WC4 Mod For Homeworld 2 In The Works (June 5, 2006)

[Quarto]

The Morningstar will definitely be inferior to both. Excalibur is the premier dogfighter of the game, followed by the Bearcat, while Dragon is the best omnirole, followed in this by the Morningstar. In terms of RL equipment, Excalibur would be the F-22, Bearcat the Typhoon, Dragon the Rafale and Morningstar the F/A-18.

Mostly a reasonably analogy, except for the Dragon . The Rafale could perhaps be the WCP Vampire (well, Panther, more likely). The Dragon, meanwhile, is very clearly the F-35 - an over-equipped, underperforming hyper-expensive bird that's going to get cancelled after a limited production run.

 

[L.I.F.]

Mostly a reasonably analogy, except for the Dragon . The Rafale could perhaps be the WCP Vampire (well, Panther, more likely). The Dragon, meanwhile, is very clearly the F-35 - an over-equipped, underperforming hyper-expensive bird that's going to get cancelled after a limited production run.

French and uber-fan of the Rafale talking here: do not underestimate the F-35. The program has been badly managed, but its fundamentals are the very same to Rafale's, to which it is much closer than to the F-22, for example. The plane will come late, that's a fact, but is going to be cheaper in the long run than most would think by reading the media.

Why do I say that? Because, like our plane, it is thought as a system platform first and foremost, not as just a plane. Something like the F-22 or the Typhoon, the Hornet and all previous planes, were still-frames of an era, great when they came out but gradually outdated. You could improve them, but it was hard and expensive, required factory-level work to change and you ended up with disparate fleets in your inventory. Not an issue if you just buy a whole new fighter after five to fifteen years, but such a thing is over now.

Then come Rafale and F-35, the actual new generation of plane design (one is LO, the other VLO, but that's a bit less important in real life than the generalist media tend to say). How are they different? They are entirely modulable, in both hardware and software. The things I will describe are factual realities that were achieved over the past ten years by Rafale, and F-35 has a similar design, meaning it will do the same thing too. The plane comes in 2003 with a central processing system, that's nice, a few dozen PowerPC cards that run your radar, IR sensors, data fusion system, and all the plane. Now, after three years, these processors start getting a bit old, Moore's Law and everything. No problem, swap the processors with new ones, and the system works like a charm, faster than before.

How, when such a thing would be impossible on F-22 or the previous planes without rewriting all the plane's software? Virtualization. F-35 and Rafale are like us Wingnuts playing Wing Commander II on a modern computer. They do not rewrite WC2 for Windows XP, then 7, 8 and 10, they just use DosBox. Well, these planes have a hypervisor, the equivalent of an emulator that will be updated easily and that will generate a very specific workspace for the software while using changing hardware.

What does it mean? Typhoon, F-22 and the previous planes will be using their old processors in 2020 or 2030. Maybe there will be a big and very expensive rewrite of their code to fit a software update once or twice, but that's it. F-35 and Rafale? Their processing power will grow with Moore's Law for an absurdly low price. And when you realize that, for example, Rafale's electronic warfare suite was already smart enough to spoof a S-300´s radar during a NATO exercise and made the plane invisible to Libya's air defences in 2011, I can let you imagine the effectiveness of high processing power on F-35's systems.

Then there is the hardware. India, decades ago, bought some pretty nice Mirage 2000 planes from France. Nice and cool delta-winged planes. But the equipment became old, and in the late 2000's, they asked the manufacturer, Dassault, for hardware upgrades with the radar, fire control, etc. The bill was in double digit millions... per frame. This is the reality of old planes, where you send them back to the factory and equip them each with the new stuff or not at all.

Now comes the Rafale and the F-35. See, here, in Frog-land, we're stingy with our budget. We have the latest tech in radars, with the brand new AESA systems, but we have roughly one AESA radar for three or four planes, the other having their original PESA radars. Not a problem, because with the new generation of plane design, it's just a matter of unplugging the radar from one plane and plugging it on the other plane for it to work perfectly. Or the IR cameras, or the omnidirectional IR sensors for proximity warning (DAS for F-35, DDM-NG for Raf'). It's done every day when a patrol has to take off and allows us to do the job without spending nearly as much as before. Oh, and the actual plane update to allow it to use the new radars, the new missiles and stuff? Bring a USB drive, plug it into the plane in the base's hangar, grab a coffee and a newspaper, and 30 minutes later, it's done for free. This is how in ten years, the consensus from potential foreign buyers started with Typhoon being a better plane and ended up with it being completely blown away by Rafale, because the latter grew constantly in capacity and the former had many troubles being upgraded.


This is what the F-35 will offer you, people. Large spending at the beginning, but with the assurance that you will have something up to date cheaply for the next 40 to 50 years. And I'm not talking about nice promises from Powerpoint slides, I'm talking about the operational reality as it is seen with its European cousin for a decade now.

 

[Quarto]

French and uber-fan of the Rafale talking here: do not underestimate the F-35. The program has been badly managed, but its fundamentals are the very same to Rafale's, to which it is much closer than to the F-22, for example. The plane will come late, that's a fact, but is going to be cheaper in the long run than most would think by reading the media. [...]

This is what the F-35 will offer you, people. Large spending at the beginning, but with the assurance that you will have something up to date cheaply for the next 40 to 50 years. And I'm not talking about nice promises from Powerpoint slides, I'm talking about the operational reality as it is seen with its European cousin for a decade now.

Well, I wouldn't want to hijack this thread with a discussion of present-day fighter development, but... here's the thing. The approach you describe is, ironically, horrendously outdated straight out of the gate. It's based on a number of very flawed (IMO) assumptions. Here goes...

1. A core assumption is that the second half of the 20th century will continue in the 21st century. That just as we've seen for the past 50 years, it will make sense to continue producing aircraft on the assumption that it will still be in service fifty years from now. Why should this be the case in the age of miniaturisation, computer-assisted design, and the rise of drones? Why assume that fifty years from now, we'll even be flying jet fighters, rather than some new-fangled new type of engine? It's a bit like Britain trying to future-proof the Sopwith Camel back in 1916 - yeah, sure, if you build the Sopwith Camel well enough, it will still be serviceable in 1966. But do you need it to be?

2. Another assumption is that powerful outcomes require cutting-edge technology. This was true twenty years ago, when these programmes were first being conceived. It is no longer true today. A present day jet fighter does not require a supercomputer to operate. As disturbing and controversial as this might sound, we can already achieve the equivalent of all the software packages from an F-16 using an iPhone (or maybe two). Granted, an F-16 does not have the capabilities of an F-22, F-35, or the Rafale. Does it need to, however? We are assuming here that there is no point of over-design, where the costs of continued development would be too high in relation to the benefits. But there is such a point. How many new F-16s and F/A-18s would it be possible to manufacture and deploy for the price of the F-35 programme? And how many F-16s do you need, before the far more powerful F-35 is outmatched and shot down? In the face of the rise of China, who in the decades to come will be increasingly able to outfit potential combatants not with dozens of F-35 equivalents, but with hundreds F-16 equivalents at half the price of an F-16, this is not a trivial question.

3. A third assumption is that the costs of developing new fighters are justified at all. Now, the romantic in me certainly hopes so. The sceptic in me also tells me that drones are unreliable by definition - remote control is prone to hijacking. But the realist says that drones do change everything, and just because the drones of today are worthless in combat doesn't mean that ten years down the track they still will be. I think it would be crazy to not continue developing the equivalents of the light-weight F-16 - a pure dogfighter. But developing an-all-in-one strike fighter at an exorbitant price? That's much more questionable today.

4. Finally, there is the assumption that the capacity to continue spending these amounts of money on defence will remain. The US has doubled its national debt in the space of a couple of years. Other countries are finding themselves in even hotter water. In all countries that are participating in the F-35 programme, the rising costs and underperformance of the F-35 have generated enormous controversy. Trump is not a US-only phenomenon. Anywhere you look, you're seeing the success of politicians who challenge the status quo. I strongly suspect that if even one nation was currently to back out of the F-35 programme, this would generate political pressure in a number of other states to follow suit. The US would basically need to bribe other countries into sticking with the F-35, pushing the costs up even further. Would the US have the political will to still continue with the programme at that point? I think it's very revealing that about two years back, they scrapped their new trainer programme. The plane that was being developed specifically for the purpose of training new F-35 pilots was scrapped in order to take some heat away from the F-35 budget. What will happen when the next US debt ceiling crisis comes along (and remember, those crises come from out-of-control spending, and the lack of political will to do the right thing and stop spending)? At which point will somebody make the decision to wind down the F-35, reducing the number of ordered aircraft from thousands to mere hundreds?

It's entirely possible that the F-35 programme will continue unchanged. The political prestige invested in the programme is so huge, that a cancellation would send shockwaves through America and all around the world: it would literally be the event that goes down in history books as the symbolic end of Pax Americana. But Pax Americana as a period is already over, and America is already unable to foot its bills. At some point, someone will have to face up to that. Maybe it will happen after F-35, during the development of its inevitable successor. Regardless, the F-35 is a lot like a full-plate armour knight in the 17th century. Impressive. Powerful. Still fairly impenetrable to enemy arms. But... you know, if you can field several dragoons or hussars instead, you're not going to be spending money on trying to develop even more powerful full-plate armours. If I were buying new fighter aircraft at the moment, I wouldn't look to the Rafale or to the F-35. No, I'd go for the much cheaper Gripen, but I'd get thrice as many of them. I'd neglect stealth and all that other very impressive jazz, and I'd focus on aggressive combat capabilities. Literally, I'd shift away from the full-plate knight model, towards the Polish hussar model.

 

[L.I.F.]

1. A core assumption is that the second half of the 20th century will continue in the 21st century. That just as we've seen for the past 50 years, it will make sense to continue producing aircraft on the assumption that it will still be in service fifty years from now. Why should this be the case in the age of miniaturisation, computer-assisted design, and the rise of drones? Why assume that fifty years from now, we'll even be flying jet fighters, rather than some new-fangled new type of engine? It's a bit like Britain trying to future-proof the Sopwith Camel back in 1916 - yeah, sure, if you build the Sopwith Camel well enough, it will still be serviceable in 1966. But do you need it to be?

To this question, the answer is most likely "yes", for simple reasons of cost. Designing brand new systems is expensive, horrendously so, and drones do not avoid this problem themselves, the cockpit being a small part of the cost compared to the avionics and the software. The idea is that until such a technological breakthrough like small and affordable SABRE engines, a country can keep flying the same plane without having to redesign everything yet another time as in the 20th century. That's actually the core assumption here: that unlike the second half of the 20th century, we will not have a new plane every five years.

2. Another assumption is that powerful outcomes require cutting-edge technology. This was true twenty years ago, when these programmes were first being conceived. It is no longer true today. A present day jet fighter does not require a supercomputer to operate. As disturbing and controversial as this might sound, we can already achieve the equivalent of all the software packages from an F-16 using an iPhone (or maybe two). Granted, an F-16 does not have the capabilities of an F-22, F-35, or the Rafale. Does it need to, however? We are assuming here that there is no point of over-design, where the costs of continued development would be too high in relation to the benefits. But there is such a point. How many new F-16s and F/A-18s would it be possible to manufacture and deploy for the price of the F-35 programme? And how many F-16s do you need, before the far more powerful F-35 is outmatched and shot down? In the face of the rise of China, who in the decades to come will be increasingly able to outfit potential combatants not with dozens of F-35 equivalents, but with hundreds F-16 equivalents at half the price of an F-16, this is not a trivial question.

Actually, it tends to be less expensive to achieve the same result with more advanced platforms. Take a look at Libya, which was in some way a bit like the 1991 Gulf War for us when it came to tech demonstration. If you come with F-16, you will need a very large package to achieve your goal. First, you'll need your F-16, obviously, to carry the bombs. But then, you will also need dedicated jammer craft to neutralize part of the enemy defences. Then you'll also need SEAD/DEAD packages. Add to this air superiority planes to get some coverage for the whole thing. At this point, you also start needing more refueling aircrafts, more spare parts, a bigger logistical trail, etc. To this you have to add the usual US tactic which is to spam cruise missiles on Day 1 to wreck enemy defences and keep the enemy's head down.

Now consider what happened with the modern design school: first of all, some planes lurked in the previous days, using their EW suite to map the enemy defences and record their emission patterns. Then, single flights came, capable of simultaneous AtA and AtG action, penetrating the defences by soft-killing them through EW (in F-35 case, it would be EW and VLO), meaning a lot less planes deployed and no need for cruise missiles to break down the door. Same for air combat: if you cannot properly attack the more modern fighter, it will just leave whenever it feels outmatched.

3. A third assumption is that the costs of developing new fighters are justified at all. Now, the romantic in me certainly hopes so. The sceptic in me also tells me that drones are unreliable by definition - remote control is prone to hijacking. But the realist says that drones do change everything, and just because the drones of today are worthless in combat doesn't mean that ten years down the track they still will be. I think it would be crazy to not continue developing the equivalents of the light-weight F-16 - a pure dogfighter. But developing an-all-in-one strike fighter at an exorbitant price? That's much more questionable today.

The development policies consider both manned and unmanned aircrafts. The idea is that combat drones would be extension of the manned aircraft, allowing it to have a sensor and weapon network all over the place while keeping control through directional (extremely hard to hijack) communication links. And for dogfighters, I would seriously advise against placing all the bets on pure agility. Japan wanted to do that with their Zero, the US Navy showed them why having more power was thoroughly better in gunfight. Consider also the fact that nowadays, you tend to have much higher performance IR missiles, capable of shooting behind the plane or having BVR ranges themselves.

4. Finally, there is the assumption that the capacity to continue spending these amounts of money on defence will remain. The US has doubled its national debt in the space of a couple of years. Other countries are finding themselves in even hotter water. In all countries that are participating in the F-35 programme, the rising costs and underperformance of the F-35 have generated enormous controversy. Trump is not a US-only phenomenon. Anywhere you look, you're seeing the success of politicians who challenge the status quo. I strongly suspect that if even one nation was currently to back out of the F-35 programme, this would generate political pressure in a number of other states to follow suit. The US would basically need to bribe other countries into sticking with the F-35, pushing the costs up even further. Would the US have the political will to still continue with the programme at that point? I think it's very revealing that about two years back, they scrapped their new trainer programme. The plane that was being developed specifically for the purpose of training new F-35 pilots was scrapped in order to take some heat away from the F-35 budget. What will happen when the next US debt ceiling crisis comes along (and remember, those crises come from out-of-control spending, and the lack of political will to do the right thing and stop spending)? At which point will somebody make the decision to wind down the F-35, reducing the number of ordered aircraft from thousands to mere hundreds?

In terms of the political mess, I'd rather not start such a derail here (plane tactics seem appropriate, but politics, a tad less). But I'll just say that even though I was a quite vocal opponent of the F-35 a few years ago, I've learned enough since then in the "non-glamorous" aspects of air combat to say that the reports found on many blogs and generalist news are more sensationalist than real.

It's entirely possible that the F-35 programme will continue unchanged. The political prestige invested in the programme is so huge, that a cancellation would send shockwaves through America and all around the world: it would literally be the event that goes down in history books as the symbolic end of Pax Americana. But Pax Americana as a period is already over, and America is already unable to foot its bills. At some point, someone will have to face up to that. Maybe it will happen after F-35, during the development of its inevitable successor. Regardless, the F-35 is a lot like a full-plate armour knight in the 17th century. Impressive. Powerful. Still fairly impenetrable to enemy arms. But... you know, if you can field several dragoons or hussars instead, you're not going to be spending money on trying to develop even more powerful full-plate armours. If I were buying new fighter aircraft at the moment, I wouldn't look to the Rafale or to the F-35. No, I'd go for the much cheaper Gripen, but I'd get thrice as many of them. I'd neglect stealth and all that other very impressive jazz, and I'd focus on aggressive combat capabilities. Literally, I'd shift away from the full-plate knight model, towards the Polish hussar model.

Cheaper? Gripen is roughly 60M while Rafale is 80M. And given the growing differences in avionics and combat systems, it's more like these modern planes are German machine guns from 1870. We Frogs had "élan" and aggressive tactics, but it was definitely not enough.

 

[L.I.F.]

Outside of the derail, good news!

I managed to get Border Worlds' capital ships to get modular turrets. You will be able to select individual turrets and recycle them to free a spot and build other systems.

In the release to come, you will be able to replace normal Laser turrets with Stormfire turrets or ImRec missile turrets and AMG turrets with VLS cells (Vertical Launching System). A VLS cluster will fire salvoes of long-range anti-ship missiles plus medium-range high-performance anti-air missiles (the same that are on Confed destroyers, which, BTW, are easily destroying the long-range missiles, just saying).

In short, you can turn your artillery cruisers into guided missile cruisers, which will be nothing short than devastating but will lack the kind of direct fire other capital ships enjoy. Oh, and each VLS cluster costs 1,500, almost as much as a destroyer. As of now, the Border Worlds faction is considered feature-complete for release and I'm going to test it a bit before cleaning up the folders and uploading the stuff.

 

[L.I.F.]

OK, people, I've just uploaded the new content, with 562 MB of fun stuff for you to enjoy.

The patch contains some fixes to some issues with the two main factions' ships and introduces the Border Worlds one. The AI is not yet supposed to work for it properly (meaning I haven't done anything for it, I'll give it a quick makeover tomorrow) and I was not able to test every imaginable configuration, so if it crashes, post about it here and/or on the mod's Steam page with details of what you were doing when it crashed, and I'll try to fix it as fast as I can.

 

[Quarto]

Cheaper? Gripen is roughly 60M while Rafale is 80M. And given the growing differences in avionics and combat systems, it's more like these modern planes are German machine guns from 1870. We Frogs had "élan" and aggressive tactics, but it was definitely not enough.

Actually, 60M for the Gripen is at the high end of the scale of what you can pay for that plane - it does depend on how you want to outfit it. Regardless, the Rafale is not really considered competitive compared to the F-35 in terms of technological advancement - but the latter is much more expensive. In many ways, it's a bit unfortunate that we've framed this discussion in terms of Rafale & F-35 versus everyone else, because I don't think the two are in any way comparable. The Rafale is nowhere near the technological level of the F-35. It's actually much closer to the kind of approach that I have in mind, where you make compromises in order to optimise your machine for a specific role, rather than trying to make an expensive and ultimately underperforming jack-of-all-trades. The Rafale is a fighter (and a good one!) that happens to also be capable of doing a few other things none-too-shabbily, but not well. The F-35 is supposed to do everything well. I'm sure they can optimise and improve the plane until eventually, it does do everything well. But in the meantime, new designs will have come along that outdo the F-35 in just a few departments while remaining inferior in others.

And the comparison to 1870 is very apt indeed. In 1870, France was crushed, above all, by a German willingness to throw out the accepted playbook and dramatically change their modus operandi. Technologically speaking, the Germans were fighting with an inferior, outdated rifle characterised by worse range and accuracy than the French weapon of the time. It was the French who had machine guns, not the Germans. The one thing the Germans did have was a very optimised, and innovative, artillery - but while this was important, it was hardly crucial. The Germans won their victory mostly with inferior weapons, but intelligent officers. The French had continued to upgrade their equipment, but ultimately they still thought it was 1815. This is precisely why it is a bad idea to depend too much on superior technology. This story repeated itself in 1914, and 1940 (the French had better tanks in 1940! But the Germans knew how to use theirs).

You'll notice I skipped most of your arguments, primarily in favour of avoiding getting into a protracted debate that neither of us probably has the time for, and which would distract from your mod. I do get that there are a lot of arguments in favour of the high-tech approach taken in the F-35. At the moment, however, I think that there are more arguments against them than in favour. Above all, I think it's a fallacy to think that designing an all-in-one-craft is going to be cheaper and better than designing multiple aircraft that serve more specialised roles. I think this is entirely unproven, because none of the countries taking this approach have demonstrated how it works in practice. And when I say "how it works in practice", I mean how it works when you start incurring losses, like in an actual real war as opposed to Libya (which was, from a technological point of view, the equivalent of Mike Tyson taking a five-year-old's lunchbox). Suppose a middle-sized country has been persuaded to buy the F-35 because they need fewer of them. Ok, so they buy fewer of them. But now, every time they lose a fighter, they also lose a bomber, an EW aircraft, and several others - all in one. It's a very dangerous position to be in, if you ever get into a real shooting war. And let's leave it at that, getting back to your actual topic .

 

[L.I.F.]

I'll agree to not get caught in a big derail (though I disagree with many points you're discussing). Plus, the new version of the mod was just released and I fixed the big obvious release bug (forgot to upload the UBW icons), so enjoy!

 

[L.I.F.]

Various small patches were done during the past few hours to fix graphical and gameplay issues.

 

[L.I.F.]

OK, so, for some strange reason, it is absolutely hilarious to use the Morningstar in MP when I foolishly underestimated the effectiveness of its Mace. See, four of the fighters coming in hot with their Mace, firing it at 6,000 metres, way beyond their targets' firing range and seeing the lightning-fast rocket create a supermassive fireball that kinda destroys every single fighter within 2,000 metres, while there was a huge fighter battle, well, it was a tad overpowered. Hilariously so, though, since it erased a decent part of the enemy battle line. In consideration of this, the Morningstar now has a hard cap to avoid its spamming and its rocket has been nerfed with a range of 4,500 metres and its area of effect is limited to 1,000 metres... which should still make it very painful to tank.

Of course, I do not think I need to explain to you what would happen if, I don't know, you happened to fire such a missile at the enemy carrier right when it launches or recover its fighters. OK, now that this is said, I need to go giggle somewhere else.

 

[DefianceIndustries]

That could be a..."Hot Mace" for your opponent...ah, see what I did there? ok...back to texturing...grumble, grumble.

 

[L.I.F.]

This destroyer does not exist. Any rumours regarding its production or deployment are lies.

Sightings of such a ship are obviously the result of drunk-piloting and should be reported as such to the nearest authorities.

The Strategic Readiness Agency never commissioned any advanced variant of the Southampton.

Such a non-existing ship is not far faster than any destroyer and most frigates, nor is armed with a pair of experimental heavy plasma guns to replace its anti-matter weaponry.

Now...

 

[L.I.F.]

People... I think I've gone too far. I've done something that Modders were not meant to do. @Klavs81 did some gorgeous work, but one kinda kept my attention for its sheer size and the ambition it represents. Kinda like, you know, Icarus' Sun, the thing that you know you should not try to reach but do so anyway?

>_>

<_<

This is the first version, without any kind of advanced texturing work to make it look really as great as he did in his screenshots:

DEFINITELY work in progress, that's a proof of concept of my latest workflow, with a... > 500 k polygon mesh. I have no clue if I'll use it, how, why or where, but... wow. It can be done.

 

[DefianceIndustries]

How many submeshes did you have to slice that up into?

 

[L.I.F.]

How many submeshes did you have to slice that up into?

Twenty-eight. X_X

If the game's devs at Gearbox ever hear about this, they will have a heart attack and yell at me. Again.

 

[DefianceIndustries]

Too funny! that's awesome.

 

[L.I.F.]

Too funny! that's awesome.

Yeah. Let's just say I am definitely NOT going through the approved process to get the ships in-game.

 

[Dundradal]

So, I'm now pretty convinced something weird is going on or I'm not comprehending part of the fighter dynamic.

Fired it up again last night, started making a group of fighters (8 Hellcats, 8 Bearcats, 8 Excals) and had them go to a rally point not far from the carrier and HQ. I noticed that when they ran out of fuel and needed to dock that some of them just went dumb. And it appears their stupidity was tied to trying to dock at HQ? (At least, that's what it seemed like) As I couldn't get them to really respond until I tried to select them alone or broke them from the larger group. It just seemed really strange. I should probably get a video of it so you can see what I'm talking about.

Also, wasn't the capship limit supposed to go up?

 

[L.I.F.]

So, I'm now pretty convinced something weird is going on or I'm not comprehending part of the fighter dynamic.

Fired it up again last night, started making a group of fighters (8 Hellcats, 8 Bearcats, 8 Excals) and had them go to a rally point not far from the carrier and HQ. I noticed that when they ran out of fuel and needed to dock that some of them just went dumb. And it appears their stupidity was tied to trying to dock at HQ? (At least, that's what it seemed like) As I couldn't get them to really respond until I tried to select them alone or broke them from the larger group. It just seemed really strange. I should probably get a video of it so you can see what I'm talking about.

Also, wasn't the capship limit supposed to go up?

Dumb, how so?

 

[Dundradal]

They simply get stuck or appear to get stuck. They'll stick around the HQ but don't do anything. They don't appear too be docking and then reforming. They just start sitting pretty.