New, alternate means of modelling QNP in v1.78

[Pax]

I was reading Fyron's Modding 101 site the other day, specifically the chapter on QNP propulsion written by Suicide Junkie, and a thought struck me (quite forcefully, in fact I think it may have left a mark! ).

With the new compenhancements.txt capabilities, QNP effects can be produced via mounts, rather than just having to (as an example, in pre-Gold P&N) add 30 or 40 maximum-tech engines to your shiny new 10,000kT-displacement Battle Moon *just* to get a speed of one!

Here's the gist of it. Suppose we decide that 20kT of engine will moe 100kT of ship, at a speed equal to the engines rated MP output. IOW, a single 10kT engine that makes 3 movement points, willmove a 100kT ship at a speed of 3. That's the basic "Scale" for this example.

Now, in the mod I'm slowly working on, I've changed the ships a bit; the classes will have the following names/masses:

Escort, 100kT;
Frigate, 200kT;
Destroyer, 400kT;
Heavy Destroyer, 600kT;
Light Cruiser, 1000kT;
Battlecruiser, 1250kT;
Battleship, 1500kT;
Dreadnaught, 2000kT;

Now, here's the trick: the engien is HUGE in it's raw form, but, it's also not something anyoen will ever willingly use. It masses 1000kT, and costs ludicrous amounts of resources. Sounds silly,right? Wait ...

... we script a mount, specific to each class of ship (minimum and maximum vehicle sizes set to include only ONE class of ship per mount). A reduction in cost and size is set up for each mount -- bringing the engine down to the 20:100 ration we want.

The Escort, for example, would have a mount that reduced engine size and cost by 98% ... to 20kT.

The 1000kT Cruiser would need a 200kT engine, so it gets an 80% size reduction.

All the way up to the Dreadnaught, which at 2000kT, would need an engine that massed 400kT ... thus, it gets a 60% reduction.

Now, mind, I'm sure osme of you are wondering why the engine component in raw form isn't just sized for the biggest ship class. Well, at least in my mod, I'll have other, potentially-larger ships available with the rght racial trait, so ...

Also, the list above isn't all-inclusive; it omits colony ships, transports, carriers, and so on.

Plus 1000kT is easy to figure reductions for.

based on the above list, here's what each engine would be, size-wise:

Escort, 100kT; engine = 20kT; reduction = 98%
Frigate, 200kT; engine = 40kT; reduction = 96%
Destroyer, 400kT; engine = 80; reduction = 92%
Heavy Destroyer, 600kT; engine = 120; reduction = 88%
Cruiser, 800kT; engine = 160; reduction = 84%
Cruiser, 1000kT; engine = 200; reduction = 80%
Battlecruiser, 1250kT; engine = 250; reduction = 75%
Battleship, 1500kT; engine = 300; reduction = 70%
Dreadnaught, 2000kT; engine = 400; reduction = 60%

Now, this can be either with or without a 1-per-ship limit; if you want all ships with a given engine to move at the same speed (I don't personally recommend it, except perhaps for mods aimed at newbie players), make all hulls allow only 1 engine.

Personally, I'd recommend allowign 40% to 60% of a hull to be engine ... since the above ratio works on a 20% of hull ratio, 60% gives a better spread of possible speeds (1, 2, or 3 times the rated MP).

Now, a 100kT Escort with a trio of 3MP engines moves at 9, for only 60kT of it's mass; a 2,000kT Dreadnaught can only make the same speed if it mounts 1200kT of engine (!!).

Such an approach might actually work very well in certain genres -- the star Wars genre for instance, whee the Executor-class Super Star Destroyer has several custom engines, eachof which ALONE outmasses an entire normal-sized Star Destroyer! (Hint for non-SW geeks, the Executor was Vader's personal command ship, and is the big ship that crashes into the RotJ DeathStar 2 during the final battle).

So. Thoughts; sugestions; praise; high-velocity rotten fuit and vegetables?

[ August 20, 2002, 08:22: Message edited by: Pax ]

[Nodachi]

With the new compenhancements.txt capabilities, QNP effects can be produced via mounts, rather than just having to (as an example, in pre-Gold P&N) add 30 or 40 maximum-tech engines to your shiny new 10,000kT-displacement Battle Moon *just* to get a speed of one!

Yup, and if you weren't careful you'd run slam into an error by giving a ship more than 255 movement points.

I think you've come up with an outstanding idea! With a system like this modders can set speed limits at whatever level they wish for thier mod and still maintain the QNP proportions throughout ship sizes, all without ever hitting that error.

Damn good work!

[Puke]

[quote]Originally posted by Nodachi:

Damn good work!

i'll say. and flexible, too! this would let you create dedicated capital ship drives, that are too big to fit in a small craft, even with reduction. thus giving extra edge to big guys.

you could even combine this with the QNP principals, tweaking the size reduction to compensate for an engines-per-move number. you could still keep the max number of engines under, say, 15. then you could gain some extra push by dropping a capital ship engine into a smaller hull (and taking up 2/3s of its mass).

edit: example below

1000KT engine, 1mp
100KT ship, 1mp/move
1% mass for 100KT ship mount, = 10KT engine and 1 move

2000KT ship, 10mp/move (note, not a 1:1 scale)
10% mass for 2000KT ship mount = 100KT engine and 0.1 move

7500 KT engine, 10mp
scales to 75KT to push a 100KT ship 10 moves or 750KT to push a 2000KT ship 1 move.

obviously these numbers can be fudged with, and im not sure that this is even worth doing.. but it might bear more thought. the original idea might be better in its pure form..

[ August 20, 2002, 12:14: Message edited by: Puke ]

[Nodachi]

*Bump*

No other comments?

[Baron Munchausen]

Very good idea! This 'open source' pooling of ideas is what has made SE work out to be such a great game even though MM hasn't got the ability to fully develop it. There's just no way he would have had the time to develop and play balance all the fancy options he has programmed into the game. With clever ideas like this, and lots of 'hobby' players testing for themselves, we're making it into quite a nice game.

[jimbob]

Well, yeah, now you can have basemoons running around with 3, 4, and more movement by using the "movement bonus" type movement instead of the "movement points" type of propulsion. You can abandon QNP, only to re-introduce it in the ship mounts.

I was thinking it would be great to introduce an Ancient Tech technology tree that offered non-Newtonian movement so that large ships could by-pass the Range Check Error. Then I was going to use the 'max ship size' mount limitation to allow the creation of a few smaller non-Newtonian drives. Any takers?

[Puke]

i was thinking that this would be a great way to modle QNP for bonus movement, as well as for combat movement.

[Pax]

You don't have to revert to bonus movement (one of the aspects of propulsion in SE4 I never did like overmuch).

Specify a movement-point rate for each engien type; then, specify that all ships require 1 engine to move. Now, one engine component will -always- produce the same number of movement points, regardless of what hull it's mounted in (like stock SE4).

HOWEVER, more akin to QNP-mods, more and more of the ship will be used up, to maintain that same speed. Then you can reintroduce pure-bonus-move c0omponents (like Solar Sails), similarly adjusted for mass relative to the hull in question.

Also, you can impose an ever-decreasing speed limit by specifying an ever-dwindling maximum number of engines allowed ... say, all adding up to generally the same total tonnage, representing the biggest engine array that can be built.

Thus, given the same mass of engine, smaller ships will move faster ... and with an upper ceiling, the bigger ships cannot simply spend more and more of THEIR space, to keep up with smaller ships *determined* to go faster.

[Baron Munchausen]

Be aware that this will have the side-effect of making engine-destroying weapons much less effective against larger ships. Some may think this is 'logical' since larger ships would have larger engines. Some may not like it, though. Something to consider while 'balancing' your changes.

[Pax]

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
Be aware that this will have the side-effect of making engine-destroying weapons much less effective against larger ships. Some may think this is 'logical' since larger ships would have larger engines. Some may not like it, though. Something to consider while 'balancing' your changes.

Change the structural damage resistane at a slightly different rate than the size, so that damage resistance increases half as fast as size, perhaps.