywhere at anytime. Actually... that's not bad idea. Since I'm pushing the build radius down you would have to engage the planet to get rid of the interdiction satellite. And with less space to defend there would be more turrets for more fireworks. This wouldn't completely stop fleets from sneaking past, but it would make it painfully slow.

 

Oh, no nav points. That would render my map setups, choke points, and planet setups, useless. It SUPPOSED to take a long time to get from one side of the galaxy to the other. Hyperspace speed needs to be boosted. Like 3-5x faster.

[Evaders99]

Ooo I love some of these ideas. Definitely changes the tactics of the game

 

(Always had fun with hyperspace inhibitors... esp those WTF moments in Homeworld where you're being attacked unprepared out of nowhere)

[quantum_dragon]

Oops... I never thought about how easy it would be for enemy fleets to sneek passed if the jump angles were higher

 

I know I'm probably getting off topic a bit, but what about making jumps take more anti-matter, and significantly lowering anti-matter regen in enemy space? So if you jump, jump, jump, you pretty much can't use your special abilities in combat, and could end up "stranded" in a hostile planetary system for a bit. (Allowing planetary defense fighters to harass you, and since you cant regen anti matter, losing your own fighters further handicaps your fleet, and also allows defending fleet to have a chance to catch up.) I know this would probably mess with balancing a bit, and would have to be reworked, but that would address the issue I think. I also think this would be cool as a good representation of "supply lines."

 

Another reason I like the lowered anti-matter regens is because I think fighters shouldn't be "built" on board ships, but rather "resupplied" (represented by anti-matter regen) when in friendly space... This of course would probably require a little more balancing on the fighters, and maybe have bombers present a little more of threat than they do now since once they are gone, they are gone for a while. (Could even have "Fighter Factories" be anti-matter restorers. With the exception of Yuuzhan Vong who can grow things on their ships anyhow. )

 

My offer to help rebalance the fighters other than speed still stands, as I would like it so they seem more valuable (like they are in the movies) and fleet engagements are a little more logistitics involved...That and I have a thing for fighters as you can probably tell.

[NovaCameron]

That would work. Plus planets are going to be much tougher so you you won't be able to break through and then take out a sector easily (to recharge). Jump angle at 60 seems fine. SW you just need to point your ship in the right direction and be out of the grav well to jump. Like 15000 will be the weakest planet. Max: 120000. ^^ I want planets to be tough to take out. and I think that would do it. lol

[quantum_dragon]

Just updating and letting everyone know I didn't die.

 

So far, speed adjustments feeling pretty good. I had to go along with class speeds like you mentioned nova because otherwise you would end up with the lucrehulk crawling way to slow and republic capitals achieving near star-fighter speeds if i went with using Gs as a base speed. To compensate i changed some ships acceleration factors to reflect the canon g numbers.

 

Sorry if there a lot of errors in my post as i was using my phone to update.

[EvilleJedi]

The main reason the speeds are where they are at is gameplay, if what you have plays better then I think it is a good option. I had a lot of complaints of ships being too slow to cross gravity wells.

 

I like some of the ideas of jump bouys, but I wouldn't want to shrink the build zones because right now, even though ships can sneak through a system you can still build outposts to deal with them and draw them away from the planet and ship yards.

 

 

So on that note, if I wanted to use 'actual' acceleration numbers things would just be obnoxious.

 

For an ISD I can't remember the impulse that the engines can generate, but it is enormous. (the powerplant can generate e25 watts continuous) I know Ender at stardestroyer.net did some very detailed calculations to show the performance, but I really can't find them right now.

 

However, the number below number comes from the practical intra-system transit times of about 8 hours (diameter of orbit of jupiter for example is 17 AU to the sun)

 

Standard intra system cargo barges and personal shuttles would need to go between habitable planets in 4-8 hours, at 4000km/s this is roughly earth to jupiter in 8 hours, though we have seen intra system times much shorter ( 1 hour or less) so unless the planets are in an unstable orbit the average garbage heap should be able to hit 8000km/s - 16000km/s in open space.

 

I think the ISD was given operational ceiling of around 40,000km/s because of relativistic effects

 

Another good example is the centerpoint interdiction field. The field extended out to the outer reaches of the inner system, so if that would be defined as our Oort cloud at around 200 AU, 4000km/s would take roughly 3 months which I believe is the number the book stated.

 

Also consider that most star wars fighters must be capable of capable of flying a minimum of 9km/s just to leave a small planetary orbit and being able to leave bespin/yavin would require a much higher number (Jupiter escape velocity is 59.5 km/s) we also know that most fighters and falcon can easily get 4-5 planetary diameters from a dead stop at the surface to make a hyperspace jump in somewhere between a thirty seconds and two minutes, so numbers like 1000km/s to 4000km/s are not unreasonable in a gravity well. Also, the yavin fighters launch somewhere around t-15 minutes in the death star count down and are on station above the death star for rough 5-10 minutes. Given that the death star was pearing around the edge of yavin the distance would have to be a minimum of 2-3 million km. Ganymede is around 1million km from Jupiter and doesn't have tidal problems like Io does so it might be a good example. (The third leg of the triangle would be longer than it would be in a right triangle so 2-3 M km seems reasonable if not low) This comes up with a number roughly between 2000km/s and 4000km/s. Those fighters would need to accelerate to this velocity in the first 30-60 seconds and decelerate to a combat velocity on approach to the death star and to charge shields and weapons. This would mean an acceleration between 50km/s^2 and 100km/s^2 for the fighters at minimum. so can things go WEEEEEEEEE fast in the movies when they need to, yes they can, how do you reconcile that with the action scenes? you really can't.

 

The inertial dampers need to be able to easily absorb this acceleration because they also need to be able to take the full recoil of the guns and also negate any external impacts. If a starship is to even remotely survive in fleet operations it needs to keep its crew intact under heavier fire than it can dish out. It definitely can't liquefy the crew when it fires its own guns too.

[NovaCameron]

We're working on balancing the ship speeds. The ship speeds are way too slow imo. I have them at 2.5 normal and it's ok, I might be tempted to make it faster once I test out my planets. We can mess with all the ships speeds with the gameconstance but getting all the ships balanced and cannon TO EACHOTHER is the issue here. That we need to mess with each ship file.

[quantum_dragon]

First of all I would like to say EvilleJedi, its pleasure speaking with someone who looks like they have done more homework than I have

 

You make some very good points on the ship travel speeds on the "in system" part of things. I have read only a few books myself, but do recall similar references of 8 hours and such of in system travel.

 

From a non-combat, logistics point of view those speeds are completley acceptable. For combat however, as you said "how do you reconcile that with the action scenes? you really can't." Two fighters flying by each other at 3,000 to 4,000 km/s wouldn't even't register in each others vision, let alone the feasibility of being able to keep track of each other in a dog fight.

 

I am sure we both could probably go on forever discussing the possibilities of why it is that way, (maybe start another forum topic on that heheh) and find a way to justify the two very drastic differences, including why they don't use those "cruising" speeds when catching someone or running away, or the point of having a smaller ship to run when a big cruiser can go just as fast, but the end result is, that Sins' physics and AI engine wouldn't even remotely support whatever we came up with...lol.

 

With that being said, a compromise has to probably be made between the canon of the "Combat" and the "Cruising" speeds. Lets face it, the "stats" of the star wars universe seem at times to contradict itself, along with what you "SEE" in the movies. (also given that movies skip through time due to limitations in viewing time and film. So the next scene could actually be sometime later, not just a second or two)

 

These indiscrepancies is probably why there are so many "Retcons". http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Retcon ( I would hate to see how many there would be if someone tried to consolidate the speeds people mention in books, stat books, comics, games, and what you see in the movies.)

 

Anyhow, with trying to come up with a compromise I did find a "safespeedscalar" for maximum speed and linear accel and decel. Upon playing with it, I did find that in gravity wells with no enemies present, ships can be made to go much faster, I even did a 100 and they went a hundred times faster XD, but still flew their normal speeds if enemies (including pirates) were present.

 

I was thinking with a combination of using the safe speed scalar to make the ships go faster, to represent a "cruising" speed (since in space if you can keep significat thrust you can keep going faster but this would make manuevarability very hard as at those speeds, the manuevering jets would have a hard timing countering the momentum and velocity, so you wouldnt do this in combat.) and raising the jump angles, we could improve the non-combat playability of the game.

 

Now you wouldn't want to raise the safe speed scalar to much, a) cause it would just seem kinda stupid b) you don't want getting through non-enemy or your own space to be "too-fast", otherwise you wouldn't have to consider tactical or strategic options in defense or offense, if you can just run around really quickly.

 

Right now I have been messing with the scalar making maximum speed 2 or 3 times faster when safe, (so theres not an obnoxiously obvious difference,) plus having the higher jump angles, and I have also raised the overal speeds slightly, to be a little less movie canon, but have a little more playability.

 

When I am done, if it is alright with you guys, I will send Evader and EvilleJedi private messages with links to a zip file with the changed game info files for 1.0E and if you approve maybe I can help with the rest the mod.

 

Also as a side note I did change one other thing which was the particle size of the shots coming from fighters. I didn't think turbo laser sized shots fit small starfighters. They are now more accurate to the size you see in the movies.

[EvilleJedi]

If the safe speed scalar turns out to work well that will be awesome! I tried implementing something like that with abilities and it was a mess. IMO the main reason you don't go really fast in combat is that which would you rather do? put all your power to guns or all your power to engines. If we can get ships to cover gravity wells quickly but then slow down in fights that is ideal. This allows players to get out of position because they were cruising in the gravity well, but localizes combat groups to more interesting discrete battles. it also makes it harder to respond to two wave attacks, so feints become a practical strategy for entering a gravity well.

 

The in universe explanation I use has a few parts

 

1) pilots and gunners are needed to make the 'human' decisions, the weapons and craft mostly fly themselves and just take the biological input as the intent. Obviously you could have a high sophisticated droid do this, R2 series droids are capable of flying quite well without a pilot. When the problems of inertial negation, radiation shielding and antigravity are solved so completely that disposable consumer level products use the technology and that fully serviceable ships with hyperdrives can be bought used for a minimal price in backwater forgotten planets like tatooine, the cost of putting a pilot into a craft is probably minimal compared to the high performance parts, fuel, coolant or a highly adaptable droid brain. We do know that droid fighters can easily run a war and be quite effective against biological pilots as demonstrated in the clone wars. The high complements seen on imperial era vessels are probably just the bureaucracy of the empire. New Republic vessels had around 2 crew members for each gun battery vs 7 or so for the empire, a fire control specialist seems like the minimum needed to operate a large starship weapon.

 

2) If you are engaged in combat at long range with light speed weaponry, what is the maximum range you can effectively fight at? well for a stationary target or one with a known trajectory we know Venator heavy turbolasers could accurately hit something at ten light seconds (so hit a target on the earth from the sun) but what if the target is maneuvering purposely to avoid fire? well if we use our 50km/s maneuvering acceleration for a 1000 m vessel we find that the maximum distance you could reasonably hit the target is at around 3000km without utterly blanketing space with fire (a huge energy waste). The targeted vessel only has to move half its own length in the time it takes the energy to reach it. if the vessel can maneuver faster, then this number could be lower the 750 km. this is still beyond visual recognition range without magnification, but at ranges closer than 300km a star destroyer could be manually targeted with very minor optical assistance (especially considering the accuracy of the weapons we are talking about.) We haven't even talked about ECM making sensor readings inaccurate and other techniques like laser dazzling to render optical sensors useless. Also we are not entirely sure if Star Wars has FTL sensors as standard equipment aboard capital ships (some surveillance ships have long long range FTL sensors, out to LYs), if you know the enemy fired when it happens you can just move out of the way if you can accelerate fast enough. With all this factored in the practical range is now more understandable.

 

I really haven't dug into the math behind hitting starfighters because it starts being a statistical analysis of vectors representing the incoming fire (staggering and fire rate included) and the probability of those intersecting a volume of random motion along a partially predictable trajectory. However, when we apply the simple analysis above of hitting a generic target to star fighters, due to the much smaller size and higher ability to rapidly maneuver in an evasive pattern over short distances we find that the ability to hit anything at greater than 100km by anything that isn't a self guided missile is effectively nil, and also considering the refire rate issues of the weapons (1-2 shots per second max) you may only get 1 computer controlled snap shot off on a high speed pass. So should they be going WW1 biplane speeds? probably not, but 2000-3000 km/h speeds in a close dogfight with engagement ranges for normal operations out to 100km might not be at all out of the question for practical combat (again ECM not considered and also not considering that there will be A LOT of background radiation if capital ships are present and slugging it out) The movies at that point could represent romantic anecdotes of the surviving pilots recalling split second judgements.

 

3) This is the most important piece of the puzzle IMO, shields... change... everything... you have to pour a lot of energy into a small point to overload them or just have such overwhelming firepower that it isn't funny (think that a nebulon-B frigate was at Endor and running the brim trench of the Executor and the vessel was not slowly cooling scrap even after several minutes of fire) Modern combat is one hit one kill so everything is focused on dealing maximum damage to the target from as far away as possible. In space combat with shielding we know that many vessels can stand up to their own firepower for more than 15-20 minutes and in many cases the concentrated firepower of much more powerful vessels or a numerical advantage for at least as long. There are Alpha strikes and other tactics that can cripple vessels quicker, however once you have engaged in combat you either run to hyperspace or see who wins. The energy battle becomes who can keep their weapons firing at full output the longest without compromising weapon geometry for protection of weak shield areas and without overheating or over stressing internal components. Maneuvering is almost pointless once you are under 10,000 km if you want to devote your power to weaponry. There is some ambiguity about how battles at ranges between 10,000km and 1000km would really be fought (is it more of a stand off skirmish to prevent some other action like landing troops or deploying fighters?) but once you are under 1000km there is really no difference between that and point blank, you are essentially committed until you decide to leave.

 

Another note, running away in realspace is pretty stupid, you stop shooting your optimal gunnery, and then start accelerating in a straight line with your engines exposed to fire. You aren't going to be able to maneuver much since your thrust is going out the back, and in the first few dozen seconds you are going to be well within the optical kill range of the weapons. So hitting you is going to be quite easy, you are keeping one face of the shields constantly exposed to the enemy and you can't outrun lightspeed weaponry that can hit you at absurd ranges, in fact the aggressor may just charge their guns to make sure you are quite dead. At this point missile weapons become extra deadly because the screening fire is less and the warheads can accelerate on a very straight trajectory. We see most vessels leave under fire by simply making a hyperspace jump, the time delay for orientation and calculation not withstanding.

 

Both the Battle of Coruscant and The battle of Endor are considered noteworthy for the close proximity fighting, but both are quite readily explained in the source material. The psychological effect of having vessels in Coruscant skies visible by the populace, landing strike troops on the surface and forcing republic forces into poor position to prevent stray fire from hitting the surface was a key strategy of Grevious. The absolute arrogance of the Emperor at Endor in making sure that every Rebel knew that they would die in the most in your face way possible was also premeditated. I believe that most battles would be fought at medium range (5,000km-300km) simply because unless the goal is to utterly destroy the enemy vessels (by trapping them or surprising them), one side will withdraw before losses are registered, the only casualties being the lucky shots and the vessels that were exposed to concentrated assaults.