"However, I also beleive this whole thread to be moot, as I doubt that we'll actually see any of the suggested changed from either party."

Damn you devs for making me look stupid! =)

"Anyways, I just wonder why any devent Itani pilot thinks when he realizes that his ship is the best runner in the entire universe."

I think, "I pity the person who tries to run from this ship."

Might I point out that if you know how to fly the valk, and use its advantages (light weight and good T:W ratio) appropriately, it's just fine, and in fact probably a good deal overpowered to boot.

I notice most of the people who complain about it being too easy to hit are the ones flying it with sunflares, rails and/or gauss. Bigass, heavy weapons on a light, agile fighter. Of course it's going to handle like shit.

Now it's been buffed, and we essentialy have a ship which works great in a role it's not supposed to have, and is infuriatingly overpowered in the role it was originally intended for (that very few bothered to use it for)

Now I'm not saying you're wrong Cunjo, you may very well be right. But let's give it some time before we decide if it's balanced or unbalanced. I've only had one fight in it myself, and that was against you where you dropped me to 19%. I'm sure it will still fall quickly to a prom as well. But in any case let's test it a bit.

Yes, as I just posted to the 1.7.10 thread, the X-1 is not permanent. It's an experiment, on which feedback is much appreciated. So, don't bemoan its existence too much, if it's a bad idea, hopefully that will become clear.

understood.

When you take the X-1 away, will players who have purchased them still have them in inventory?

Yeah, regardless of final mesh model, those of us that did that mission should get to keep the name on the hulls.

So how much was the collision mesh actually shrunk? I was doing a side by side comparison today with the target boxes, and the hittable area appears to be identical, or almost imperceptably different.

The target box is still taking the cockpit into account, and because it was only the wings that were flattened, the box still is the same size.

The collision mesh and the visual mesh are pretty close.. as close as we can get them in every case. So the collision size has been shrunk as dramatically as the visible ship.

And yes, when it's pulled I hope to just replace the ship mesh and remove it from the merchandise data, so it'll no longer be purchasable, but it will still be in your inventories as the X-1.

I'd rather people didn't stockpile a million of the things, though. They don't stack, and having a whole lot of them can slow down your sector load times, and station docking times for the character. Station limits will be along eventually.

Right. So what exactly is the % of the squish?

So I spent some time with several different people tonight testing out the X1 in comparison to an IDF. I know, it's supposed to be the same as a vengeance, but I didn't have one in the area.

So far, the difference doesn't seem to be noticeable in 1 on 1 combat. Percentage wise, the results were consistently similar between the regular valk and the X1. This was mainly in energy duels, some with flares.

I'm not passing judgement yet, it's still early. But if things continue in this fashion, I think that squishing the body very VERY slightly to match the wings might be the fix.

Lecter: I did it by the seat of my pants using FFD (free-form deformation) tools, pulling control points. I'd guess the engines are in the ballpark of 30% smaller, vertically? But I'm not sure. The main body is completely unchanged. I can make a render sometime this week, overlaying the two, if that'd be helpful.

It's easy enough for me to squish the entire ship, or just the engines in different ways, and so on, once we have some more testing input.

Thanks, was just curious. 30% is twice what I'd have guessed, so if/whenever overlay is posted, it'd be cool to see.

And so far, my experience has more or less mirrored Ghosts: no real difference in damage taken.

I'll call in a marker for some more brutal matched layout testing once I'm done with exams >.>

<.<

Also, Ghost: the X-1 is a temp ship that's not going to stay around. "Breaking it" is ok. Let's see what happens if it gets a SERIOUS squash already. Then reduce said squash if it's broken/impossible to hit... rinse, repeat. Experiment(al).

As a suggestion for the test mission itself... to combat the AI's stupid tendency to warp out arbitrarily (like, even if you're sitting there attacking it and you've only been in the sector for five seconds total), would it be possible to either a) reduce the number of bots you have to kill out of all of them or b) move the mission to a roid field already?

The mission's hard, as it should be. And that's fine. For that reason, it should remain untouched.

My problem is it's also damn buggy, because well... as Inc said (paraphrasing) "The whole AI code is a mess". They constantly warp out. Trying it 30 or so times (Cut me some slack, I'm on one of those toilet seat iBooks from the 90s for a bit), I have made it to the second stage without them warping out, ie I killed them before they could, three times. So maybe break them in waves of 3,3 and 4 or lower the bot count overall?

Or, I know there's oter ways via the mission editor. Just saying it needs a few minutes of tweaking to force the bots to stay.

breaking the first wave in half is what i suggested earlier.

that and the warp fix would be nice.

inc, could you change whatever flag for the mission so we could retake the mission again? i'd like to try the mission *using* the x1.

as for ghost's and lecter's results thus far, i can't correlate. i haven't had a decent pvp using it yet. but as far as agts are concerned, the x1 seems a wee bit less vulnerable to them damn hogs in border skirmish. also, flying around hostile teradons is easier to manage, it seems.

I'll see about tweaking the mission to try and make the bots not stupidly leave. That's a fundamental AI problem, though, and i'm not sure if breaking things into waves will help. Oddly, in the four or so times I tested it, I didn't have that happen to me. I'm curious if there's some specific case that causes it.

Also, I can make a secondary mission which becomes available *after* you pass, which is basically the same as the test mission, but has no impact on your accomplishment flags. That would be easier to do.

we were discussing the difficulty of this missioqn in-game the other night and nolan did the mission down in jallik while i was doing it in deneb.

deneb was lagging horribly that night for me (wich didn't help aiming but doesn't totally excuses my inadequacies...)

so, perhaps sector lag is in it for something?