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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  8mo ago (text post)   Edited 8mo ago   1311 thread views

The Motte Moddes: HighSpace (August 2023)

The goal of this thread is to coordinate development on our project codenamed HighSpace - a mod for Freespace 2 that will be a mashup between it and High Fleet. A description of how the mechanics of the two games could be combined is available in the first thread.

Who we have

Who we need

The more the merrier, you are free to join in any capacity you wish! I can already identify a few distinct tasks for each position that we could split the work into

  • developers: “mission” code, “strategic” system map code

  • artists: 2D (user interface), 3D (space ships, weapons explosions)

  • writers: worldbuilding/lore, quests, characters

What we have

  • Concept art for a long range missle cruiser, curtesy of @FCfromSSC

  • A proof of concenpt for “strategic” system map we jump into on start of the campaign. It contains a friendly ship and 2 enemy ships, you can chose where to move / which enemy ship to attack.

  • A somewhat actual-game-like workflow. Attacking a ship launches a mission where the two ships are pitted against each other. If you win, the current health of your ship is saved, and you can launch the second attack. If you clean up the map you are greeted with a “You Win” message, or “You Lose” if you lose your ship.

  • A “tactical” RTS-like in-mission view where you can give commands to your ships.

Updates

  • The System Map and the Tactical View got minor pimp-ups. The System Map now shows the ship names, and the Tactical View has a grid to help with orientation, draws ship icons if the ships are too far away to see, and draws waypoint, and target icons to give some indications of the ship's current goals.

  • The System Map now supports Battle Groups, and the player is now in charge of one - the original GTC Trinity cruiser, and a wing of fighters.

  • We now have “just in time” mission generation. Like I mentioned in the previous thread, the scripting API gives you access to the file system, so it was pretty easy to generate a mission file on the fly. This has some advantages over using a “blank” mission file and setting up the mission via the API, because not all mission features are exposed to the API. The most obvious example here will be how there's no longer an “extra” player ship, just the ones explicitly declared for the System Map (in the previous versions you'd be flying a fighter, even though in theory there were no fighters in the System Map).

  • Thanks to the fighters and their current load-out it's actually not that hard to win the game at the moment. Your cruiser will easily dispatch the Shivan one, and as to the corvette, you can order your ships to run away, and take out the turrets yourself, then order your ships to attack. It will take a while, but with a defenseless enemy it's only a question of time.

What's next

  • The System Map didn't get a lot of attention so far, so I'd like expand it. It would be nice to move around an actual star system, add camera movement, and split/merge mechanics for fleets.

  • The Tactical View is somewhat functional, but still needs to give a player handle on what's going on, and better control over their ships. I wanted to add subsystem status, beam cannon charge status, and a handier way to give advanced commands.

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My IRL obligations caught up with me sooner than expected, so I didn't get much done this month, but I've been working on the System Map and there's a few things I would like to get feedback on:

  • Circular orbits only. To avoid contradictions between Freespace's non-Newtonian flight model, and basic orbital mechanics all orbits would always be circular. You can move around using conventional engines, and when you stop the resulting orbit will just continue to circle the body with the currently highest gravitational influence on you. This might imply clockwise-only movement as well, since there is no way to decelerate and change directions.

  • Lagrange points. If you have an inkling of where the enemy is, you can use them to keep the line of sight broken. OTOH, they're an obvious place to check / want to have control over.

  • Realistic distances, yay or nay? I'm opting for yay, with subspace allowing you to cover large distances, I don't see an obvious reason to forgo them, and they'll let ships hide in the vastness of space.

  • OTOH, there has to be a way to detect your enemy. This is where I'd like to the imitate High Fleet, and go with some active/passive sensor system. Active sensors being high-accuracy, and covering large distances but giving away your position, and passive systems being shorter range, but allowing you to stay relatively hidden.

  • Subspace jumps giving away your position? And the vague direction of the destination? It's accuracy will depend on the distance from the jump source?

Another update.

I got the real-time ship movement sketched out. Ships now have a destination instead of teleporting, and move towards it at a constant speed. Or they would, if I wasn't crashing the script with nil access.

Attempting to debug this led me to ask the question: where are those debug statements getting sent, anyway? Hardlight seems to expect an fs2_open.log. It also seems to think we can tell whether or not we're on a debug build using version numbers, which hasn't panned out. And it doesn't mention scripting at all.

I'm going to shelve this for tonight. Let me know if you can see my github account, and I can push my questionable branch to the repo or something.

Attempting to debug this led me to ask the question: where are those debug statements getting sent, anyway? Hardlight seems to expect an fs2_open.log. It also seems to think we can tell whether or not we're on a debug build using version numbers

I'm on Linux, so I'm not a 100% sure where it ends up on other OS', but I think it should be something like C:\Users\<USER>\AppData\Roaming\HardLightProductions\FreeSpaceOpen\data\fs2_open.log. Good point mentioning debug builds, I think only they output to the logfiles. Knossos should be downloading them automatically, and you should have the option to launch a debug build from it (I usually build the game myself, and run it from the IDE when working on the mod).

And it doesn't mention scripting at all.

Yeah, I'm a "hit things with a hammer until they do what you want" kind of guy, and for whatever reason the Freespace API feels pretty intuitive for me, so it's never been an issue, but the documentation is not that great. You might want to check out the Scripting API page on the Hardlight wiki, the FS2 Open Lua Scripting page, and the Scripting functions reference page I mentioned earlier.

Let me know if you can see my github account, and I can push my questionable branch to the repo or something.

Yup! I sent you the invite.

Various Damage and Mitigation ideas

If I'm understanding the existing freespace damage systems correctly, ships are made of components, each of which has hit points. Components have to be external, because there's no mechanic to track penetration through multiple components to, say, hit something buried deep within the hull. There's a number of tags available to mark things that don't simply die from normal fire, requiring damage from an appropriately-tagged damage source before they can be destroyed.

If we are limited to just those mechanics, there's a lot of cool things we could do, but the following is some ideas for better damage and protection mechanics. The following is more of a blue-sky look at crunchier options to handle damage and damage mitigation.

Damage Vs. Penetration

ideally, we separate these statistics out, so we can have high-penetration/low-damage weapons and vice versa. Railguns are high-pen, low damage, beams are balanced, missiles are usually high damage, low-pen. I have no idea if this is possible in free-space; if not, we can probably kludge up a reasonable approximation with various tags.

As I see it, there's several game systems between an attacker and defender

Detection - You have to actually detect a target in order to shoot at it. Various forms of emissions control, stealth and concealment can the chances of this.

Position/Vector - You have to be within effective range of the target and have your guns oriented on the target, and then the target still has to be there when your attack arrives. Ship speed and maneuverability could have a serious impact here, as well as jump mechanics. Faster ships can dodge projectiles or avoid the engagement range of beams, different vectors between the two sides can shape the nature of the engagement, etc.

Countermeasures - Jamming, Dazzling, Spoofing & Decoys, all reduce the enemy's ability to land effective hits.

Interdiction - fighters, defensive missiles, point-defense systems - these only work on large or relatively slow-moving projectiles, but they're fairly effective.

Mitigation - Shields and armor.

In my head, what I'm imagining at a fleet level is a lot more like a turn-based strategy game than a traditional RTS; positioning and shaping the battlefield is very important, and the actual shooting happens relatively quickly. Fighters, Strike and Picket ships and frigates might mix it up in a furball, given that their lighter weapons, shorter range and higher maneuverability makes turning and burning a workable option. For large ships/fleets, I imagine that combat probably doesn't involve the two sides burning into a head-on engagement with all guns blazing, but rather cat-and-mouse games where they attempt to either engage for maximum damage from a superior position, or flee and break contact from an inferior one.

Armor

Armor resists penetration and absorbs damage. Armor panels are components and have a maximum health. When destroyed, they no longer resist penetration, but still absorb some percentage of damage.

Armor Grades - Various grades of armor, offering various combinations of durability and penetration resistance. Might also offer advantages against specific kinds of weapons, like kinetic penetrators or beams.

Armor hardeners - Conducts protective fields through armor plating to physically reinforce them. greatly increases protection, but suffer the drawbacks of shields, in addition to being very expensive. Higher-tech option to scale armor protection in the mid to late game.

Shields

Generic shields are effectively hitpoints. The generic shield absorbs all incoming damage until it is depleted, and then collapses, recharging after a certain amount of time if no additional damage is taken. Not a huge fan of shields in their standard form; they serve a gameplay purpose of making combat less punishing, but in a more strategic game that doesn't seem like much of an asset.

I'd argue for shields being largely effective against projectiles, and have either no effect or a minimal effect on beams.

Shield Effects

Generic - absorb all impacting damage

Hard - absorb all damage below a threshold, higher damage penetrates

Soft - absorb a percentage of damage, allowing the rest through.

Deflector - de-normalize beams or projectiles, potentially deflecting them.

Hazardous - Shields burn out or explode when overloaded, damaging or destroying the mounting ship. There might be a grace period between overload and the shield module cooking off, allowing you to attempt to jettison a critical module.

Emergency Shutdown - Shutting down shields when they're below some percentage of total power means they can't be turned back on again until serviced.

Cold Start - When activated, shields must charge from zero power.

Limited Duration - When activated, shields last for a set duration before depowering. Once they depower, they have to be serviced before being activated again.

Expendable - The shield module is explicitly a one-shot asset; when triggered, it defends for a duration, then burns itself out.

Interference - Shields block cooling, drives, weapons fire, radar, or other ship functions. Inspired by a story I read once, where the big enemy dreadnought had a shield that made it entirely impervious to enemy fire, at the expense of making it completely unable to move, shoot, or even see until the shield came down.

Shield Regeneration

No Regen - requires out-of-combat servicing before shield strength can be restored, or maybe the shield unit itself has to scrapped and replaced.

Last Hit Cooldown - Regenerate after a certain amount of time without taking damage

Constant - Regenerate constantly but at a low level.

Curved Regen - Regeneration speed is either increased or decreased proportional to remaining capacity.

The idea here is to make shields something other than the first-order-optimal solution to damage mitigation. Limited duration shields allow you to deny a portion of fire, but aren't really a long-term solution. Hazardous and Emergency shutdown turns shield management into a high-risk gamble in a serious fight. Interference forces you to choose between shielding and your other tactical options.

The idea I'd suggest is to try to put shields in a position where they're a limited, optional defense, rather than a core defense like point defense and armor. Make them a special thing that's highly effective but with big drawbacks, and then let higher-tech versions improve on the drawbacks until at the top of the tech tree you get what would be a standard shield in another game, but it feels absolutely amazing in-context.

If I'm understanding the existing freespace damage systems correctly, ships are made of components, each of which has hit points.

One thing to keep in mind there's also the generic hull health, independent from all the components.

Components have to be external, because there's no mechanic to track penetration through multiple components to, say, hit something buried deep within the hull.

I think that's not necessarily true. I think bombs have a radius of effect, and I've seen them take out multiple components in one strike. It possible they'd damage something deeper in the hull.

You can also have "casing" components that you'd need to destroy to expose something beneath them, I saw a few mods doing it. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea. I really like the idea of fighters/bombers doing subsystem strikes to take out a specific advantage the enemy might have. I did also have concerns that this tactic might be overpowered. In vanilla FS2 they get around it by most subsystems, except engines, not really doing anything unless explicitly scripted. It makes sense because if taking out the weapons subsystem of a capital ship actually took out all it's weapons, they would be way too easy to defeat. You can compensate by giving subsystems a lot of health, but adding a casing would make it a look more interesting, since you can see it get blown off. Hopefully you can also give the casing a different type of health than the actual subsystem, so you'd need to use anti-armor weapons to blow it off, and then anti-subsystem weapons to actually disable the system.

Then we'd have to decide what the actual effects would be, because having a critical system located in a central hub feels like bad design.

There's a number of tags available to mark things that don't simply die from normal fire, requiring damage from an appropriately-tagged damage source before they can be destroyed.

I think that's right, but I'm not familiar with the tags that are available, or whether you can add your own. But yeah I know capital ships can only be taken down with anti-cap weapons.

Detection - You have to actually detect a target in order to shoot at it. Various forms of emissions control, stealth and concealment can the chances of this.

Interdiction - fighters, defensive missiles, point-defense systems - these only work on large or relatively slow-moving projectiles, but they're fairly effective.

There is some support for that in vanilla, but it's mostly about fighters. So there's stealth fighters that cannot be targeted by radar, or locked on by missiles. You can only shoot them down by spotting / targeting them with your eyeballs, unless you have AWACs ships around, which can make them visible on your radar. Then there were mods that played with these ideas for capital ships. AWACS being used for jamming the enemies' targeting, special tagging missiles the fighters could fire point-blank, which allow friendlies to target despite the jamming, etc. I think we could reproduce that easily.

Position/Vector - You have to be within effective range of the target and have your guns oriented on the target, and then the target still has to be there when your attack arrives. Ship speed and maneuverability could have a serious impact here, as well as jump mechanics. Faster ships can dodge projectiles or avoid the engagement range of beams, different vectors between the two sides can shape the nature of the engagement, etc.

I have some concerns here, because if we're going for anything more sophisticated than "let's try spinning, that's a neat trick", it implies heavily modifying the AI. The scripting API allows that, but it feels like it's going to be a lot of work to figure out how exactly it works, and then coming up with a set of strategies that will cover most of the bases for the AI.

In my head, what I'm imagining at a fleet level is a lot more like a turn-based strategy game than a traditional RTS; positioning and shaping the battlefield is very important, and the actual shooting happens relatively quickly. Fighters, Strike and Picket ships and frigates might mix it up in a furball, given that their lighter weapons, shorter range and higher maneuverability makes turning and burning a workable option. For large ships/fleets, I imagine that combat probably doesn't involve the two sides burning into a head-on engagement with all guns blazing, but rather cat-and-mouse games where they attempt to either engage for maximum damage from a superior position, or flee and break contact from an inferior one.

Yes! This is exactly the feeling I'd like to go for. Originally I thought to make the System Map an actual TBS, but I'm warming up to have it real time with time compression. The idea being that on the strategic level anything happening second to second is not going to be that important, so you'll have to fast forward until something significant happens.

The idea I'd suggest is to try to put shields in a position where they're a limited, optional defense, rather than a core defense like point defense and armor. Make them a special thing that's highly effective but with big drawbacks, and then let higher-tech versions improve on the drawbacks until at the top of the tech tree you get what would be a standard shield in another game, but it feels absolutely amazing in-context.

I love that idea. I think a lot of games lazily throw away this kind of mechanical variety in favor of "this, but bigger" as a way to show progression.

As to your specific ideas, they all seem doable and I'd just note them down in the wiki, and try them out one by one when we get to that part of the development. We'll probably be running into issues when implementing them, either on their own, or through interacting in weird ways (and hopefully sometimes in good ways!), but I don't see a way of figuring out what will work and what want ahead of time.

You can also have "casing" components that you'd need to destroy to expose something beneath them, I saw a few mods doing it. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea. I really like the idea of fighters/bombers doing subsystem strikes to take out a specific advantage the enemy might have. I did also have concerns that this tactic might be overpowered. In vanilla FS2 they get around it by most subsystems, except engines, not really doing anything unless explicitly scripted. It makes sense because if taking out the weapons subsystem of a capital ship actually took out all it's weapons, they would be way too easy to defeat. You can compensate by giving subsystems a lot of health, but adding a casing would make it a look more interesting, since you can see it get blown off. Hopefully you can also give the casing a different type of health than the actual subsystem, so you'd need to use anti-armor weapons to blow it off, and then anti-subsystem weapons to actually disable the system.

I played the BattleTech video game quite a lot, it has a very similar system, and it indeed has a bit of a problem with component targeting being overpowered. One way to balance it a bit is to not have general "weapon subsystem", which is indeed stupid design, but to have each specific weapon be it's own component, so that even if the opponent has shot some weapons to pieces, other weapons function just fine. Likewise there isn't a single "cooling subsystem" there are multiple "cooling components" located throughout the ship. Another is to give components some redundancy so that they are still somewhat functional even if significantly damaged. Casing/Armor for each component should also be present, I agree, and in general each component needs a surprisingly high amount of health/armor compared to the general hull points to make anything but component targeting viable (or you need to make component targeting very difficult).

I've created a branch to try and make the system map real-time-with-pause. Rather than blink fleets to their destination, the route will remain highlighted, and a separate hotkey will toggle playing and pausing. When unpaused, your fleet will advance along the line until it's close enough to trigger a battle. Sound good?

I did have some trouble testing, because once I died in a mission, I couldn't get back to the System Map. Not exiting the mission, not "restarting" the campaign. Clicking the mission doors would still put me in a default fighter--subach, prometheus, and harpoon. To test again, I had to restart the game.

Also, I'm a garbage pilot, and GTVA has already begun court-martial proceedings.

I've created a branch to try and make the system map real-time-with-pause. Rather than blink fleets to their destination, the route will remain highlighted, and a separate hotkey will toggle playing and pausing. When unpaused, your fleet will advance along the line until it's close enough to trigger a battle. Sound good?

Yes, very nice!

I forgot to mention it, but around the time FC was setting up the wiki, I thought we should have a proper github org for the repo, so I set one up. Send me your handle, and I'll add you ( @FCfromSSC, you should already have an invite).

I did have some trouble testing, because once I died in a mission, I couldn't get back to the System Map.

Yeah, right now only subspace-jumping out of the mission sort of works. I wanted to have the current player ship be switched on death, but that will require a custom build of the game. I think the best I can do with just scripting, is a switch the to Tactical View, but obviously it's not ready yet.

Clicking the mission doors would still put me in a default fighter--subach, prometheus, and harpoon. To test again, I had to restart the game.

I'll take care of it. Right now the only way out post-death is to "quick restart" the mission, and not die the next time :)

Also, I'm a garbage pilot, and GTVA has already begun court-martial proceedings.

If it's the Alhazred you're having trouble with, it's your tactical skills that are in question, not your piloting. That ship is equipped with extremely powerful anti-fighter beams, so there's no way to personally get close to it without having your day ruined. Your cruiser should be able to deal with it easily, though.

EDIT:

It was easy enough to fix restarting the campaign from the main hall. I just pushed the fix. I was also working on the system map (I added camera movement), so if you don't want to bother with resolving potential conflicts, the fix is literally a single line of code.

Thanks!

Conflicts won’t be an issue. Last night rapidly turned into a crash course in lua rather than any written code. I still haven’t been able to figure out where ba is defined, but I learned a lot about metatables.

ba, as well as all the other two-letter globals are the Freespace LUA API, they're injected from the game's source code. There's some documentation for the API here (see: libraries) though I think it's somewhat out of date, and not everything is there. I've made a habit of keeping the corresponding source files opened in another window. Other mysterious globals and undefined methods might come from libRocket

Feel free to ping me if you bump into anything else that doesn't make sense.

Spaceship Weapon Ideas

The three classic weapons of spaceship-based miltary scifi are the beam, the missile, and the railgun. The challenge from a game-design perspective is to make balance the strengths and weaknesses of each of the three, such that they have unique and rewarding niches in the tactical environment. The following is my take on them. There's a lot of assumptions baked into the descriptions here, and I don't know how much of this can actually be implemented in Freespace 2, but I figure laying it out is a place to start at least. Alternate takes are welcome, let's hear what you guys like. @netstack, it's ideas time!

Railguns

  • Cheap, low-tech, easy to maintain, easy to feed.
  • no loss of terminal effect at range.
  • Good penetration, allows them to threaten even heavily-armored components like reactors.
  • Effective range is limited by relatively low projectile velocity.
  • Railguns and their capacitor banks are heavy, and require heavy mounts to absorb their considerable recoil.
  • Larger projectiles are vulnerable to interception.

Railguns are powerful, cheap, easy to make, easy to maintain, and easy to feed, which makes them a nearly ideal primary armament. They're pretty good at hammering enemy ships and short and medium range, pretty good at point defense, and adaptable enough to fit a variety of roles, thanks to a wide selection of specialized projectiles.

The problem is that "pretty good" is about where they cap out. They're general-purpose low-tech weapons, and that means they lose out both in specialized roles and to the increasing benefits of tech advancement. They do get some upgrades and higher-tech variants that can compensate for these discrepencies, but they're simply outclassed by beams at the high end of the tech scale.

Variant Ideas

Submunitions - These shells break apart into a cloud of smaller projectiles, trading hard-target penetration for increase hit probability and damage against soft targets.

Guided Munitions - Larger warship railguns can fire shells with their own guidance package and manuevering thrusters to allow limited homing on target. These are much more expensive than standard railgun shells, but provide much-improved long-range accuracy. Due to the powerful forces involved in a railgun launch, the guidance packages are more limited than those found on torpedoes, but they're also more resistant to point-defense fire.

RKV - The capstone of railgun tech, RKV cannons launch projectiles at meaningful fractions of the speed of light. Greatly increased projectile speed means greater effective range and far greater terminal effect.

Beams

  • best possible accuracy, as they travel at light-speed.
  • Good balance of damage and penetration makes them highly effective against against all but the best physical armor.
  • shortest-range of the three types, due to the beam diffusing over long distances.
  • power hungry, requires a lot of supporting hardware.
  • waste heat, requires even more supporting hardware.
  • high tech, so might be hard to come by or prohibitively expensive.

Beams are the ultimate high-tech, high-class weapon. They're ideal for defense against fighters, missiles and torpedoes, and the higher-powered versions are devastating to ships as well. Their problem is range, cost, and the supporting hardware they require, which often leave them underpowered relative to railguns as primary armament. There are a number of workarounds to these issues, but all generally involve some pretty serious tradeoffs in terms of rate of fire, limits on the number of shots available, or other drawbacks that relegate them to more niche roles.

Beams are tech-limited. The better a faction's tech base, the better beams get. The more resources a ship can dedicate to them, the better beams get. These effects combine to scale the effectiveness of beams exponentially as you move toward end-game units, until they effectively become the ultimate weapon for those who no longer concern themselves with the denominations of their currency.

Variant Ideas

Burnout - Greatly increased power, but only good for a couple shots before needing to be either replaced or replenished outside of battle. Often mounted as special anti-ship weapons on fighters.

Periscope - beam emitters can be buried deep in the hull, their fire directed through relatively light and agile reflector turrets. Beams set up this way are highly resistant to damage, while maintaining the responsiveness of light secondaries.

Pulse - The beam is pulsed rather than continuous, trading raw damage for a much faster cycle time. Typically used by dedicated point-defense weapons.

Hotshot - These weapons have traded off cooling support for increased power. Limits the rate of fire to allow for a cooldown, requires expendable heat-sink material, or both.

Missiles/Torpedoes

  • Extreme range.
  • Excellent accuracy thanks to sensors and guidance.
  • Excellent penetration and damage.
  • minimal hardware requirements.
  • Vulnerable to interception, countermeasures, jamming and spoofing.
  • The most expensive weapon on a per-shot basis.
  • Bulky and heavy, so only a limited number can be carried.
  • Stowed missiles are fragile, and a detonation risk if struck.

Missiles (the little ones) and Torpedoes (the big, capital-ship-killing ones) are excellent both offensively and defensively. They home on targets and they hit for serious damage. They're good against fighters, good against capital ships, good at point defense. They're highly adaptable, with variations suitable for every occasion. They let you launch battleship-killing salvos from a metaphorical rowboat. Why would anyone use anything else?

The biggest problem missiles present is logistical: missiles and torpedoes are complex, high-tech, expensive and bulky per-shot. This means that you can never carry as many as you'd like. They're the most expensive weapons system on a per-shot basis, and the bulk and expense makes resupply and procurement that much harder, so you can never get as many as you want either.

The second problem is that they're vulnerable to countermeasures, point-defense, and interception. Whether on offense or defense, volume of fire is decisive. Obviously, this aggravates the logistical challenges, but the more immediate drawback from a tactical perspective is that there's such a diversity of offensive and defensive tech in play that there's often an irreducible element of chance in serious engagements.

The third problem, particularly for dedicated missile platforms, is that magazines full of missiles tend to suffer catastrophic detonations when penetrated by enemy fire. This makes dedicated missile platforms rather more vulnerable than gun or beam ships.

Variant Ideas

Dumbfire - Lacks a guidance system, flying straight ahead until it hits something or self-destructs. Much, much cheaper, but worthless at anything but very short range.

HV Dart - Accelerates rapidly to very high velocity, relies mainly on kinetic impact to deal damage. These are effectively expendable pocket railguns.

Swarm - launches a swarm of mini-missiles, short-ranged and highly maneuverable.

...Okay, that's enough from me, at least for now. There's already a separate thread on shields, and we haven't even gotten into electronic warfare, targeting/illumination, and countermeasures yet.

Sorry for the late response. I have some experience with modding games, though I tend towards mainly balancing & adding smaller new functionalities and not total overhauls like this.

I’m also not sure whether this is the advice you're looking for, but as a general design choice I think it you maximize rich gameplay by using rock-paper-scissor systems and limited use items that can negate advantages with a strong emphasis on combined arms, and that can be risky but possible to be circumvented with skill. My favorite example - not scifi - is anti-tank encampments that shoot any tank to scraps in seconds, but that have middling reloading times and atrocious turning speed and so can still be routed with 3+ fast tanks if you plan a good approach. But if the same anti-tank encampment is properly supported with scouting, that approach is unlikely to work. But the scouting can be circumvented by limited-use smoke bombs … and so on.

I'm normally against one of the weapon categories being the ultimate in any circumstance such as high tech beam weapon supremacy. But with a RPS/limited use counter item system in place, you can have some weapons at a premium while still keeping the other viable. And the key to that is obviously armor/shields/point defense. In my game, all three would work in general, but armor would be especially good against railguns, shields against beam weapons (for theses two it can be vice versa as well), and point defense obviously against missiles, and to such a degree that even if beam weapons are better pound-for-pound at late tech, shields would be so good against them that you more or less have to pack the other categories to get around them. Since thus both attack and defence are strongly related, I’ll further talk about both concurrently. I don't think it makes sense to talk about weapons without also mentioning the defenses they try to get around.

You already mentioned many possible ways for the guns to function differently, so I'll only add a little bit to that. Railguns should be exceptionally good at causing specific component damage but cause low hull/structural damage, missiles cause large-scale hull/structural damage, while beam weapons cause less than either but also cause heat damage. Railguns recoil means that need to be mounted in a fixed position and so have a limited cone of fire, Beam Weapon cones are primarily limited by the position and size of the ship they're mounted on and Missiles can move on their own so they can go wherever they want. Likewise, armor would be primarily like an extra healthbar that gets slowly used up during the fight, and so it is very strong against alpha strikes but increasingly useless in long engagements. Shields would regenerate fast enough against slow rates of fire to be significant but they can still be depleted, so they are average against either. Point defense are the most extreme, they don't get depleted at all (even if you include an ammo system, point defense ammo should use up so little space as to be effectively endless). But you need a full gun per single projectile in a salvo, so they are strong against drawn-out engagements but bad against alpha-strikes. This already has many other implications, such as shields being better on larger ships (because the regen is harder to nullify through focused fire) or beam weapons being better on smaller ships (as they can get >180° cones). Armor and PD could similarly have directionality. A dedicated pursuit ship with extreme forward speed, forward-facing weaponry and armor but helpless if intercepted at an angle can be quite interesting for example. In general directionality and weapon cones add lots of variety and potential for outplaying.

So let's move on to heat. Heat should be a build-up bar that causes increasing damage at thresholds - mainly component damage at first, then organic staff if you model that, then eventually even structural damage. As you mentioned yourself, beam weapons should build up the most heat. Imo the same should go for shields; There is no reason for Armor to build up heat, and pd should build up less than beam weapons/shields. Every ship has a base dissipation and can set up cooling/radiating components, but these have diminishing returns as there should be only a limited number of good locations on any ship for such components.

So what gameplay would this add up to? Let's look at for example engagement length. A short engagement ship (let’s call that a Fighter) may be small, have lots of armor, and it can afford to run lots of beam weapons with minimal cooling (but should also run other weapons, especially missiles as they are naturally good at alpha strikes). It can have very high effective stats with very high manoeuvrability at the cost of not a lot of endurance and needing support/repair between fights. A long engagement ship (let’s call that a Patrol Ship) may be large with lots of shielding and pd with good cooling components, and primarily run railguns as offense on the broadside since it neither uses up ammo fast nor build up additional heat and a mix of support missiles and maybe some beam weapons on the backside (the former to support the broadside, the latter in case an enemy ship gets around). It can keep on going even through multiple fights at the cost of a weakness to dedicated alpha strikes, limited offensive capabilities and being generally more direction-dependent. You can also design an Hit-and-Run Anti-Fighter ship with Shields/PD + Beam Weapons/Missiles, but it would struggle with heat management, or design an Anti-Patrol Ship with Armor + Railgun, but that would have the opposite problem of not appropriately taking advantage of its heat pool (and thus having on-net worse stats overall).

At last, limited use items/actions. As mentioned, they should be mainly used to patch up weaknesses and should be designed for that purpose. For example, the Patrol Ship struggles with alpha strikes and may want to run some kind of smoke-like effect or a short-term shield overload that needs to be timed right. If the opponent just does an instant alpha strike that is easy, but any good opponent will try to start a "fake" alpha strike to get you to use up the ability and then attack in earnest. It's very important for these to be low investment and not too strong however, otherwise negating weaknesses becomes trivial.

So to recap all three elements I talked about add up to increasingly complex gameplay:

  1. Having all components be intrinsically different means that for any dedicated role, there is a unique mix that fulfils that role best
  2. The RPS system then ensures that none of the ships is strictly best, and furthermore opens up categories of Anti-X ships that are good at specifically beating specific categories while being bad at any other dedicated role
  3. The Limited-Use Actions/Items even the field in unfavored match-up, allow for more skill expression and thus reduce the common situation where fights are decided before they start - but since they are, well, limited, it’s still important to position yourself so that you only start fight where you have an advantage

Since you already were talking about the first - intrinsically different dynamics of the weapons - I guess I'm especially arguing in favor of 2. and 3. . You don’t even need a long list of weapon subcategories, and in fact I’d postpone that to later and instead concentrate on making the key trifecta solidly balanced. More variety of low-investment, low-effect Limited-Use items/actions can also be a good way of adding some complexity without screwing up the balance too much.

Thanks much for this! It's neat seeing how different people approach the problems involved!

Railguns should be exceptionally good at causing specific component damage but cause low hull/structural damage, missiles cause large-scale hull/structural damage, while beam weapons cause less than either but also cause heat damage.

I'd agree with the railguns; they're crit-seekers, at least at the low-to-mid end when the projectiles are too small to fit a nuke warhead. I'm leaning toward beams just being balanced, in that they just sort of melt ships generally. The best defense against beams to my mind is speed, since faster ships have an easier time avoiding their engagement envelope while pelting them with projectiles. So that incentivizes the ship-builders to put heavy beams on faster ships, since they'll need to close the distance as rapidly as possible... or else just use a much bigger beam, and compensate by having it run on expendable coolant or something similar. Or possibly both; booster fuel could be dual-purpose coolant. A frigate that runs its beam for five seconds and then has to refill on coolant could be just fine, if that five seconds is enough to core other frigates or severely damage a destroyer.

Re: Armor, shields and point defense, the way I'm thinking about it is drawn more from what I know about modern naval combat, and the idea is that no defense is particularly good. The best defense is not to get shot at. Failing that, the defenses are there to make the best of a bad situation, and they all come with significant drawbacks. Armor's too heavy, and I just made a big post about various options for making shields less First-Order-Optimal and more of a specialized, situational defense.

Point defense are the most extreme, they don't get depleted at all (even if you include an ammo system, point defense ammo should use up so little space as to be effectively endless).

I'd disagree. PD cannons, whether chemical or railgun, have a basic problem: they use small guns with lower velocities and shorter effective ranges to engage projectiles closing at very high speed. Pushing the engagement distance out as far as possible is very beneficial, but the further out you go, the more you need to compensate for lack of effective accuracy against a moving target with sheer volume of fire. This means your PD guns are probably better off firing very inefficiently in pursuit of marginal increases in effectiveness, because there's no point preserving ammo if the ship gets cut in half by a torpedo. I'd say PD guns should absolutely be limited by ammo, heat, capacitors, whatever other mechanics seem appropriate; fire efficiency is not really something they can afford.

A dedicated pursuit ship with extreme forward speed, forward-facing weaponry and armor but helpless if intercepted at an angle can be quite interesting for example. In general directionality and weapon cones add lots of variety and potential for outplaying.

Yeah, this is the sort of thing I'm really hoping we can execute in terms of encounter logic and, I suppose, enemy AI. I'm definately trying to think of directionality and intended attack profile for the ships I'm making. The gun cruiser I'm currently working on has beam periscopes in the nose of the ship, so it can cover something like a 340-degree arc, able to target pretty much anywhere but directly behind it, while the railgun batteries are set up to fire straight ahead only.

Imo the same should go for shields; There is no reason for Armor to build up heat, and pd should build up less than beam weapons/shields.

Shields generating heat would be a fantastic drawback, wish I'd thought of that for the writeup!

Excellent writeup sir, thanks for taking the time!

Re: Armor, shields and point defense, the way I'm thinking about it is drawn more from what I know about modern naval combat, and the idea is that no defense is particularly good. The best defense is not to get shot at. Failing that, the defenses are there to make the best of a bad situation, and they all come with significant drawbacks. Armor's too heavy, and I just made a big post about various options for making shields less First-Order-Optimal and more of a specialized, situational defense.

Tbh, while the Three-Body-Problem book series includes a lot of silliness, I think it's right that the most reasonable extrapolation of modern combat into future combat is an ever-widening gap in favour of offense, until almost all war is just shooting at all stars in the general vicinity of any signal you notice, with the purpose of blowing them up and eradicating all life in the system. So in a sense, I may even argue that I'm not just agreeing, I think you're not going far enough. But in games, realism is a tertiary concern for me; Imo, internal consistency is the most important (which admittedly some also call realism, which annoys me to no end) and balancing/variety of gameplay is the second most important.

My main issue is that if you want people to bother with defenses, you need to make them worth it. If armor is just too heavy people just won't run it, if shields build up heat and also depletes easily, people will preferably spend their heat budget on nothing but beam weapons. In the real world people bother even with sub-par armor because they only have one life, but in my experience it just doesn't really work in games. Even if you force them into running some defense, if it's strictly and significantly inferior to offense they will almost entirely ignore it, and for good reason - in which case most game design paradigms will tell you to forgo the mechanic and instead focus your efforts on the mechanics that matters. So if you want such a system, I'd recommend to not really bother with different defense designs, just give ships/components armour and health points and call it a day, spend your effort on weaponry, detection and its interception, hitting and dodging, there are enough other concepts. Most gameplay will then center around positioning as you say, since actual combat will usually be over in seconds.

I'd disagree. PD cannons, whether chemical or railgun, have a basic problem: they use small guns with lower velocities and shorter effective ranges to engage projectiles closing at very high speed. Pushing the engagement distance out as far as possible is very beneficial, but the further out you go, the more you need to compensate for lack of effective accuracy against a moving target with sheer volume of fire. This means your PD guns are probably better off firing very inefficiently in pursuit of marginal increases in effectiveness, because there's no point preserving ammo if the ship gets cut in half by a torpedo. I'd say PD guns should absolutely be limited by ammo, heat, capacitors, whatever other mechanics seem appropriate; fire efficiency is not really something they can afford.

You probably know more about it than me, but I'm not sure this basic logic holds up in ultra-high (sight) range combat such as space combat. If you can see the projectiles coming for quite some time before impact, and they have very limited capability of swerving once they're at high speed, even relatively low velocity bullets may have a decent chance to hit them. If ~10-100 bullets are on average enough to hit a rocket and each bullet is so small that the rocket takes up 1k+ times as much space as a single bullet, PD will naturally have a very good fire efficiency even without prioritising it deliberately. Though if the projectile doesn't include an explosive component, such a PD will probably not have enough kinetic energy to actually do anything.

I mostly agree with you, but I don't know if having some weapon types be strictly superior is necessarily a bad thing in a single player game. Other than balance, there's also the question of progression. When there's a visually distinct weapon that you initially cannot obtain, but see in action, running into someone with it strikes fear into your heart, and when you finally get it brings joy. It can be pretty fun when done right.

Another way would be to have let's say 3 tech lvls, and the first tech lvl has only the base 3, the second has a variant for each, the third has another variant, for a total of 9 (and the variants are still similar enough so that they don't screw up balancing too much). But the base variants still get upgraded alongside. So you can have distinct "scary" high-tech variants without losing the basic balance.

I had to mull this one over, because on one hand yeah you can do it like that, but on the other there was something about it that I didn't like and I couldn't put my finger on.

My issue is that sometimes the balance feels forced. Take something like a fantasy medieval RPG, they often go with warrior / rogue / ranger (/various spellcasters / etc. etc. etc.), and then they try to balance them so that in the end everybody is mostly an even match for everybody else. It makes perfect sense, you wouldn't want one class to be obviously better then the others - otherwise, why even play them? It's even more important in multiplayer games to balance them out. Then, there's the equipment, warriors get to wear heavy armor, rangers light-to-medium, and rogues only light. Also kind of makes sense, it would be ridiculous of a rogue to run around in full-plate. So then you want to give the characters a sense of progression, so you come up with a tier system for the equipment... and this is exactly when you run into the effect I want to avoid. You have a level 1 warrior, and he's wearing full-plate, and then after lots and lots of adventures and gained experience he becomes a level 10 warrior, and he's wearing full-plate... but awesomer!

What's worse a rogue wearing fetish gear leather armor can meet him head-on (as long as he's also level 10), and in my opinion that's just wrong. If a rogue wants to kill a fully armored knight, he has to wait until the dude goes take a shit and drop a massive rock on him, poison him, wait for him to go to bed and stab him in his sleep... anything other then fighting the guy head-on! Now granted, that means you have to give each class a way of accomplishing the goals in it's own distinct way, and that means work, which in turn might very well mean we'll go with the tech level system that you recommend, but if we could find a way to have actually distinct play styles for differently equipped fleets, that would make me very happy.

I think we're not very far from each other in opinion. We both want different components to be viable to generate diversity of builds and gameplay, we're mainly quibbling about how complicated gameplay needs to get and how much needs to be "forced" through balance. I'm generally in favour of starting out with an extremely simple basic design and to generate emergent diversity through making all options genuinely viable. I'm not opposed to adding more complexity once the basic building blocks are solid, but one should be careful. In my experience, complex system may have more theoretic dimensions to generate theoretic diversity, but they very reliably devolve into there being just a single, maybe two or three, dominant strategies, and the balancing is even more work, not to mention that the complexity was a lot of work in the first place.

For your example, if we want to go for maximum realism: That's why "rogues" arguably didn't exist historically. Armour-less murderers at night could easily be armour-wearing knights at day. Highwaymen simply wore the best amour they could afford, and often were literally wayward knights. Realistic medieval combat, at a high "level", is just dudes in full plate armours with large shields, probably also on horses. No dual-wielding nonsense, no lesser armour categories, small knifes are strictly a back up weapon if you get into grappling on the ground. IF you want a rogue to exist as its own thing, particularly in team combat, they probably need a good helping of magic. Also, in most games I know, if there is a Rock-Paper-Scissor system (Fire Emblem for example), rogues are in fact not really able to take on armoured knights on their own without a significant level advantage. They usually use teleportation/fast movement to get close to ranged fighters/mages and kill them before they can unleash their spells, but armour they often struggle with.

As another example that may satisfy you, you could make it so that beam weapons/shields are balanced around early game cooling systems, and, as the cooling systems get better with tech, beam weapons/shields get better as well. But as the cooling is not infinitely strong and there are only a limited number of good slots for cooling, heat build-up will still limit ships in how much of either they can run, so they still have to make a trade-off between the best offensive component (beam weapons) and the best defensive component (shields) and will need to consider what other weapon and/or defense to run alongside it with spare slots. Together with an R-P-S system, it could still end up being reasonably balanced. Though from experience I suspect that it will end up being a system consisting entirely of two types of components in terms of gameplay - beam weapons/shields, and whatever is good against them, with any group that is good against something else playing at best an extremely marginal role. R-P-S systems ease up balancing a bit, but they're no replacement.

There's a lot of assumptions baked into the descriptions here, and I don't know how much of this can actually be implemented in Freespace 2

It's quite an amazing coincidence, but a lot of these, including the variants are either available out of the box, or can be done with just a touch of modding. It's just a question of modifying the parameters in weapon definitions, and re-skinning them. For example, Freespace has these slow-moving plasma projectile cannons (which always felt a bit underwhelming to me, even when they managed to score a hit), what's a railgun if not that, but with faster projectiles, and a different look?

  • Submunitions

FS2 flak guns with a different skin.

  • Guided Munitions

I think I saw mods with "bendy beams", should be no problem.

Beams

Yeah, that's not gonna be a problem. There's a ton of built-in support for that, and lots parameters you can play with.

Beams are tech-limited. The better a faction's tech base, the better beams get. The more resources a ship can dedicate to them, the better beams get. These effects combine to scale the effectiveness of beams exponentially as you move toward end-game units, until they effectively become the ultimate weapon for those who no longer concern themselves with the denominations of their currency.

On that note, I was thinking it might be fun to have some in-mission resource management for ships you control. Even vanilla sort of has that for fighters, by letting you allocate energy to engines, guns, and shields. I'd like something more complex for capital ships but I'd like to finish the basic Sysytem Map and Tactical View features before jumping into that.

Periscope

Is the idea here that you would see the beams getting reflected from the outside? That might be a lot of work, but should be doable, and would look insanely cool!

If we want to go full-anime, how about "disco ball" turrets, splitting the beam to hit multiple targets?

Missiles/Torpedoes

Much like beams, lots of built-in support.

Dumbfire

Available out of the box, and work exactly like you described

HV Dart

Depending on how you want to do it, that's either a very fast dumbfire, or a projectile cannon pretending to be rocket. If you want the acceleration to still be visible to the player, it should be doable with some light scripting.

Swarm

Available out of the box, but in my opinion will need better maneuverability than vanilla. These rockets always felt useless to me.

What about completely conventional, chemically-powered ballistics? I get that they're often ignored in sci-fi due to being boring caveman technology, or because their muzzle velocities and accuracy are insufficient for long-range space battles, or because people assume that gunpowder doesn't work in space, or because the writers just have a strong dislike for real guns. But do they not work? Especially in settings with close-range fighter engagements? Yes they lack velocity, but couldn't you still use them to overwhelm defenses with high rates of fire or heavy projectiles? Yes they're less accurate than magnetically accelerated shells, but can't they compensate for that by using proximity fuzes?

In short, I see uses for old-school guns at knife-fighting range. But feel free to shoot me down here.

What about completely conventional, chemically-powered ballistics? I get that they're often ignored in sci-fi due to being boring caveman technology, or because their muzzle velocities and accuracy are insufficient for long-range space battles...

It's the muzzle velocity/accuracy one. The problem with chemical slugthrowers is that your projectile velocity is capped to the maximum expansion speed of the propellent gasses, which top out at around 1220 meters/second, and even getting that velocity is fairly prohibitive. I think there's various theoretical ways to improve that somewhat, but railguns are just a whole lot better, because the distances involved in space combat mean additional projectile velocity is equivalent to additional effective range/accuracy, not because the bullet goes closer to where you want it, but because the target has less time to get out of the way.

In short, I see uses for old-school guns at knife-fighting range.

I actually agree with this. I don't think there's any reason why railguns couldn't be adapted to rapid fire, but chainguns and electric gatlings are going to give you high ROF cheaper and with lower technology, at the price of reduced effective range. Have them as low-end Point Defense and possibly fighter weaponry, and you have something to upgrade to in more advanced ships.

What about completely conventional, chemically-powered ballistics? (...) But do they not work?

They'd work. All you need is a combustible gas, oxygen, and a combustion chamber. It's just that they'd be outclassed by most other technologies. Maybe they'd make sense as a dumb-fire missile alternative (they're basically the same thing, except missiles carry their fuel to accelerate over time, while guns would have the fuel carried by the ship, and would have to do instant acceleration of the projectile).

More compact than missiles, with higher initial velocity, and cheaper to boot. I guess the argument that railguns or coilguns do it all better holds true, so long as you assume that each ship has a power plant that's so strong that the energy cost of powering a magnetic gun that outclasses any chemically-powered weapon is negligible.

I just recall very much fearing the flak guns in War In Heaven, and those were fired at fighters at a distance of...maybe 500 meters? You don't need railguns for that!

More compact than missiles

Rockets are mostly fuel. At the end of the day the same amount of fuel releases the same amount of energy, meaning the same acceleration. One (and I don't know which) might be more efficient at translating the chemical energy into kinetic, but I wouldn't expect that much of a difference, so at the end of the day, I think they'd be the same size.

They do make sense on Earth, because half of the fuel mass is floating in the atmosphere.

so long as you assume that each ship has a power plant that's so strong that the energy cost of powering a magnetic gun that outclasses any chemically-powered weapon is negligible.

Even now slapping a nuclear reactor on a space ship, or even a probe, solves energy problems to the point nothing else can really compete.

You don't need railguns for that!

OTOH, if you already have rail guns it's easier to feed it different munitions than set up entirely different guns, feeding mechanisms, etc.

OPSEC and project resources

I do a lot of my project planning in google docs, and I'm planning on setting up a doc to store ship, tech and weaponry concepts; this will prevent digging through multiple threads and also allow displaying images in-line, which generally is easier and more visually pleasing. The downside of Google Docs is that it might connect to your google profile in a public way, which I'd imagine people here might not appreciate. I've already set up a burner gmail account for this project, and it might be a good idea for others to do the same. If there's a better option for organizing info, I'm open to suggestions as well.

What about some sort of wiki? There's hosting services for it, they're friendlier to burner accounts, and offer a better structure for categorizing your documents. The downside is that editing might not be as smooth.

never played with a wiki before. I'm willing to give it a try. Got a preference?

I have some experience with self hosted ones, but I don't want to set up a website for this project (at least yet), so the only preference is externally hosted, free, and no ads. https://miraheze.org/ and https://wikitide.com/ look interesting (they run the same software - mediawiki).

we now have a wiki.

It's currently set to open access. Probably we should have people register and then lock it down to only those people?

I'm in, too.

Do you and @ArjinFerman need to apply to be admins, or is there a way to do that on my end?

Did you manage to figure out the permissions? I wanted to take a stab at adding some pages, but I think I don't even have edit rights.

...I think, maybe, possibly I've got it sorted out. the UI was not intuitive. Let me know if you're able to edit? @netstack, same to you?

More comments

I don't see any option to do so on my end. You might be able to set permissions in the View User Groups option on the sidebar?

While I appreciate the trust, I don't think I particularly need to be an admin to contribute.

I just signed up!

It's currently set to open access. Probably we should have people register and then lock it down to only those people?

Yeah, if anyone wants to join later they can ping us.

I'm getting one set up with miraheze now. will post once it's up.

Yeah, I like the idea, but I'm not sure about using Google's stuff. I think I'd prefer MS if we don't find anything else, since I'm not using it privately or professionally, so there's not chance I log in with the wrong profile.

Anyway, I'll try to look for some alternatives.

First Asset Import Attempt

So I took a stab at importing @FCfromSSC's models into the game. Right now this is just the view from the mission editor to get an impression of the relative sizes. The textures are all goofy since I just slapped the ones from vanilla assets on top of our ships, with no regard for proper mapping (in fact, I'm not sure how to do proper mapping yet).

I first tried to scale the interceptor to one of the vanilla fighters.

Then I applied the same scale to the cruiser.

Like I thought the FC's cruiser is already about destroyer-ish sized, but somewhat smaller, so I think that's reasonable. If our dreadnoughts stay within the Collosus-Sathanas range we should be fine.

@FCfromSSC, for now I merged your changes into a new ship_concepts branch to keep works in progress separate from master. If you pull it back to your repo I can send .dae exports of some of the vanilla ships. Turns out that some of the ship's game features are already saved in the model, for example:

  • The shape of the shields, like I expected
  • Location of turrets,
  • Location of all the subsystems
  • The shape of the debris chunks the ship falls apart into upon destruction
  • Docking points
  • Location of weapon mounts

So designing the ships might be quite a bit more work than initially expected, though I think I can help out with that. If you want to take a stab at exporting the vanilla ships yourself, you'll need VPView32 to extract the models from the game, and POFTools to convert between .dae and .pof formats.

Heck yeah!!!

Judging by the interceptor/Ulysses comparison, the ships still need to come down another 25-40%, which should make them even smaller relative to the FS biggies. I'll start digging into the actual implementation side of stuff soon, maybe try some super-simple texturing as well; I can get the scales ironed out then. No worries about the extra ship setup stuff, I was expecting it and I don't think it'll be a problem. I've just gotta have some free-time to dig in and figure out the workflow.

Judging by the interceptor/Ulysses comparison, the ships still need to come down another 25-40%

I tried eye-balling the size of the cockpit of each fighter to make them relatively the same size, so it ended up scaled down by 1/6. Here's the result:

The Cruiser ends up being something between an FS2 corvette and destroyer, so I think it's right on the money.

I also couldn't resist trying to see it in-game. Right now you get a tonne of warnings, and the glow points make no sense since they're copied from a Deimos class corvette:

I would maybe be interested in getting involved.

I have programming experience. Usually front end web UI type stuff, but I've done lots of weird one off things in other areas.

Here is my late night sorta drunk take on an idea that I haven't seen before:

Solar system scale wars, with fleets of frigates, one or only a few super large scale ships, and a system of assymetric information warfare.

You would not know what your opponents are doing, only what your own ships are doing.

You'd be slowly capturing orbits with the solar system to expand your awareness.

Dreadnaughts are needed to take down dreadnaught shields.

If your dreadnaught knows the positioning of an enemy dreadnaught, if they are close enough it can take a shot and take out the shields.

The shields take a while to regenerate.

In the meantime frigates can do damage to the dreadnaught.

I'm having trouble fleshing out the full explanation of what I have in my head. But it gets you different size fleet engagements, with a long view of preserving your frigates, until you can get a decisive victory by destroying the enemy dreadnaught. You are trying to hide your dreadnaught from the enemy fleet while also positioning it for the kill shot.

Smaller engagements will see just a few frigates and their fighter squadrons trying to kill each other off.

Medium engagements might be a dozen frigates engaging each other for prime positioning of a dreadnaught.

Large engagements will have dreadnaughts facing off with multiple dozens of frigates to support them.

Strategic map mishaps and information assymetry could cause any of these fleet types to mix. And victory for your side might mean annihilating the enemy or escaping to bring back information about the enemy fleet location.

I would maybe be interested in getting involved.

I have programming experience. Usually front end web UI type stuff, but I've done lots of weird one off things in other areas.

Happy to have you! Web UI experience is perfect, as FS2 allows you to modify it's UI with libRocket. It's basically HTML + CSS + scripting, except it uses LUA instead of javascript for the latter. Not all HTML/javascript features are available, but it's close enough that you should feel right at home.

@FCfromSSC, I'll bring you in here since you wanted to talk about mechanics, and cjet focused heavily on it.

are we going to be primarily experiencing the game from a fighter, or a warship, or the fleet as a whole? What does gameplay look like?

I'd like to go for a balance. Just like the Total War games have you go back and forth between grand strategy and battlefield tactics (and you could imagine adding Mount & Blade on top of that if you wanted to get up close and personal), I like the idea of half the battle being setting up the chess board in the system map, and the other half a proper execution of the battle plan. In my opinion, barring an overhaul of in-mission mechanics, the game's engine heavily favors a fighter perspective. We could even incorporate that into the story, with one character being a hot shot pilot, and the other a wise admiral, and you'd be assuming the role of one of the other depending on the situation. I could see it making sense to sometimes assume control of a capital ship, if your fighters have an overwhelming advantage and you don't want to get bogged down in the details, or your plan depends on having a specific ship in a specific place.

As for the gamaplay in the system map, my vision is very close to cjet's:

Solar system scale wars, with fleets of frigates, one or only a few super large scale ships, and a system of assymetric information warfare.

You would not know what your opponents are doing, only what your own ships are doing.

You'd be slowly capturing orbits with the solar system to expand your awareness.

The only rub being, that I'd like space exploration to be part of the game, and getting bogged down in a solar system for too long would turn exploring the cosmos into a bit of a drudgery. Of course we could just have the early systems be relatively undefended, and have the massive solar system scale war be the Last Stand of the game.

What sort of weapons do these ships employ? Are shields a thing? Those sorts of questions. I've been leaning very hard into crunchy hard-scifi for these, at least in terms of aesthetics, but I'm open to other approaches.

How hard is "hard"? The autist in me would love to go as hard as possible, but I can already tell you we will have to make compromises. For one, is it really hard-scifi if you don't even have Newtonian flight-, and orbital mechanics? But right off the bat I can tell you we're not doing that, as FS2 is made to give the "WWII aircraft in space" vibes common to space fighter sims, and even simplified orbital mechanics could result in massive velocity differences between encountered ships, crashing into planets, etc - stuff I don't want to deal with as a programmer, at least at first pass.

When it comes to weapons, my opinion boils down to: lore should serve gameplay, not the other way around, and we should make use of what the game engine offers us out of the box.

I would like to make use of the game's subsystem mechanics. Surgical strikes on specific subsystems would make it more interesting to spend your time flying a fighter. You could use them to take out the enemy's engines so your ships can outmaneuver them, take out their subspace drives so they cannot retreat, take out their sensors so the rest of your fleet can slip by, etc. So a that would imply a dedicated anti-system weapons.

I have to say, I do love FS2's massive beam cannons. It's mostly a visual thing though, and I think we can make rail guns look just as cool, so I'm not invested.

Having shields would also add to the variety, because that would mean dedicated anti-shield weapons. We could follow FS2, and have shields for fighters, but not for capital ships. I've also seen mods with shielded capital ships, and they were fun enough as well. Or we could go with cjet's idea:

Dreadnaughts are needed to take down dreadnaught shields.

I have to say I like it. Though that raises a question, is the idea that dreadnoughts are impervious to anything other than another dreadnought, including bombers delivering their payload at point-blank range, or anti-subsystem strikes? I think it's a workable idea, especially since you want to use them very sparingly, but we have to be sensitive to balancing.

If we opt for making them vulnerable to bombers, we could have the dreadnoughts rely on their escorts for remaining impervious. FS2 offers extremely effective anti-fighter turrets that can be attached to capital ships (In fact I added them to the Shivan cruiser in the latest update, I forgot to mention you probably shouldn't fly too close to it as a fighter), so we could have special anti-fighter frigates, guarding dreadnoughts, and the whole formation being basically unstoppable unless matched with firepower, or their commander's incompetence (war nerds can correctly me if I'm wrong, but I think I heard that modern carrier battle groups work sort of like that).

Strategic map mishaps and information assymetry could cause any of these fleet types to mix. And victory for your side might mean annihilating the enemy or escaping to bring back information about the enemy fleet location.

I love the idea. I don't know how well it fits with your vision, but one thing I'd like to keep from vanilla FS2, is subspace jumps. Long story short, FTL in Freespace happens via these jumps, and ships have to recharge their drives between each jump. It's not explicitly stated in the lore, but other mods played with the idea of "subspace maneuverability" i.e. how often a ship can jump, what kind of trajectories can they plot, etc., with the basic idea being that the bigger the ship, the more time it needs to charge it's subspace drive. This would allow for a "luring" mechanic in the strategic map. A dreadnought entering the battlefield would be a big deal, because that means it would be committed to it for a while. Maybe that means it turned the tide, or minimized casualties in an otherwise evenly-matched engagement, or maybe it means it fell into an ambush, or left another strategic point unguarded.

Okay, that's it for now. Thoughts, feedback, and terminology disputes are welcome. What's the proper way to handle ship-class nomenclature? Should the term "dreadnought" bring to mind "really big, overwhelmingly powerful ship" or "obsolete ship from three generations back"?

I kind of want to say the former, but something is telling me a super carrier / mothership / mobile logistical center for your fleet, would be more practical. Then again if you have that, dreadnoughts could be a dedicated platform for taking the super carriers out.

The only rub being, that I'd like space exploration to be part of the game, and getting bogged down in a solar system for too long would turn exploring the cosmos into a bit of a drudgery. Of course we could just have the early systems be relatively undefended, and have the massive solar system scale war be the Last Stand of the game.

I always feel like I've wanted a space exploration game, but also every space exploration game I've ever played has felt like a disappointment. Even the latest version of No Man's Sky has kind of boring exploration mechanics. Its just that they made so many of the other mechanics in the game workable and good that the lackluster exploration has fallen off as a point of criticism.

Realistically, Space is a whole bunch of nothing. A bunch of rocks, some glowing balls of fusion, and lots and lots of nothing. Freespace in particular is in a rough position to make exploration interesting. I'm not even sure what level of mechanics are allowed, but I feel that traditional space exploration would be limited to obtaining new skyboxes, or reading text of something happening off screen.

The only interesting thing a freespace player can really explore are new ships and new mechanics.

In my opinion, the issue here isn't exploration, it's the sandbox. No Man's Sky is boring because it doesn't have much to say, what you'll find through your exploration boils down to new life forms, gadgets, biomes, etc., in the end pretty superficial stuff. Contrast that with something like Star Control 2 that follows a "scripted main quest with no guard rails" formula. You're running around the galaxy, looking for allies, and clues as to where to go next to solve the main quest / current side quest. The clues you get are often vague, so you're never sure if you're headed the right way, and what you're going to find, and you have a good chance of finding something valuable by random chance. It's quite enjoyable.

But in this case I was thinking of copying HighFleet - clear direction, some degree of freedom of movement, goodies spread out on your path randomly.

Realistically, Space is a whole bunch of nothing

Realism is for training simulators and, ironically, sandbox games.

Ever play Escape Velocity? That is the only space exploration game I've really ever enjoyed.

No, I checked my library on steam. Nothing. Then I checked for the game on steam to see reviews and description. No space exploration game by that name came up. So I go and search for it on the internet, and find this wikipedia entry. If that is the game then holy crap. It was released in 1996 almost thirty years ago. No wonder I hadn't played it.

...Man, now I feel old.

Endless Sky is a free (actually free, no microtransactions) and modernized Escape Velocity clone. There are several others but that's the most polished and complete of them.

Additional thoughts:

The shields are for protection within subspace travel. The faster you want to go, the stronger the shields need to be.

Rule of thumb: fast travel between solar systems needs dreadnaught sized shields. Fast travel between planets needs frigate sized shields. Fast travel between planets and their moons can be done with fighter sized shields.

The shields can pull double duty and be used in combat as well.

Not sure about these:

  1. maybe the subspace engine energy can also be tuned for use in a weapon that can bust subspace shields. But it would mean longer engine charge times. So fleets might be forced to choose between fighting or escaping.
  2. The shields are large so that smaller entities can travel alongside the bigger ships.
  3. Shields can merge. Smaller shielded entities can "pop" through a bigger shield with a bit of pushing. And if the shield has been weakened a bit with subspace beams.

Rule of thumb: fast travel between solar systems needs dreadnaught sized shields. Fast travel between planets needs frigate sized shields. Fast travel between planets and their moons can be done with fighter sized shields.

Funnily enough, that's literally the opposite of what I had in mind - I thought fighters would have a higher in-system mobility, but I think I like your idea more in the end, because otherwise they'd be overpowered (hit and run strikes from anywhere within the system feels like a bit too much). I like that there are several implications to this idea. If unaccompanied fighters are jumping in to attack you, that means there has to be at least a frigate in the neighborhood. If they're jumping in with a frigate, taking it out cripples their means of escape allowing you to mop them up later. If you want to ensure your strike force's ability to retreat, you might want to leave a frigate behind nearby, instead of committing it to the battle. Very cool!

1. Maybe the subspace engine energy can also be tuned for use in a weapon that can bust subspace shields. But it would mean longer engine charge times. So fleets might be forced to choose between fighting or escaping.

I'm not sure about it either, but it sounds like a relatively cheap thing to implement, so we can try it out at some point.

2. The shields are large so that smaller entities can travel alongside the bigger ships.

3. Shields can merge. Smaller shielded entities can "pop" through a bigger shield with a bit of pushing. And if the shield has been weakened a bit with subspace beams.

#2 might be doable (I think you just make a 3D model for the ship's shield, but I haven't checked). #3 would require modifying the game engine quite significantly, so that's a no for now. Vanilla FS shields let smaller craft pass without resistance.

a system of asymetric information warfare

A pet idea of mine that I have literally never seen implemented in a game and that I still wish to implement at some point myself is the idea of location-based information and information propagation. For example in space warfare, if ships can travel at say 1/2x the speed of light and information travels at the speed of light, and you send out scouts towards an enemy that you suspect is coming towards you, then you can only "see" the opponents at 1/2x of the distance between you and where the scout found them, not the moment the scout finds them. And as you move yourself across the map, you will get more recent knowledge of some parts of the map while the knowledge of other parts gets increasingly outdated to the point that if you still have troops beyond just scouts there they're de-facto on their own and can't meaningfully be supported in time.

Though admittedly such a system makes the most sense in a (historic) 4x games, since I think the speed by which information travelled is a big part of why kingdoms tended to break down beyond a certain size and why capitals tend to be in certain places that is just entirely missing from contemporary 4x games.

I guess there’s Achron. Though it’s not information-based so much as their resolution of time-travel mechanics.

The only game I’ve played that really bothers modeling intel in such detail is Nebulous: Fleet Command, and it’s limited to radar geometry over kilometer-scale battlefields. No relativistic effects. Unless they’re coming in the solar system update, which I doubt.

I don't think any existing space combat sim has relativistic effects, certainly not this one. The closest is a very hard scifi game called Children of a Dead Earth, which has only plausible 20 years in the future tech, so a far cry from relativistic velocities.

The closest is a very hard scifi game called Children of a Dead Earth

I think I ran into the dude making it, when I was working on a Kerbal Space Program clone.

With an N-Body Simulator (the kind NASA uses to plot spacecraft trajectories), all orbital phenomenon from hyperbolic orbits, Lagrange points, and orbital perturbation are all correctly simulated.

The absolute madman... Will have to give it a spin.

August Art Update 001 - Back in the Saddle

@ArjinFerman, I was opening a window to ask if you were going to post a new thread or whether I should start one myself when the notification popped. I've been waiting all last week for this!

Most of last month was taken up by personal commitments, so I got very little done on this project. What I did get done, though, was some sketching of ship ideas, and as of last Monday I've been back to work modelling them out with my evening art time. I'd like to preface this with a mention that we could probably use some more discussion about mechanics and setting; are we going to be primarily experiencing the game from a fighter, or a warship, or the fleet as a whole? What does gameplay look like? What sort of weapons do these ships employ? Are shields a thing? Those sorts of questions. I've been leaning very hard into crunchy hard-scifi for these, at least in terms of aesthetics, but I'm open to other approaches. My next post will probably be a conversation starter about weapons, tactical assumptions, and tactical/strategic gameplay concepts to get a better impression of what everyone's thinking.

A note on terminology: Judging from the Freespace modding documentation, they rate ships on the following scale:

fighter > bomber > Frieghter/Cruiser > Corvette > Destroyer > Juggernaut

...which is clearly stupid and wrong. I'm using the following scale, which is better because I made it:

Fighter > Strike/Picket Ship > Frigate > Light Cruiser > Heavy Cruiser > Battleship > Dreadnought.

...And anyone who disagrees can fight me make their case using facts and logic.

As always, all of this is open to revision as needed.

Concept - Interceptor

Pics Here

The idea here was a long-range interceptor, designed to patrol far from its home carrier to interdict enemy scouts and torpedo strikes. I'm imagining the primary armament as a bank of four heavy railguns mounted centerline in the fuselage, with rockets and missiles carried on the stub wings on either side.

As mentioned, I started this one when I wasn't sure whether we were going for an experience centered in fighters the way Vanilla Freespace 2 does, so this is probably a lot more detailed than we'd need for a warship- or fleet-centered experience. I'm also working on figuring out a workflow for these; I'm not sure if I want to go for full normal-mapping, or something less work-intensive and more stylized.

I'd rate this concept about 60% complete. A lot of the primary forms have been mocked up, but the stub wings are perfunctory and the reactor/main body is mostly just mockup. I'm going to wait on feedback before pushing it further.

Concept - Pursuit Frigate

Pics here, with annotations

This design is optimized for speed, with a secondary emphasis on alpha-strike firepower; Armor is virtually non-existent, limited to a minimally-reinforced bulkhead and the reactor cap. Armament is a single heavy railgun (and possibly a small salvo of externally-mounted torpedoes). The hull is stripped down the the absolute minimum, a skeletal framework to hold the components together against the high-G forces generated by the drive. Secondary drives provide enhanced maneuverability and short bursts of additional speed. Frigates like this one are designed for perimeter defense and short-range interdiction, not extended patrols. Note the fighter in the lower-right corner of the bottom picture, for a sense of scale.

I'm aiming here for the bottom end of the warship scale: the cheapest, lightest ship I could think of while maintaining a plausible mission. I like the feel of the lattice hull, though I'm not sure how well it will render at range in-game. I'm hoping I can massage it into something workable.

I'd call this concept something like 80% complete; I'm not happy with the tail-end, and want to rework it some to get a better shape, with the exterior frame closing back in to connect to an extended drive.

Concept - Patrol Frigate

Pics here, with annotations

This is a well-rounded frigate design, intended for long-duration patrols around the outskirts of a system. It's much slower than the pursuit frigate, but with better armaments, better amenities, a much greater range, better armor, and a more balanced (though admittedly lighter) main armament. It's considerably more expensive than the previous ship as well, but it's a far more versatile hull in the bargain. The hull is built on a heavy-duty framework surrounding a core hull spindle, with modularized mission packages mounted above and below. This allows the base hull to be easily refitted or upgraded to match the ever-changing mission requirements of the end-user. It might not be glamorous, but it's a solid workhorse design that will generally get the job done. Again, I've added a fighter for scale.

With this one, I was aiming for the most average light warship possible, the M4 sherman of space. Not sure what else to say; it's a good, solid ship.

This concept is about 60% done. I started working on this one after halting work on the fighter over poly-count concerns, and misremembered the poly-budget for light warships, so this one ended up rather under-detailed and over-optimized. i still like the general shape, and want to come back and spruce it up a bit more once I get some feedback.

Concept - Light Missile Cruiser

Pics here, with annotations

(For completeness' sake, I'm reposting this design from last time in the same format as the other ships.)

As seen previously, this is a light missile cruiser, intended to hang back and launch heavy salvos of anti-ship torpedoes from extreme range, then retreat under cover of its escorts before retaliation can arrive. It's optimized for standoff firepower, with minimal armor mainly offering protection against fighter-class weaponry and a hull stuffed with large torpedo magazines, so a direct engagement against other warships or even strike ships is likely to go poorly. It does mount a powerful sensor array, allowing it to detect and target enemy ships from extreme ranges. The hull design is adaptable, with conversion to a pocket-carrier being one of the more common variants encountered, but the relatively weak drive makes gunship conversions a poor option.

Please, refrain from TOOB comments.

This concept is probably around 85% done.

Compilations

It helps to see the ships together, to get a sense of scale.

Of course, the above designs are on the low end, from a fighter up to a light cruiser. What about the high end?

Here's my initial noodlings on a supercap ship, probably in the dreadnought range, with a few of the lighter ships around it for scale. This one is probably more like a 30% concept, just roughed in, but the idea is a center-mounted battery of supercap-scale heavy railguns, with banks of very large anti-ship beams/other guns running down either side of the hull, top and bottom. ...Not sure what else to say about it; it needs more work, and probably some more development of the story and general feel we're going for. I'm of two minds on the general design. I kinda like it, and kinda feel like it's too symmetrical. I might try cutting it in half, flipping it 90 degrees, and fitting some more elements on top of it to make a more interesting design. I dunno.

Okay, that's it for now. Thoughts, feedback, and terminology disputes are welcome. What's the proper way to handle ship-class nomenclature? Should the term "dreadnought" bring to mind "really big, overwhelmingly powerful ship" or "obsolete ship from three generations back"? Let me know what you guys think. Sorry all this is still in grey-box mode; I wanted to get some actual ships designed before I dug into getting them set up in-game, much less texturing and modelling. If it's annoying, I might try some quick render-paint-over shenanigans.

Impressions.

Interceptor: Seems to strongly resemble a rotor-less attack helicopter, which gives off a slight uncanny valley effect. And why is the cockpit so far forward? To give the pilot a wider field of view? Engine appears a little underproportioned for what I assume should be a very fast craft - but you said long-range, not high-speed, so maybe my expectations are wrong. Overall looks cool, wouldn't mind flying it.

Pursuit Frigate: I did not expect that. A flying truss? Well, why not! But that's a lot of ship for something barely armored. I guess it works out by real-world rules where you don't get shot at all the time, but I would not be comfortable flying escort for that in Freespace! By Highfleet rules it would work out though. Also, the tanks are obviously drop tanks, yes? Yes?

Patrol Frigate: Looks like another piece of public infrastructure - in other words, very Highfleet! I like it. Simple, unassuming, utilitarian, like one would expect a medium-size mainline ship to look, and it wouldn't be strange to see many of them. Nice combination of round and blocky shapes. And that cheeky cocked sensor is a nice touch.

Light Missile Cruiser: As previous said, very nice. I have almost no complaints here. Given that it is neither fast nor very armored, how does it defend itself against long-range missile strikes? Fighter cover, EW or anti-missile missiles? I don't see any point defenses on the hull.

Size Comparison: It's been a while since I played Freespace, but where the scales of ships really that much different? Fighters appear very small in that comparison, and those small-to-medium capital ships appear very large. Does the engine support that? If so, no complaints.

Supercapital: Makes me uncomfortable. So many resources in one basket. Also, I'm getting StarSector pains form seeing a ship with a giant hole in the middle. Does the hole do anything? The gantries suggest as much, but it still looks like an aesthetic flourish better suited to a yacht and completely unjustifiable on a warship that big. Apart from the giant glaring hole, the silhouette looks good. If the ship is that big in order to house the biggest railgun possible, then why not make that spinal gun longer by utilizing more of the space behind it? But you say it's a bank of several, so I'm I guess that's not really the point.

On the general symmetry debate: Aesthetically asymmetry can work out, see the Vaygr in Homeworld 2. But as @cjet79 said, there should be some kind of visible justification for it - some large piece of machinery that requires asymmetry to house.

I like your designs. I thought the world of spaceship design had gone entirely stale, but here are some very unexpected ideas.

Interceptor: Seems to strongly resemble a rotor-less attack helicopter, which gives off a slight uncanny valley effect.

The stub-wings definately aren't helping there. I gotta work on that. I'm drawing a bit from M.A.K.'s Lunadiver Stingray, a (far superior) design that I'm a big fan of, but the forms need work.

And why is the cockpit so far forward? To give the pilot a wider field of view?

That, and because there's a bank of railguns running along the underside of the fuselage, and the rear area is taken up by life support and capacitors. Also, because I thought it looked cool! Thinking about it, though, there's no reason not to go glassless and just bury the pilot down in the guts of the craft. They'd be safer there as well...

Engine appears a little underproportioned for what I assume should be a very fast craft - but you said long-range, not high-speed, so maybe my expectations are wrong.

The gubbins on the back of the tail are the torch outlet; the engine is the egg-shaped mass the lattice-tail attaches to. The pipework running down the lattice is supposed to focus and accelerate the high-energy plasma output from the reactor, and the idea is that pushing the outlet back at the end of a long tail allows for a smaller, lighter shadow-shield to protect the rest of the ship from the radiation output of the torch exhaust. It's supposed to be a somewhat kludgy and awkward way to get higher performance without adding weight or cost. The downside would be that the system is effectively unarmored and is quite vulnerable to damage...

Pursuit Frigate: I did not expect that. A flying truss? Well, why not! But that's a lot of ship for something barely armored.

It's really, really small. The crew compartment is somewhere around the size of a large bus, maybe a trailer? Figure maybe 5-8 crew? It's also very fast, so it can try to do hit-and-run tactics with the railgun. But yeah, I was thinking more about how much fun it would be to shoot at; I definately wouldn't want to be responsible for its safety.

Also, the tanks are obviously drop tanks, yes? Yes?

Could be, could very well be. It definately needs more fuel; I didn't leave room for much in the current iteration.

Given that it is neither fast nor very armored, how does it defend itself against long-range missile strikes? Fighter cover, EW or anti-missile missiles?

The idea is that it lobs missiles from extreme range and then runs away, relying on escorts to deal with pursuit or retaliation.

I don't see any point defenses on the hull.

Those are missing from all of these at the moment; I need to design some and then add them in. All the ships should probably have them in some capacity.

Does the hole do anything? The gantries suggest as much, but it still looks like an aesthetic flourish better suited to a yacht and completely unjustifiable on a warship that big.

The idea I was toying with was that the interior of the hole was essentially a dockyard for resupplying and possibly carrying lighter vessels. You're right that it's mostly there for aesthetics, though; holes in ships look cool.

If the ship is that big in order to house the biggest railgun possible, then why not make that spinal gun longer by utilizing more of the space behind it? But you say it's a bank of several, so I'm I guess that's not really the point.

Yeah, I was thinking of the primary railguns more as a saturation barrage weapon rather than maximizing single-hit power. At the scale of a ship like this, extra damage isn't the deciding factor, but you can't kill what you can't hit. The idea was that the railgun bank gives it a massive salvo of heavy shells, such that it can get hits even at significant range simply by throwing so much steel downrange that it can't all miss.

That, and because there's a bank of railguns running along the underside of the fuselage, and the rear area is taken up by life support and capacitors. Also, because I thought it looked cool! Thinking about it, though, there's no reason not to go glassless and just bury the pilot down in the guts of the craft. They'd be safer there as well...

The "hard(er) sci-fi writer explaining away rule-of-cool art" answer is that this is already the case and the dome at the front is a sensor array.

Everything you said is reasonable and satisfies me, but

holes in ships look cool.

is pushing it.

No no no. The holes were never cool. Nobody wants to see your shiphole. Cover it up, for decency's sake.

Edit: No, seriously. Holes always ruin immersion for me. As soon as I see a ship designed with a hole like that, any sense of realism evaporates and I'm back at "spaceships in this work of fiction are just random shapes that move about by magic and do whatever the plot demands, there is no consistent, internally logical underpinning to this world." Same when Starsector has all of its ships that don't have holes instead be bifurcated. I know everyone wants their ship to have a distinct shape, but can't designers be more subtle than to just turn them into Brezeln or croissants?

Size Comparison: It's been a while since I played Freespace, but where the scales of ships really that much different? Fighters appear very small in that comparison, and those small-to-medium capital ships appear very large. Does the engine support that? If so, no complaints.

I originally wanted to bring it up as well, and even wrote a comment to agree with you, but ended up deleting it. The fighters looked very small vs the cap ships for me on mobile, but seem fine on a proper monitor.

Edit: On second thought, I think the cruiser is about destroyer size... I think we'd need one of the FS2 ships next to them for comparison.

@FCfromSSC, can you upload the models of the fighter and one of the ships? I could take a stab at importing them into the game.

...I gotta set up a burner account to get connected to the github project. Darn OPSEC. I tried just changing the file extensions to .png, but that sadly didn't work. I'll try and get that done as soon as possible.

I was opening a window to ask if you were going to post a new thread or whether I should start one myself when the notification popped. I've been waiting all last week for this!

Nice! Yeah, I wanted to wrap up the features I've been working on the past month before opening a new thread. It might be you'll need to kick off the next month's thread, because I'll have some IRL stuff to deal with in September.

A note on terminology: Judging from the Freespace modding documentation, they rate ships on the following scale:

fighter > bomber > Frieghter/Cruiser > Corvette > Destroyer > Juggernaut

...which is clearly stupid and wrong. I'm using the following scale, which is better because I made it:

Fighter > Strike/Picket Ship > Frigate > Light Cruiser > Heavy Cruiser > Battleship > Dreadnought.

...And anyone who disagrees can fight me make their case using facts and logic.

I'm embarrassingly ignorant about actual ship classifications for someone who spent so much time playing old naval warfare games, and was already burned a few times trusting that fictional classifications reflect reality, so it does not surprise me if FS's system is all LIES. I'm happy to go with your system.

I love the designs, and I can't wait to see them in action! I'll probably have more to say about them once I see them in game.

How about replacing Light Cruisers with Destroyers and just calling Heavy Cruisers plain Cruisers? That way you don't need to double-dip on the Cruiser term for broad classification, it's easier to distinguish categories at a glance, and you can still use the Light / Heavy distinction for other purposes like setting apart two different designs in the same broad class.

Aw shoot, I forgot destroyers. We've definately gotta have destroyers.

To my way of thinking, you really do need two classes at least to cover the cruiser spectrum; the gap between destroyers and battleships is just too wide otherwise. I'll admit that there's no actual rule here, since in real life the designations are more like guidelines than actual rules, but a decade of playing naval wargames has cemented the difference for me: Destroyers are escorts, cruisers are independent, multirole ships. Destroyers mount light singles in turrets, light cruisers mount destroyer guns in double or triple mounts. Light cruisers are minimally armored, heavy cruisers are both armored against anything smaller than themselves and heavily up-gunned.

And then you have battlecruisers, which sound awesome but are basically battleships minus the armor.

The gap between destroyers and battleships is a pretty big one, but modifiers are pretty useful, so maybe it works out to just go with "cruiser" as a class, and use light/heavy/battle modifiers within the class? I could live with that. Good thinking, sir.

Good points all. But I've always disliked having a bunch of cruiser designations that span wildly different weight classes. Rule The Waves for example has annoyed me to no end with its CLs and CAs and BCs, but at least it had the excuse of being historical. I hope that in the future we can invent a few new terms to cover that gap!

Feedback about symmetrical: not enough.

Most military designs are perfectly symmetrical. One of the big exceptions is carriers, because they have an extremely pressing design concern that makes symmetry highly costly.

A cheap realistic military ship would have as many identical pieces as possible. Symmetry makes that easy.

The one major lacking piece of symmetry is the single rail gun. If you want to go back of symmetry then truly build the ship around a giant rail gun. Make most of the ship the rail gun.

Also, counterintuitively to most gun designs a rail gun could be heavy anywhere rather than just being back heavy. Most guns are back heavy because the explosion and acceleration happens in the chamber. A railgun's acceleration occurs throughout the barrel. And it could be designed to impart more acceleration anywhere along its flight path. More gradual acceleration is easier.

I played eve online for many years and it fully took over the part of my brain that deals with ship size classification. It's pretty similar to yours.

Drone*

Fighter*

Frigate

Destroyer

Cruiser

Battlecruiser

Battleship

Carrier

Dreadnaught

Titan

*the drone and fighter were controlled by larger ships and not actually flown by players. Fighters usually required carrier platforms, while drones were usable by almost any ship size.

Each day I drift closer to being an “ideas guy” instead of a real contributor. Perhaps I started there, but I certainly haven’t done anything to get out of it.

As usual, though, I love what you’ve done with the place.

Your initial feedback gave me a big motivation and confidence boost, so even if your contributions stay limited to that, I'll be very grateful.

Well, I got a post I'm working on about ship weapons and game mechanics ideas, so I'll ping ya for that when I get it posted!

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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