ice for shields, and other grit-tech stuff

[Ed Kolis]

Originally posted by Spoo:
You could use an allegiance subverter (change the range to 1) to represent the boarding parties. Then you could still use shields as shields.

Damn, I was just about to suggest that! That's what I just did in my mod to alleviate the "board once to take out their security stations then board again for sure victory" exploit! Of course this will make Master Computer ships unboardable, but when you think about it this is logical - if the ship has no crew, why would it be designed with open spaces for enemy troops to occupy?

[Spoo]

is it harder to subvert (i used to think so, but have not tested in a while) a ship with more crew-quarters?

I know it's this way for boarding parties, but I think that the only factor for allegience subverter success (besides actually hitting the ship) is the "damage" of the subverter in the form of a % chance to subvert. A damage rating of 80 has an 80% chance to convert the ship, 100 has a 100% chance, and 110 still has a 100%.

[geoschmo]

Ok, technically water released into space would likely boil, not vaporize of freeze. (EDIT: Of course, since vaporizing IS boiling, I guess I was off a bit here. ) The reason for this is that water freezes by being reduced in temperature, and to do this it has to radiate its heat out. Vacuum is a very poor conductor of radiant heat. Also the vacuum of space is low pressure by definition and the boiling point of water lowers as the pressure drops.

That being said you could supercool the water before releasing it, or add some chemicals to it that would keep the boiling point artificially high I suppose. You could also keep it pressurized in some sort of membrane while you waited for it to freeze. This would actually make a lot of sense as it would allow you to shape the ice shields the way you wanted.

My biggest question about this is why would ice be a shield? It sounds to me like this would be another kind of armor.

But if you want the ice to be considered shields, the ice would be partially effective at blocking projectiles and missles I would think. Maybe you should make the standard weapons blocked by shields.

Also, to your question. An ice plate over the hull would interfere with boarding I would think. They would have to cut through it to get to the docking ports, or to the hull itself.

Geoschmo

[ August 26, 2002, 14:21: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[Suicide Junkie]

if using the emissive idea, conventional weapons would need to do enough extra damage to account for the emmissive armor, but what if it ran up on a ship without the shields? they would do an extra 35 points of damage per shot, or so.

Actually they don't all the weapons would be affected somehow by the ice shield. A plasma stream would waste a small portion of its energy on the ice, and a projectile would take some damage from it as well.

The key is that the weapons which can be blocked by the shield all have reload 1, low damage per hit, and are almost completely absorbed by the EA ability.
The weapons which skip the ice shields do a lot of damage in each shot, with a larger reload. The damage is only reduced by a tiny fraction because the shot is powerful & slow reloading