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Post by Hicks on Dec 19, 2017 18:01:33 GMT
Soooooo it turns out that is the ship's shadow on the editor's walls. whoops. weird that it is reversed.
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Post by Hicks on Dec 19, 2017 17:45:42 GMT
So, I'm having a few problems with this update. performance took a hit again, which is understandable because i game on a potato-puter, and it is probably either the shadows or polygonal armor that is doing it, but even beyond that when i open the ship editor the game crashes after a few seconds. After 2 crashes I just clicked on the first ship i could to advance to the next screen, and then this happened: not only was the actual ship editor a slide show of poor frame rate, but why is there another ship off in the distance?. It's pointing the wrong way! And it is different than the one I opened, see how it has fewer radiators. weird. edit: Turns out I was right about the shadows, my potato-puter cannot handle them at all. the frame rate vastly improved when i turned them off. still a neat feature to have, even if I can't enable them.
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Post by Hicks on Dec 8, 2017 10:28:32 GMT
So... yeah. Raise capitol for the developer we all wish we could have been, who created the game we always wanted.
And a question for your post: would you buy a CoaDE 2 that did absolutely nothing to CoaDE, everything is as much the same as possible, except it also had stable multiplayer?
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Post by Hicks on Nov 18, 2017 13:15:54 GMT
So let's circle back.
Firstly, and I cannot stress this enough, space is already militarized and literally everything that is both in orbit and has dV is a goddamn kinetic weapon. Have y'all ever played vanilla Kerbal Space Program? Literally everything is a goddamn missile that can be rammed into anything else.
The part about space piracy using cold gas missiles placed by hydrogen steamers is as crazy as it is crazy expensive. What space pirates actually do is hack anything that is remote controlled and has dV to use as a weapon to ransom vessels in transit with the threat of attack.
And back to infantry; the only infantry I can forsee are actual swashbuckling space pirates. And they don't want the cargo, they want the ship, as undamaged as possible. And that means they are the only group of people who actually want to room clear their target's habitat module. They can't irradiated it with a nuke, because then the ship glows and is worthless; they can't blast it and totally wreck the habitat module, that's where all the computers and controls to operate the vessel are located and an uncontrollable ship is worthless. The cargo on a cargo ship is peanuts compared to the fission reactor, reaction mass, reaction tanks, radiators, and MPD, and will probably be spaced ASAP just to increase accelleration and dV. An actual ship possesses all the resources actually needed to continue to live in space without resupply or access to the precision spare parts needed to repair and replace all the shit that could break down in the deep black. And furthermore, a ship or ship parts are worth far more than their mass in gold to anyone else in space. There's always a ready buyer for ship parts who either dosen't want to or dosen't care to ask if a part is legal, they need reaction mass now, or a reactor now, or a radiator now, or would you rather wait another 3 months for an air scrubber system or whatever from Mars to arrive?
TLDR: anything in space with dV is a weapon, and pirates are hackers who both repurpose orbital craft with dV as missiles to extort money and are literally the only people who would want to have an infantry incursion in your habitat module so they can rid their new spaceship of all this unnecessary meat cluttering it up.
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Post by Hicks on Nov 6, 2017 13:05:36 GMT
The point is that the first space armed conflict will be infantry based. Like... duh. The first war not fought on earth won't be be a war so much as a rebellion, and it will be fought in either a dirt side colony or space station by people living inside the habitat. The war will as brutal as it is short. And then if the victors haven't pissed off earth in their destructive rampage they live, otherwise the die of either being cut off from earth's resources or die from exposure after earth breaches their habitat with a missile strike. So will go the first few rebellions until a colony is self sufficient enough that it can do 3 things: exist without resupply from earth, intercept missiles from earth with munitions whose entire process of manufacture was without any support from earth, and build and deploy those munitions faster than earth can send missiles.
Thereafter, wars between planets will be fought in space, and the loser of the ultimate high ground gets nuked, repeatedly, from orbit. I still believe the space marine will exist, if only to ensure those who surrender stay suppressed during the surrendered takeover. But battalions of infantry in space are just not a thing in the near future solar wars. You can have specialized remote operators to pilot combat drones into stations, and they'll probably be guarded by armed and armored personell as a last line of defense should everything go pearshaped and their soon to be prisoners decide to instead mount a counter attack. But the winner of the ultimate high ground ultimatly holds all the cards and only ever offers and accepts surrender to asuage their own consience; and any infantry counter attack ends with the ship (already at a distance from the habitat or in orbit) perforating the habitat with lasers or kinetics or nuking them from orbit.
It gets weird if earth loses the ultimate high ground, because the colony can't send the infantry necessary to actually pacify earth. Earth is simply too big and too habitable. Earth would either acquiesce to the colony's demands or every single population center on earth would be systematically nuked until every identifiable means of production was destroyed.
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Post by Hicks on Nov 3, 2017 7:49:13 GMT
Luna. Mostly for the much faster response if something goes wrong. Space us deadly, but at least you won't starve to death waiting for rescue, and it is far easier to stretch the life support for a week if you're on the moon than the months it would take to be rescued from the belt. Plus, industrializing the moon would make it competitive with asteroid mining reletively cheaply with current technology; a lunar space elevator can be made out of Kevlar.
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Post by Hicks on Nov 1, 2017 19:15:10 GMT
Hicks : The missile is a one-way spaceship. There are certain things you can do to a missile's drive to extract more performance because you only need to function for a short period of time - even if the design is a perfect copy of a spaceship drive. This might include running at an unsafe temperature, using corrosive propellants, removing radiation protection of emergency shutdown mechanisms and so on. No? Missiles have 4 advantages over starships, they usually present a much smaller crossectional area and are therefore harder to accurately target at long range, their thrusters may accellerate faster than a crew could survive, they can use self destructive weapons without killing an onboard crew, and they can be launched from outside of a target's direct fire defence envelope. For these 4 concrete advantages they can suffer light speed lag if their controller is far enough away, and are more difficult to armor because they have a lower reaction mass to payload ratio for the same thickness of armor. But you're talking about fusion rockets, and I've yet to see a realistic design that is 100% efficient at rejecting all thruster waste heat with the rocket exaust. That means massive radiator wings for a fusion thruster, which favors the ship over the missile for the remass:payload dV ratio and balloons the targetable cross-sectional area of the missile. To mitigate that the missile would use a casaba nuclear lance to increase its effective destructive envelope. And then it's a question of engineering if the space ship defends itself with a big ass laser or goes back to the 60s and rapid fires a cloud of defensive casaba nuclear lances from conventional cannons or coil guns, either from the ship itself or more likely a defensive drone. As an aside, Casaba nuclear lances. Gosh, how great would it be for them to be in CoaDE? I'm pretty sure the meta would shift to drone blast launchers filled with ejectable nuclear lances.
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Post by Hicks on Nov 1, 2017 11:51:48 GMT
CatastrophicReEntry: That dosen't seem to pass the smell test. If both the ship and missile have the same type of thruster, then reletive dV is always dependent on the ratio of reaction mass to payload regardless of the size of the platform.
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Post by Hicks on Oct 31, 2017 7:15:30 GMT
Session 2 is done and so far the running theme is Enderminion gets on the wrong side of the popo an just barely gets exiled forever from the world forever instead of executed. But that's just life over a world with a law level D in Traveller.
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Post by Hicks on Oct 30, 2017 18:40:02 GMT
Lol. You're gonna need all the help you can get. I ran the numbers, and there's at least 700 crew on that cargo hauler. That's noncombatant personell whose sole job is to make sure the ship dosen't explode. Alone? You're gonna have your work cut out for ya.
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Post by Hicks on Oct 30, 2017 4:46:19 GMT
Hexcrawl the StarsThis sample map is too small for my tastes, so my game uses one 16 times bigger and prettier.So. I'm GMing a Mongoose Traveller (1st edition) game on roll20.net. THE DISCORD IS HERE. Traveller is a far future space table top roleplaying hexcrawler, and this is the open invite. I have an absolutely massive sector map and worked for... 19(?) hours to make an Excell file that parses the 12 pages of coded world's you can explore and adventure through. This is an open invite to be a player at nearly anytime I have access to a computer; PM me on Discord if you're game. Attached are the campaign's 12 page pdf of sector worlds and a custom Excel file that can quickly expand and explain them. I can help with character creation questions and access to rulebooks. If you're interested, come on over to Roll20 so i can set up a character sheet for you; I look foreward to seeing how you manage to scrape enough credits together for your ship to not fall apart for the next seven hundred and twenty hours.
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Post by Hicks on Jul 26, 2017 10:22:43 GMT
Oh well. Next time I'll armor the sides against lasers and decrease the reload time of the cannon.
Too bad I can't play CoaDE anymore. My computer is a potato and while the game worked in December pretty well every patch makes it chug slower and slower. I cold barely even open any mission involving a gas giant (too many moons) and now it is just unplayable after the target prediction update. The same happened with Space Engineers: worked ok to start with but now it requires a direct X 11 compatible graphics card to even open, and my potato does not have a graphics card.
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Post by Hicks on Jul 21, 2017 0:31:02 GMT
Neither methane snow nor meteor rain nor contraction heat nor solar flare nor gloom of tidally locked night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed high density rounds.
We have the internet, we have radio transmission and we have plenty enough advanced cryptology to support it, yet we still use physical FIAT funds, require hand signature and every form in triplicate. Who said this'd be any different in the space age?
The idea is quite simple. What is the fastest, most reliable and most economically viable way of getting a standardized packet of high priority mail to and from the Moon? Other bodies would be a bigger nut to crack, so it's better to keep it simple and mostly three-body.
Would Lunar Post require specially designed containers/tugs for incoming parcels, or would they simply ship their mail along with passenger shuttles? Would it be faster to expedite high priority mail in dedicated containers launched on a free-return trajectory to be captured by either an orbital station or dropped into the ocean/mare? And how difficult would it be to ship from the largely equatorially inhabited Earth to one of the planned Moon habitats near its poles?
It's all dependent on infrastructure. But anything that couldn't be faxed will go by either mass driver or rocket and sorted by G tolerance, with the lowest tolerance being the most expensive. High G tolerance mail is loaded into a thruster/heatshield/parachute armature and fired by a mass driver from the earth to low lunar orbit and deorbited by the small chemical thruster. The unfurled cannister is repacked with return mail and fired by a mass driver into an extreamly low earth orbit, where the heat shield/parachute let it land in a designated pickup zone. Technically moon to earth mail is cheaper than the reverse, but will be limited to the number of canisters sent by terrestrial mass drivers. Rocket mail will be far more expensive, but will piggy-back on personal transfers from earth to the moon.
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Post by Hicks on Jun 29, 2017 12:43:22 GMT
So yeah, the sword and board in mine. I actually submitted 2 different ships; the other one had a hueg 1Gw laser turret with matching MPD, but that was when there weren't enough ships to fill the board.
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Post by Hicks on Jun 22, 2017 10:15:29 GMT
What matters most: size, mass, firepower, thrust, dV, or expense?
The answer is victory. All other metrics are irrelevent compared to victory. I would shun the largest, smallest, fastest, slowest, cheapest, most expensive, and everything else in favor of a ship that wins, and so should you.
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