We could get around this by making the rounds "Bolt" type, like proton torpedoes are. If there was a way to do that for the missiles with guidance systems, I'd suggest we do it to all the missiles. I have a lot of trouble with shooting my own missiles down and with them not doing damage even when they hit.

Good idea - I forgot about the special case torpedos. Yes, in this case, there already is a type of ammonution which cannot be targeted. However, I doubt that it can be modified to be able to steer for itself, cus the game handles missiles similar to ships. But we shall see about that.

I think missiles have to be targetable. It's a traditional thing in WC that one daring way of defeating a missile is to shoot it. It's also traditional that one has to stop shooting the guns after firing a missile, or to be careful with aiming to make sure you don't destroy your own missile. It even said so in the Privateer manual. What they shouldn't be is tractorable, IMO.

It is? The only time I ever saw it happen was to torpedoes in Wing Commander 2.



Are you sure? I had a legit copy of Privateer back in the 90's, and I don't remember reading that.

Quoting the Privateer Manual, page 60:

SURVIVAL TIPS
by Lieutenant Travis Sanford
When I recently attended a convention on Oxford, I was fortunate enough to make the
acquaintance of a young pilot working at the fighter base. Mark Thornton’s boundless
enthusiasm for his job impressed me so much that I decided to interview him for publica-
tion here. What I have compiled is condensation of our conversations about his training at
the TCSN Academy. Here are the high points of his advice for rookie pilots.

Use your weapons and blasters wisely. When you are attacking hostile fighters with a
combination of different weapons, you should follow a few very basic rules. For example if
you open fire too quickly after firing a missile, you might hit the missile while it is still on
its way and explode it harmlessly , leaving your enemy unscathed.

...................................................................

I didn't play the other games, though; only Priv, RF, and Privateer 2, so I'm not sure
whether missiles were target-able in all the games; but they should be, anyways, IMO.
And there's a "tractor-able" flag for each unit in units.csv. This was an addition that
Spiritplumber and I worked together to add, and later Klauss cleaned up and committed
to the vs engine, though I'm not sure whether it made it in before PR1.2. If it didn't, it'll
be there when we upgrade to VS-svn. Then all we need to change is to make missiles
non-tractor-able. There's no need to go as drastic as making them non-target-able.

Agreed, though in wc2 AFAIK you can't target them. Probably because i'm pointing the wrong way because of the dated graphics.

Probably WC1/2 didn't compute bolt-to-missile collisions. That's really expensive to do, when you think that the complexity of collision increases with typically the square of the number of objects in the collision queue. Just my guess but I'm sure if there was no shooting missiles it was due to technical compromises; not because they didn't want to. The issue of flying missiles by tractoring them is totally unrelated, really. The problem is not with being able to target (and destroy) missiles; it's a problem with being able to tractor them in the first place (tractor-beam magic being better forgotten than remembered); and in second place, the physics absurdity of something big and heavy (a ship) being towed by something lighter.

(How I'd love to eradicate tractor beam technology from WC, for good...)

We could always do our own personal retcon and turn them into grappling hooks.

Yep; I once had that very thing in mind. Wasn't my idea, though; someone had suggested it for Vegastrike, and I thought the idea was great, and that it could be used in future WC projects. The retcon should be such that it explains what we've experienced in WC rather than contradict it. Suppose we got some pretty futuristic kind of grappling hook: It would be like a missile that unfolds a grappling hook at the front and unrolls a tether from the back. The tether would be made of carbon nanotubes and be invisibly thin. The missile part would be rather big but invisible at the distance. The HUD computer would make it visible by showing it as a beam of light projected on the HUD. And the fact that it is aimed and fired like a beam, is enough for everyone to refer to it as a beam.
Problem is, Forstchen came up with the brilliant idea of having tractor beams used for assisting landings on carriers, and that's hard to explain as grappling hooks and strings of nanotubes...