Joebwan

I put videos of some of the trips to Google videos so my poor low-bandwidth server wouldn't get crushed. http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=miniquest

Very cool

There are some really good screen shots here! Good composition, which is no small feat to capture given the hectic nature of combat -- the subject matter doesn't want to stay still for the camera.

The AT-HA looks interesting. Do you have any information on it? Has it appeared in any expanded universe source? Does it have any "official" backstory?

There are two different build time XML tags -- one for solo play and one for skirmish play. Make sure you are modifying the right one.

Cool mod. Nice to see extensive modding. The mixture of technical and design creativity reminds me of the old days of game development where the programmer was also the designer. Another side effect is that we can see design experimentation which helps with future expansions/product development.

is basically "hull" health. When hull health is depleted the ship is destroyed. If a ship has hard points and if all the hard points are destroyed a ship is also destroyed. Hard points have their own health and for the most part, if a ship has hard points, then those take damage rather than the hull. There are (or were) some exceptions to this where damage would be applied to the hull rather than to a hard point and this was making ships too easy to destroy in certain cases. This is why TacticalHealth will typically be higher than the sum of the health of the destroyable hard points the ship has.

This is correct. Couldn't have said it better myself.

You may get the desired result (much faster fighter movement) by slowing the larger ships down and then increasing the game speed. Or you could increase the travel speed of bolts, missiles, and torpedoes greatly to compensate for the targeting issues against faster fighters/bombers. Another issue that can have an adverse affect on targeting fighters is if they are reduced in size the collision mesh is reduced in size as well, so if all other things are equal, a fighter that is 50% smaller is about 4x harder to hit.

Balance evaluations based on the demo version would be premature. Much has changed between then and now -- especially in the area of balance.

Fighters and bombers are very sensitive to speed increases. Other factors come into play that can have an adverse effect. The game does 2nd order predictive calculations for firing, but not 3rd order prediction (i.e., it doesn't take into account the rate of change in the rate of change in fighter flight movement) which means fighters become very very hard to hit at high speeds due to the time it takes for a laser bolt to reach the fighter.

We have fixed countless things since the demo version and yes that even includes improving the battle-cam AI.

Has it been determined that the weapon batteries mounted along the edge "trench" of a Star Destroyer can fire directly "upward" or "downward"? If the firing point of the trench weapons is recessed, even a little bit, then the firing angle would likely be restricted such that rotating so the top of the Star Destroyer to face the target won't necessarily allow the side guns of both sides to fire on the target. It seems reasonable that the weapon turrets located along the top of the body near the superstructure could fire directly "upwards", but then, as indicated above, the side weapon batteries would likely no longer be able to target the enemy, so it could result in less firepower overall. This tactic wasn't performed to my recollection in any movie space battle sequences which could be further evidence that this tactic doesn't work.

This is correct. The Star Destroyer is closer to an Aircraft Carrier or a Battleship of WWII era. Both of those kinds of ships were literally bristling with anti-aircraft guns, yet were sill very vulnerable to bomber attack. If caught alone and without fighter cover, even a small contingent of bombers would spell certain doom. Star Destroyers and other capital ships follow this model. There are also balancing reasons that this model is followed since a ship that could defend against all threats as well as have the firepower of a Star Destroyer would make unit force mix strategy almost meaningless as there would be only one "best choice" ship to buy.

This is essentially correct. The Airspeeder's "tow cable" is more properly called a "trip cable" in the context of attacking an AT-AT. If the AT-AT is stationary, it cannot be tripped by the cable and the cable will fall harmlessly to the ground.