tholians

[Spuzzum]

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
Giving them Crystalline Technology was a natural choice, of course. If only there was a way to simulate the Tholian Web... we can only make them research and use tractor/repulsor beams for now.

Hmm... I wonder if Malfador would be opposed to implementing features designed to temporarily cause disruption of ship functionality. A Tholian Web generator could simply be two components that work in tandem -- a Disrupt Engines component and a Disrupt Weapons component. The Disrupt Reload Time is the closest thing to it, but that only disables the weapons as long as it takes to reload them.

Having some kind of device that could disable an entire portion of the ship for a pre-determined length of time -- i.e. being able to force a ship to be unable to move or shoot for 3 turns or so -- would be just plain cool. =)

I'm not sure how Malfador does ship abilities in the code, so I don't know how hard it'd be to implement. Based on my own programming "experience", and judging the overall difficulty of attaching lingering status effects to ships, I'd say it'd be moderate difficulty -- not a cinch, but not too difficult to consider either.

[Baron Munchausen]

You know, logically the 'Energy Dampener' ought to stop your engines as well as your weapons for however may combat turns. But by that argument, if it saps ALL energy, it ought to kill your shields too. Completely disarming a ship would be too powerful. I think that's why MM has seperated the functions into different classes of weapons.

I do wish we had at least a few area-effect weapons, though.

[oleg]

Here is a missing base ship:
1025689899.zip

I am not satisfied with carriers either. I wanted to make them sufficiently different for better recognition and read in some web site that tholians make bigger ships from two or three smaller ships. That was the idea behind carriers.
I think I should remake them still.

[Gryphin]

Area Affecting weapons:
Could a storm be created that would kill engines and shields?
Could it be miss labled to indicate it is a "safe" storm? Just a buch of "eye candy"?
Could a racial tech be modded such that only one race would have access to such storms.
I realize this would not work in combat but the race in quesiton could build ships to create these storms, and ships to remove them after the flys have been caught in the web.

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by oleg:
Here is a missing base ship:
1025689899.zip

I am not satisfied with carriers either. I wanted to make them sufficiently different for better recognition and read in some web site that tholians make bigger ships from two or three smaller ships. That was the idea behind carriers.
I think I should remake them still.

Well, the existing image looks like a ship with 'horns' or something. If you want to combine several hulls, maybe you could hang a couple of lengthened hulls from a larger hull like 'booms' or 'nacelles' and make a 'battlestar' looking ship. Or just put a flying bridge between a couple of cruiser-size hulls, for that matter.

[Atrocities]

Tholian Web Site

If your interested in seeing what Oleg has done, please visit his Tholian Web Site at theNASY.

[Baron Munchausen]

Looking at the Tholian fighters I had a thought. The 'small fighter' looks like what I think a Tholian carrier should look like! Can you make a ship of the same geometric design as the small fighter but of much more apparent mass? You could make each successively larger carrier by adding more 'segments' to the design, since the breaks between the triangles would be where the 'bays' would be for fighters to launch and land.

Conversely, the carriers look like good fighters. The little extra hulls that give the apperance of 'horns' look like engines on a fighter.

Other than that, the designs look pretty good. I do think you've got the light cruiser and cruiser reversed, though. The light cruise has more in common with the smaller ships, including it's color scheme. The light cruiser looks more like the larger ships. I'd switch them around.

[ July 04, 2002, 20:08: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]