Hi

I´ve been lurking around the forums in the last months, since well... I never had much to add and was busy with RL. Anyway, about the stuff you guys want to change/add to the games guns and missiles, ive been wondering. So, respectfuly, I am asking.

1- I am unsure where the rationale that privateer missiles are somehow small rockets come from. I always found it odd that a centurion can carry around up to 20 of them ok, but I figured that was just for game balancing. At the game intro, we see a talon launching missiles at a tarsus and they look just about as big as the mssiles from other games. So.. they are not exactly small rockets.

2-All ships in the game had the same guns. There were not milspec or civilian guns. The broadsword had mass drivers just like a player craft could have. You can rationalize that they had different kinds of guns for military and civilian ships, or that the military ships had downgraded guns because its a backwater sector, but aside from the differences between the games ( which, can be explained simply because they are different games ) I don't know if there's any canon reference to that.

There's simply no canon reference to draw on for comparing Privateer weapons to other WC game weapons.
Absence of canonical reference does not imply that there's a difference; nor does it imply that there isn't a
difference.
Absence of a canonical frame of reference for comparison is simply that: No guidence.
So we don't need to appeal to canon to assume a difference; nor could we appeal to canon to assume there
is no difference.

So, in the absence of guidence from canon, second priority in line is common sense: Does it make sense that
civilian ships would be as well armed and capable as military ones?

With regards to missiles: Does it make sense that a 100,000 credit Centurion can carry 20 missiles, whereas
a roughly 50,000,000 credit Hellcat carries 6 or 8 or whatever the number was?
No; it doesn't make one iota of sense.

Your post seems to be conveying a lot of bias; and I don't understand why. First you recognize that 20 missiles
for the Centurion seems a bit much; but then you insert a BUT... and simply forget the fact.
Just look at the missile launcher box! We calculated, by comparing measurements of cockpits and whatnot,
that that launch box is about half a meter wide and half a meter high. How big can the missiles be to fit 10 of
them in such a small space? It is completely obvious that we're talking about MUCH smaller missiles than we
see in WC games.
The missiles that the talons launch during the intro is ***nowhere near*** the size of missiles we see in WC.
Even so, they are bigger than you could fit 10 of in the Privateer launcher.

Same goes for guns. Look at the size of those guns on a Hornet!



The sizes of guns we see in Privateer don't even begin to compare.
And size matters!!!
Take the Exeter, for example. It's 360 meters long. So each of its turrets is bigger than a Centurion:



So you can't tell me that, just because they are lasers, they should have the same power as the little lasers
that you mount on a Centurion; can you?

well, okay, now i get it.

Hahaha, that was easy

On the other hand, there ARE contradictions to the model we've adopted. Us being able to fight
dralthis with a centurion, for instance. But such contradictions are few and manageable. Our
current retcon/theory is that Dralthi 7's, as we see in Gemini, are much weaker than other
dralthi models, because they had to fit them with jump drives, to reach gemini, which takes up
a lot of upgrade space.

EDIT:
Also, regarding the Talon, in particular, bear in mind that as crappy as talons may be, they are
NOT civilian ships; they are terribly old and crappy, but *military* fighters; probably interceptors.

Well, fireskull still has a point. I'm 99% sure the original game had only one kind of laser, mass driver etc., which got used in every instance, on the players ship and on others, from tiny fighter to kamekh, paradigm and drayman.

I'm also not 100% sure about your monetary comparisons. a) the 200k for the cent are without any equipment, with bells and whistles it can easily cost something closer to 600 or 700k. b) the 50-million figure is from WC 1 or 2 I think, and I think the monetary system back then was not important, and origin changed that like they did the units for shields, gun power, ship agility and everything else. (we discussed inflation and currency reform as a possible retcon)

I'm still for introducing several sizes of all guns and missiles, so we can make some sense there (especially for even bigger ships, and up-to-date, frontline military equipment, like the WC3 ships), but we'll have to ensure we do not change the balance too much, e.g. by making broadswords 10 times harder to kill or something like that, as this would affect several missions (e.g. the smuggling missions would become much harder)

re talon:
perhaps it sucks so much because it is a hybrid atmospheric/space fighter? would fit not too badly, due to the wings (which most of the others have as well, I know, but the retcon could work )

You might be right... probably right. Still,
a) fireskull's question was specifically about Privateer vs. the rest of WC, and that we have no canonical
answer for, and
b) It just makes too little sense for a laser to be a laser to be a laser, regardless of size. If the canon is
indeed like so, then this is one of those few instances where I'd say "screw the canon".

No, the 50 million figure actually comes from Action Stations.
That was the cost of a ... Corsair? ... No, hold on... the Corsair was its predecessor; my mind is a blank...
The Wildcat.
The Wildcat was a space-only fighter, and in turn the predecessor of the Hellcat and later Bearcat line.
When (then young) Tolwyn crashes a Wildcat on landing, one of the deck crew guys tells him "there goes
50 million". Obviously it must be a huge figure, regardless of possible monetary changes; because Tolwyn
is wounded and partly burnt; so you wouldn't talk about money to him under the circumstances unless it
were huge money --more than Tolwyn was worth, in the implied undertone.


Exactly. This will be a very challenging endeavor.
But it HAS to be done. If you read through forum threads of other WC mods, you'll find we're not the only
ones having trouble making sense of WC's weapons and shields and armor stats. The problem is a monster
that's still alive and kicking. Which is understandable: The WC creators/franchise holders never felt anywhere
nearly as bound to canon as modders do; and consistently broke their own canon from one game to the
next... --not to speak of their literature stats disagreeing with in-game implementations, etceteras.

Well, smuggling missions are too easy, anyways.
But in any case, Broadswords are big, heavy, low maneuverability bombers. Their frontal weapons are not
for shooting fighters; they are for weakening carrier shields in anticipation of a torpedo strike. What they have
for fighters is three turrets for defense. If you fly your fighter defensively, a broadsword can't target you with
its front guns, at least theoretically. But if it did score a front gun hit, it should be pretty devastating for a fighter.


That's a good idea.
Come to think of it, the fact that Talons are atmo fliers is implied when retros attack bases in RF. Obviously
they don't have cruiser-size guns or ground bombing from space capabilities. If they are attacking bases,
they are probably doing so by flying down to their targets.

So the figure is much older than I thought. even more time for inflation
I totally agree.Smuggling missions are what you do in the beginning of the regular campaign. I think they need to be not too hard, or we'll change the feel of the game too much. for our added missions things can be different, but the campaign should stay about the same as in the original game, imho. I just used the broadsword because it was mentioned before. it also has 3 turrets, which are quite huge. if we change the front guns, we should change the turret guns as well... perhaps we should invoke the 'dralthi-retcon', and show the deadlier WC2 broadsword outside gemini... how about the stiletto? it is faster than the cent, if we give it better guns (and following your logic strictly, it should also have better shields etc.), it will be quite deadly.

Yes and no...
Keep in mind that turrets should be a lot less powerful than fixed guns, size being the same.
Why?
Because fixed guns can take a lot more recoil.
Turret mounts are a lot more delicate than fixed mounts, by comparison.

Possible.
I don't remember where I read it, but I think broadswords are refit for various roles
besides bomber.
The dralthi 7 argument is not broadsword-extensible, as the broadsword always had a jump drive, AFAIK.

Hmmm...
Good point...
Too good a point...
Gladius too.
Ahhh, but the WC Stilletto and Gladius are not jump-capable; so, Dralthi-7 argument again.

uhm... do the wc/privateer guns have recoil? well, at least the mass driver should, but origin never cared much about physics... and recoil can be compensated, via muzzle brakes or firing stuff simultaneously to the other direction or...

anyway: most american fighters in WW2 had 12.7mm or 20mm guns. 12.7mm turrets were used e.g. on the B-17, and 20mm on the B-36 (plus some B-17 variants IIRC), designed shortly after the war...
OTOH Stukas/sturmoviks used 37/40mm, and some B-25 variants (and some german planes too) even had 75mm guns, clearly too large for an aircraft turret. (then again, those or similar guns were turret-mounted on tanks and ships...)
I think the biggest guns on airplanes were the nose-mounted 102mm of the anti-ship version of the (WW2) italian Piaggio P.108A and the 105mm howitzer of the later AC-130 gunships (firing to the left while the aircraft circles around the target)

The subject of recoil was extensively debated at the WCU forum. I was arguing for NO recoil, but
I was beaten by physicists and outvoted by fans to total submission and conversion

Recoil would be awesome!

Chuck, I asked that because I thought you guys are making a Privateer game. I think it doesn't makes sence to change those things if you want a Privateer game.

It does if you want to span a wide range of options, though. But I have to argument that not even the original Privateer guns are set correctly in PR 1.2 ( or gemini gold ) and neither are the missiles, maneurability of fighters, shields.. well you know better than I do chuck.

As a fairly blatant example. In the original Privateer there was a scale of damage and effectiveness from dumbfires to friend or foes. FOF not only had instant lock on, they also were the most damaging missiles. That doesn't happens in the mods, where dumbfires do the most damage though they can't lock. Which is fine for creative purposes and makes sence if you want to balance the missiles.

edit: BUT in all other WC games (up to WC3 which is what I played), dumbfires were the most damaging missiles, while FOF did fairly low damage because you could just spam them. So there you go.. another monster to make sence out of.

Well, you're raising good questions and then answering them yourself

Indeed to all the points; both for and against.

This is precisely why Gorbalad and I have been getting psychologically ready for months now, for the
biggest brainstorm in History.
We want to tackle this monster and kill it dead. But we haven't started yet.

Did you see our ship sizes brainstorm?
We collected ship size data from official sources; made measurments of ship sizes in-game (in the
original game), AND we placed human models in the cockpits to educe ship size from that; AND
we brainstormed sizes further on the basis of ship roles and fundamentals. And only THEN we
put final sizes into a table. The process is documented, so that in the future someone says "this
ship should be bigger", we can refer back to the reasons why we made it the size we did.
None of that old WCU crap process of adjusting things by eye and gut, and leaving no record of
what was changed and why.

And that was a tiny foretaste of what's to come.
Once we're done brainstorming weapons and shields and stats, we will have our final decisions,
and then it will be a matter of implementing them. And there will be NO further changes without a
very good reason.

And I know you like this kind of work, so I'd like to invite you to be part of the big brainstorm. But
I'm not sure when it's going to start. Thing is, we want to get the graphics and modeling work
out of the way first.

as the baking stuff uses only one of my cores, I can make good use of the other, and fire up dosbox, to collect ingame data from privateer and WC1/2 (once I make them work) about ship manoeverability. I'm not sure if I can get reliable weapon data as well (stuff like x hits with gun y kill ship z), but I'll try to.

recoil ingame...
so forward guns would make you slower, turrets firing in all directions would make your ship turn slightly and/or move laterally? not sure if the VS engine supports this, but I think I would hate it

I was once working on a turret for the Bengal carrier for WCU, and the guns had sliding action
(in Blender, but we were going to implement the recoil animation). I was also arguing that the turret
itself should also move slightly and slowly in recoil; --just a barely perceptible motion.

hmm. I'm not sure if it'd be worth the work, if just the barrels recoil a few cm. I think you'd never see that on fighter shooting at you, because the guns point at you. maybe you can see it on a capship turret firing at someone else, if you are close. Of course you can see it on your own turrets in an external view. (does anyone use external view in a fight?)

What do you mean with turret movement? I can imagine that the turret could rotate slightly, if it has 2 or more guns which fire alternately, i.e. it rotates a bit to the left when/after the left gun fires, and to the right, when/after the right one fires.


Were there Stilettoes and Gladii in WC?
EDIT: according to WCpedia only Gladii were seen outside privateer, in WC Armada.

No; I just assumed about the Stiletto; but anyhow, if it's a military ship then it is, or was, in military use,
whether or not another WC game showed it. And military use implies NO jump drives, as we know
that the first fighter with jump capability is the Excalibur.
So, my point stands.
On the other hand, Armada contradicts the theory about lack of jump drives. In Armada you can move
small ships sans carrier from one star to another. But I wouldn't take that too seriously.

Chuck.. I really cant compromise to be around when you guys are brainstorming, my university keeps me off the internet fairly often.

Anyway...

About the jump drives. What evidence do we have that they are really perfomance impacting? It is a fact that they don't change anything on your ship in the game after you install them.

What I am trying to say is that we are assuming things. Even if it had impact on perfomance, they could have taken measures so it really didn't.. by installing better engines or whatever. It would make the fighters more costly, but then again they had less Dralthi and Gothri striking commerce lines than fighting at the frontier. And if you think like that, actually the Dralthi and Gothri in Gemini are MORE deadlier than their counterparts at the frontier. Add to that that its not possible to really compare ships in between games... because they dont make sence at all when put together.

Damn!

HARD evidence? None.

True; but that can be explained.

Ehmm... You're not getting it... We ARE "assuming things" deliberately; not by accident.
We need to explain how some guy with a civilian ship can go up against kilrathi military fighters
and live to tell the story. Assuming things about jump drives is a means to that end.
We were brainstorming one time, and noticing all kinds of canonical contradictions and
inconsistencies, and we wanted to come up with a way to retcon them, reconcile them.
So we came up with the jump drive theory.
You're not telling me anything new about our assuming things.
We made no secret of the fact that we were assuming things.

True, but you are also assuming things in order to shoot down our jump drive theory.
They could have; but they also could have NOT; and that's a good thing It allows our retcon to live.
You see? You're looking for reasons to believe the jump drive theory *might* not be good.
Why? I don't understand what your motivation is.
We're looking for reasons why it might BE good, as it helps solve problems.
And we've been finding lots of good reasons. It fits perfectly in fact.

Assumption:
The reason why installing a jump drive in your cent doesn't impact performance is because the
jump drive itself doesn't affect performance; it is the upgrade space it takes up that does. But
in civilian ships, that space is already taken and reserved for a jump drive, so you gain nothing
by removing it. At least not without a good mechanic that could convert that space for use by
something else.
So, if later in the game you buy a Drayman and have a Cent in the hold for defense, if you meet
the right mechanic at a bar, you could, for a modest sum of 150,000 credits, have him remove
the jump drive and refit the space to accomodate much better engines and shields. See?
The reason the confeds don't put jump drives on their fighters is because it would make fighters
less effective; --never mind cost. What's the point in increasing the weight of a fighter by 900
kilos to put a jump drive it will never need to use, since it travels aboard a carrier?!?!?!?! What
you're suggesting is insanity. The only point in having a jump drive in a fighter would be if it was
a stealth fighter or cloaker that could sneak in for espionage or hit and run. And that's precisely
why the first time ever the confies put a jump drive in a fighter, it was ALSO the first time they
put a cloaking device on a fighter --the Excalibur.
/Assumption

Exactly.
Assumption:
The cats are not trying to invade Gemini. Why would they? They got the retros working for
them there. For them Gemini is like Siberia; a place to send their convicts. Instead of death,
put them in a cheap Dralthi 7 and send them to Gemini to redeem themselves.
/Assumption

In what sense?

Precisely.
This is precisely the problem we are trying to solve, and the reason why we deliberately make
helpful assumptions.

I brought those things up because I didn't see anyone doing it It's food for thought.

As for the Dralthi and Gothri in privateer, what I tried to say is that we could assume (yes I am assuming things too lol) they had similiar perfomance to their frontier counterparts even if that jump drive was taking upgrade space, because the cats used more tech to keep them balanced.

Maybe. but:
they would be more expensive than the frontline models
they would be better than frontline models, which means flying them would no longer serve as a punishment
they should be a bit bigger
and, the most important reason:
it would turn the game's balance upside down. any missions or random encounters with kats would be a nightmare.
we would need to change the frequency of kat random encounters, probably change some missions, ...

I think we should keep frontline kat and confed ships mostly out of gemini, to stick close to the original games. things may be very different in other places, of course.

Ahhhh, gottcha!
That's good. We need feedback like that; and if a WC conoisseur like you can't find solid fault
with our retcons, I feel a lot more confident about them already.
I might add, with regards to jump drives, that we seem to see a gradual progression towards
miniaturization in WC canon. No HARD evidence, but a lot of circumstantial evidence.
In the early era of WC, jump drives are the monopoli of larger ships, down to Corvette size.
Then we hear of variants of the Broadsword with jump drives. Notice however that the
Broadsword, although officially a bomber, has been modified for such roles as exploration,
with jump point telemetry installed. Another variant of the Broadsword had the kind of
equipment needed, I can't remember if it was to detect cloaked jump points, or to analyze
energy trails to tell if a jump point had been used in the last few hours. I wish I could recall
where I read these things, though... I can't remember.
Later in WC we see a couple of heavy-fighters and bombers featuring jump drives.
Finally we come to WC3, when the Excalibur is introduced, which has a small jump engine,
with enough fuel for only two jumps I think it was.

On the civilian side of things, however, we see jump drives used commonly; not only in
Gemini, but in the Landreich too, as early as late 2620's, before the start of the war, and
in ships smaller than corvette-size.

We also hear of at least one instance of a small military ship having a jump drive in 2629;
but that was a personal transport with only a single laser for defense; the ship that Turner
takes to fly to the Landreich in Action Stations.

I think the amount of evidence is overwhelming that combat ships and jump drives are
pretty incompatible right up until the Privateer time-frame, but begin to become less
incompatible going forward.

Frankly, I don't think so. I don't think a Centurion
would stand a snowball's chance in Hell against two dralthis and a gothri, even if their
pilots were brain-dead, if they had similar performance to WC counterparts.
AFAIK, the kilrathi systems East of Gemini have never been seen except in maps. My
retcon theory calls for A LOT of asteroids around this border area, such that capships
can't get through. A natural barrier which protects Gemini from the cats, and protects
Trk'Pahn from the confeds as well. This would help explain why we never see any
cat carriers around Sumn-Kp'ta, or confed carriers stationed at Perry. Thus, the Gothri
and Dralthi we see in Gemini got to have jump drives, and this would explain why they
are so weak as to be at par with civilian ships, --again, IF we assume a high degree of
incompatibility between combat equipment and jump drives; --which seems to be the
case as mentioned above.
I think it all fits together quite nicely.

Exactly.
Once we open into Sol, and then into Vega, if we decide to go that way first, I think there will come a point
where flying a Centurion is just a fancy suicide technique.
Which is good from a gaming perspective: If we're going to expand Privateer, we wouldn't want to stay
forever at the "Centurion being the be all and end all of ships to own" paradigm, of course.
The way I see it, a Centurion going up against the likes of a Hellcat would be a total joke. The centurion's
weapon size mounts being for such small weapons, they wouldn't scratch the paint of a Hellcat.
Centurion missiles being as small as they are, you might achieve slight damage if you fire all 20.
Meanwhile the Hellcat would have better electronics, a much bigger power plant; and a single big fat
missile would rip your Centurion to shreads before you even got a chance to eject.
I'd say probably the Centurion would be no match even for civilian ships in Vega; specially in Border Worlds,
where confed rules and limits for civilian craft might not apply.

EDIT:
Ehmmm... Add that argument to all the others: Even if we made no assumptions about jump drives, there IS
canonical evidence of civilian ships being less combat-worthy than military ones. Namely, when the dealer
salesman says about the centurion that it was voted "the best publically available fighter". That's a clear
implication that craft NOT sold to the public (i.e. military) would be substantially better. So there should be
no contention about civilian vs. military disparity. This is canonical fact.
The jump drive theory, again, just fits in rather perfectly.

One more thing:

The cats don't really have much science and technology of their own.
They shun intellectual pursuits.
They take technologies from races they conquer, and have engineer slaves of other races working on new designs
in many conquered worlds.
The slave engineers hate them, of course, and in Action Stations some of the cat torpedoes fail to
explode because one of the parts in the firing system is inserted backwards. It was such sabotage
that saved the Concordia when a second torpedo hit failed to explode.
My point is, the cats don't have such R&D flexibility as to say "let's throw the R&D kitchen sink at it and make a
Dralthi that has jump drive and yet is as good as its counterparts without".
Besides the fact that it would be such a worthless pursuit... Why? What's the big advantage? Just for Gemini?
The cats not only have carriers, but even their corvettes, destroyers and cruisers have fighter bays. The cats
are big on carrying fighters around. What they did --putting a jump drive on the Dralthi 7-- is rather exceptional,
already.