Travler

[Puke]

no, im not makeing a Travler mod, though it would be cool if someone would.

Rather, i have a question about some ship concepts from the game. Specifically, system defense boats. I have already modded engine systems that trade combat movement for real movement, but i want to take it a step further.

in Travler, system defense boats are non-jump capable ships that trade the mass required for jump engines for lots of guns and armor. to get from system to system, they can be ferried about by tenders, which are basically big jump engines that the ships can latch on to.

I would like to make a class of ship that can not jump. I realize that this can be done with fighters, and I would love to make a mod for the game that does away with traditional fighters and makes all ships very large ship-sized fighters. then traditional ships would be non-combat things that only exist to ferry the combat ships from system to system.

The problem with this method, is UNIT STACKS. i dont like the idea of all the ships being part of one huge stack. i dont like that its hard (or impossible) to control the size of the stack when using the launch order outside of tactical combat. i dont like the fact that you cant break up stacks of units once they are launched. ship managment is basically impossible on an individual level, if they are treated like fighters.

so i put the challenge to you: how do we model system defense boats, or non-warp-capable ships in se4? just give them zero strategic movement and call them sector defense boats? but that sort of sucks, and it would be nice for them to at least be able to move within the same system (even if they are towed or carried somehow) even if it is impractical to have them ferried between systems.

i thought about giving them movement, but no supply storage, so they could only move while fleeted. but that would not work for many, many reasons. I am having a really hard time figuring out how to make this happen.

About the only practical thing that i can come up with, is to give all warp points the SECTOR DAMAGE ability, and enough to destroy any ship outright. then give jump engines enough armor to soak the damage up. then make all weapons skip armor. then make all armor have the shield ability. then either do away with the idea of regular shields, or tweak it somehow. this would mean that only specific ships could jump, and dedicated system defenses would have to be constructed inside a system, once spaceyards are Online.

gimme some ideas. gimme some feedback. think of something better.