SE5, Tell Aaron what's on your Wish List

[Atrocities]

I doubt with the new 3d engine that we will see fleets larger than 40 ships or so.

[Aris_Sung]

Use a small group of those to lure a dangerous defence fleet away from a strategic planet so that another, real attack fleet can attack the planet.

On this point that StrategiaInUltima made about trying to lure away the defence fleet, I'd like to add this idea. Repulser beams should be modified to be able to push bit by bit a ship into a planet's atmosphere which leads to its subsequent crash. (IMHO, this would be realistic. Objects not entering the atmosphere with the right approach vector do burn up.) Thus, this will discourage empires from surrounding their planets so that the offence fleet doesn't have to go up against the defence fleet plus planet-based weapons. This would make it more challenging for the defender to defend his holdings as he will have to come up with new defenses to protect the immediate circumference around his planets, while his fleet is further out in space duking it out with the attacker.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Or perhaps the possibility of smaller ships (<400kT) to land on planets even, while larger ships need to stay in orbit. Really huge ships (>10MT or so) can't even enter orbit for fear of plummeting in the gravity well.

Also, warp points should have some sort of gravitational attraction or event horizon, so they suck objects closer in. This would make mining WPs harder as you'd have to re-lay the entire minefield when it's been sucked in and destroyed wy the WP. Also, really huge ships passing by through the same sector should get slowed down or even sucked in by the gravitational pull. You're about to use your DCOMCA on an enemy attack fleet when you suddenly locate it in another system...

[Phoenix-D]

StrategiaInUltima said:
Or perhaps the possibility of smaller ships (<400kT) to land on planets even, while larger ships need to stay in orbit. Really huge ships (>10MT or so) can't even enter orbit for fear of plummeting in the gravity well.

The Moon would disagree with you there. Everything has an orbit, some just need to be farther out than others.

On a game aspect I don't like this idea simply because of the additional, IMO unneeded, micromanagement.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

At least the ability to mod it in.

Or you could program in "gravitational pull" of objects, that is measured in kT. That way, when your ship/base gets too close to a stellar object, it cannot escape its gravity anymore, and plummets to its death. This pull would also affect moons, and they would have a high kT rating (say, 500TT (TeraTons)).

edit: And btw, why is a simple ship bridge 10,000,000 kilograms in weight? Why is a fighter cockpit one million kilograms? Why are fighters the weight of a fair asteroid?

[Phoenix-D]

Because it simplifies the record keeping. That, and if you'll notice you don't have to build in most support equipment/ammo/consumables/etc. That's taken care of in the base tonnage.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

So, to keep the comps in realistic proportions, each ship carries the approximate harvest of the entire planet for fifteen unusually good years in a row? Man, you could feed a crew of ten million for decades on that supply of food... provided it doesn't go off

[Phoenix-D]

StrategiaInUltima said:
So, to keep the comps in realistic proportions, each ship carries the approximate harvest of the entire planet for fifteen unusually good years in a row? Man, you could feed a crew of ten million for decades on that supply of food... provided it doesn't go off

You think that scale issue is funny, go see Starfury. The units really don't matter, and it'd be hard to find a scale that "works" for everything.

[MightyPenguin]

Aris_Sung said:Repulser beams should be modified to be able to push bit by bit a ship into a planet's atmosphere which leads to its subsequent crash. (IMHO, this would be realistic. Objects not entering the atmosphere with the right approach vector do burn up.)

Or not, since by the time you got a beam strong enough to overcome the engines (you think a ship isn't going to notice that it is falling into low orbit?)it'd be far more efficient just to blow a hole in it.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Unless high-powered repulsers are all you've got on your ship as you spot a nice soft target of opportunity like a damaged COMCA just waiting to be pushed into a planet lying somewhere nearby... or repulsers could be cheaper than normal weapons.

And even if it would be more efficient to blow a hole into the ship if you're facing a Heavy War Cruiser, I don't think you'd stand up to a COMCA. My COMCAs usually sport one or two hundred top-lev shield generators and regens... and I think that it'd be far more efficient to push a ship like that into a planet than to try and blow a hole through tens of thousands of shield points with regenerators backing them up, and several hundred units of armor, all the while while the ship is pounding away at you with battery upon battery upon battery of heavy weapons... don't you think?