Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

If the largest graser is 300 kt... is the BC-grade graser(second largest? third largest?) gonna be small enough to shoehorn into a LAC?

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

The largest grasers are not battlecruiser grasers, but dreadnought/superdreadnought grasers. Then comes battleship weapons, then battlecruiser weapons.

A dreadnought (not even a superdreadnought) took the fire of multiple (I think 4) enemy battlecruisers with no damage, but in return blew them all to pieces. There is a fairly large capability gap between BCs and ships of the wall.

Aren't LACS about 20,000 tons? That would make them 20kT, so you sure as hell can't fit a 300kT weapon in them.

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

No, you're not shoehorning a DN graser into a LAC. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif The BC grasers are smaller and much less effective. Not surprising considering that a BC is something like 10 times smaller than a DN..the advanced LACs still have to use different components though.

The HH Mod ships are mounting less weapons overall than the actual ships, just to keep things somewhat sane and avoid SE4 screaming in pain and crashing.

Phoenix-D

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

Re: LACs, thanks for the clarification! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Yeah, the game might not like 60+ weapons on an SD. XD

Are weapon platforms and sats going to be more useful than they were in the books, considering that SE4 probably cannot model cee-fractional missile strikes?

Will ringworlds/sphereworlds at tech levels waaaaay beyond the books be added in? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

No sphereworlds, no ringworlds.

"Are weapon platforms and sats going to be more useful than they were in the books, considering that SE4 probably cannot model cee-fractional missile strikes?"

Sats yes, WPs not likely. I still need to find a way around the "store 50000 missiles on a planet then launch them en-masse" problem..

Phoenix-D

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

I am a great fan of the honour harrington books and whilst I have kept quiet so far, I would like to contribute sensibly to this thread, albeit that I have no abilities as a modder.

I think the size of the drones aka missiles is going to be the keypoint here. IIRC the 'Fearless' in "On Basilisk Station" had storage for about 120 missiles - for the storage for these to fit on a light cruiser, you obviously need to massivley downsize the size of the drones (and possbily use fighter size components on them).

My next thought is that this could work for laser head missiles, in addtion to the warhead and the engines (I think you would need to design missile specific double/triple speed engines) you could add combat sensors to replicate the effect of penaids, and ECM to reflect the effect of jammers, and if you could stack these compoenents, that would allow you to create the pure jammer missile concept Rafe Cardones nailed the Sirius with.

[ August 09, 2002, 14:28: Message edited by: Growltigga ]

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

ECM components will stack if they have different family numbers.

You should probably make each successive ECM component provide diminishing returns.

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

SJ, I didn't know this. Does that mean that I can put ECM I AND ECM II on my vessels and that they will stack up?

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">No. It is because they belong to the same family number and only have different roman numerical numbers. To make them stacck, you must edit components.txt file.

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

"I think the size of the drones aka missiles is going to be the keypoint here. IIRC the 'Fearless' in "On Basilisk Station" had storage for about 120 missiles - for the storage for these to fit on a light cruiser, you obviously need to massivley downsize the size of the drones (and possbily use fighter size components on them)."

Correct.. and remember that there are different sized missiles. That may get me out of this jam actually. I'll make the high-damamging capital missiles pretty big, as well as the warheads, but restrict all the warheads to one per drone so you can't just load up on the more efficient per KT smaller missiles. Combine that with increased missile storage space, increased population size, reduced planetary storage, and BIG troops, and this may just work..

"My next thought is that this could work for laser head missiles, in addtion to the warhead and the engines (I think you would need to design missile specific double/triple speed engines) you could add combat sensors to replicate the effect of penaids, and ECM to reflect the effect of jammers, and if you could stack these compoenents, that would allow you to create the pure jammer missile concept Rafe Cardones nailed the Sirius with."

Already doing it..also pure armor missiles, etc. The only problem is there's no way I can see to control when they're launched.

ECM abilities do stack, and I'm using that to my advantage. The impeller wedge components do a lot of things for the ship- and they give a 65% ECM bonus EACH. But each hull has a -100% to-hit built into it. So you loose the wedge and you're a sitting duck in more ways than one.

Phoenix-D

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Phoenix,

Why Direct Fire warheads instead of contact ones? Is this something that fits with the HH universe, or a workaround for some problem you came across trying to implement the missle drones.

What do you mean by "the Drones get in each others way"? I can see a hundred drones with direct fire weapons milling about could be a problem, since they dont' stack like fighters. Is that what you mean? I wonder if maybe my first question has the answer for the second. If you change the warheads back to ramming warheads don't you eliminate the problem of them getting in each others way?

Your other three problems stated in your post aren't really problems for the mod I am considering.

The store 50,000 drones and launch them at the first fleet that attacks would be a problem. However, it would actually be a problem for attacker and defender as well, since once launched the drones cannot be recovered a simple single ship probing defenses would clear out any stockpile of drone missles and these two things would cancel each other out and make the defenders less likely to attempt this tactic, don't you think?

Geoschmo

[ August 09, 2002, 20:15: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

If you want to use them, I uploaded some design name files under the mods section from the honorverse. Just to reiterate, I make no claims on their completeness, but you might be able to use them as a starting place when you are ready. Or, you can just throw them in your game! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

"Why Direct Fire warheads instead of contact ones? Is this something that fits with the HH universe, or a workaround for some problem you came across trying to implement the missle drones."

Ramming is not affected by ECM; HH universe missiles are very much affected by ECM. So the contact warheads are range-1 single shot. The HH books also have a weapon called the laser-head missile; it's a bomb-driven laser mounted on a missile. Missile flies to within 40k kilometers, denonates the bomb which fires the laser at the target.. it's also supposed to destroy the missile, but I can't make SE4 do that.

"What do you mean by "the Drones get in each others way"? I can see a hundred drones with direct fire weapons milling about could be a problem, since they dont' stack like fighters. Is that what you mean? I wonder if maybe my first question has the answer for the second. If you change the warheads back to ramming warheads don't you eliminate the problem of them getting in each others way?"

No, you don't. The HH universe also has ships firing *obscene* numbers of missiles to saturate the enemy point defense. I've cut that down by at least a factor of 10, but in a major fleet battle there will STILL be hundreds of drones flying around; even before they get to the target they get in each other's way because they can't stack. I suppose I could use fighters for the missiles instead of drones, but then I wouldn't be able to do another component, that is light attack craft.

"Your other three problems stated in your post aren't really problems for the mod I am considering."

Good..

"The store 50,000 drones and launch them at the first fleet that attacks would be a problem. However, it would actually be a problem for attacker and defender as well, since once launched the drones cannot be recovered a simple single ship probing defenses would clear out any stockpile of drone missles and these two things would cancel each other out and make the defenders less likely to attempt this tactic, don't you think?"

Perhaps. We'll have to see I guess..

Phoenix-D

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Ah, that makes sense then. I am not trying to make missles suceptable to ECM, but I am going to be giving them ECM components themselves to protect them from PDC some, so contact warheads should work fine for me.

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Hmmm, well that doesn't work for me cause then they can be recovered after combat, and I don't want that. I guess I will have to trust that with the contact warheads they don't get too much in each others way on the way to ramming their targets. Too bad drones can't stack though.

Geoschmo

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

Uhm. Maybe have drones take up an obscene amount of space, and have the amount of storage offered by missile storage greatly increased? (Of course, that means you could then use missile storage to haul troops. O_o; No such thing as a free lunch...)

How will missile pods be modelled?

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

How are missile pods going to be implemented?

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

As of now I don't know.

Phoenix-D

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

Drone launcher with its own cargo space? Make it take up less space than it actually holds - call it a missile pod?

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

Eh, maybe. The problem is that doesn't really accuratly represent the pods. Right now the missile tubes hold 1 shot each. If I make a "missile pod" that is, say, the size of 4 missiles but holds and shoots 5, people will use *just* the pods, and fire multiple missiles out of the "pod".

Phoenix-D

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

unfortunately its probably impossible to simulate the books perfectly.

If limiting number of components on a ship is working correctly that would help , then you could restrict its use as far as how many can be on a ship and make them cheaper than normal launchers. Several different components could be created limiting the size of ship that they can be on. Each pod component holding a few more missiles(drones) to simulate numerous pods on bigger ships.

how about component destroyed on use? maybe this would encourage using more than just the pods, set the value for the number of missile(drones) being launched at maximum number when fired. I.e. 5. Repairing the Pod could be considered part of rearming them. they should take up little space and be cheap however.

Another thought is find a way using the new mounts capabilities coming in patch 2 and do a combination of abilities and mounts.

[ August 14, 2002, 00:13: Message edited by: AJC ]

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

Thinking about the Missile Pod - How about creating a component that is really quite large cumbersome and somewhat pricey if its just placed on a ship.... Until you put it on a mount.

make a mount specifically for the missile pod that reduces its size/cost - the explanation that its a mounted pod. limit the size of a pod component by hull size.

The size of the Pod component could be a representation of multiple pods. Limit the pod to one per hull and increase fire power of the pod by 25% per ship hull size or something along those lines.

The mount(s) can be easily designed with the upcoming features for mounts in the next release!

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

"increase fire power of the pod by 25% per ship hull size or something along those lines."

Cannot be done; you can't change the number of drones launched with a mount, and you especially can't change the damage done by a drone by modding it's launcher.

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

Little off topic: Do you guys know that "On Basilisk Station" and "The Honor of the Queen" are available free for download from http://www.baen.com/library/ ?

The Free Library is hosted by the official Baen Books publishing company. It is not pirate.

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

Yep. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Could you model SD(P)s by creating a component called, oh, "Hollow Core Pod Launcher" that's limited to 1 per ship, takes up a huge amount of room, but can also launch /and/ store a very large number of drones?

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

"Could you model SD(P)s by creating a component called, oh, "Hollow Core Pod Launcher" that's limited to 1 per ship, takes up a huge amount of room, but can also launch /and/ store a very large number of drones?"

Still doesn't seem to model them well, but it's the best shot yet.

(yes, I'm still working on this. Slowly. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif )

Phoenix-D

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

Woohoo!

*bumps while he's at it*

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

Funny. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

At the moment I'm re-working for the patch. Testing out different styles- haven't decided if the bigger energy weapons should just be mounts, or actual components. Leaning toward components, because then I can do other things with the mounts.

Phoenix-D

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

*beats head against desk*

SE4 is not liking me. The update in short is that I have very little done. I am running into MAJOR problems. Right now I'm just trying to get energy-only SDs up and running.

Se4 is not liking this at all. I have two SDs, identical designs, in the sim. They have:
1 bridge
5 CQ/LS
supply storage
4 1000kt Grasers doing 1000 damage, Quad to shields.
a number of Sidewall generators that give 1200 shield points and have 1200 Crystalline ability.

what happens most often is the SDs fire, and can't penetrate the shields becase I've made them too powerful. OK, fine.. but occasionally they will breach the shields, damage the components within..and stop firing. Neither ship will fire a shot for the rest of the battle, despite fully recharged weapons and good to-hit chances. this is on tactical, as well.

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

If anybody will ever make HH ship set, here is
my model (128X128 BMP) of HMS Fearless:

1033490793.bmp

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

Heads up for lovers of the book series. The next novel (War of Honor) is in stores in hardcover. And for those who don't have the previous books it comes with a cd will ALL of the previous books on it!! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/shock.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">No, it's more like drug pushing. "The first ones are free..." http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

War of Honor was good. I like it.

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

I'm not familiar with the Honor Harrington series. Tell me about the story and technology.

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

Well, I obviously like it a lot. You can read first two books ,On Basilisk Station and Honor Of The Queen, free on-line :
http://www.baen.com/library/

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

For the lack of responces by others I post a short review of the first H.H. novel that I found onthe net. I hope it will heat up your interest http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif :

"So far there are eight books in this series. Each one is perfect and while they could be read independent of each other I would recommend tackling them in sequence if you want to maximize your enjoyment. The eight titles are, "On Basilisk Station", "The Honor of the Queen", "The Short Victorious War", "Field of Dishonor", "Flag in Exile", "Honor Among Enemies", "In Enemy Hands" and "Ashes of Victory".
The feel of the books is quite similar to David Feintuch's Nicholas Seafort series. It is set in the far distant future amongst a competing variety of human empires. Each empire controls an area of space including its stars and planets. Honor Harrington is a member of the Royal Manticoran Navy, charged with the protection of the realm in service to the queen. In the first book Honor is a commander in charge of a smallish space craft. She has been sent to purgatory, (Basilisk Station), as an indirect result of physically rejecting the advances of one of the aristocracy while in the academy, years before.
To make matters worse, her ship is carrying an experimental weapon, to the exclusion of most others, which has just amply shown its shortcomings during Navy maneuvers. Her crew is embarrassed by their recent performance in the exercise and many of them blame Honor for this as well as the posting to Basilisk. Furthermore, when her ship arrives at Basilisk her old enemy is the Captain in charge and promptly leaves the system for questionable repairs, dumping the responsibility of the whole area in Honor's lap with only one small ship to carry it out.
The rest of the story takes us through Honor's efforts to turn things around in the face of an ever worsening situation. We learn to love her as she holds true to the best principles that most people can only talk about. The other characters are well defined and the details of the politics and human dynamics are smooth. A further pleasure is the well thought out military scenarios. The weaponry and craft performance has been designed by Weber to provide a diverse yet plausible array of military confrontations.
Luckily for us, the readers, this future has made available a medical treatment that extends the lifetime of its citizens many fold. For this reason I look forward to many more novels from David Weber, leading me further into the life of Honor Harrington."

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

BUMP. I say, BUMP!

I have not been on this forum in ages, im down to one pbw game that I am actually playing in, and I have no free time. I have a GritTech mod 2/3s of the way to an alpha release, and will probably be begging for help once it is stable enough to play.

but unlike the Stones, time is not on my side. I dont have time to play my game, work on my mod, or read this forum.

But my mind keeps wandering back to the HH mod, and hoping that in another month I will again be able to play lots and lots of SE4. Where is the HH mod? any luck? still progressing? Is there any community support if P-D has gotten weary of beating his head against it? This mod sounds awesome! I want to see it, and play it!

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

I'm having difficulties, and decided not to post any more until I have a playable Version. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

I'm also waiting on the next patch, because of the bug with Quad to Shields and Quarter to Shields weapons. The energy weapons are all Quad to Shields, and the Energy TORPS are quarter, to simulate the energy torps not having much effect on ships with sidewalls. However, a bug in SE4 means that these weapons do 4 times and 1/4 times their listed damage *all the time*, instead of just to shields. That and the ships keep behaving quite oddly in my tests, and I haven't resolved how I'm modeling the laser-head missiles.

Phoenix-D

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

The shield damage factors are supposed to be fixed in the next patch, thankfully.

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

Which is why I said I was waiting for the next patch http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

The truth of the matter is I got frustrated, and haven't more than fiddled with it since then. Semester break is coming up though, so I'll try to get something done.

Phoenix-D

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

Put a fork in it, it's done.

I have now exausted my abilities to work with SE4 on this. If anyone else wants to try, you're welcome.

The problem is the disparity in ship sizes. Light Cruisers are 200kt, SDs are 8000kt. This means I have to use mounts, in order to keep the space used for drives and brige, LS, etc fair.

SE4's mount system rounds down. This means with the size reductions I have to use, many components end up being zero KT in size. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif

Another problem is the SDs behave oddly. I filled them with just my drive system and the normal components, and they had the problems I described earlier in the thread- fire one salvo then refuse to do much of anything. Knocking the size down to BBs, and everything works fine..so I have to conclude these 8000kt behemoths are just too much for SE4 to handle. 17 shield generators, 40 Armor components, 30 APB XIIIs, 5000 shield regeneration from damage, etc etc etc..too much stuff for the engine to track.

Phoenix-D

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

Phoenix-D, the grit tech mod should be out in beta next week. you should take a look. I shamelessly cribbed laser missiles from HH fiction, but would be happy to replace them with something else, if it treads on this mod.

anyway, the point of my post is this: i have ships from 200-10000KT, and handle both the engines and the armor with mounts. I dont have any 0KT components due to size reduction, and the scale seems to work out OK. I did have to implement dry-dock shipyards to get things built, but I wanted it that way anyhoo. I dont know if I will end up having the problems with things not firing in strageic combat, as you describe. If so, I will work arround it with weapon mounts for larger ships.

I am guessing that you might be running into problems with silly numbers of missiles and drones being launched into combat, and the game not wanting to fire any more. I would love to take a look at what you have got so far, if you upload the mod somewhere.

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

"Phoenix-D, the grit tech mod should be out in beta next week. you should take a look. I shamelessly cribbed laser missiles from HH fiction, but would be happy to replace them with something else, if it treads on this mod."

Which is gleefully treading on someone else's work? No way, no problem.

"anyway, the point of my post is this: i have ships from 200-10000KT, and handle both the engines and the armor with mounts. I dont have any 0KT components due to size reduction, and the scale seems to work out OK."

Anything that would end up being less than 1 kt in size get's round down. My 50kt Life support modules end up as 0kt on DDs, because 1% of 50 is .5, rounds to 0. On light cruisers, which take a 2% scale mount, they are 1kt in size. Any component of 20kt original size or less gets chopped to zero though.

"I am guessing that you might be running into problems with silly numbers of missiles and drones being launched into combat, and the game not wanting to fire any more. I would love to take a look at what you have got so far, if you upload the mod somewhere."

This was with pure beam weaponry, only. There's not a lot -too- the mod; just made the bridge, LS, and CQ bigger, added the two drives I mentioned, and changed the ship sizes.

Phoenix-D

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Question: Why do you want the Crew Quarters and Life Support components to have mounts? I'd think the SE4 standard "x-amount required for this Y sized ship" would suffice.

It sounds like you're taking the components and scalling them down. The mount system in SE4, actually came about during the first Beta period, was designed to take components from the standard size and move up in range/power, not down. We weren't thinking of using mounts to "minatureize" components.

It seems to me a HH MOD could use the "Neutonian" system from the B5 MOD for the engines, a modified mount system for weapons and maybe side-wall generators. The only thing that'd be hard to do is the "fog of war" since SE4 doesn't have any.

I've only just began to read the HH books, actually reading "A Short Victorious War" right now. So I appologize now if these questions are obvious or dumb.

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

"Question: Why do you want the Crew Quarters and Life Support components to have mounts? I'd think the SE4 standard "x-amount required for this Y sized ship" would suffice."

Because the smallest ship is 100kt and the biggest ship is 8000kt. To keep the amount of LS and CQ fair would involve a LOT of clicking.

"It sounds like you're taking the components and scalling them down. The mount system in SE4, actually came about during the first Beta period, was designed to take components from the standard size and move up in range/power, not down. We weren't thinking of using mounts to "minatureize" components."

Which is where this problem comes from. However, using the mounts to scale things up doesn't work. Why would the player even bother? I suppose I could make them ridiclously expensive and use the mount to scale down, then hope I didn't run into the same problem..

"It seems to me a HH MOD could use the "Neutonian" system from the B5 MOD for the engines, a modified mount system for weapons and maybe side-wall generators. The only thing that'd be hard to do is the "fog of war" since SE4 doesn't have any."

See problem about ship sizes. This also ends up running into the 255 MP limit, which drasticlly cuts down on the amount of speed captial ships can have. And I still don't know what the problem with the SDs is.

Phoenix-D

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Too bad fighters can't warp... You could make the small ships "fighters" and start the "Ships of the wall" at Cruisers or Heavy Cruisers.

Since fighters and ships have different techs that would have helped on that situation too.

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

I need the fighters for LACs though, so even that wouldn't have helped much.

Phoenix-D

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">There is a new one, "War of Honor"
Where can I get a copy of the Honor H. Mod?

killer out

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Make there be a "Large Armor" thet = 10 normal armor
same with shiedls crew corters etc.

killer out

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

The AI will try to use the most recent=lowest component in the list, even if it means squeezing a 500kt life support component into a 150kt escort. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: Honor Harrington Mod Discussion
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Well, if that's the only way, I'd live with clicking. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif