EvilleJedi

viscount model is completely unfinished, the malevolence is actually pretty close to being done, just need to finish up some of the more boring parts

I've toyed around with this idea, it does make sense to have a 'preprogrammed safe hyperroute' or some sort of techno babble, especially inside your own territory.

I haven't seen any way to do that with the vong shields, the hit effects are determined by the weapon but can't be modified by the target. In Homeworld 2 the easy hack was to make it so that the anti missile weapons did the void effect, so it looked almost right, some shots getting through and voids all around the ships. I guess we could look into some sort of generic void effect triggered by an ability when the ship is under attack, but it definitly won't match the income fire, just be a random effect

turning off shields was a fix I asked for in a patch, it was a gigantic performance hit even with heavily optimized shields (I'm talking about shields with very few polygons, like 20 or so) The shield rendering actually bothers me a lot because of the fall off of the effect. I wouldn't have a problem if it was pretty localized, but with the volume of fire the shield become almost completely opaque within seconds and all you see is that and it looks BAD

what type of Victory do you propose? personally the victory II makes the most sense, but between the demolisher and ISDI there isn't a lot of room

In the newer versions the victory was removed from the empire because the broadside duplicated the victory I role and the ISD I and II cruisers were a better fit.

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.

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.