Babylon 5 Mod

[pathfinder]

Finished a bout of tweaking the AI. anyone want it?

[Fyron]

Originally posted by Nomor:
That seems perfect. Now how about lesser races having fighters that can hide in Asteroid belts and spy on their siblings. You could also give Asteroid Belts a 1% ship damaging property so that fighters could not park out there the whole time. Caused by stress and collisions with small debris. Ships with mining equipment would be immune to this effect?

You could add sector-sight obscuration to asteroids, and then anything could hide in them. You could not set it up so that only fighters could hide there.

Asteroid belts have vast amounts of empty space between asteroids. Hiding in them is extremely unrealistic. For all of the probes that NASA has sent out through the asteroid belt in our solar system, none of them had to worry much about course corrections to avoid asteroid collisions (IIRC).

Sector-damage is a fixed value, not a percentage. If it does not do enough damage to destroy a component of a ship or the whole fighter in one turn, it will not do anything. eg: if the ship's weakest component has 10 hit points, then a sector that does 9 damage will never harm the ship. Partial damage does not stack outside of combat.

[Suicide Junkie]

You could add sector-sight obscuration to asteroids, and then anything could hide in them. You could not set it up so that only fighters could hide there.

You could give Type A cloaking to the sector, and Type B to the fighters.
Give sensors both type A and B detection, but slightly less than the cloaking.

Only fighters or ships with active cloaking devices will be able to hide in that location.

Or is your only option for sector cloaking the broadband all-5 cloak?

[ October 23, 2002, 03:18: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

[Fyron]

Sector cloaking applies to all types evenly. It's level can be customized, but unfortunately it cannot have different levels in different types.

[Nomor]

That might be even more fun .. having Asteroid Belts with random damage values that would or would not damage components based on their damage resistance.

" Asteroid belts have vast amounts of empty space between asteroids. Hiding in them is extremely unrealistic. " I don't see how that follows. A NASA probe is designed to avoid collisions with objects.

A manned space craft could if it wanted manoeuvre close to a large rock, put on the parking break, shut down all non essential systems and make like another rock and thus be less visible than a ship in open space. The fact that there are large distances between asteroids still doesn't stop you from hiding behind one.

I thought this would a great motivator to research scanners and provide a strategy level that isn't there in the original game.
SJ: Thanks for the above.. oink in the flyment.

[ October 23, 2002, 18:58: Message edited by: Nomor ]

[Suicide Junkie]

Your quadruple post has been cut down to size.

You need a little more patience next time

Fyron: How about this: double the cloaking ability of cloak type B for every component.

That way, an asteroid field with obsucration level 2 is effectively giving the fighter level 2 in type A, but only level 1 in type B!

Then, the method I described should work!

[ October 23, 2002, 19:03: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

[Val]

I like the hide in asteroids bit, could also give the ability to small ships (Scouts, Escorts, Destroyers) as well as fighters. I had actually considered the asteroid cloaking all ships/fighters myself while I was editting the quadrants and such, but had set the idea aside.

I do have a question with Scanners though - If a ship has a cloak component with level 3 Gravitic (or whatever it was called), do you need a gravitic scanner of higher level to penetrate? Or can you also penetrate with an EM/Active scanner of sufficient level?

As to Vorlon's cloaking, never really saw it happen in the show or books, though they should have scanner jammers to avoid scanning at distance. I know the Shadows had the phasing in and out of Hyperspace, but that wasn't like the Star Trek cloaking, they actually entered and left Hyperspace during the combat, it was as if they were jumping into and out of combat, not actually cloaking their vessels (there is a rule in the AoG stuff that allows them to phase in and out to avoid being targetable, unless you follow them into Hyperspace). So I would say no there too.

On the other hand, the Torvalus (Dark Knife vessel in the Coriana fight with all the ancients) do have a real cloak, the technomages also have a cloak (and Illusions) and the Hyach have some sort of cloak. The fact that the Technomages can do it suggests the Shadows should be capable (as Technomage tech is derived from the Shadows), but maybe the Shadows never bothered or just preferred the enemy see them coming. I believe the Drakh may also have one, though not sure.

[Suicide Junkie]

I do have a question with Scanners though - If a ship has a cloak component with level 3 Gravitic (or whatever it was called), do you need a gravitic scanner of higher level to penetrate? Or can you also penetrate with an EM/Active scanner of sufficient level?

As in the humans-only P&N mod, the grav cloak only protects against grav sensors.

All ships get the basic level 1 active scanners (or is it passive?). The scanner only attempts to beat the cloak type matching its sensor ability type.

[Fyron]

Val, I never said they had star-trek cloaking devices. But, cloaking devices are the only way to model this in-game. There are 5 different cloaking abilities, so they could all be used to model the different kinds of cloaking, phasing and stealth technologies.

Vorlons don't have the same type of thing that Shadows do, but they can have their ships enter special pockets in hyperspace, and hide there from other ships in hyperspace.

Edit:
Oh, and Val, get an avatar. SJ keeps confusing us for some reason.

[ October 23, 2002, 23:25: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[Suicide Junkie]

Doh! Val, get an avatar, so I don't keep confusing you with Fyron