New kinds of PDCs

[Baal]

Not with Small Phased shields. The Phased PDC doesn't skip them but a Null space would, which is why I stuck it in along with new small phased shields.

[Suicide Junkie]

Exactly.

"Skips all shields" is the exact same as "Skips shields and armor" (ie. null-space), when units are involved.

"Skips normal shields" (ie. phased weapons) would not be pointless since you have phased unit shields.

[Spoo]

quote:

---

-Will feature quasi-Newtonian propulsion. SE4 still allows instant stop-and-go, but your speed will be proportional to thrust over mass.

---

That sounds really neat. Can you tell us how you did it?

------------------
Assume you have a 1kg squirrel
E=mc^2
E=1kg(3x10^8m/s)^2=9x10^16J
which, if I'm not mistaken, is equivilent to roughly a 50 megaton nuclear bomb.
Fear the squirrel.

[Suicide Junkie]

Really, your acceleration should be based on Thrust/Mass, but speed is the next closest thing in SE4 .

So... start with a collection of moddable settings, and facts about SE4:

- Ships with enough engine components to total more than 255 'standard' movement points crash the game. (bonus movement may or may not count towards the total).
- Shipsize.txt has a setting "engines per move"
- The engine ability is: provides x standard/bonus movement points.

Now, we want speed to be divided by the mass of the ship... so we shall make the engine force required for each notch of speed proportional to the mass of the ship.
To keep total movement points below 255, I chose to make the "engines per move" equal to Mass / 50.
Thus, we have:
ES: 150kt, 3 engines per move.
FG: 200kt, 4 EPM
DS: 300kt, 6 EPM
...
DN: 1000kt, 20 EPM
BS: 1500kt, 30 EPM.

Now, I decided to make the DS my pivot, so a DS design would have the same speed in original SE4 and my mod.
Since a DS requires 6 EPM, the typical engine must provide 6 movement points.
I also decided that the "typical engine" as above should be in the middle of the tech tree, so Ion Engine I's would provide less than 6 Movement, while Quantum engine IIIs would provide more.

Now, I said to myself, why not do more messing with the engines? As of now, I think I will have propulsion tech levels that contain:
Chemical Rockets: decent thrust (5), poor fuel efficiency(30-50), large amounts of supply bays will be needed to run these.
Nuclear Rockets: better thrust (6), decent fuel efficiency (15-20), high on radioactives cost.
Ion engines: poor thrust (3), awesome efficiency (3-4)
Singularity Drives: good thrust (7), great fuel efficiency (2-3), uses directed Hawking radiation from a tiny black hole to propel the ship with 100% conVersion of mass to propulsive energy. The only losses are from operating the tractor/repulsor beams required to hold the black hole away from the ship's hull.
WarpPointDrive??: no thrust, poor fuel efficiency, bonus movement, might not be used.

Anyways, back on topic... uh,yeah. Standard engines need to produce about 6 movement, so we go to components.txt and boost the "standard movement" of the engines to numbers near six .

So, an escort with 60kT (6) of the "standard" engine, would have:
6x6=36 "movement" points,
Divide by number of engines per move, and:
36/3 = 12 movement points.
If I were to fill up the escort with 13 engines and a MC III , then we get 13x6/3=26 movement points on a ship than cannot do anything but scout.
Putting on a shield and an antiproton beam brings us back to 6 engines, and 12 movement points.

Now, try the same setup on a DS. Six standard movement only gets you 6*6/6=6 movement. The DS is twice as heavy, so it moves twice as slow! With the extra space on the ship, we could fill it with engines and an MC III again, and we get 28 * 6 /6 = 28 movement (vs 26 for the escort).
It is still a useless ship, but with more engines pushing just themselves and an MC, we get a little more speed.
With a shield and antiproton and MC, taking up 90 space, we have 21 engines left, giving us 21 movement rather than 12.

Now take it up a few notches to our Cruiser. At 500kT, it takes 10 EPM. If we want just the shield, antiproton and MC, we get 41 engines. 41*6/10 = 24.6 = 24 movement. Damn fast, but a cruiser with only a shield and antiproton beam is pretty crappy for fighting.

Now, 41*6=246, which is cutting close to the 255 ceiling. If I want 7 MP engines, I will have to limit the engines per ship to 36. That will make LCs the fastest possible ship.

For a Baseship, we have 30EPM, so we need 5 engines (5*6=30)just to get one movement outta the sucker. 36 engines would provide 7 movement with a single backup engine, but you would have to sacrifice 1/3rd of your baseship to propulsion space, leaving just over 1000kT free. That would be like having an engine-only LC rammed up the rear end of a battlestation .

Anyways, looking back at that, I think I will have to limit the engines after all... well, maybe not... DS/LC will have the top speeds in the game, but the ES can get better fuel efficiency (by using fewer engines).

That baseship, with 35 engines, would burn (35*10*7 = 2450 supplies to move 7 squares in one turn).
The escort, however could get a speed of 8 with 4 engines, using up only (4*10*7= 280)
11% of the fuel that the baseship used!
In SE4 as original, the two ships would use the exact same amount of supplies to move the same distance, despite one being 10x the mass .

Now I'm way off topic, so if you have any questions, now would be a good time

[BeeDee10]

Now _this_ I _love. It has never made sense to me that the exact same engine module can propel a 150Kt spacecraft at the same speed and with the same resource consumption as a 1.5Mt monster. The _scale_ shouldn't matter in space flight, it's all about the proportions. Differentiating engine efficiencies makes sense too, to allow for slow-and-steady long haul arks and overmuscled in-system defence frigates.

Is this system going to be made into a mod, or is this merely a theoretical description left up to the reader to implement?

[Old Possum]

Hello suiside_junkie.
How where you planning on geatting the computer to use this mod?
I found that when I adapted my data to reflect starfire engine requirements, that the AI thinks Minimum speed = minimum engines
and desired speed = desired engines.
To get around this I had to edit all the AI designcreation files to greatly increase the number of engines in the ship designs, otherwise the computer would do things like build a SD with ony 4 engines and a move of 1! or a Monitor with 4 engines and a move of 0! Also, unfortuately I also had to break the ship types down into different sizes, because if i just left , for example, the attack ship as a single entry,; Then the computer would try to cram 12 engines int an escort, if I had edited the minimum speed to 12, to allow SD's to have a minimum speed of 3.

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

---

Is this system going to be made into a mod, or is this merely a theoretical description left up to the reader to implement?

---

This system will be implemented in P&N v2. The BattleMoon shipsize described will have a maximum of 1 movement, and should require 30 engines for 1MP, with the option of 6 "backup" engines before the engine limit is hit.

Old Possum:
I was planning on trying the AI out with a minimum engines of 6, desired engines = 36 (max). I would hope that this would give the ships basic movement, then fill in whatever space is left over.
At the very least, would have a new design plan for each hull size.

[Will]

Neato. Some things that are sort-of related to this that I have been thinking of:

Reduce the supplies that engines store by a lot (though varying for engine type, IE, solid rockets would hold more fuel "inside" than an ion engine) and increase the need for supply storage.

I have no idea how this could be done currently, but have a requirement of one "reactor" component for every X number or kT of engines/weapons/shields/etc. Might have to be a feature request to MM...

Change QReactor component to generate a fixed amount of supplies instead of unlimited.

Make sure that the AI builds lots of Supply Tankers.

[Suicide Junkie]

Simply reducing the engine's supply storage would do it, and I will probably have it that way in my mod.

quote:

---

but have a requirement of one "reactor" component for every X number or kT of engines/weapons/shields/etc.

---

For a trek mod, we were going to make the reactors be supply storage...
It would be the same as this acceleration as speed propulsion model, but would be Power modeled as Energy.

I am also going to make bases not have unlimited supply, so they have to be resupplied manually, or have solar panels.
All bases will have some supply storage and generation built into the hull, though.

[JenMax]

I don't know if this is do-able. If you want to reduce supplies carried by each engine, and you vary the amount of supplies carried by engine type, (your example, solid fuel inside "stores" more supplies), THEN you might also want to vary how much each TYPE of engine regenerates fuel per turn. Ion engines might get a bit of "fuel" based upon suns in system (amount of "ions" floating about to 'grab'), or allow some types of engines to "refuel" by skimming gas giants...(not original idea - read in book 20 years ago... ee doc smith maybe?). What do you think of this type of add on to engines?