I have some ideas that might or might not appeal to you guys. If there's a topic for these things, let me know, I'll delete this one and post them over there.
When showing range, wouldn't it be nice if distances under the minimum is shown in of millions of km instead of the long string of numbers when using km, it improves readability .
Hull integrity. I feel it's abstract and imaginary. If you look at the science fiction series vessels don't explode when this number reaches zero, it just means a hull breach and they just vent air, plasma and fluids. Electrical conduits may be damaged or torn. Beam lasers melt the skin, pulse lasers are ablative due to the super heating effect and the explosions the create, but this doesn't harm the superstructure underneath. Explosive decompression of tanks, if the hull is breached, may hurdle a spacecraft temporarily out of control but unless there's a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen/oil/hydraulic fluid there isn't much to burn. My guess is that in the eighties and nineties, computing power was so limited that it was better to let stuff explode than to have a number of wrecks in your screen. The question is, what are the type of reactors used on board the ships? Matter-antimatter reactors need electromagnetic containment, fusion reactors need coolant. Wouldn't it be nice to just have leaks of fuel, coolant and air, the more damage the more leaks? It's then a race against time to find a station and get it all fixed. Or, even nicer, you're able to buy spare parts and engineering kits to repair the damage yourself - with limitations like in reality: you can't fix a coolant conduit when the engines are running.
Atmospheric shielding (AS). Braben had a nice idea, but it's implementation is totally flawed. A 20 tonnes fighter does not have the surface area of a 1200 tonnes tanker. "One size fits all" is wrong. Not only that, some of the larger vessels have the aerodynamics of a billboard. How about you buy shielding according to your liking, the faster you want to fly in an atmosphere, the more shielding you require. Since I don't believe aerodynamics and frontal area are computed thus friction purely depends on dynamic pressure, just use hull mass. If 1 tonnes of atmospheric shielding is needed for a 20 tonnes fighter, then perhaps 60 tonnes is needed for a 1200 tonnes craft to be really effective?
Another idea: just like the Space Shuttle the AS gets damaged. I would suggest that during combat, first the AS gets damaged, then the skin. Fast re-entry may wear down the effectiveness of the AS as well, putting more strain on the undamaged AS. Another idea is being in the corrosive atmosphere of a planet, even when parked, will reduce the effectiveness.
And in case of overheating, instead of total destruction (like the Columbia), why not breach some coolant pipes, break down the scanner, destroy a laser or thruster ...
But this only works if overheating happens much faster than in the Alpha 10.
If you guys like the idea of internal systems that can be damaged and need maintenance/repair, I could write/draw some stuff. And I'd love a power distribution facility like in the excellent Klingon Academy.
A question, do models have multiple hitboxes?
In Frontier components like scanners and thrusters and cargo could be damaged. I remember one time in FFE I checked my ship for damage and found that I was carrying about 20 tons of rubbish. I wondered where that came from. It turned out to be what was left of my hyperdrive. Fortunately I had a fuel scoop and there was a purple gas giant in the system. I earned enough credits selling hydrogen to eventually buy a new one. Anyway, this reply is to offer encouragement. 😀
atmospheric shielding is more like an energy shield, always seemed like an explanation that better fitted the tech and look of the game - i.e. no visual changes required.
but you're right, whatever - it should weigh more depending on the size of the ship and could also be damaged along with other systems.
some form of limited cloaking technology and scanners to find cloaked ships
Not according to the manual (-:
Not according to the manual (-:
well, whatever... neither are properly supported + energy shield works better in the game.
Thats true of Frontier but not of Pioneer. She has full support for visual changes with the addition of atmospheric shielding. Its just that no-one has ever bothered to do that with their models 🙂
So you could either change the texture or load a new mesh with the addition of atmospheric shielding.
EDIT// Its probably best to just add a mesh onto the craft to save from loading up whole sections dynamically, which is slow.
well thats cool, is that actually supported right now? and aren't we still assuming a spherical heating model? like it heats equally on all sides... so in practice you can probably still assume that it has some sort of spherical shield - which also accounts for the aerodynamic model fairly well - the air is not really interacting with the ship, but a sphere that surrounds it.
Whats actually supported right now is changing of the ship visually depending on whether atmospheric shielding is equiped, so you could have a tiled texture or mesh appear over the front to visually simulate the shielding, its generally up to the modeller/coder making the ship whether they use it or now. It works in exactly the same way as the visually loaded missile stuff works, as well as antennae ect.
As for heating the ship-visually on entry its not currently supported. I think it would be pretty easy to factor it in but Im not sure how costly it would be.
EG: We already have a value ship temperature and we already pass other values dynamically to the ships, so I don't see anything stopping us from passing the temperature to the ships.lua as well and use that to scale colour of a mesh between transparant and red or something like that.
sure, i understand. i mean "physically", heating (and of course drag, and also lift) is a function of surface area, angle of incidence and so on... Pioneer assumes a "spherical" model as far as i can tell. i.e. drag, heating and lift are a constant (given constant velocity and dynamic pressure) independent of how the ship is actually oriented to the airflow.
I can put it simply: There is no aerodynamic modelling. There is a highly simplistic drag model, but even describing it as spherical is crediting it with a shape that it doesn't have. (:
I know there isn't, thats what i've been saying all along... And when i say spherical, i know there isn't actually a sphere, like a polygon or mesh or something interacting with some fluid dynamics simulation... I mean it acts like a sphere, if you had a sphere in space and de-orbited it, that shape would not behave differently based on its orientation to the airstream.
So, again, at least for me i guess, despite what the manual might say; i'm gonna assume that the aerosheilding is something like an ionised air plasma shaped as a sphere or some type of forcefield which better accounts for the simplistic "flight model" or lack thereof.
In system fuel consumption.
I really hope it will be implemented, I think using simple calculations for specific impulse would be a nice way to go.
To make it really interesting: use hydrogen for hyperspace but use hydrogen + LOX for in system travel. Maybe available as a difficulty setting for hardcore simulation addicts? Searching for gas giants to replenish your hydrogen tanks is one thing, having to look for a planet with an oxygen atmosphere is more of a challenge 🙂
Instead of LOX which is O2, having liquified O4 (tetraoxygen) on board is a nice deus ex machina to lower the requiered mass for buring the H2 + O (assuming the mass of O4 = O2). Although not scientific, using only hydrogen as a chemical propellant isn't either.
Unless ... the hydrogen is used in some kind of hyper-efficient ion thruster, in that case forget the oxygen part 🙂
But then again, how does the ship generate the enormous amount of electricity to power the ion thruster? Nuclear reactors?
There's no way you could conceivably move a ship as large as the ones in Pioneer around a solar system in comfortable timescales, with a chemical rocket, carrying only a handful of tonnes of fuel. At the very least, the fuel (in our case, hydrogen) would just be the propellant, with the required energy probably being delivered electrically. You can't have a reactionless drive, so you must throw something out of the back.
Perhaps hydrogen fuels the fusion reactor which electrically propels the resulting helium as reaction mass?
Anyway, as you use propellant, your ship should definitely lose mass.
True, even back in the days when I started to play Frontier I always thought the idea of having such a specific impulse (didn't know the words for it then 🙂 ) was totally unrealistic.
I think the idea of a fusion reactor is a nice one and I'll drop the idea of chemical rockets.
Solar sails FTW 😆
Wrt to fuel... what about antimatter? We could use an equal amount of hydrogen and anti-hydrogen to propel us to these extreme velocities, and our 'fusion' reactor might be able to speed up the exhaust gasses with some handwavium... as well as convert all that extra light into something useful.... AFAIK antimatter would literally give you MC^2 or 9x10^19 Joules per ton of fuel burned, so .5tons anti-hydrogen and .5 tons of hydrogen. Thats a lot 😉
"Handwavium" fuel of the erm... gods? 😆
Annihilating one tonne of mass... the energy density of that is deeply frightening. How is the antimatter contained? What if containment fails? It's not just your ship that would go. You'd very likely exterminate all life in the current system, and in years to come there would be tourists flocking to more and more distant systems to watch for the flash.
Even if you could use it properly, the stream of hard radiation coming out of your engine would be cause for concern at all starports.
It's not confined to antimatter, of course. Any engine powerful enough to be interesting is a weapon of mass destruction.
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