Dark_au

There should be proper mine clearance equipment. Including Mine-plow thors. Shooting mines to clear them is stupid and gamey. this is how proper mine clearing operations are done:-SB mine breach demo Video The business with mine pods needs to get fixed. Preferably don't allow them in pods.

I'm sort of in the middle of Both K & squidly... I like the idea of a blend. Imagine that the crew compartment in a tank is like one of those snap n shake glo lamps. When it drops its just a vat of squishy biological material. In it are nano bots which when released convert the biomass into a predefined organic base life ( the varieties bieng the bot names)imagine a scene out of 5th element only without the cute naked girl. If you took it out all it would look like is a football with tendrils and lobes. The user is just teleoperating it through a mental/ nano symmetry. Just because the troops look humanoid doesn't mean they are. Maybe they are more like Robo-cop or the terminator. Maybe their own hyperalloy skeleton is part of the power armour. Maybe the face is just there to make the technicians more comfortable. Extrapolating the old / lost technology idea maybe the humans on the LS are actually unaware of its nature. Maybe they are little more than primitives who are captured and trained as is needed (using nano tech teaching methods ( think borg)). Maybe they worship the AI and other Artificial constructs as some form of omnipotent ancestor. Before we get locked too much into the we part of it... what about other facets of the first post. What does anone think of the Idea of a Crusading force trying to bring the rim back together. They could have a "brain dead" liveship which they actually control. This would lead to a great intro for Indigenous technology mixed with LS tech... maybe even some other artifacts of lost technology from deeper into human space.

if you have a mouse wheel

oh and also please could the "space" map be controlled by other controls than the movement ones. Like the cursor keys. It also needs a way to zoom in and out easier.

Erm... this may be an old one or a new one. Just tried joystick for the first time. I have a afterburner 2 hotas setup. I found with the turret traverse set to joystick x axis that I cannot turn a full 360 by holding it in a direction. If I hold it all the way left the turret turns 90 degres left then keeps wanting to re-center. Also have set my throttle to the throttle of the JS. Tanks and hover this is brilliant for ( it has a rockker axis under the fingers on the left hand which is brilliant for Steering). For wheeled vehicles its a nightmare. With the sensitivity set all the way down and a realistic dead zone the paladin wheelies in either direction (forward or reverse) and flips over completely about half the time. The shrike is even worse. Is there anyway to make the "gunsight" key a toggle rather than a hold. IE click it and you are in gunsight. click again and you are back out.

thats what I was doing and finding better penetration from accute angles ie when the thor is looking more toward you that when its purely side on. Also dropping shots seem to penetrate better hitting from an accute downward angle than they do hitting the angled side where they are more perpendicular to it.

Just a note on shot-traps. This was a thing of WW2 and the early 50's. Since the invention of the DS round shot traps no longer apply. A deflected round is designed to shear. If it tumbles at all it can not penetrate. This is why the penetrator is fin stabilised. Shot-traps applied in the days when the AP round was a rifled slug which could be deflected down into the soft top. It also only applied to single layer armour, a composite laminate would just ignore a deflected rifled slug... Even the mighty 88mm. A penetrator today is designed to shear so that the remaining part of the penetrator has a sharp end to puncture where the round first hit. It will keep doing this until it no longer has the energy to shear. I would think that the DT rounds are like this though i cannot be sure.

With the HEAT rounds is the engine taking into account its angle of impact?. Modern heat rounds work better if they align with the "normal" of the surface they are hitting. The cone of the shaped charge has a very narrow field. If it is bieng checked I think its actually working in reverse. heat seems to penetrate better when it hits at an accute angle. I have no proof for this it is based purely on observation.

Had this bug. I've seen it before too... Playing the campaign when all of a sudden all the bots just seem to go numb and stop responding to commands.

as it isn't moving put a second 76mm in the turret and have it fire like a pom pom gun. Give it more HE and have the logic if you can't penetrate it, annoy the s**t out of it. A thor wouldn't have much chance to aim while bieng pounded by a 76mm HE every second.

ANyone else think they are too weedy?. THey just don't have the punch or mindless firepower of the old plasma turrets. These are really not much of a threat.

76mm, Light, Air-deployable, Recon tank... sounds like a Scorpion

managed to get slug-fest to work by editing the correct turrets. At missions end even though by the score I had won it declared it a failure

On slug fest in campaign mode the ctrl-d doesn't work. I think the Scenario is calling for the old AA and ground turret.

or how about this maybe the "we" are techno-psychics ( think techno-mage / psi-corp from B5). The bots are clones copies of psychic hosts like a wizards familliar. So when no psychic is controlling them they only have their dumb animal instincts. Nice and un-jammable method of remote control.

if it were to be a light tank recon then maybe base it on the Wiesel

Just had an odd CTD. I was playing standalone raid with a long deployment time on defence. I'd voted myself commander and told all the bots to not drop and extracted them. I set up my defences then gave a bot a drop order. I clicked on the allow drop and CTD.

Damned good question. Maybe the "we" are sentienr holographic combat personalities and the "crew" component is some crystaline nano matrix for it.. Cos something definately screams when you brew one up. Maybe the Bots are like a low level non sentient keeper unit like a rats personality. Not imaginative but aggressive and persistant.

The other question too is if the 2 sides are 2 live ships. 1. Why do they keep ending up at the same systems. It would be better to raid where they aren't. 2. Eventually you'd think they'd work out that they are losing half of what they gain in combat loses, so they may as well team up and go halves anyway. 3. Is one actually persuing the other looking for tech to destroy it. Yeah the hill idea makes sense but on the Twin peaks map with those nice layers I would think you'd find the softest layer and go in horizontally.

Ahhh... But then its the hill not the top of the hill thats important... You can go in through the side. Plus the layered rock implies a natural enviroment rather than an artifact covered in dirt

I don't like the drop pods, Not exactly what I had in mind. I guess I was looking for something more "War of the Worlds". I was hoping to see drop pods come in like meteors with layers of ablative heat shielding to slow it down by aerobraking. Or coming in at low angles on airless places. In a sci-fi context the hitting the ground hard could be talked away with some form of internal inertia dampening or stasis field. The final impact could then be the final part of the braking system. Leaving a nice deformed crater in the ground to cover the content's egress.

I better preface this by saying this is hopefully a lead into a usefull discussion and maybe can lead to a better concept for scenario design. I am also only talking about things in general terms not trying to negatively question nor "pick holes" in what the devs have produced. Maybe if they are willing this could lead to some extra info for the background story. In military terms the 2 important questions are "why" and "How". The 2 are strongly linked. The "Why we fight" leads to "How we fight". A good example of this is the medieval period. Most concepts of mobile warfare are broken in this period. The changes weren't because of the method, nor the technology of war but in the "why" of the fighting. A lord wouldn't be going to war for glory, Patriotism nor ideals but to get rich. The name of the game was Ransom. If a poor lord could capture a rich enemy lord he could hold that lord to ransom and it would be the making of him and his familly (plus the guys actually doing the dirty work). This change in the "why" lead to a new "how". Scenarios like raid have a defined "why" of their own in the background story, that is raiding for resources. There are a couple where that how and why don't work as well. Haven and Twin peaks spring to mind. The "why" of this is less apparent in the background story. Historically a hill is important because it gives the defender the ability to see and fire down apon the attacker without the attacker bieng able to see and fire apon them. With weapons of massive range and the ability to take the ultimate high-ground of space hills would appear to be of less tactical significance, especially in a raiding context. If the context is to then etablish a defencive position then thats outside the raiding concept a little. So maybe there is something more complex. Maybe "Water" is a group who are trying to re-establish some form of government in the rim, They are using captured liveship technology to try and defeat these raiding pirates. Maybe they are looking to gain power over the region for themselves. Maybe they are motivated by fear, thinking that if the "fleets" ever return that a peacefull region won't be anihilated.

CP2, Great idea, However look on the net for footage of how badly this can go wrong too... There is one notable film where an engineer vehicle dropped in this manner runs off the pallette and keeps going for about 500+ m where it then flips and cartwheels. Having said that its almost the perfect way to drop light units. I've actually seen this done in person, back in the 70's when airshows were taking more risks. Saw a C130 drop a Scorpion, the thing was off the pallette and driving almost before it stopped.

I've changed my oppinion of blender a bit since reading this:- Blender Noob to Pro For some reason though I just can't get UVW mapping to show up in viewports or render though. I've follwed the tutes and still didn't work. Oh well.. I got it to work once but since then nada. I started an idea maybe someone else wants to run with it. I'd "like" to work on the textures for it but I just don't seem to have the feel to actually finish making it. The idea is like a land based alternative to the Galaxy. The idea comes from the D.Drake Novel "The Sharp End" In that there are Huge tracked Road-train type trucks. I was trying to turn this idea into a sort of futuristic log-pac. Something truly huge with a massive signiature which requires 2 herpes to jam and protect it. I've got the super structure modelled but then could work out how to UVW or how to make the wheels / tracks as seperate items.

how are dropship numbers and resupply values changed?.