Topic: SFC-Orion Pirates Weapons Data

[Roychipoqua_Mace]

Hey, maybe it was like that in an older version. Great work on this chart, though, it's a good resource

[TarMinyatur]

Confirmed: AMD6, AMD12 and Plasma D all rearm in one turn as soon as the entire Hardpoint is empty as compared to a PH-1, which is a known quantity. You will see them jump to a "Ready to Fire" state immediately (Hardpoint all filled in) if the weapon is not totally discharged after firing, but the slow "crawl" to reload definitely takes one turn.

I must be thinking of EAW. A few worthwhile changes never got into OP for unexplained reasons.

[TarMinyatur]

Hey Corbomite. Check out your info on plasma point defense.

From Khoromag.org:
"Phaser damage versus plasma was at a 8:1 ratio, meaning it took 8 points of damage to lower the plasma's damage potential by 1. In SFB the ratio is 2:1 however during playtesting we found this to be too unbalancing. We settled on 4:1 as a good ratio. It takes 4 points of damage to reduce the plasma warhead damage by 1."

[Corbomite]

Hey Corbomite. Check out your info on plasma point defense.

From Khoromag.org:
"Phaser damage versus plasma was at a 8:1 ratio, meaning it took 8 points of damage to lower the plasma's damage potential by 1. In SFB the ratio is 2:1 however during playtesting we found this to be too unbalancing. We settled on 4:1 as a good ratio. It takes 4 points of damage to reduce the plasma warhead damage by 1."

That may be so as it says that in the patch Read Me, but it also says that ADD 12 arms in 2 turns and Plas D arms in 1.33 turns in there and I just checked those out and found otherwise. I will check them again and try to find a valid test for plasma. I vaguely remember Dave changing it and not documenting it, but I could be mistaken.

[Corbomite]

Confirmed: Phasers do 1/4 damage to plasma. Chart amended.

Reconfirmed: ADD 6, ADD12, and Plas D arm in one turn.

[TarMinyatur]

Corbomite, thanks for checking this stuff out. An entry, explaining that AMD's which hit fighters do 1 to 6 points of damage, might be helpful. Also stating that your AMD's will be 16% less accurate if they fire while your ship is using Erratic Maneuvers, might be good info, if it is true. I know that EAW had an EM penalty. OP might not have it.

The new table format is nice. Good work.

[Corbomite]

Corbomite, thanks for checking this stuff out. An entry, explaining that AMD's which hit fighters do 1 to 6 points of damage, might be helpful. Also stating that your AMD's will be 16% less accurate if they fire while your ship is using Erratic Maneuvers, might be good info, if it is true. I know that EAW had an EM penalty. OP might not have it.

The new table format is nice. Good work.

Thanks for pointing out possible errors.

Since AMD will fire until empty or the target(s) are gone/out of range I didn't see the point of a damage chart for it. Plasma D has better range and decreasing damage so knowing if that fleeing fighter is within range is more important since if it was within range of a loaded AMD, it would probably already be dead.

I assume there is an EM penalty for all PD, but I can't think of an accurate way to test it.

[TarMinyatur]

To test for an EM penalty, it helps to have some player's assistance. Fly a D5 erratically at speed 16 away from a pursuing D6D at a steady range of 3.9 on a large map, and keep track of AMD shots and number of slow missiles destroyed. A sample of 72 shots (thereby totally exhausting the D5's pair of AMD-12's) should be convenient and sufficient. 33 to 39 kills would indicate a penalty. 45 to 51 kills would indicate no penalty.

It will take about 10 minutes to do this experiment at game speed 8. The hard part may be finding someone interested in data collection...OP isn't installed on this computer.

[Corbomite]

To test for an EM penalty, it helps to have some player's assistance. Fly a D5 erratically at speed 16 away from a pursuing D6D at a steady range of 3.9 on a large map, and keep track of AMD shots and number of slow missiles destroyed. A sample of 72 shots (thereby totally exhausting the D5's pair of AMD-12's) should be convenient and sufficient. 33 to 39 kills would indicate a penalty. 45 to 51 kills would indicate no penalty.

It will take about 10 minutes to do this experiment at game speed 8. The hard part may be finding someone interested in data collection...OP isn't installed on this computer.

Confirmed: EM causes a firing penalty for AMD. It killed exactly 54 drones out of 108 potential shots (50%) while performing EM, firing at range 3+. As a control I did a no EM run and killed 54 drones out of 72 potential shots (75% very lucky!) at the same range.

Added a new section for EM effects on weaponry and updated the notes for Plasma I's, Plasma D's and AMD.

[Corbomite]

Updated Cloak notes. I had a detail wrong.

[Jonnan]

Lets try this again - <G>
I converted the listings here to a TiddlyWiki file, which allows crossreferencing and so on. It does require Javascript, and while editting/saving changes works flawlessly in Firefox, any other browser I've had to tweak the settings a bit. But viewing should be fine in any browser.

Hopefully people will find this useful - I find it's a nice format for referencing stuff in.

Thanks - Jonnan

[TAnimaL]

Dude, that is totally WICKED! I love it! Fast, efficient, easy to use... I will definitely be using this. Thanks a whole bunch!

tiny, tiny, minuscule comment - how hard would it be to add the T/R beams (heavy and light)? I know they're not used by most, but the mod I'm working on with a friend uses them as limited-use heavy weapons. Just curious.

Again, great work!

[Jonnan]

Dude, that is totally WICKED! I love it! Fast, efficient, easy to use... I will definitely be using this. Thanks a whole bunch!

tiny, tiny, minuscule comment - how hard would it be to add the T/R beams (heavy and light)? I know they're not used by most, but the mod I'm working on with a friend uses them as limited-use heavy weapons. Just curious.

Again, great work!

?? I feel stupid - I'm not familiar with the TR Beam (I mean, I know them from SFB/Andromedans, but I didn't recall them being in SFC.)

That said - you should be able to add them yourself (I added basic help files in it, because I can't remember stuff - top left hand side has a link) just find the section you want them in (I'm guessing hit or miss weapons?) and click 'new here' - it will start a new entry tagged for that section, and automatically show up under the Table of Contents listing there. If you want to distinguish it from the regular entries change the username 'table of contents' to something like 'Andromedan Invasion Mod' or some such - I just used 'Table of Contents' so there would be a quick link back to there in every entry. Make sure you can save before you spend 15 minutes editing - Firefox works great (Asks for permissions, then works fine), other browsers are hit or miss.

For reference purposes, the baseline product here is TiddlyWiki (http://www.tiddlywiki.com/), and whats not in that is in the http://mptw.tiddlyspot.com wiki, minus the parts I ripped out because they were more than I needed. I use it for things like searchable references, game faqs, occasional storywriting and stuff - <G>.

Anyway, glad you liked it.

Jonnan

[marstone]

don't feel bad TR beams were unfinished, there are references in the code to andro's and tholians but they never made the cut fully into the game.

[Jonnan]

Ah - sad that they didn't make the cut, but good to know I'm not going completely senile either.

I was definitely having a "I'm *sure* I would have remembered *that*?!?!" moment - <G>

Jonnan

[Roychipoqua_Mace]

don't feel bad TR beams were unfinished, there are references in the code to andro's and tholians but they never made the cut fully into the game.

That's interesting, I didn't know they had any Tholian progress in the game, even if it was unfinished.

[marstone]

don't feel bad TR beams were unfinished, there are references in the code to andro's and tholians but they never made the cut fully into the game.

That's interesting, I didn't know they had any Tholian progress in the game, even if it was unfinished.

There is even mention of the Jindarians

[Corbomite]

TR Beams are in the game and work (they are a Range of Effect weapon). The graphic was never finished and they come out as a plain blue line. There are mods where folks have overlaid new/other weapons textures so I'm sure it would be possible for someone to "finish" them by creating a graphic or simply swapping out one we already have. I always thought the Heavy Phaser graphics would be a good choice: Phaser B for the TRH and Phaser A for TRL. I can create a chart for them if there is enough desire for one or if we fully incorporate them into the game.

[TAnimaL]

sorry I didn't make it clearer in my post that the TR beams are "broken but working" in the game; in my mod we're currently using them as "Neutron Blasters" (a nod to Blake's 7 fans) on a R-D7B,  2 T/R-H and 2 T/R-L with FA arcs. It's a mean little sucker...

Corbomite, which texture gets modified to override the T/R blue? Last time I think I tried fx0 and fx1.bmp to no avail.

Jonnan, I'm going to try loading them into the tiddlywink now, but it's my first attemp, so we'll see how that goes...

[Corbomite]

I don't know how to do it myself and I can't even find phaser textures of any kind in the Textures file. They might be part of the Sprites file in which case we can't do what I proposed. Chris Jones was the one I remember changing out weapons textures for his UAW mod I think.