Draymans had multiple turrets.

This sounds cool, this sort of scripting is right up my alley. As soon as we're done adding ships...

As far as I am concerned the final tier is: Dorkathi, Bengal, Epee and Strakha, and maybe the kilrathi asteroid fighter. Anyone wants anything else?
 
Hello,
i'm a new pilot from germany now playing around with WCU.

To the thread:
Can it also be, that the road from Gemini to the other Confed-Sectors is guarded by a big Mil-Spec-Base from the Confed to control the lane? Like the Pegasus-Asterpoid-Base from the movie or the Sector-Control-Station in WC:prophecy?? That would explain, why there wasn't the System in Privateer. Comes somebody who are not friend with confed, you can go away or be busted, but don't travel through the jump hole.

Sorry for the bad english, but i haven't speaked or writed for about 10 years this language. ;)

Grusim
 
Makes sense to me!

Right now we are mostly doing SHIPS; systems will be done later. If you want to add a station to a system, open the .system file in /sectors/gemini (or wherever) and look at how it's done :) it's a text file, easy.

In fact if someone wants to fix the sol system... please do... i'm busy collecting ships and putting them in right now as that is the most urgent thing since it will determine how big the filesize for WCU will be.
 
My random thoughts:

1. What would seem likely is that in the system where Sol sector connects to Gemini, there's a permanently stationed Confed garrison.

This garrison need NOT include ships. As likely, in fact, is that Space Forces squadrons are stationed on strategically located planets. However, very strategic systems will have fleets stationed there.

Example systems for SF squadrons: Oxford, New Detroit, New Constantinople.

Example systems for TCN fleets: Perry (Fleet HQ), Blockade Point Tango, Blockade Point Alpha, Ragnarok
 
I must take a look in my WC:prophey- Big Starmap and look how you came from the gemini-Sectro to the rest of the world and perhaps put then on some locations to restrict a super-starbase . That would explain why you has privateer could not so easily go from one Sector to another. (You have worked for pirates, you smuggled and you haven't give us your steltek gun, now go to the Kilrathi but don't think to see our beautifull sol!)

spirit, i must for this manipulte which xml - file?? And to make it then fix forever give it to you or what??

C ya, Grusim
 
To catch up on this thread:

the priv dray has none, the wc1 dray has one wimpy flak gun, the transports in wc2 same, the priv-wcu dray has six very ineffective turrets because this gives the player the ability to buy upgrades. That's my take on it. If you have a better idea gameplay wise please being it up

I can certainly do that.

The game is not about having an amazingly great ship that can do anything. It is about balance.

Consider that the Drayman exists in Privateer specifically to give the player something that he can be hired to defend. If your project is going to expand the game to allow the player to "fly" a Drayman, then the mechanics of the game should be expanded to allow him to actually role play the situation proplerly rather than inventing some sort of magic super Drayman.

If a player wants to fly a Drayman (which should hold some sort of reward - 100x the cargo capacity of a Galaxy or somesuch), then he must be responsible for hiring an escort (or signing on as part of a convoy - less profit, more safety). Getting a Drayman should be an opportunity for a new strategy and a new experience of gameplay, not a chance to fly a giant Centurion.

Interesting gameplay should be the goal, not chicken fried regular Privateer.
 
thehawk: i've already done such a set of where-you-go-in-each-game maps - i'll dig them up and find somewhere to put them online - they're too big to just attach to a post.
 
If you need space tell me :)

About Dray turrets: Right now most NPC Drays come with reasonably wimpy turrets that are just there to give you, the escort, some time to actually defend the Dray before some yahoo in a Talon parks behind it and plinks it to death. (Play the Oxford missions with and without turreted Drays and see for yourself). I suppose that a player could find the cash to put six tachyon turrets on a dray, but then it would become very boring to fly it -- so the player would buy something else, or keep a Demon inside the Dray and fly that for defense instead, which is really the point in the first place.
 
I don't really think transports can launch fighters. The instances you're probably thing of are wholly unrelated to ordinary shipping -- when the Bonnie Heather or the Gamal Gan carries a pair of fighters, it's because they've been converted into pocket carriers. It's Special Ops stuff, and it's not a case of ships also being used to transport goods. Paladin isn't transporting a load of luxury food and also a Rapier II... his cargo hold (which isn't even really a cargo hold) is *just* for that Rapier. End Run talks a bit about attempts to literally strap fighters to the outside of a transport to solve the escort problem, and how that didn't really work...

If the Oxford missions aren't working properly, it's some other balancing issue -- clearly, the original Privateer managed to play them with Meson-gun armed Draymen.
 
Warlock- Oh, cool. I will await patiently.

Spiritplumber- is there anything wrong with Sol system other than getting into/out of it? (see my post about non-Gemini sectors on the other board, or that note I sent) If not, I already have a set of files that is fixed, tho currently you have to take a specific jump route to get there (the auto-generated systems for me are almost all wonky).

-thehawk
 
Bandit LOAF said:
I don't really think transports can launch fighters. The instances you're probably thing of are wholly unrelated to ordinary shipping -- when the Bonnie Heather or the Gamal Gan carries a pair of fighters, it's because they've been converted into pocket carriers. It's Special Ops stuff, and it's not a case of ships also being used to transport goods. Paladin isn't transporting a load of luxury food and also a Rapier II... his cargo hold (which isn't even really a cargo hold) is *just* for that Rapier. End Run talks a bit about attempts to literally strap fighters to the outside of a transport to solve the escort problem, and how that didn't really work...

Interestingly enough, there is a historical parallel for a merchant aircraft carrier. It seems that during WWII the British outfitted about 35 merchant ships with rocket powered catapults. These merchant carriers (or "CAMs") were capable of carrying a single, disposable fighter plane. The idea is that in an emergency the plane could be prepped, launched off the deck, and defend or attack a target. The only problem is that these merchant vessels were unable to retrieve the plane after launch. This meant that the pilot would have to bail out after his mission and be pulled from the sea by the CAM vessel.

A similar issue would occur with the Drayman craft. You could always shove the ship out of the airlock, but it would be *extremely* difficult to recover. The primary issue is that a merchant ship would lack a landing bay neccesary for recovery (much like the CAMs lacked a sufficient recovery deck). The tractor beam is an option (very similar to hauling a plane out of the water with ropes), but the limited loading space would make it difficult to effectively pull the ship through the airlock. It certainly couldn't be done with the standard tractor beams. Someone would need to throw ropes around the ship, or use a specialized tractor beam located in the hold.

A possible option for those that want their Draymans to be carriers, is to allow the ship to launch but not dock. At the end of it's mission, you would tell the pilot to eject and you'd tractor him in. Your defensive craft is lost in the process.

Wingmen pilots should be purchased/hired to fly these ships. Without a wingman on staff, the ship you push out the lock would receive no attached AI and would pretty much just sit there.

Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAM_ship


If the Oxford missions aren't working properly, it's some other balancing issue -- clearly, the original Privateer managed to play them with Meson-gun armed Draymen.

The number one thing that needs to change is to delete that damn corkscrew manuver! All the other manuvers are fairly consistent with the WC universe. The problem with the corkscrew is that no pilot could possibly fly that pattern (intertial compensators or no) and still keep such a straight centerline approach. And a pilot could DEFINITELY not manage to shoot anything pulling a stunt like that!

The number two thing that needs to change is the enemy's target aquisition. It seems that the enemies always target you, or target something else. This leads to the situation of a dogfight where the enemies ignore your wingmen/militia/confed/whatever, and always spend their time nailing your shields. If they considered all targets equal, then you might actually have a chance of blowing away bad guys before dying.

Beyond that, formation flying would be a nice addition to enemies. Also, grouping them as a wing would help balanace out the enemies selection algos. i.e. Instead of picking a number between 1-20, the mission generator could select one to three wings of ships. Each wing could be of a different ship type (with appropriate semantics and wing size), and the algo could make intelligent decisions about why so many wings would be present. :)

One way or another, I love the Privateer Remake. You guys have done some great work! The only issue with it is that it feels unpolished after you past a few of Tayla's missions. Hopefully WCU will learn from this and produce an even better product. :)
 
Spirit, maybe LOAF has a point about Draymans joining convoys and stuff? Remember in Fallout how you join convoys. Could be just like that: If four Draymans agree to a run, each must have a minimum of 2 launchable escorts to participate, say, and the group pools resources to hire a few extra ones to fly along. Something like that. But you're right, IMHO, that the 6 turrets barely give the Drayman a bit more time to live, so that the escorts can do their job. I think if people insist on having less turrets, it could be put to a vote between the current 6, or just 3 but with autotracking...

Oops! I just read LOAF's next post. If that's so forget the "minimum 2 launchable escorts" bit. Just pooling resources to hire 4 wingmen for a group of 4 Draymans should do, I guess. Hmmm... not when attacked by 7 kilrathi and 5 retros...

Anyhow, that's what one would want to do no matter, rather than occupy precious cargo space. Escorts can fly, right? So, let'em fly.
 
Great post, Batman. About the ability to launch but not recover escorts, it would work in my kind of game, namely where the number and strength and frequency of enemy encounters is more in line with what one could expect in real life. Like there was this sim game TFX, around same time as Privateer, in which you flew F22, F117 and Eurofighter missions, and most missions were relatively easy, difficulty increased very gradually; but if you died you were dead... couldn't reload the game. Had to start all over.
The moment you can reload a game, the developers start to think that making missions so hard one has to try multiple times to complete them is okay and cool. I'm not venting against the remake, rather against Origin. Anyhow, if the Drayman can carry fighters, you can bet money on it, it will need to launch them often enough to make the losses from abandoned fighters exceed the cargo profits.
 
A little confession... the entire WCU thing started AS me saying "Cool, you can fly a Drayman... I want some turrets on it, and I want to be able to keep a Demon strapped to it and launch it when neeeded".

I agree with batman on most stuf -- IIRC the other thing they did (or maybe this is just me remembering the anime Porco Rosso, but I'm reasonably sure that the Italian navy had at least one of these in WW2 in real life) was catapult-launch flying boats which could then land on water and be recovered with a crane. This was done because flying boats are difficult to water-takeoff.

Right now a good % of the reason why EVERY capship including the Dray carries fighters is that, as was pointed out, the wing generator is a little broken so we want to make sure that Drays DO come with an escort every time. Eventually I'd rather anything smaller than a Paradigm not carry fighter at all, BUT be escorted by some. The player ship might be an exception because, well, I personally like to play carrier :)

Right now my main concern is "punching in" WCU ships, guns, turrets etc. (I did the Bengal this morning and I'm now making sure that turrets don't shoot through their parent ship, which looks very stupid). Next (for me anyway) will be ship AI then better universe generation.

Please keep in mind that I AM NOT THE BOSS OF ANYTHING HERE!!! If you want to implement something, try it out and see how well it works, if it works better than what's currently there then by golly let's merge it in!
 
I'm amazed how fast you picked this up spiritplumber. After a few hours looking at the code, i got more pissed off then anything else ( and i used to program in basic, delphi, php etc ). Maybe's it Python in combination with the functions, but for the love of god, sometimes i feel like strangling some of the people who wrote the variables. Way to many variables that are strangly defined.

My hat off to you for figuring it out :)
 
spiritplumber said:
I agree with batman on most stuf -- IIRC the other thing they did (or maybe this is just me remembering the anime Porco Rosso, but I'm reasonably sure that the Italian navy had at least one of these in WW2 in real life) was catapult-launch flying boats which could then land on water and be recovered with a crane. This was done because flying boats are difficult to water-takeoff.

You remember correctly. The earliest forms of aircraft carriers were Seaplane Tenders, which lauched the planes off their deck, then recovered them with a crane. As I understand it, these ships would transport the planes to the battlefield where they would take off and perform recon. They were tremendously slow to launch, recover, and turnaround, so they were generally staged at the front of the battlefleet. (i.e. Where the fleet would be, as opposed to where they were.) When true aircraft carriers were developed, the Japanese made the mistake of putting them out in front of their other ships. This manuver played a large part in the Japanese defeat at Midway. (The US held back the carriers and used the battleships for coverfire.)

The one other thing you're correct about is that these tenders *were* merchant ships. However, they were *converted* merchant ships. i.e. They no longer carried cargo. The hull was reused, but the entire ship was remodeled to support launch operations. AFAIK, none of these ships were ever in private hands. This would tend to make the case for flying a paradigm in the game instead of a Drayman. The Drayman just isn't big enough to handle both cargo and launch operations.

Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaplane_tender
 
True, but I think that launching/undocking a spaceship in 2669 is probably comparatively easier than launching a seaplane in 1941 -- no need to get up to speed to get airborne for one. I always make a point to specify that the ships which you can have as cargo are fitted for it, if you look at the ship descriptions. It's mostly a gameplay issue for me ^^; thanks for the course correction though!

This said, the original Dray in the game has 5000 cargo space, while the one you buy has a maximum of 600. So maybe mr. burrows says "I don't do that big cargo runs anyway, so 'etls sacrifice a % of my cargo hold for launch equipment"
 
True, but I think that launching/undocking a spaceship in 2669 is probably comparatively easier than launching a seaplane in 1941 -- no need to get up to speed to get airborne for one. I always make a point to specify that the ships which you can have as cargo are fitted for it, if you look at the ship descriptions. It's mostly a gameplay issue for me ^^; thanks for the course correction though!

No, it isn't. As I mentioned earlier, this is something that Confed tried which didn't work out. From End Run: "They had tried the idea of simply strapping a fighter to the outside of a ship and launching when needed. It was a nightmare and a suicide job. The pilot had to suit up, go EVA along with his launch crew. If they were in the middle of a fight and the transport did any maneuver while they were outside, they were dumped off and lost."

This said, the original Dray in the game has 5000 cargo space, while the one you buy has a maximum of 600. So maybe mr. burrows says "I don't do that big cargo runs anyway, so 'etls sacrifice a % of my cargo hold for launch equipment"

No, it doesn't. Any cargo capacity for the Drayman is speculation on the part of the Vega Strike guys.
 
True, but I think that launching/undocking a spaceship in 2669 is probably comparatively easier than launching a seaplane in 1941 -- no need to get up to speed to get airborne for one.

The ability to simply shove the craft out the lock would definitely make life easier. However, recovery would still be just as much of a problem, if not more so. Have you ever seen spaceships docking? It's a very difficult procedure involving the need to match base velocities, spin, and alignment. Even the slighest misalignment could result in a crash of ~100 mph! Remember, in space it takes very little to change the velocity and direction of an object. i.e. There's almost no friction.

If you could continuously accelerate at rates that most cars are capable of, you'd find yourself going hundreds of thousands of miles per hour within fifteen minutes! Now imagine the powerful rockets they use for manuvering, and you'll find that docking is anything but easy to do. I imagine that even the crane method of WWI was fraught with all kinds of perils.

I still think you're better off assuming that Escort Carriers have been sold to private hands as the demands of war required that Confed deploy newer and more powerful carriers. An example of this in modern history is the HMS Vengence which was sold into private hands (on EBay, none the less) for a mere 2 million dollars! She was purchased by Brazil, but was later put back up for sale. Last I knew, a Japanese company was considering making her into a Casino.

One of the biggest issues that Brazil had with the carrier were operational costs. Unlike a Battleship which is itself a weapon, an Aircraft carrier is merely a weapons platform. As a result, its operation requires a significant, ongoing operational expense that far exceeds its initial aquisition cost. Brazil learned this the hard way and never managed to bring the carrier into full operational status.

Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Vengeance_(R71)
http://www.fleetairarmarchive.net/vengeance/

So how would one go about merging this into the game? Well, IMHO, it would be nice to have a true carrier added that would have significant cargo space (like the Paradigm). You can then choose to use that space for either cargo or for flight operations. i.e. Do I ship 5000 cubic meters of grain, or do I purchase missile loadouts, spare armor, extra parts, and more aircraft? And remember, you need to hire a wingman for every plane you launch off the deck.

Once that's in the game, then we should stop pretending that carriers are fighter craft. Instead of "flying" the ship, you'll be running carrier operations such as launch, plane recovery, and repair/turnaround. An interface should be added to the HUD that allows you to see the status of all your planes at once. A small graphic for each ship, plus the standard white/red system would work fine. Perhaps an indicator for missiles/no-missiles. You could then command your ships to launch or recover. When they're recovered, it will take each ship about 5 minutes to be automatically repaired, prepped, and relaunched. (Perhaps this could be changed based on how many grease monkeies you hire?) The only way a pilot could immediately relaunch is if you have another plane already prepped for him.

I know it would make for a very different game than privateer, but that's pretty much what happens when you add capships to the game. Still, it could be a very *cool* game that builds on what Privateer started. :)

A few things would need to change, however:

1. Capships should have more armor. This nonsense about a capship being taken out by a couple of talons is exactly that.

2. Phase Shields? Anyone? Even if we assume that the WC3 gun enhancements are available in Privateer, it still shouldn't be very easy to take them out with guns. This nonsense about a capship being taken out by a couple of talons is exactly that.

3. True torpedos need to become available. These torps would provide the only sure way to bring down a capship. This nonsense about a capship being taken out by a couple of talons is exactly that.

4. The best way to take care of a capship, is to RUN AWAY. Those things are big, have lots-o-guns, and could outlast a single fighter any day. The only advantage small ships have is their speed. If you want to take on capships, you better be packing some torps. This nonsense about a capship being taken out by a couple of talons is exactly that.

Oh, and did I mention that this nonsense about a capship being taken out by a couple of talons is exactly that? ;)

The upside to all of this is that fanboys get their super-ships, but they pay dearly for operating it. Not to mention that WCU becomes an even more interesting game. Wouldn't it be fun to take bounties from Confed for taking out Kilrathi carriers and bases? :D
 
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