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
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@FCfromSSC - 2D/3D artist
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@netstack - developer, tester, and suggester of great ideas
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@Mantergeistmann - writer
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Me - developer
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
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developers: “mission” code, “strategic” system map code
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artists: 2D (user interface), 3D (space ships, weapons explosions)
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writers: worldbuilding/lore, quests, characters
What we have
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Concept art for a long range missle cruiser, curtesy of @FCfromSSC
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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.
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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.
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A “tactical” RTS-like in-mission view where you can give commands to your ships.
Updates
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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
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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.
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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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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!
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.
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.
OTOH, if you already have rail guns it's easier to feed it different munitions than set up entirely different guns, feeding mechanisms, etc.
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