err, whats up, like technology is stagnant/regressive in WC?

W

wankski

Spaceman
dunno if this has been discussed before, but i didnt know what to search for... anyways my question is this....

is technology stagnant in WC or what !?

i mean in wc3 there was the excalibur ! it could cloak (okay once !) but it could jump, had cool powerful auto-tracking guns... and was damn good !

now the real supership was the dragon ! it could cloak whenever, had unlimited afterburners !! and those really cool plasma cannons !!

now my question.... why did technology reverse in wcp which is set way after the kilrathi and border worlds conflict?

no cloak, no plasmas? nothing???

in any case the dragon would have been hella useful against the bugs.... especially them unlimited afterburners...

anybody got an idea why the ship design went backwards?


at first i thought the guns and shields must be more powerful (as a general design evolution or something..) despite carrying over the same unit ratings... ships are slower and u'ld think tech. like cloak and unlimited afterburners would be carried over... what the? its like its a step back or something!!??

cheers

joe
 
Techinology did not reverse. There's a big Plasma gun on WCP on the Devastator, it's more powerful than the fission Cannons of the Dragon.

Didn't we have "infinite" afterburners on the Tarsus, on Privateer? That's not hi-tech.

Regardless of that, remember that the Dragon was a special ship... Perhaps they couldn't mass product it's matter/anti-matter engine. The technology is still there, but, for some reason, they didn't use it on any fighter we see (and presumably, in no one else, since the Vampire is the best available one).
 
Originally posted by wankski
dunno if this has been discussed before, but i didnt know what to search for... anyways my question is this.... is technology stagnant in WC or what !?
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What.

i mean in wc3 there was the excalibur ! it could cloak (okay once !) but it could jump, had cool powerful auto-tracking guns... and was damn good ! now the real supership was the dragon ! it could cloak whenever, had unlimited afterburners !! and those really cool plasma cannons !! now my question.... why did technology reverse in wcp which is set way after the kilrathi and border worlds conflict? no cloak, no plasmas? nothing???
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Alrighty.. where do we start? How about: the Excalibur is still active during Prophecy. We see a bunch of them in Secret Ops. It's not the same Excalibur we see in WC3 though.. nor is the one in WC4. What we do see though, is a distinct post-war cost-cutting trend after WC3. You don't really need every heavy fighter to have a cloak when you're just hunting down a few random rogues Kilrathi and pirates. Surely you're not suggesting Confed lost the blueprints for a cloaking device. It's still around, but it's clearly not necessary for it to be commonplace. On Plasmas: we see them all over. They're available to civilians, and the biggest Plasma we've ever used forms the core of the Devastator.

in any case the dragon would have been hella useful against the bugs.... especially them unlimited afterburners... anybody got an idea why the ship design went backwards?
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Especially the unlimited afterburners? How often do you run out of fuel in WCP? I found that the fighters in 2681 stretched out fuel economy much longer than previous generations. And we are given the ability to close scoops and just slide at afterburner velocities indefinitely. Ship design didn't go backwards at all. The vertical and horizontal thrust vectoring available on the Panther and Vampire are quite an innovative new design.

at first i thought the guns and shields must be more powerful (as a general design evolution or something..) despite carrying over the same unit ratings... ships are slower and u'ld think tech. like cloak and unlimited afterburners would be carried over... what the? its like its a step back or something!!??
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The entire foundation for the Midway class of carriers is economics. Building those was much cheaper and more efficient than upgrading the current ships on the lines. The streamlined and efficient designs of the fighters she carriers is clearly an extension of that. And that's not to say everything has been stripped and is weak.. There are certainly some nice and expensive toys available.. but it's pretty unrealistic to think that in a decade of postwar reconstruction and demobilization, they'd spend resources to put all sorts of bleeding edge crazy technologies on standard patrol.
 
Originally posted by Delance
Regardless of that, remember that the Dragon was a special ship... Perhaps they couldn't mass product it's matter/anti-matter engine. The technology is still there, but, for some reason, they didn't use it on any fighter we see (and presumably, in no one else, since the Vampire is the best available one).
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The Excalibur uses a matter/anti-matter engine.. but that doesn't negate your point that the Dragon is cost prohibitive. Even if you consider the Dragon the most superior fighter Confed produced, that's no justification for continuing to build more. The US has 48 B-2 bombers right now. There aren't any plans to build more. And to take this to the later 27th Century.. Confed already had other excellent heavy fighters that regular tech crews and pilots already had experience with. Progressing further with the Dragon was simply unnecessary.
 
yeah, i c your point.. the first thing that came to mind was economic rationalisation too... but...

the US example is kinda different... there is no one to disrupt / take on the accepted status quo.... all enemies are known to be militarily inferior...

but with confed... this is space we are talking about... just like the kilrathi and the bugs... came outta no where... tho i kinda have to accept the agrument that cost was the no.1 reason for not continuing with these technologies... its just this is like how many years after the kilrathi conflict??

and yeah, i agree the afterburners rarely run out, and are more efficient... but i have done it once or twice.. (albiet at or near the end of the mission..)

... so it must be cost then huh?... that sucks... kinda like the wcp refereneces to the midway as a cost effective behemoth, cos it was s'posed to be its own single ship fleet or something...? or is that the vesuvius i am thinging about??


about the old unlimited afterburner tech going way back to wc1 and 2, i dunno never played em... but in that case, shouldnt tech that old be commonplace?

cheers

joe

ps: the dragon was built dont forget, when confed had no enemies... fine it wasnt made in big numbers... but at the time they were still reeling from the kilrathi and the BW conflict was mercifuly short... (but then again maybe tolwyn secretly tooled up for the conflict he knew was to come??) :shrug:

thanks for the input...! :)
 
Originally posted by wankski
but with confed... this is space we are talking about... just like the kilrathi and the bugs... came outta no where... tho i kinda have to accept the agrument that cost was the no.1 reason for not continuing with these technologies... its just this is like how many years after the kilrathi conflict??
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Doesn't matter. Even after first contact with the Kilrathi people were trying to slash the budget. People are very eager to do so after 40 years of constant war.

... so it must be cost then huh?... that sucks... kinda like the wcp refereneces to the midway as a cost effective behemoth, cos it was s'posed to be its own single ship fleet or something...? or is that the vesuvius i am thinging about??
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It's not just cost.. it's practicality. In the situation Confed is in, it makes much more sense to use a smaller number of specialized stealth vessels than equip everything with a cloak. It's the same reason you don't put torpedoes on everything and load every fighter with six guns.

about the old unlimited afterburner tech going way back to wc1 and 2, i dunno never played em... but in that case, shouldnt tech that old be commonplace?
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It is. The hydrogen scoops have long been an aspect of WC spaceflight. We only see implementation in the engine here and there with the autoslide, but it's there.

the dragon was built dont forget, when confed had no enemies... fine it wasnt made in big numbers... but at the time they were still reeling from the kilrathi and the BW conflict was mercifuly short... (but then again maybe tolwyn secretly tooled up for the conflict he knew was to come??)
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If you played WC4, you know the Dragon is an aberration. Under normal circumstances, it never was and shouldn't have been built at all. It is by no means a Confed "peacetime super fighter" that bucks the cost-cutting trend.
 
yeah thanks for the info chris.... tho i still dont accept it fully...

like computers today... a PC 5 yo just dont cut the mustard today.... i would have thought likewise with ships in the WC world... i mean it is a lot of years... and still the ships that help u in wcp like the dilrathi and vakoth (sp?) are still competitve... fine they may have had upgrades and such, but still after these many years it should be no contest...

i kinda accept that man over machine arguement. ie, that a vakoth with an ace pilot is still formidable... which brings me to my next point...

alien tech. Why is it that the next enemy confed meets, it has pretty much the same tech.? even the kilrathi and bugs are similar relative to confed ships that is.... slightly weaker but more manoeverable... this i dont get...

i would have liked more variation, like an alien race with far superior weapons, to really have humanity on the backfoot, and require some genuine ingenuity to repel.... (oh yeah and alien ships that merge to make a super ship dont count... its old really... remember transformers??, plus it only takes a volley or two to disperse them..)

meh, this bug threat aint half as bad as the cats... they had us licked if blair didnt wack their homeworld and break their spirit.... so u'ld think something as dark as the prophicised 'death' would be ... well... deadlier...

i dunno... i feel that the cats seemed far more formidable than the bugs this time around... whats with this contant that means alien tech. would be on equal footing with confeds? even the same design philosopy and execution..

cheers

joe
 
I thought cloak was abandoned because the bugs could some how track it. I remember something about the Wc3 and Wc4 Excaliburs being a different model number (I never really paid much attention to them) in SO, especially since the SO Excaliburs have their reaper guns replaced by standard ion guns.
 
Yeah, the bugs could see through Cloaks.

The Devastors Plasma Gun could take out any Fighter with one shot.

The Devastor also had Auto-Tracking Turrets
 
I don't think it was really documented; it's more a sound theory than anything else. There have been cloaks since WC2, so why the sudden abandonment of cloaking in WCP altogether? Surely, had the Bugs not been able to defeat the cloaking technology, it would be standard to at least have a wing of such ships...but there aren't. Also, remember that in the beginning of the Nephilim advance, the TC was desperate in finding a way to counter them; we would have used cloaks all the time had we been able to, because they use so many damn ships even for a lousy patrol. That being the case, we can safely assume that they can see through our, and the Kilrathi, cloak.
 
Originally posted by Delance
Where did you get this info from? AFAIK, the cloak isn't even coded in the vision engine.
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True, but IIRC Prophecy was to have a cutscene showing some Piranhas cloaking during one of the first encounters with the bugs, and the bugs just continued to see them anyway.

Of course, I might be wrong, and even if I'm right, I'm not sure a cutscene removed from the final version of the game counts as official. (In other words, I don't think there's any real confirmation that the bugs can see through cloaks... but as Wulf just said, it's a very reasonable assumption to make).

--Eder
 
You know the Dragon costs more than whole system ecomemies?

The Cloak should probably have been on the Vamp and maybe the Panther, what got me was the loss of auto track.
 
Originally posted by Eder
True, but IIRC Prophecy was to have a cutscene showing some Piranhas cloaking during one of the first encounters with the bugs, and the bugs just continued to see them anyway.
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As I recall, the audio for this unused scene was found and extracted from Prophecy. It features Stiletto ordering Maestro to engage his cloak.
 
Originally posted by BattleDog
You know the Dragon costs more than whole system ecomemies?

The Cloak should probably have been on the Vamp and maybe the Panther, what got me was the loss of auto track.
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meh, good point....

didnt know about the dragons cost, tho kinda suspected it... but with the auto track, thats a good point... u cant tell me it would cost that much to have main armaments on turrents ! i mean current technology does it cheaply eg, chain gun mounted on apache... should be a piece of cake for 2500 or whatever the yr is.. bah !

:D

(it was prolly a gameplay issue, like most of the descisions methinks)

cheers

ps: what about flash pack? now that was a cool bit of tech. i missed !! :(
 
Originally posted by ChrisReid
The Excalibur uses a matter/anti-matter engine..
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I know, but the Dragon engine somehow made it possible for it to regenerate the afterburners, according to Pliers talk with Blair. That's what I was talking about. The "juice came directly from the power plant", as opposed to other ships.

Confed already had other excellent heavy fighters that regular tech crews and pilots already had experience with. Progressing further with the Dragon was simply unnecessary.
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And there's the political component, with Towlyn's trial and all. I think confed techs are fairly adaptable: I don't remember anyone from Sparks to Rachel to complain about new fighters, in fact, they love it. And remember, Pliers used to work for confed too. :)
 
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