With Salvo! coming out soon, I was thinking about a possible "Age of Sail" mod for SE4... and THAT got me thinking once again about the Solar Sails in SE4 and how to make them more realistic!
Recipe for more realistic solar sails:
1. Remove all engines but solar sails from the game. (They don't fit into the new engine paradigm we're going to set up)
2. Take away supply usage from all components.
OK, we're done with what you have to give up for this to work. Now on to the fun stuff!
3. Limit solar sails to One Per Ship
4. Give solar sails lots of standard movement (remove the bonus movement) with mQNP applied
5. Give solar sails Supply Storage, Supply Usage, and Solar Supply Generation of some arbitrary amount - it doesn't matter what as long as they're all equal.
6. Optional - For added realism, give solar sails the Armor ability so they tend to be hit before other components, unless you heavily armor your ship
So what does all that do? What you get is, now solar sails will ONLY function in systems which actually have stars to produce the solar winds!
Now if I could figure out how to make the movement depend on the number of stars... could increase the supply capacity of the sails and change the movement back to bonus movement, but then they would continue to function for several turns after leaving a multi-star system for a no-star system... I guess that represents inertia or something...
True Solar Sails
Threaded Mode