Feld

About a month ago I posted a comment on this glorious repair feature. I'm not being sarcastic. Think about it: A Nimitz class aircraft carrier is 1,092 feet long with a crew complement (not including air crew) of 3,200 people. A Questar class heavy cruiser is about a 1253 feet long and has a crew of...27. I don't know if the SC has mentioned much about how he envisions the ships working, but I'll bet that a great deal of the repair work is done by robotics and nanites under the direction of human engineers working through a massively parallel computer network. When enough of that network goes down you hear "Logistix computer destroyed" and your engineers are left to muddle around in whatever section of the ship that they happen to be in. There, these ****ing brilliant people orchestrate tons of 'bots and millions of nanites all while cursing at a computer terminal that displays the 3000AD equivilent of the hourglass mouse cursor. Pandemonium ensues. I love that...

quote:Originally posted by Soback: [QB]The weight has nothing to do in space, mass does, and acceleration. Even if a shuttle is small but has a whole lot of thrust, towing a more massive object, he will accelerate slower but then can shut off it's engine and make small course corrections when needed. So running out of juice faster when towing a bigger ship, not necessarily true, but if you hyperjump a lot then yeah. [QB] Well...not quite sure how BCM sublight drives work. If they are reaction drives (i.e. throw stuff out the back to go forward), the shuttle/Stormcarrier combo would possess *much* less acceleration due to the fact that the same Drive was pushing approximately 4 million times the mass around (assume Stormcarrier and MkI shuttle are boxes with Appendix dimensions and approximately the same density). Also, a given load of fuel, ejected from a mass at a given speed imparts a given amount of momentum. If you raise the mass, then the acheiveable velocity changes goes down. Of course, BCM looks like it uses some form of inertialess or near inertialess propulsion. I dunno. I don't really care. Either way, I wouldn't want to be that shuttle pilot: Captain verrrry quietly) "Pilot?" Pilot:"Yessir!" Captain:"Look behind you." Pilot:"Aye sir!" Captain:"Do you know what that huge black void that looks big enough to swallow your ship is?" Pilot:"Yessir, the barrel of main gun number 4, sir!" Captain:"GOOD! NOW GET ME THE $*&^!$#*&! TO EARTHSPACE, I HAVE A PLANET TO INCINERATE!!" Pilot:"AYE SIR" (diverting power from shields, weapons and life support to the engines)

My AE's had days like this...

That much I noticed from the fact that my CC no longer does an F-16 impression However: 1. Do ATL/V, ATL, CTL and the other tracking logics all mean what they did before? Is the ODSM logic the same as the old ODSM/L (RITL/V but in an ODS weapon)? I mean, this is a space game that makes a hardcore effort to cover all different types of tracking logic and DOES IT WELL (holy sh*t!!). 1.5 And HOW DO THOSE STO MISSLES WORK?! I sure want to know because I was stupid enough to go down to Mars in a Terran military Questar and get plastered by what I *think* was a Starlight missile. I say *think* because my PTA killed it shortly after it launched and then my ship just about disappeared in a very large explosion. I lived to get back to Starpath, but I have just GOT to know if those weapons can find me in orbit! 2. Do the CC systems interact with each other like they did before or were many changes made there too? For instance, the old manual mentions a battery which stores the power that the solar reactor converts. The BCM manual does not mention a battery. Yet I've lost my reactor, been on the dark side of a planet and seemed to have power, so do I guess I have a battery, but the new docs don't mention it. (The vast percentage of my experience to date deals with getting my ship NEARLY destroyed. And I still love it!) Oh yeah, I acknowledge that I might be the only one who gets kicks out of these nuts and bolts, but IT'S SO COOL!!

Roger that! The only question is: How does BCM change the mechanics of the game universe? For that, I'll need help from somebody a lot brighter in the ways of BCM lore than I...

I bought BC3K back when it first came out, followed the upgrade path and spent one lazy afternoon printing the manual out, reading as I went. I learned an awful lot about flying the ship based on the descriptions of the missile guidance systems and the detailed discussions of how ship systems interelated. Are they gone because everything's changed now? Is it hard to put them back in? I'd love to read updated ones. my 2 cents.

I have NEVER had this much fun getting my tail shot off! Bear with me, this will end up being on topic. I'm a Terran military commander, GCV Kraken, a Questar class. I make the mistake of taking an unmodified ship, an inexperienced crew and a just about totally green CO down to the surface of Mars to visit the Insurgents. They didn't like that. Two STO, a bunch of SAMS and some high energy laser fire later, my ship looked like this: >Reactor: Breeched, all auxilliary reactor systems destroyed, radiation on all decks. >Solar Power: down to 11% output. >All life support systems destroyed. >Weapons: yeah, right. >Shuttlebay, destroyed. >Main Computer: destroyed, most secondary data systems destroyed. I managed to afterburn to 35000 MSL and leave orbit, whereupon I went to Starpath station. I plugged into their Logistix and had a grand old time learning about the very thing that the SC just described. The station wouldn't give me or didn't have all of the parts, their SE's could only work so fast and a goodly chunk of my crew was injured or worse. Bottom line, a ship as badly damaged as Kraken would probably be scrapped. Now, why am I so excited? In real life, I'm an officer on a submarine and I've seen serious casulaties at sea (No, not as serious as AE's poor ship). The response of the crew to a loss of all communications is about what dnoyeB!'s joke suggests. People fix what they see in front of them, only very well trained or experienced people are thinking about the big picture and the whole scene is chaos. The loss of the Main computer, the Logistix computer and the injury of my CE all simulated the effects of a loss of communications in a crew of 22 on a ship that is supposed to be over 1250 feet long. It's the first time I've ever seen it in a game and it's beautiful!!