Ship Talk

[Arralen]

Originally Posted by jars_u

Cartesian-vector-based ...so the Cartesian coordinate plane can still be done in hexes RIGHT?

Forgot - no, you can't do vector-based thingies in hexes.
No squares, no hexes.

Only small dots and and long movement arrows.


Btw., I'm still not convinced that firing arcs make any sense.

How will ships be depicted in SL - with engine at one end only, as usual? And combat will be cartesian-vector based as well?
In that case, firing arcs are especially moot, because, as you'll remember, in space your engines are fighting inertia and gravity, not athmosperic drag. If you want to go 90° to the left, you'll have to point your ship ~135° backwards and fire your engines.
Now, if you're spining your ship around anytime to manoeuvre anyway, you can surely point it at a target for the short time required to fire the big spinal gun.

Moo2 got this completely wrong, as they completely left out inertia - for longitudinal movement. But turning the ship costs movement points, what does not make any sense from a physical p.o.v., because the energy (and therefore time) required to turn the ship is much lower than whats required to make it move somewhere.

Moo2 is also a striking example why firing arcs don't make sense, even from a game design viewpoint: By using "front only" you can pack much more weapons than the AI (mostly uses "front + sides"), and most fights are over before the ships get even near each other.

Now if the battle plane(?) was much bigger, and the firing speed of the ships much lower, and movement & turning speed much higher (no firing on every movement turn), then firing arcs would make a sensible difference ...