Plasma vs cap ship missle

[Taqwus]

Aaron could always add Mechwarrior-style weapon temperature rules...

Hrm. A pity that missiles aren't implemented as very cheap non-retargettable units, and missile launchers as bays. That'd allow for fast, large salvos as well as customizable missiles, but gives you the reasonable drawback of having a finite supply.

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[Atraikius]

dmm - if you try the Mirak (Kzinti from the SFB board game) you can see what the missiles (actually called drones) can really do. The reason for the fast reload rates is that the drones are fired from racks, which either carry 4 or 6 single space drones, or 2-3 double space drones. One of the 4 space racks has the capability to fire two drones per turn, the other can fire 1 drone per turn. Once all drones located on the rack have been fired, additional time is required for reloading the drone rack. An additional feature of the drones in the Star Fleet battles board game is that there are additional types of warheads, including one shot phasers, and that drones can be custonized with each different component assigned a size (in half-spaces) and also assigned a speed setting, allowing you to use armored drones, ecm drones, etc... Personnally, I would like to see SE4 drones implemented similar to them, essentially customized and build like fighters, but fired from special 'drone rack' components.

[dmm]

Taqwus and Atraikius -- Thanks for the good thoughts. I wonder if it is possible to mod SEIV fighters in such a way. You'd have to change the tech tree, of course, but that is do-able in principle.
Good: You could get the limited launching per turn. You could have the number limited separately from general supplies. You could restock at any planet. (Is that right? You don't need a spaceyard to make fighters, right?)
Bad: The problem that stumps me is how to limit their range during combat (ships don't use fuel during combat), and how to keep them off the strategic map (unlike real fighters).
Somewhat bad: The AI wouldn't know how to use them.
Possibly bad: Players could retarget them in midflight. (Personally, I like that.)

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

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Bad: The problem that stumps me is how to limit their range during combat (ships don't use fuel during combat), and how to keep them off the strategic map (unlike real fighters).

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Just give the drone rack 1 fighter launch in combat, and zero outside combat.
There may be an entry in settings.txt to control how may fighters a planet can launch, too.

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[dmm]

The previous Posts got me thinking about mines in combat. Is it hard-coded that mines have zero movement, or can that be modded? If moddable, then that would make mines very interesting for tactical combat.
I guess you could also mod a missile to do that. The range is limited by hard code. A moving mine could be a max-range "missile" that is hard to destroy, does damage like a mine, moves one/turn. The ship component would be the size of a minelayer component (or maybe smaller since multiple mines can be laid each turn, but only one missile fired), would use up supplies slowly, and would fire every turn.

[Atraikius]

Star Fleet Battles includes a cruse drone variant for long range bombardment, from that standpoint having them move outside of combat would be fine.