Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Draxis]

Hm... I was planning to suggest reworking the pulse-disruptor into more of a very strong, slow-shooting (once every 2 turns?) gun once I had the idea more clarified in my head, that or a flat damage-per-hit buff to disruptors, because right now it seems like turbolasers (and probably heavy lasers) are the dominant weapon in fights between high-end ships, and high burst damage would be a decent way to get around the defenses based on mass damage-reduction (deflectors and emissive/absorbtive).  That could help break defenses; otherwise, letting there be kinetic impacts/ramming (with a suitable chance to miss, and only if one of the ships is explicitly ordered to try to intercept) would be a good way to hurt stationary bases, and allow more variety and usefulness in missiles.

[ekolis]

Ramming would be cool. Technically, the disruptor bolts and the like are "components" in the mod files, so there's no reason SJ couldn't add ramming as a feature - I guess he just hasn't worked out how to balance it yet?

[Draxis]

Yeah, the balance would be rough; I would say to make the hit chance based on some aggregate of acceleration in different directions, and reduced by greater closing speeds, but even that would probably leave either large ship-to-ship-ramming or small projectiles too strong, depending on how the math was balanced.  It would be a huge pain to implement impact mechanics properly (or even decently), as well.

[ekolis]

Well, impact mechanics would work basically the same as a shot from a weapon impacting your ship - the only difference being that both the rammer and the target both inflict and receive damage, as opposed to the projectile only inflicting and the target only receiving.

The hit chance - yeah, that would probably depend primarily on acceleration in directions not aligned with the axis of the collision, I'd imagine, with high values for the rammer increasing accuracy, while high values for the defender would decrease it. So if I'm coming at you from the south, then my northeast/northwest/southeast/southwest acceleration values would increase the accuracy, while your acceleration in those directions would decrease it. If I'm coming at you from an odd angle (not along one of the hex axes), I guess the directions would have to be weighted based on sines and cosines of the angles involved, or something.

[ekolis]

So I was curious about the relative power production of various fuels, when making a joke about the number of calories in a gram of antimatter vs. a gram of fat or carbs, and SJ linked me to an xkcd comic which gave a few values. This made me realize that, according to the arbitrary units I picked out of a hat for the energy values in the game (and SJ didn't seem to mind), we are apparently flying steampunk starships.

A small capacitor has a mass of 5 tons, is 1 meter across, and can store 500 megajoules of energy. Now that might seem like a lot of energy... but it's really not. According to http://xkcd.com/1162/, a fuel as simple as *gasoline* has an energy density of 46 megajoules per kilogram. And gasoline has a density of roughly 0.75 kilograms per liter. So our space-age capacitor is actually equivalent to a gas tank containing a bit over 14 liters, or a bit under 4 gallons, of gas.

Yeah. I think maybe we should use *giga*joules instead

edit: Oddly enough, one player we recruited for a game a while back described the carrier he was given as a "steampunk platypus"... how appropriate!

edit2: Actually, I think the issue comes from the fact that I'm far more familiar with watts than with joules. So I scaled everything based on the reactors. A tiny reactor that produced 150 gigawatts seemed a bit over the top, even for sci-fi, so I made it megawatts instead. Assuming that a turn is one second of game time, then, that would make the capacitors store energy in megajoules. And realistically, a starship with no reactor would be designed to survive in space for more than just a few minutes on energy reserves! So it's more that capacitors store too little energy compared to the power output of a reactor than it is an overall scaling issue, I'd think...

[SuicideJunkie]

New GUI version is up.
 - Flicker command is available on the gui (not much use except for armor irises where you want to fire now and pay 1CnC to have the option of being protected next turn)
 - Multi-shot & barrage fire options in gunview.  Click & drag for a popup menu that will allow you to fire your entire broadside at a target at once.
Note: warheads are excepted from the fire-all-guns command.

linuxthancs.rar has been moved to the more appropriately named thancs-gui_source.rar
See:
http://imagemodserver.duckdns.org/nick/GreenEggsAndHam/THANCS/

[Draxis]

It seems that all of your bases in Fabthree have lots of armor; what if we were to ban armor on bases, and only allow shields?  That would make defending them heavily enough to totally resist attack extremely expensive, especially as they expand, but would still allow vital parts to be protected without too much cost.

[ekolis]

I dunno, that seems kinda artificial...

Maybe what we need is armor piercing weapons! SJ and I were talking last night, and he mentioned that he was considering adding submunitions to the game - when a shot "dies" due to hitting something (or perhaps also reaching max range), it could optionally spawn more shots of arbitrary strength, location, and velocity. And when a component takes damage, it could do the same. So, to make an armor piercing weapon, what you would do is make a regular weapon that, when it hits something, spawns a second shot a few hexes in front of it. The original shot will then hit the armor, but the secondary shot will skip through the armor and hit the components behind it.

You can do a lot of fun things with submunitions. For instance, you can make components that explode when hit, damaging nearby components. You could make reflector shields that take half damage from enemy shots, and bounce the other half back at the attacker. You could make backscatter weapons like the Shotgun Ice from Megaman X that shoot smaller projectiles in a cone backwards when they hit something (don't stand too close!). You could go totally batshit insane and recreate the climactic battle from Ender's Game by creating a weapon that does massive damage, and when it strikes something, fires six projectiles, identical to the original, one in each direction, that have a range of 1 sector and also spawn more projectiles if they hit something!

Also, missiles are particularly effective against bases. Because bases can't dodge, missiles always do maximum damage to bases if aimed correctly, and everything else floating in the same sector, too. And missiles do damage proportional to the surface area of their target (up to the blast size of the warhead), so they will damage bases more than they would a smaller ship. Missiles are, of course, vulnerable to point defense, but if you really want you can design armored missiles!

[ekolis]

Oh, and regarding the steampunk starships, after we did a lot of math trying and failing to figure out reasonable units for time, energy, and power, SJ pointed out that the only energy storage devices we have in THANCS at the moment are capacitors, which realistically don't store all that much energy.

He did say that he was considering adding batteries, which would have a large local reserve of energy that could only be depleted or restored at a finite rate from the ship's capacitors. So let's say you have a battery with 10K energy storage and 100 power transfer rate, and your capacitors can store 1K energy. If your reactors produce 500 power, then if your capacitors are full, most of your power generation will be wasted, even if the batteries are empty, as there's not enough transfer rate to charge up the batteries that fast. Conversely, if your capacitors are empty, but your batteries are full, then you can only use 100 energy per turn plus your reactor power, because the batteries can only discharge 100 energy per turn.

[Draxis]

The submunitions idea does sound fun and useful.  Another potential use would be to let any potential projectile guns added break up properly on impact, or for shots which explode when they hit things.  The batteries would also be neat, though I think in the game's current state anything increasing power storage densities would only make turbolasers even more dominant.

If these changes were made, especially the submunitions one, would it be possible to start the game now and use any potential weapons resulting from the changes once they come in?  There would be no need for station-killing weapons at the beginning of the game.

[Girlinhat]

All I really want to see, as far as submunitions go, are explosive slugs.  They do 1 damage, but when they impact a target, it creates a 1-radius explosion one tile back from the impact point - if it hits armor, then it explodes OUTSIDE the armor.

[SuicideJunkie]

In general when new features come in, the old components will retain their features and only newly built ones will get the new attributes, so it shouldn't be a problem.

Pending mod changes:
 - New solar panel component; retractable energy generation component - 3 tiles wide x 9 tiles long.  Generates 15 E for $300.  Slightly less efficient than a tiny reactor, lighter but bulkier.
 - Small reactor reduced in cost from $7500 to $7000 to better fit E/$ curve.
 - Hex shield increased in energy cost to 75
 - Hex deflector decreased in energy cost to 75
 - Reactors can store one turn's worth of their power generation per turn to avoid problems with recharging and firing and etc when no capacitors are available.

[Girlinhat]

One thing I'd like to see, are 'military reactor's that are the same size as a bridge (fit into a T3 hollow) and produces similar energy for its size, has more durability, but costs more.

ALSO the firing arc option is great!

[ekolis]

Is anyone actually reading my AAR? I'm thinking of discontinuing it, because as far as I know, no one is... speak now or forever hold your peace!

[Girlinhat]

Is anyone actually reading my AAR? I'm thinking of discontinuing it, because as far as I know, no one is... speak now or forever hold your peace!

I wasn't sure where this was...