Travler

[Puke]

no, im not makeing a Travler mod, though it would be cool if someone would.

Rather, i have a question about some ship concepts from the game. Specifically, system defense boats. I have already modded engine systems that trade combat movement for real movement, but i want to take it a step further.

in Travler, system defense boats are non-jump capable ships that trade the mass required for jump engines for lots of guns and armor. to get from system to system, they can be ferried about by tenders, which are basically big jump engines that the ships can latch on to.

I would like to make a class of ship that can not jump. I realize that this can be done with fighters, and I would love to make a mod for the game that does away with traditional fighters and makes all ships very large ship-sized fighters. then traditional ships would be non-combat things that only exist to ferry the combat ships from system to system.

The problem with this method, is UNIT STACKS. i dont like the idea of all the ships being part of one huge stack. i dont like that its hard (or impossible) to control the size of the stack when using the launch order outside of tactical combat. i dont like the fact that you cant break up stacks of units once they are launched. ship managment is basically impossible on an individual level, if they are treated like fighters.

so i put the challenge to you: how do we model system defense boats, or non-warp-capable ships in se4? just give them zero strategic movement and call them sector defense boats? but that sort of sucks, and it would be nice for them to at least be able to move within the same system (even if they are towed or carried somehow) even if it is impractical to have them ferried between systems.

i thought about giving them movement, but no supply storage, so they could only move while fleeted. but that would not work for many, many reasons. I am having a really hard time figuring out how to make this happen.

About the only practical thing that i can come up with, is to give all warp points the SECTOR DAMAGE ability, and enough to destroy any ship outright. then give jump engines enough armor to soak the damage up. then make all weapons skip armor. then make all armor have the shield ability. then either do away with the idea of regular shields, or tweak it somehow. this would mean that only specific ships could jump, and dedicated system defenses would have to be constructed inside a system, once spaceyards are Online.

gimme some ideas. gimme some feedback. think of something better.

[geoschmo]

As you know this is one of the most requested and attempted mod ideas. Everyone's favorite scifi mod from trek to B5 would benefit from some way to make ships that are restrictable from jumping. I just don't see a way to do it that I like.

Your sector damage idea is original, I will give you that much. Not sure it's practical though. For one thing, wouldn't you have to do that manually? Or is there some way to modify the systemtype file to do that.

What if you just made them really slow in normal space. Only one sector per turn. You'd still have the problem with stacking though.

Although, even if ships could be blocked from warping that wouldn't meet your needs for system boats, cause they couldn't be ferried. What you need really is a class of drones that can be recovered and given orders like a ship.

Geoschmo

[Elowan]

Color me stupid but I don't see the point in constructing a ship that can't jump or use warp tech unless its a maintenance bot.

So you have a 'border patrol' ship. Some alien pops through a gate shoots and then pops out. That BP ship better be able to pop through same gate and pop the miscreant.

If you don't want the ship to use a gate - don't send it through one.

Or is that too simple? Help me out here.

[Suicide Junkie]

Elowan: Imagine that the jump engines (warp point open & warppoint close) weigh 400kT (same as spaceyard).

It would be the height of absurdity to put jump enignes on all of your ships: if you did, they would be useless in combat.

Instead, like the space yard, you have one ship in the fleet dedicated to the task of ferrying ships through warppoints.

[Urendi Maleldil]

How did you mod the engines so ships have more strategic movement than combat movement?

I haven't been able to figure it out.

[Q]

I must admit that I have the same question as Elowan:
What would be the use of ships that can't leave the original system? Would this add something to the game we don't already have with the fighters and drones?

[geoschmo]

For the current game as it is no, it wouldn't add a lot. But for those people that would like to do a scifi mod such as Trek, Traveller, or B5, having ships that are not capable of jumping is important. The mods can be, and have been, done without it. But you have to take "license" with the universe you are attempting to model and make the players do mental conVersions to accpet the SEIV system. Adding this flexibility would help those mods.

[Gryphin]

Is it possible to create a ship that such that it only had enough supplys to move 12 or 18 sectors?
This won't stop it from leaving a system but it would restrict it's movement such that inter system travel would be impractical.
I personaly don't like to build a resupply depot in every system.

[Puke]

you could do more with supply usage if weapons did not use supplies. then you could make a ship that only holds enough supplies to move one sector, but when fleeted with other ships it can move further.

I know the warp point damage thing hurts ships warping thru, and the system-center (black hole) damage only hurts ships *stopping* on that sector. how does storm sector damage work? if it only damages ships stopping there, 1MP ships could not move through, but 3 MP ships could move in, jump, and move out without taking damage.

I think the warp point damage is the best way to do this, but it has some real problems. to make a ship capable of passing through, since there is no component that protects ships from natural disasters, you will need lots of armor. enough to make a ship 'unkillable.'

so say you make a large component called a jump-engine or some such, that provides movement and also a few tens of thousands of armor points. to be able to fight these ships, you would have to get rid of normal armor in the game, and make all weapons skip armor. then you could use shields to represent armor, and phased shields to represent shields.

thats all workable, but here are the problems:

you wont actually be able to kill jump ships in any practicle fashion. you will leave them as hollowed out hulks with an in-tact engine. this would not be bad, if not for two things. one, they will continue to cost the owner maintenance. two, they will continue to blocade a planet if left in orbit of it.

as for what this adds to the game, it creates another choice for ship building. you will have to decide between having a ship with long range mobility, or having a ship that devotes all of its resources to combat. imagine if warp engines took up 1/2 or 2/3s of the space of a ship. then ships without warp engines would have double or tripple the mass to devote to armor and weapons. much more formidable in combat, but they cant leave home.

like i said, the ability to ferry these ships is entirely secondary to stoping them from leaving home. they could just be given a strategic movement of one or two, but then they would not have much of a chance of intercepting anything in-system.

[geoschmo]

Storm damage hits when the ship enters the sector.

You could mod all the waepons so they don't use supply. If you do the supply thing you don't need the sector or warp damage. Then your "Warp Engine" is really just a standard engine with a huge amount of supply storage. Make it really big so you don't have room for anything else on the ship. Or make a hull with the storage built in and room for only engines. You'll want to disallow standard supply comps and definetly QR if you do this. You might even want to disallow or radically increase the cost of supply facilities. If the supply facs were disallowed you would have a "Warp Ship" that had a finite usable life span. You'd just have to destroy them when they were out of fuel. Your weapons ships wouldn't have to be destroyed though.

If you went with the damage idea instead I wouldn't have a problem with the damaged warp ship hull costing you maintenance because the rest of your navy would be zero maint units, correct? But personally I dislike the unit Version of this idea a lot because of the stacking issue.

Geoschmo