Babylon 5 Mod

[Urendi Maleldil]

SolidWorks? I have no idea what that is. At school I use 3d studio max which uses the renderman engine. It's slower for raytraced stuff and nowhere near as high quality as POVray.

[Timstone]

Haha... you don't recognise it? well that's okay. It's a 3D program to make models of machines, layouts of pipes and more of those industrial uses. It's a program for the engineers (like me). I can do almost everything with it, it just takes soem time to do it right. It does have a renderer, but I don't have it installed. So I'm searching for that right now. The renderer can render cool stuff like mirrors, wooden surfaces, all kinds of metals (like Hg) and more. You can also make your own decals, but I haven't tried that yet. First step is to make some nice models. But do you know if POVray can handle the fileformat of SW (*.sldprt and *.sldasm)?

[ November 27, 2002, 15:25: Message edited by: Timstone ]

[AGoetz]

This won't stop the RCEs, but it worked on my most recent one : Make sure that in all of your *Design_Creation.txt files that the section

Name := Ship Builder
Design Type := Space Yard Ship
Vehicle Type := Ship

has a Minimum ship size of greater than 500.

Most recent RCE occured when the Shadows researched Propulsion 6 and tried to design a Cruiser sized Space Yard - it can't fit a Space Yard on a Cruiser in the B5 Mod and so it filled the space with engines and hence overflowed the engine total power variable.

[pathfinder]

Thanks, I'll check that AGoetz!

[Nomor]

Val: Any chance of reducing the requirement for fighter bays on Carriers so that they can have some sort of defensive weapons or even repair drones. At the moment it's set at 40%; 30% might be better. Also, when the AI upgrades my Carriers it turns all the Cobra Bays into Expanded Fighter Bays , which can't launch.

There is a flaw in using the auto or Strategic combat mode and Carriers. Using the Strategic option as opposed to the Tactical mode the Carrier launches its fighters in large Groups of fighter wings e.g. 5 per wing. A shadow opponent simply swats these down 5 at a time , and wins, whereas if you manually launch fighter units one at a time the Shadow can only destroy them one at a time thus allowing you to swamp the Shadow and take him apart. I take it that all combat in the PBW will be of the Strategic kind and not Tactical?

(Is it not possible to allow repair drones on some of the larger capital ships?)


I just completed my first Stella Balancer and ended up with a Black Planet, however regarding the construction of these Devices, could we not make use of Carrier Hulls. We could have a Version of the Carrier Hulls that would have to contain an Ancient Device as opposed to Fighter Bays thus allowing them to be constructed at Planets and then "driven" to the target Star. You could have a technology level of say "Ancient's Device Ship Hull ConVersion" if you wanted?
Just a thought.

[ November 28, 2002, 00:00: Message edited by: Nomor ]

[Dead Meat]

whereas if you manually launch fighter units one at a time the Shadow can only destroy them one at a time thus allowing you to swamp the Shadow and take him apart.

Thanks I'll keep this in mind

I take it that all combat in the PBW will be of the Strategic kind and not Tactical?

Correct. PBW games are just like PBE games. All combat is handled by the AI (for better or worse). What about checking the amount of units (grouped thingy, i forgot its name in the empire options) launched. Or is 5 the lowest number? (can't remember)

[AGoetz]

I've never built a Stellar Balancer, so no comment.
If you want defences on your carriers, build bigger Carriers
Regarding the Shadows swatting your fighters, maybe if you had bigger carriers so as to launch even more 5 member fighter squadrons you could overwhelm the Shadows point defence. Also, try putting some armor on your fighters.
example (all figures are from Version 33)- a Shadow PDF Multiphased Cutter X at minimum range does 257 points of damage. Light Armor Class 6 absords 15 points/kT. If you put 18kT of light armor on a Heavy Fighter it will survive a direct hit (though with only 7kT left over, won't be good for much else). Putting 9kT on means that the first fighter in the stack is toasty - but the second will survive that first salvo and hence may get to fire it's own weapons.

[Krsqk]

RE: Stellar Balancer/Black Planet

Do you mean a planet with no graphic and atmosphere/conditions of N/A? This sounds like the "null planet" problem SJ and some others have had when creating new planet sizes.

Of course, I'm assuming that a "Stellar Balancer" is a component to create a small constructed planet around a star to prevent it from exploding, and that a "Black Planet" is what I've described above. I could just be spouting useless nonsense, though.

[Fyron]

Ok... I sent Tesco a zip of my B5 mod folder, so he should be good to go.

[Timstone]

Does anyone knows which fileformats POVray can handle?