Capital Ship Shield Module - BUG ???

[Tharrick]

Yea, I think I'm just going to make all the capital ships immune to cloaking.  Except the frigates, maybe.  Anything bigger than that is a bit hard to hide

Given the distances we're talking about here, a visual identification in space combat is pretty much impossible at any realistic range regardless of size, until we get to celestial-body sized units (like, say, the dyson sphere).
I always assumed that the cloaker ships, rather than making something 'invisible', simply provided a very high level of radar dampening or some similar effect that would mess with other ways of detecting ships, like picking up on their electromagnetics or some such. So it makes sense both that capital ships can be cloaked, and that massive electromagnetic systems, like weapons and shields, would need to be disabled to allow said cloaking.

That would also explain why firing causes the cloaking to drop, and why there's that cool-down period before a ship can be cloaked again

</hard sci-fi geek>

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, I don't mean "looking out the window" detection.  The game doesn't care about any of this, but presumably they're working off various signals inevitably given off by powerplants, engines, etc.  Similarly, the concept of "cloaking" probably involves all manner of electronic warfare, etc.

Though bear in mind that if any kind of scientific rigor were to be applied to all this, it'd need to start with the fact that the distance from one extreme end of a system's traversible range (roughly 160,000 range units) can't be more than a few light-seconds given the speeds of the various ships and the fact that there's no perceptible signal delay from one end to the other.  And within that kind of range, something as big as a DN might well be visible to the mark-one eyeball

But in any event, there are a number of gameplay problems with the spire capital ships (larger than frigate) being cloakable, so that will be going away.

[Lancefighter]

Would you consider giving them a specific self-cloaking module instead (in place of shields)?

Also, your premise that a mk1 eyeball would be able to see anything is a stretch.. While sitting in orbit around earth, youd be hard pressed to tell where the outer planets were..

And if someone were to build their starship out of a black nonreflective material.. well. You cant see something that radiation doesnt reflect from (assuming that no radiation is being emitted from the object)

[keith.lamothe]

Would you consider giving them a specific self-cloaking module instead (in place of shields)?

I'll consider that, yes.

Also, your premise that a mk1 eyeball would be able to see anything is a stretch.. While sitting in orbit around earth, youd be hard pressed to tell where the outer planets were..

I was basing my guess upon the premise that the diameter of the widest-generally-used area of a planet (160,000) range units is only a few light-seconds across at most.  A light-second is roughly 300,000 kilometers.  The distance from the earth to the moon varies from roughly 350,000 kilometers to roughly 400,000 kilometers.  The distance from the earth to the outer planets is quite a bit more than that

The DN isn't moon-sized (though the Avenger gets close), but it's big enough that you'd certainly see it from the earth's surface even at a million km.

And if someone were to build their starship out of a black nonreflective material.. well. You cant see something that radiation doesnt reflect from (assuming that no radiation is being emitted from the object)

Right, there are passive stealth systems one could do, as well as active.  The spire stuff sure don't look black non-reflective, though

[Lancefighter]

To be fair, on the Enterprise they never actually looked out the window - the viewscreen was supposedly merely what the sensors thought were out there, in a picture so people could interpret it. Extending this to aiwar, youre merely seeing representations of the ships, not the actual ships.

 It makes no sense to build a bright pink tank to be used in urban warfare - why would you build a shiny white spaceship?

[keith.lamothe]

It makes no sense to build a bright pink tank to be used in urban warfare - why would you build a shiny white spaceship?

Because that's what the physical properties of the structural members produce   They don't so much build them as grow them, and paint doesn't work so great.

Anyway, that's beyond the level of digression I'm here for

[Lancefighter]

arguing with game devs rarely goes well anyway. They just make up more rules for their fictional universe 

[keith.lamothe]

I wasn't actually making anything additional up for this particular conversation, but I'm not above doing so if necessary

[Shrugging Khan]

Please, mr. Lamothe...never bring up science again. It hurts my hard-sci-fied heart to be reminded of the innate softness of AIW 

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, during the earlier exchange I kept thinking "Man, Khan would grind his teeth to dust over this"

[Shrugging Khan]

Stop making fun of me! Why would you think that?

Did I ever disclose my sci-fi stance on this board?

...anf fy if fere fust in my mouf?

[keith.lamothe]

Actually it did occur to me, as I recalled your gritting teeth (metaphorically) over some or another of the more ludicrous simplifications present in AIW's model

Of course, it may have been someone else, and I just thought it was you.

[x4000]

If it was you, you're certainly not alone, at any rate.  We have loads and loads of hard sci-fi folks around here.

Originally I didn't do explosions, but just did puffs of white, to be more realistic.  Of course, that was supremely unpopular, so now we have unrelealistic space fireballs, heh.  Once that door was opened, out came all the rest of the soft sci-fi stuff.  Of course, right from the start I had "tachyons" in there, so that's I guess the original seed.

[Shrugging Khan]

At least tachyons are something that's a simple concept IRL: "Goes faster than light. Easy!". As opposed to...whatever it is that: "Prevents ship from ever going faster than 60 km/h. IN SPACE." 

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, you can make up stuff like "we can't mount enough radiation and meteorite shielding to go faster than 0.7c without blowing up", but then you'd have everything with a much narrower range of maximum velocity but much wider variance in acceleration, etc.  And then there's all the silliness brought about trying to get around (or incorporate) time dilation.

Great stuff for a tactical game, tougher for a strategy game.