Originally posted by Earthworm
IIRC, the Zorthak didn't loose any speed or agility, so it should have remained as manuverable as the Vaktoh. And the Confed Zorthak could be based on the T-bolt frame... all things considered, it wouldn't be as bad as flying a Dev.
Perhaps it wouldn't, perhaps it would. Confed already has one ship which has the needed transmission strength and range to be used for this - the Seahawk. D'y'ant to be the one telling the players that they're gonna fly the SWACS?
Personally, I'd love to fly such a ship - a mission where you have to do weird electronic warfare/counter-electronic warfare stuff would be bloody awesome (as long as my ship has an evac pod and a good escort ;-) ), but that's just me. For most people, I think the SWACS is something to escort, not to fly.
How so? BoT had huge fleets with couple hundred capships on each side. In this missions there could be a Neph Dreadnough chasing after some light Confed carrier, tis all.
Err, no, that's not what I meant. I was thinking along somewhat different lines, so I immediately "jumped the gap" between what you were saying, and a different type of mine-laying mission - specifically, the Enyo Engagement (most sources actually say this battle took place in MacAuliffe, but Enyo Engagement sounds nicer, so I'll keep calling it that), which I'm sure you recall
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**well, what can you do to make a mission last longer for the player?** Add some major surprises during the mission of course.<G> Maybe treason, one of the pilots is working with pirates, and you sudenly get jumped by a light pirate capship along with some obsolete fighters. If you're escorting more than one capship, you could have alien cap missiles pop out of nowhere and destroy one or two ships before there's anything you can do... I'm sure you can think of something creative.
Actually, that was a rhetorical question
. There are many things that can be used to make a long mission interesting, but we are always heavily limited by the plot. In this particular case, most of the examples you gave wouldn't work. Yes, we will try to have one or two surprises to keep the player on his toes during this mission, but I'm afraid that mostly, the length of the mission will be the result of conventional hostile action. But don't worry... the player will not be required to destroy all those hostiles all by himself. That, however, is all I can say on this subject.
BTW, any word on when UO will be available?
I'm going to answer your question with absolute honesty, but please don't sue me if this answer turns out to be wrong. As I already said in the little note on the CIC news page, fan projects are weird beasts which can suddenly go into hibernation for months at a time without any reason. Actually, that's not quite right - there always is a reason, and it's exactly the same every time - one person has no time, and everybody else loses momentum. Fan projects live or die depending on the amount of momentum they build up. Thus, what I say now could turn out to be off by many months.
That having been said, I'm really, really hopeful right now. Things are looking up for UE; we've made some very positive strides lately, and we're picking up (rather than losing) momentum. Anyway, let me put it this way. On the UE downloads page, the release date is given as February 2001. I think we can keep this date - not early February; perhaps we'll only just barely squeeze into the end of February. But somewhere around that time, anyway.
