Defining drones

[Phoenix-D]

I'm attempting to see if Starshatter can duplicate the ships from the Honor Harrington series. That requires some..interesting missiles. I've already figured out how to let the player adjust the missile loadouts using hardpoints, but I'm stumped on one type of missile.

Specificlly that universe has a type called a "bomb pumped" missile. It flies within 20,000km of the target and fires a group of one-shot lasers at the target, destroying itself in the process. I *think* drones might be used for this, but I can't see any documentation on how to make/use them.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

use of the following variables:

DET_RANGE
Range from the target at which the weapon will spawn submunitions.
det_range: 5e3,

DET_COUNT
Number of submunitions to spawn.
det_count: 6,

DET_CHILD
Name of the weapon design to spawn as a submunition.
det_child: "XRay Laser",

DET_SPREAD
Randomly spreads bolt and missile submunitions that are spawned.
det_spread: 0.5,

for example:

WEAPON

drone: {
name: "lasmissile",
group: "Thor",
target_type: 0x0000fff0,
value: 3,
ammo: 35,
capacity: 2,
recharge_rate: 2,
refire_delay: 0.5,
salvo_delay: 26,
charge: 1,
min_charge: 1,
damage: 100,
speed: 4e3,
life: 45,
guided: 2,
mass: 10,
thrust: 14e3,
drag: 0.2,
roll_rate: 10,
pitch_rate: 10,
yaw_rate: 10,
roll_drag: 1,
pitch_drag: 1,
yaw_drag: 1,
syncro: false,
self_aiming: true,
aim_az_max: 1.5,
aim_el_max: 0.5,
spread_az: 0.7,
spread_el: 0.7,
min_range: 15e3,
max_range: 120e3,
max_track: 120e3,
visible_stores: false,
graphic_type: 1,
model: "rocket2.mag",
det_range: 8e3,
det_count: 5,
det_child: "laserspawn",
det_spread: 0.6,
explosion: 4,
scale: 6,
flare: "yellowflare.pcx",
flare_scale: 0.5
}

WEAPON

missile: {
name: "laserspawn",
group: "Hammer",
target_type: 0x0000fff0,
value: 3,
ammo: 30,
capacity: 2000,
recharge_rate: 50,
salvo_delay: 15,
charge: 100,
min_charge: 100,
damage: 10,
speed: 3e3,
life: 4,
guided: 1,
mass: 10,
thrust: 4e3,
roll_rate: 4,
pitch_rate: 4,
yaw_rate: 4,
roll_drag: 1,
pitch_drag: 1,
yaw_drag: 1,
syncro: false,
self_aiming: false,
lethal_radius: 7e3,
aim_az_max: 0.05,
aim_el_max: 0.05,
spread_az: 3,
spread_el: 3,
min_range: 10e3,
max_range: 120e3,
max_track: 100e3,
visible_stores: false,
graphic_type: 2,
det_range: 4.5e3,
det_count: 1,
det_child: "XRay Laser",
// model: "tube1.mag",
bitmap: "boom.pcx",
scale: 2
}

these test DEF files create the followign weapon:

First, a ship launches a spread of missiles.



Then, the missiles explode in a cloud of crappy sprites at a specified range to their target.



Then, the sprites travel a little way sbefore they themslves splat the target with a Starshatter-Canon X-Ray Laser beam.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

speaking of which it'd be grand if we could get a weapon to 'explode' when they split into a child. milo?

also i've given some thought on how a harrington-universe mod would be done.

you'd need to spend some time on custom shields. I sugges you make them fairly close to the ship in the general shape described in the books. ( a inversed tetrahedron when viewed from top). now what you do is you use a lot of polys for this shield as well. that's important.

then you add a number of holes in the shield based off how vulnerable a side is supposed to be. top and bottom have no holes, back and front have alot, sides have e medium amount. Then you scale the weapons damage and the ships integrity and the shield_factor so that shots hitting the shields do virtually no damage. only shots penetrating the shield do damage.

quite challenging and i havent tested it yet but it should work.

of course that's 'advanced', you don't need to start with that and the AI wouldnt know WTF it was doing anyways. Unless milo adds a "Broadside" AI but i'm not holding my breath, that seems low priority.

wild weasel missiles arn't as hard as they sound, what you'd do is just create a missile weapon that does moderate amounts of Power damage, thus screwing up all of a ships operations momentarily. to compliment this the ship's power levels should be designed so that anti-missile defenses suck up a lot of power to keep operating, far more so than even engines. shields btw should drain almost no power.
that's of course under the current model, milo could add something later that would make wild weasel much more 'true'.

you'd have to be careful with laser point defense, its perfectly accurate. you may want to model is as primary weapon point defense so that it is inaccurate.

just my $.02

[Phoenix-D]

Yeah, I found the submutions stuff shortly after posting, heh. Though the random aspect threw me; I didn't think it would be aimed at the target if I used a beam.

As far as sidewalls go, it seems the Starshatter shields are a pretty good representation of that already. I just hope they aren't as hardcoded as they look- any HH mod would need shielded fighters! (LACs) Actually the missiles would techniclly be shielded as well.

I haven't tried it yet but was planning on making three shield subsystems. One located in the same spot as the drive to make the upper and lower bands, and two to make the side bands. Set the top bands to capacitator style, set the deflection cost to 0 and you should have impenitrable shields. Good frigging luck getting the AI to use that effectively, though.

EDIT: looks like hardpoints don't work on starships. The WEP button never lights up?

[TheDeadlyShoe]

SS can only have one shield subsystem on a ship. Otherwise the shielding system is very, very flexible.

You can shield fighters but not missiles.

[Phoenix-D]

Not quite as bad as I was expecting, then. Hmm. I wonder if you can stick landing gear on a starship- and then make the landing gear invincible

Mission loadouts aren't quite as flexible as I'd hoped, but at least this way I don't have to define entire new ship classes just to change the load in the ship's magazines..

EDIT: aha. Landing gear on a ship does work, though I'm not certain you can make it invunerable yet. And the real reason the WEP button wasn't lighting was because I didn't specify a loadout in the mission file. Once you do, the button lights and everything works normally.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

HEh. At first I thought that might be the case, but I rarely do anything involving loadouts so I decided otehrwise. Oops. Edited out the wrong info.

[Pheagey]

(spock eye brow lift) interesting.

Phoenix-D: would u mind writing a tutorial on how to get loadouts onto starships? You know for SSDv3 when its done.

[Phoenix-D]

ORIGINAL: Pheagey

(spock eye brow lift) interesting.

Phoenix-D: would u mind writing a tutorial on how to get loadouts onto starships? You know for SSDv3 when its done.

Whatever SSDv3 is, heh.

Anyway, its pretty simple. As far as the ship .def goes, loadouts work exactly the same way as for fighters. In order for the WEP button to show in the mission screen, you must specify a loadout for the ship. As far as I can tell this also works the same as for fighters. If you don't, the player will be unable to configure his ship and the station(s) will have nothing to fire.

[DamoclesX]

surface shields are BEYOND cool, we have some on the vorchan that look just like the show.

I love that skin shield effect. its so cool that you build them in the model too, you can make holes in the shields and all that wicked stuff.

we already are going to have some ships with just shields facing one way

[Phoenix-D]

Back to the original question: from messing around it seems that drones and missiles work identically, except they have a different target type for point defense and drones get the brackets and a range indicator on the shot. Am I right?

If so now i just have to figure out how to do area of effect weapons.

EDIT: which I did. From the description I thought lethal_radius was to detonate the shot if it missed/when it got close enough. Seems to be the blast radius instead, and combined with flak: makes for a decent area weapon. Except flak: only seems to blow the weapon when it hits the end of its life, not when it gets close. No proximity weapons?