Topic: Mod idea - its a bit about modeling and specfile

[dogfighter]

i read about federation phaser systems lately and i was wondering if those theories are compatible with sfc op.
it was about phasers and the number of emiters mounted on federation ships.
lets take the conny refit as an example: there are 18 vissible emiters on the ship 6 doubleemiters and 6single emiters. the article said all those emiters are linked to 6 phasers and the ship can fire them from every desired
emiter. i thought a while about that and tried some stuff with ship edit. normaly all phasers are mounted on the yellow colored ui hardpoints (hardpoint 11 to hardpoint 25). only the weapons linked to these hardpoints will be loaded by the phasercapacitor.additional phasers on hardpoint 1-10(heavy weapon hardpoints) will work differently.
they will only work like emiters.
lets take an hypothetical example(we will ignore heavy weapons for a moment since they will always work the same on every harpoint): the federation ca aka constitotion class. lets asume the phasers on the saucer are aranged like that: hp11: 4xPh1 FA ; hp2: 4x Ph1 SFBR ; hp3: 4xPh1 SFBL. The phasers on the secondary hull are on hp16: 4xph1 ALL and on hp17: 2xPh1 RA.
if the constitution has its phasers aranged like that it has 10 phasers on the yellow primary weapons hardpoints and 8 on the purple(?) heavy weapon hardpoints.
In game the capaciter will load enough energy to fire 10 Phasers.so your ship effectivly can use 10 phasers. but the game doesnt care which hardpoint will be used to fire them.
Lets get into an ingame example: u re flying the constitution we just configured and there is an enemy vessel in front of u. the enemy is now in the firing arcs oh hp11(4xph1 FA) and hp16(4xph1 ALL).Everything works  normal at this moment. the phasers 8 will come from hardpoint 11 and 16.
Next step: the enemy is now on your portside andy your pahse capacitor is loaded. the enemy is now in the firing arc of hp3 (4xph1 SFBL) and hp16 (4xPh1 ALL) (Note again that hp3 is a heavy weapon hardpoint in shipedit!)
U press the fire button and the phasers will fire from those hardpoints. that means u have used up the energy of 8 phasers - leaving u with the energy to fire 2 phasers. in that moment the enemy comes into your forward firing arc of hp11 (4xph1 FA). you press fire and although all weapons on hp11 are ready u will only see it firing twice.
So u see hp3 was only used as emiters. your ship has 18 emiters but only 10 phasers.
that opens some possibilities for a mod.using the hardpoints that way would allow some better balancing if u want to make a canon mod with feds using ph1(max 9 damage points) and klingons using no phasers at all but standart disruptors (only 5 damagepoints at twice the cost to fire a phaser).
another nice possibility comes in mind when u try to disable the enemy: if u know where the "real" phasers are mounted u can make some hit and run attacks and that way u can disable the phaser using ships faster wich works as a balancing factor against the flexibility of the phasers (high damage, no holding energy, low energy costs,disable setting).
using the hardpoints the way discribed smaler ships can also have alot of "emiters" giving them very good firing arcs but only some phasers. it would make the samler ships alot more deadlier and more usefull.

the only problem is that u will need a ui with alot of hardpoints to use them in game. still - it is possible to to use the starbase ui wich gives u a big loed of hardpoints. and the Model hardpoinst will have to be adjusted on the modfile to have the weapons firing from the right places. the last thing is alot of work since there are alot of models out there but since the idea only aplies to phaser using ships and most races are non canon (and as such can be moded without getting trouble with canon) the whole thing works best with fedships.

well i hope i spelled everything right and please dont kill me for grammer mistake - english is not my native langluage

i just thought i share my ideas here.i know its mostly for canon stuff.




ed

[Lord Schtupp]

This is interesting. I didnt know that you could phasers in heavy weapon hardpoints and vice versa. I have not experimented with this.

1. Does a heavy weapon placed in a phasor hardpoint (hp11-25) work normally? How about its appearance in the UI?

2. Dogftr states that a phasor placed in a hvy weapons hardpoint (1-10) works but does not drain the phasor capacitor. does it drain any energy? Im not clear on that Dogfighter - please elaborate.

[J. Carney]

This is interesting. I didnt know that you could phasers in heavy weapon hardpoints and vice versa. I have not experimented with this.

1. Does a heavy weapon placed in a phasor hardpoint (hp11-25) work normally? How about its appearance in the UI?

2. Dogftr states that a phasor placed in a hvy weapons hardpoint (1-10) works but does not drain the phasor capacitor. does it drain any energy? Im not clear on that Dogfighter - please elaborate.

1.) Te heavy weapon question I don't know about' I know that they fire, but I think that they start pulling power from the phaser capacitor.

2.) Phasers in heavy mounts do not get energy from the capacitor (they charge like heavies) and do not contribute to the overall power capacity for the phaser capacitor.

[FoaS_XC]

Phasers in Heavy Weapon points will work normally so long as there is at least 1 working phaser in a Phaser Weaponpoint, at least thats how it worked last time i heard.

So what you are saying instead of the phaser emitters being the weapon, let the weapon be some system somewhere in the ship and the emitters be only a way to point it?

[Lord Schtupp]

So, from what Im gathering here, is that:

1. Phasers in heavy points work normally; draw power directly from ships power; do not count in ship's Phaser Capacitor, ummm, capacity; becomes inoperative when all phasers in phaser HPs are destroyed.

2. Heavy weapons in phaser HPs work normally; draw power from ship's Phaser Capacitor.

Anything else?

[dogfighter]

heavy weapons will work normaly. they dont drain power from the phaser capacitor.the phasers on the heavy weapons hardpoints dont drain powers since the phaser capacitor doesn load them. the phasers only cool down as they need 1round to be ready to be fired again.

there is no ui that fits that perfectly but since there is no perfect fitting ui for alot of ships (like oberth or spectre class models) i can life with the starbase ui. or is there a way to modify ui files?




ed

[Lord Schtupp]

No - I understand that its hard-coded into the game.

[FoaS_XC]

not quite

The UIs are in the Sprites.q3 file - which means that soon we will be able to alter them, as quicksilver is releasing documentation on it.

[dogfighter]

So what you are saying instead of the phaser emitters being the weapon, let the weapon be some system somewhere in the ship and the emitters be only a way to point it?

exactly. and it would explain why they mostly use very few phaser emitter at time in the shows.the same applies for some other star trek games - especialy for klingon academy. the miranda is used as the cl in that game. and in the game it only has 2 phasers and they only fire from the megaphaser cannons. in TWOK the miranda also usd only its megaphaser cannons. sure - 2 phasers is not much in sfc but if it had 6-8 or so it would be quit good and still a tiny bit weaker than a conny refit allowing it to fit into its cl role if the conny has 8-10 phasers like discribed above.
just as an example(using the ships i use for the fedsand klinks):

FFF-oberth: 2ph(4emmiters) ; 1x2Phot
FDD-salazar(represents the canon polaris Class)  (saladin refit): 4ph1(12emmitters) ; 2x2phot
FCL-miranda: 6ph1(16emitters/2of them on the megaphaser cannons using phX) ; 2x2Phot
FCA-constitution refit: 8Ph1(18emmiters) ; 2x2phot
FBC-constellation:6Ph1(14emitters) ; 4x2phot
FDN-federation:8Ph1(20emitters) ; 4x2phot
FBB- excelsior:8PhX (24emitters)

KFF-Brel : 2dis ; 1x2Phot
KDD-K-17: 4Dis ; 2x2phot
KCL-D-5(from d2mod) 5Dis ; 1x3phot
KCA-Ktinga : 6dis 1x3 phot ; 1x 2 Phot
KBC-Suvwleque: 6 dis 2x3phot ; 1x2phot
KDN-vodleh: 10 Dis ; 2x3phot
KBB - none yet