ThymineC wrote:Another cool thing I forgot to mention earlier is that having big systems and consequently high speeds of travel allows for the possibility of some neat graphical Doppler shift effects.
You're not traveling fast though. Hdrive is teleports, remember, so the light you are receiving is not frame shifted at all.
That misconception cleared up, I must say this entire thread has a disconcerting lack of credit to Independence War 2, which was a incredibly fun and awesome game made in 2001 that does virtually everything ThymineC's original post laid out.
- Systems were realistically sized. Trips of billions of KM were not uncommon. Local interactions occurred on the scale and speeds that space game fans are familiar with.
- Travel through the system is by a Linear Displacement System.. Pretty much exactly the same technobabble as an H-Drive. It operated on a logarithmic scale with a minimum speed of 1000m/s all the way up to C(controllable by the players throttle or by a well executed autopilot feature).
- Coupled with the LDS, was the LDSi Missile, an interdiction missile that would warp to the target, disable their LDS drive temporarily, and leave a waypoint for you to warp to yourself. This allowed combat to, as stated previously, occur at normal ranges and speeds that a human is capable of handling. Oh, and the LDSi missile had a very wide range of effect, meaning you were generally caught in it too.. No easy running away!
- The other form of fast travel was literally the best jump system I've ever seen. It was called the Capsule Drive, and operated by jumping from points of gravitational stability to other such points. Namely, the L1 point of any binary planet or star system. This provided choke points for traffic, but it was not a strict gate system like EVE or Freelancer had... Any Lpoint in a system could reach any other Lpoint in the system. Larger Lpoints could reach other solar systems. And it wasn't a gate in the middle of nowhere.. They were always close to planets, so you had nice scenery.
About the only downside of the game was its map.. Pretty crappy. That and long missions with no save points(though sometimes I feel that is part of the charm).
Seriously though.. Anyone who says that realistic sizes can't be done, and can't be fun, you are provably wrong. Independence War 2 did it 12 years ago. It was easily Freelancers superior(with the exception that freelancer had a pretty kickass multiplayer component).
Flatfingers wrote:McDuff wrote:With a mass-based system of acceleration and such, one would imagine that the big juicy targets for your nefarious piratical ways would always be slower than you, though.
Unless they dump all that juicy but high-mass cargo to make their escape.
That seems like a plausible trade-off for allowing escape.
Which probably deserves to go in an existing Piracy thread.
Yes. It always bugs me when they make haulers slow, even when empty. Damnit, its a box with engines and virtually nothing else. A hauler would be about the fastest thing in space if it dumped its cargo. And gameplay wise, haulers are a herbivore to the pirates carnivore. But being a herbivore doesn't mean it has to be a
defenseless herbivore. Being exceedingly efficient at running away is a very suitable natural defense to give such ships.
And I certainly hope that mining lasers pack a punch as well. I don't care what its primary purpose is.. Its
also a ridiculously powerful laser that, while it may not be designed as a weapon, is certainly capable of putting watts on a target.
(Yes, I am disappointed in EVE at making all the economic roles so utterly defenseless for the player pirates to feast on).
For superluminal disruption, you'd need something like a module that could cast a "net" over several million kilometers in every direction around you.