I think the velocity of EVERYTHING in this game should be upped:

*Upgrade ship speeds (engine speeds) by 5%, making game a little more intense

*Upgrade weapon speeds by 10%, thus making long range fights possible, cause right now to hit people with most energy weapons you have to be right up in their face.

*Upgrade rocket speeds by 5%

*Upgrade all homing devices EXCEPT Gemni's by 10%, because Gemni's have a prox. detonation radius, they actually hit the an enemy, but contact detonated homing devices usually never hit, they need to be at least 10m/s faster so they actually have a chance... Everyone can just boost away from them.

I think those are all reasonable suggestions if only because you have been conservative in your request, but can we fix what we have first before completely changing everything?

Engine speeds have been creeping up for some time as a percentage of turbo speed, but generally speaking turbo speed (and hense acceleration) is the general determining factor on how fast ships move.

The faster energy weapons move the shorter the fights will generally speaking last.

Are you advocating upping rocket speeds by 5% or by 10% then by 5% more (15.5%)?

I don't want to touch homing missile weapon speeds just yet. There are alot of features (capital ships, gizmos that could be used to counter homing weapons) on the near to mid-term horizons that will directly impact the utility of homing missiles and I don't want to play with them just yet. But I think it is safe to say that homing missiles at present are not particularly potent. The problem is that it is a very fine line between a homing weapon that never hits and one that never misses.

Incarnate mentioned something about a bulk system for Vendetta, where carrying more weapons/cargo will eventually slow your ship down a little. Granted it'll take a while to code in, but once it's in we'll be havin' a lotta fun with it.

=D

Listen, weight does not slow down an object, it simple makes it harder to move, unless the object has protruding latches that hit something like air, but being in space there is no air there is no friction to slow stuff down. A valk with 3 gravitons should have less manuverability then that of one with 3 government issued cannons.

Technically speaking, weight doesn't make it harder for something to move - mass does. It also makes it harder to stop. I imagine what incarnate means is not that you will have a lower maximum speed, but that you will manuever more sluggishly. As things stands, engines already have a thrust rating, the only thing is that the mass of ships is constant regardless of what they carry. However, you can achieve higher manueverabilities by mounting a heavier engine. If things work like 3.1 that means that if you are mounting a heavy engine you will accelerate more quickly than if you are mounting a light or efficient engine.

By "slow down" I meant in terms of acceleration. You're makin' an argument about nothing. Anyway, the sooner this is implemented, the better.

=)

Just continuing a subject that should have been dropped. :)
The difference between weight and mass, is that mass is muesured in "Kg" and weight is muesured in Newtons (N).
Mass makes an object accelerate/deaccelerate slower and a larger force is needed to achieve the same amount of "work" (w=D/T).
Weight is only present when there is a force (like gravity) acting upon the object, the amount of force determines the weight.
On earth a 1kg object weighs 9.48N.
Just wanting to clarify for non-physics graduates. :)

What the? W=FD, dude... And a 1 kg object weights 9.8 N on the surface of the earth... What were you saying about being a physics grad? Back to 9th grade with ye.

Pyro to be exactly it's 9.81N

cheers

I think that the speed issue could be best addressed like this: Once we have balanced the current game a bit more, the devs could experiment with some ships that behave a bit differently.

For example, a ship that can carry two engines but can't turbo at all (not enough structural integrity to withstand super-high speeds). This would give you a cruising speed of 100+, allowing you to turn while you do it. However, you would be easily chased down in a straight run. This could be a useful way of handling the "Ti-fighter/spy-ship" requests bouncing around in other threads.

OR: A ship with one engine but two batteries: slower overall, but able to fire almost indefinitely. Again, there would need to be a sacrifice. Maybe if mass ever effects movement the weight of the extra battery would make the ship more sluggish.

OR: A ship with one engine and NO batteries. The ship would have space freed up for extra weapon slots. Of course, energy weapons would be useless (no battery) so you'd have to rack up with missiles. The result: A slow & steady ship that couldn't turbo at all, that could carry a massive amount of missiles, homers, rockets, etc. Combine two or three of these ships with some Ti-fighters, one spy-ship, and a capitol ship and you would have a well-balanced fleet where many styles of play were accommodated, and all roles were fun to play.

Some of the ships do have two, three, or even six engines. I kind of wish that the player would be required to buy an engine for each. But only one battery would be required as a central power source. Having multiple engines should only give a slight advantage in speed and agility, though. Nothing too drastic.

Now, of course it would be even cooler if the engines had to be balanced. For example, you put a heavy in a Maurauder's right pod and an efficient in the left pod, it's gonna pull left when the efficient engine can no longer keep up.

Also, how about an EMP system for missile jamming? As long as you're holding down the jammer's button (and cursing and praying for it to actually fscking WORK this time), you lose weapons and turbo, but the missile has between a 10 and 40% chance to simply explode in space and do no (or less) damage to you.

On the topic of more engines, more engines should be addative in effect.

A ship with multiple engines should:

1) Add the thrust rating of all engines, thereby getting more thrust and from that more acceleration.
2) Average the maximum speeds of the engines to obtain its new maximum speed (calculation can be done at the time that the ship is existatiated in the universe).
3) _Add_ (not average) the turbo energy costs of all engines, thereby requiring more power to feed the turbo of all the engines that the ship has.

Therefore, there would be a trade off between having more engines and fewer. Ideally, ships should always have the same number of battery slots as they have engine slots. That is, a ship that can mount 4 engines should have 4 battery slots, and vica versa. This will result in a ship with (disregarding other modifiers) the same relative availability of energy for manuevering (turbo) but with more available energy to power weapons. This fulfills the design goal of making smaller ships relatively 'faster' and more manueverable than larger ships. Also ideally, ships with multiple engines should have increased weight (either computed or directly from the hull or both) which limits or mitigates the manueverability advantage extra thrust implies for most or all multi-engine designs. Finally, IMNSHO, multi-engine hulls generally imply larger hulls with more hitpoints and more firepower than the little 'single engine' fighters we have now (regardless of whether the fighter has 1 normal sized engine or 6 smaller ones, you are still paying for one engine). In order to keep it so that multi-engine, multi-battery ships don't completely dominate game play, they should have built in disadvantages that limit thier manueverability. For instance, a 10% penalty to turbo efficiency such that for example a two engine ship mounting two efficient engines would pay 110 power/second for turbo rather than just 100. This would keep the little fighters we have now 'zippier' than thier bigger and heavier cousins.

Interesting. I would personally like to see the maximum speed increase with more enngines, though -- especially if you deck out a smaller ship with multiple engines (as in, exchange a weapon slot and some cargo slots for another engine).

I really think the use of multiple engines will come into play if and when a system is built to account for a ship's mass. Thus: adding a heavy engine to a promy wouldn't change things too muchbecause of the greater initial shhip mass (plus the greater mass of the heavy engine), but adding an efficient engine to a small fighter could really boost it along.

I would be interested to know if the devs are planing anything like this. A lot could be done with multi-engine ships.

There should not be a maximum speed. Only a maximum acceleration.

Maximum acceleration should be a function of the power of the engine effecting the mass of the ship.

However, a ship should not decelerate without my instruction with the flight limiters turned off, even after the battery is empty. A ship could have a problem with large amounts of acceleration/deceleration(think engine pushing through the ship), and this is where the battery comes in, as a structural stabilizer. Once the ship is in motion, there is no forces acting against the ship, therefore high speeds do not cause excess stress on the hull.

This would be an interesting change in the game design because, while not having top speeds, it would be difficult to rapidly slow down from a high speed run. You might turbo up to speed. You would then have to wait for you battery to charge before you decelerate, as deceleration without the battery would damage the hull.

Combat would not change, except that you could have a slow battle that is actually 2 ships in similar high speed paths. It would also make it easier to run in a smaller ship.

phayd: That idea was tried and discarded early in Vendetta development.

I'd like to add to Celebrim's point: Real physics can be viable in some games that have extremely accurate, immensely rapid, extremely long-range weapons (Independance War: Edge of Chaos for instance, where guns had a 10km effective range) but spaceship combat was much too easy--all the aiming was taken care of for you. You just had to dodge a lot and outrange your opponent.

The maximum velocity issue isn't at all realistic, but it makes this sort of combat much more feasible, keeps the scale of the game smaller, and makes players catchable (in theory). I handwave it all off as some relativistic effects are kicking in; strange relativistic effects that cap velocities around 200 m/s. It's why rocketry is so slow, and why there aren't many physical projectile weapons. It's a strange universe out there.

For instance: Tachyons are supposed to have a velocity greater than c (according to Asimovian fiction, anyway), but tachyon blasts travel at only 190 m/s. Therefore, c is 190 m/s or less, which means we're regularily breaking the speed of light in this universe, and railguns really *are* powerful--they're hurling xithrite at over 2c! (This is clearly a special property of xithrite, which makes it a highly desireable commodity. Ship hulls probably have xithrite in their composition to allow them to fly at such great relativistic velocities.)

So, well, in short, things just work differently here. I'm sure you could pick up a few more ideas where the real world physics disagrees with this, but it's not worth the investment of effort. If reality gets in the way of fun in terms of a game, then I'm sorry, reality is just gonna have to stay at home while I'm playing, in my arrogant opinion.

PS: Don't tell anybody gauss and rail guns are the same thing. The universe will implode.

rail and the gauss are the same thing acierocolotl :D

PS: it looks like you are interested in the Aztec civilisation right ?

Not to be picky or hyperanalytical, but:

http://www.ballistictech.net/essays/gauss.html

It is at least debatable that rail and gauss are different.

No please, be picky and hyperanalytical.

That was actually highly informative. I learn something new every day.

Thanks.