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Post by Crazy Tom on Sept 11, 2016 20:34:06 GMT
I have however experience an intermittent issues with my crew dying from excessive acceleration. I'm still trying to replicate it. Crews die whenever they experience consistently high g's. One way I found this out is via excessively high rotations while your crew compartment is far from the center of mass (Linear force is proportional to rotational speed and distance from rotational axis). Most of the core ships don't spin fast enough for this to be a problem though (plus I try to keep the crew modules somewhat close to the center of mass usually). Actually, I think it's a glitch - or wonky AI behavior at least. I have no issues with a tumbler that has 2 engines at the center of mass, but if I put two pairs of engines further from the center of mass all sorts of weirdness starts happening. A four engine configuration of the above tumbler leads to immediate acceleration-death once contact is made with the enemy if the engines are placed far from the COM. If placed closer to the COM two will start thrusting in opposite directions for some reason, and two aren't doing anything.
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Post by shiolle on Sept 11, 2016 20:42:57 GMT
I'll use the following as an example: Sorry, I meant radiation shielding. I can't find it on this image. Basically, you use your NTR as giant vernier thruster. In the blogspot about maneuvering thrusters it was said NTR are not usually used in this capacity due to radiation concerns. I understand that both NERVA and RD-0410 used shadow shielding as it could greatly reduce the mass of the engine. In this configuration, the whole reactor has to be shielded or it will irradiate the body of the spacecraft as you rotate it into combat configuration. I was wondering if the game models that and if it does, how much mass that would add. Also, I think that in combat configuration this ship has to point its engines significantly sideways to avoid hitting the body of the spacecraft with exhaust. NTR's exhaust itself is not radioactive, as far as I understand, but reactor can't be shielded in that direction.
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Post by RA2lover on Sept 12, 2016 0:29:12 GMT
Can this be replicated with chemical rockets?
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Post by qswitched on Sept 14, 2016 20:32:35 GMT
Actually, I think it's a glitch - or wonky AI behavior at least. I have no issues with a tumbler that has 2 engines at the center of mass, but if I put two pairs of engines further from the center of mass all sorts of weirdness starts happening. A four engine configuration of the above tumbler leads to immediate acceleration-death once contact is made with the enemy if the engines are placed far from the COM. If placed closer to the COM two will start thrusting in opposite directions for some reason, and two aren't doing anything. Hm, I'm trying to repro the issue based on your image with no luck. Can I get a PM of your designs again perhaps? Also, the thrust in opposite directions is for very fine granular aiming. Subtly gimbaling each engine (less than a degree) and firing both engines allows very precise control of the nose cone, albeit a bit wastefully.
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Post by Crazy Tom on Sept 16, 2016 23:26:55 GMT
OK, design file sent in along with a few new crash files that are preventing me from playing right now. The bright side is that I now have some time to write up the idea I've had all week: Defensive Victory Conditions - Right now, the victory conditions for defense missions require you to destroy all enemy craft. This is especially weird on Vesta: After harassing the enemy fleet with missiles, it breaks up into individual units on courses that take them out into the solar system. The enemy ships have not been disabled, and they still have some dV, but they either chose not to return, or they did not have enough dV left to enter Vesta orbit again. So despite the enemy all flying off into deep space, the computer still tells me I lost. I think in a case like this, it's the enemy forces that should be under some sort of time limit. Or perhaps a further victory condition that if the enemy is on a hyperbolic orbit with insufficient dV to close their orbit, it counts as a mission kill. ORDER: Maintain Closing Velocity - After a lot of trial and error with missiles, I have come to the conclusion that missiles are not necessarily the best fly-by weapons, and that they in fact have an optimum closing velocity. I have found that when I do a retrograde fly-by, missiles tend to miss because the enemy dodges and they don't have enough time to enact a course correction. To that end I would like an order that allows me tell a missile to not go beyond it's current closing velocity - even to apply retro thrust to slow down if necessary. ORDER: Maintain Orientation - A big issue for spinal guns and ships with directional armor is that they can turn and expose their vulnerable areas or slew the gun off target to maneuver. It's most noticeable in Tumbler designs. I would like an order that will keep the ship pointing towards a selected enemy no matter what. I would like to be able to order a ship to close/maintains separation/retreat from an enemy while maintaining this orientation. Multiple Types of Orders - This ties in with what I wrote above. I think there should be three 'types' of orders, where one of each type is active at any one time. Translations Orders would cover things like close/maintain distance/increase distance between you and the enemy. Orient Orders would cover things like present broadside/present glacis that govern how your ship is pointed with respect to the enemy. Finally Miscellaneous Orders would let you choose if the ship is doing a BBQ roll, ore retracting all radiators at once, etc. And each level is at a lower priority that the one below, so if you have a traditional style craft, and the orientation order conflicts with the translation order, the translation order takes priority. Main Engine/RCS Orientation - I would like an option to prevent main engines from participating in orientation changes under a certain limit. For example, if a tumbler ship's keel gun is one or two degrees off target, the main engines should not fire to re-orient it, but should leave it up to the smaller thrusters. The quick and easy way to implement this is to have an 'RCS' button that can be checked when designing engines that will tell the computer. DeltaV Estimates for Enemy: It would be helpfully to know how much an enemy has left in terms of dV. IIRC,based on the heat of the engine(which is an indicator of exhaust velocity), its emission spectrum (indicating the type, and thus mass of hte propellant), and the acceleration of the craft, it should be possible to calculate how much dV an enemy craft has left in its tanks. That's the rationale at least, we can simply have the enemy tell us how much it has in the tank to reduce the difficulty of coding the feature. Gas Driven Auto-cannons - Right now the game requires an electrically driven loader for chemical guns. Would it be possible to switch that out for a more conventional system that uses part of the gases generated by the gun, like modern machine gun does? I ask because if we could eliminate the RTG and its attendant radiators from a drone, it would decrease it's thermal signature, cost, and mass. Or even including some sort of battery instead of an RTG to supply the energy for the current electric loader - the gun only needs to operate for a short while after all. Different Missile Launch Systems - Right now all loaders and launchers in game are electromagnetic. I would like to see more options such as: Mechanical spring launched missiles, cold gas launched missiles that use compressed gas, and hot launched missiles that fire up their main engines or use pancake boosters. All of these consume no power, and might be lighter to boot. Issue: Can't zoom in far enough to see what my missiles are doing. Makes it harder to experiment. edit: Also added some of karl's ideas that haven't been implemented yet: - Tell us what enemy fleet evaded which of our fleet, add option to attempt to auto-correct. - Have a list of intercepts and time until (top right?), optionally a list of broken intercepts since the last turn was run. - List of fleets so we don't have to hunt through a stack of them (bottom left?)
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Post by qswitched on Sept 17, 2016 0:18:02 GMT
Defensive Victory Conditions - [...] Yeah, I agree this needs to be changed asap. The ideas on orders are really good, I especially like the different kinds of orders, it's a lot nicer of a solution than simply adding fifty more orders. DeltaV Estimates for Enemy: It would be helpfully to know how much an enemy has left in terms of dV. IIRC,based on the heat of the engine(which is an indicator of exhaust velocity), its emission spectrum (indicating the type, and thus mass of hte propellant), and the acceleration of the craft, it should be possible to calculate how much dV an enemy craft has left in its tanks. That's the rationale at least, we can simply have the enemy tell us how much it has in the tank to reduce the difficulty of coding the feature. So mass, acceleration, mass flow, thrust, propellant type, and type of engine can all be determined by analyzing the emission spectrum. Delta-v actually can not. For instance, if you take an existing craft, and replace one of it's crew compartments with a propellant tank of equal mass, you can change the delta-v, and there's no way to tell for an outside observer. With that said, though, that's a scenario that doesn't happen in game, since all ships you fight are factory models, so I may just implement the estimate. Gas driven cannons (blowback reloaders) and different launch systems are all on the todo list (currently, staging systems are my main priority for techs to add in the future). Issue: Can't zoom in far enough to see what my missiles are doing. Makes it harder to experiment. What do you mean by this? In combat, or in design? If you mean in combat, you can zoom in to a single missile up close by selecting only that missile.
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Post by stranec on Sept 24, 2016 15:35:45 GMT
I second the request for Major Wishes #8: Spinal Weapons. I think a similar effect could be obtained by allowing the mounting angle of turrets to be changed. Even if the only other option to mounting them perpendicular to the ship's long axis was mounting them perpendicular to the armor at that point, it would allow more effective concentration of fire. One of the potential benefits of the tapered cylinder ship design is that it could be possible to have every turreted weapon face forward, presenting the smallest possible target while pointing every available weapon at a single enemy.
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Post by cardshark on Sept 24, 2016 18:06:09 GMT
allowing the mounting angle of turrets to be changed. Even if the only other option to mounting them perpendicular to the ship's long axis was mounting them perpendicular to the armor at that point, it would allow more effective concentration of fire. One of the potential benefits of the tapered cylinder ship design is that it could be possible to have every turreted weapon face forward, presenting the smallest possible target while pointing every available weapon at a single enemy. Am i understanding things properly when i read for a turret that the max turn angle, is, let's say, 70°, that it is from the vertical and that the weapon can not, in fact, aim directly parallel to the hull it is affixed to? What is the rationale for that when any turret or CIWS out there can do 90° and more ? I realize such turrets with two degrees of liberty have problems tracking near 0° from vertical, though.
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Post by aetreus on Sept 25, 2016 0:01:27 GMT
allowing the mounting angle of turrets to be changed. Even if the only other option to mounting them perpendicular to the ship's long axis was mounting them perpendicular to the armor at that point, it would allow more effective concentration of fire. One of the potential benefits of the tapered cylinder ship design is that it could be possible to have every turreted weapon face forward, presenting the smallest possible target while pointing every available weapon at a single enemy. Am i understanding things properly when i read for a turret that the max turn angle, is, let's say, 70°, that it is from the vertical and that the weapon can not, in fact, aim directly parallel to the hull it is affixed to? What is the rationale for that when any turret or CIWS out there can do 90° and more ? I realize such turrets with two degrees of liberty have problems tracking near 0° from vertical, though. Conventional Altitude/Azimuth turrets would be a big help. The tradeoff would come down to better tracking at low elevations, but high elevation mounts would require a larger turret and heavier structure to handle the recoil forces, and as noted gimbal lock at high angles.
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Post by cardshark on Sept 25, 2016 21:21:54 GMT
I decided to play the game of wishfull thinking as well, from simple-ish things that doesn't seem unreasonable to absolute long term magical lalaland of space fairies that grant all my wishes -Ingame notepad to take notes about what you did to beat a level. Or a way to save a log of your actions in a human readable way. "At time T position X,Y,Z performed acceleration along Vector V using so much dV" and so on. -Export/import ships and modules designs feature a la Kerbal -Ability to change our faction's flag. Dear god that green is ugly ^^ -Pause during battle to give orders (I would be very sad and more than a bit ashamed if someone tells me "it's already implemented you doofus") -A "Attempt to perform pass at X kilometers" order -A "Stagger Impact" button for missiles. It can be done manualy but doesn't really add much gameplay value, so why not make it more comfortable. -The ability to Allocate a given number of missiles/drones/ships from a fleet to a given target. (speaking of which, do you happen to know of a very serious wargame named Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations? It is way too complex to describe here but I am a huge fan of their interface and how to allocate weapons and missile to a target, or how you manage your systems, and i'm sure you could get a few good ideas out of it) -Real time button left of the one minute per turn one. Just for the sheer satisfaction of traveling through space real time (for exactly 5 minutes before getting bored) -Traditional azimuth/elevation turrets option -Abitility to add modules around other modules instead of necessarily stacking them -Ability to mount turrets on angled surfaces, yes, i do want my forward fire concentration lasership -More ships in space. It would feel livelier if there were civilian and overal third party traffic around -Campaign missions that reuse ships from one another, making necessary to be mindful of your ammunition expenditure. For now the metagame is way too much in favor of massive fleet of missiles and drones, and fleet actually meeting is quite the exception. -New sorts of missions. What if you have to pirate a cargo with a repurposed cargo ship, preparing your burn so that you can disable and board the target, and make your escape burn despite your appaling acceleration before the Space Guard can intervene? What if you play the space Guard and have to determine which ship is the pirate that you need to intercept among so many innocent civilians? -X4 sandbox with full resources solar-system-wide exploitation, space industrialisation colonization and conquest, and strategic resources management against AI opponents. Deep Space Industries and Planetray Resources, fighting for the supremacy in the asteroid belt! I told you I wanted the fairies to grant me wishes tl;dr: I love the game. Give me more ! MOOOOORE !
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Post by domfluff on Sept 26, 2016 20:45:17 GMT
It's a pretty common concern with tactical wargames, but any kind of strategic layer would be much appreciated here - even highly abstracted, having a reason to keep your ships in a reasonable state, or not to fire off all of your ammunition would be fantastic.
Not expecting a full dynamic multi-faction solar system war, but something to make you care about your hardware (or even crew) would be great.
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Post by princesskibble on Sept 26, 2016 21:30:05 GMT
A more complex system for scoring your performance on each level could be cool, knocking off points for injured astronauts, or adding points for conserved ammo and stuff like that. Also higher score the further under the cost and mass limits you are!
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acatalepsy
Junior Member
Not Currently In Space
Posts: 97
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 27, 2016 13:36:00 GMT
While we're putting stuff on a wishlist, I'll try to restrict myself to some pretty simple Quality of Life stuff.
- The ability to name modules. Plenty of times I'll have a component with a specific use (and properties for that use) intended that's not obvious from a quick glance, or want several variations on a similar design (with, for example, different turret properties on the same weapon) and the naming scheme (7mm 10 MW Railgun 2) is not helpful. - The ability to create new modules from the ship creation screen. This is especially frustrating with propellant tanks and radiators, where I realize I need a new tank/radiator for this design, and need to exit the ship builder, make the new design, and go back to the ship builder, but in general the ability to select "New Item" from the component select dropdown would be incredibly helpful.
I'll also chime in and second the orders and stuff as well as better missile behavior, but, you know, one thing at a time.
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Post by curiousepic on Sept 27, 2016 18:11:15 GMT
(Apologies for duplicates)
Improvement Suggestions * I've accidentally overshot opportunities by leaving the time/turn advancement at too high a setting. One way to counter this would be to, instead of having buttons to select the increment and then a button to advance time, simply let the increment button advance the time. This means the player is necessarily aware of which increment they're selecting. A labeled "future position" marker could be designated on orbit lines for each increment, omitting any shorter increments that would be overlapped at the current zoom level. * Move "Paused" and "Mission Successful/Failed" popups to the bottom of the screen or at least anywhere but the center. * Timestamps on Messages * Ability to set delays on flares (unless they can only be "lit" by the ship itself?) * Weapon range reference for a set target area, say... 1000m2 (100mx10m) listed when viewing the "weapons in use" or next to the weapon when viewing engaging ships/fleet view. * Order to (and/or default to) orient to present the slimmest radiator profile to the enemy * "Constellation designer" or otherwise an ability to more precisely and easily position ships/missiles/drones in a fleet relative to each other * Some way to view relative velocity of an enemy's upcoming interception with your fleet * Per-weapon targeting * Target center-of-area * Multi-target prioritization * AI vs AI in sandbox
Low-hanging fruit for graphics * More polys on structural beams * Some tubing connecting engine mounts, up to the interior of the ship * Increased laser flare brightness, if accurate * Depth cue for orbit lines (even just fading to 50% brightness at furthest point from camera)
Higher-hanging graphics improvements * Deformation of armor * Detection and removal or separation of bits of armor that have been "circumnavigated" by damage * A piece of geometry to stick at structural beam intersections * Radiators getting cut and floating free, continuing to glow, instead of vaporizing * IR imagery shaders at distance
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acatalepsy
Junior Member
Not Currently In Space
Posts: 97
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Post by acatalepsy on Sept 30, 2016 15:15:55 GMT
* Ability to set delays on flares (unless they can only be "lit" by the ship itself?) This is actually doable already, sort of. I have an "advanced flare", which is basically a nuclear missile with its warhead replaced by a flare and its fuel tank reduced in size so it has about 300 m/s dV. I can fire three of those at an incoming enemy swarm and detonate them manually for Instant Hilarity. More Turrets: Conventional turret designs and alternatives to reaction wheels for turret and gimbal actuation (reaction wheels can rapidly outstrip other power and mass requirements by a LOT when simple motorized or hydraulic actuators would work). This, but I'd add that the ability to retract weapons into armored holes when not in use is turning out to be more critical than I'd have thought. At extreme range, Sufficient Lasers tend to cripple a ship very quickly, where railguns are coilguns could be preserved for a high speed flyby by retracting them behind a half meter of basalt fiber and maybe a few centimeters of titanium just for good measure (or retract the armor when the weapon is firing, depending on the specific armor, weapon, and geometry).
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