Re: Space fleet battles

[grant hallman <unilogic@primus.ca>]

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At 06:22 PM 3/19/01 -0800, you wrote:
>
>
>grant hallman wrote:
>> At 03:20 PM 3/18/01 -0800, you wrote:
>>  [snip]
>> >       Then when the pump gets some electrical energy it InWater a
>> >PressureAmount message.  If the electrical power overloads the pump could
>> >be erratic or just die or something.  If the electrical power stops the
>> >pump sends a... 0 PressureAmount message.
>> 
>> I like the idea of taking non-lethal damage and having to cope with a
>> crippled ship. This is sth i argued for years they should have put in the
>> Descent game engine, even after the source was released. It makes for
>> interesting gameplay.
>
>In the pencil and paper games a ship was represented by a 10x10 or
>larger grid.
>Each unit was placed in one location on the grid so if you took a hit
>you
>rolled 2d10, one for each dimension of the grid, and cross out the unit
>at that location.
>If the same unit what hit again, well, it was already knocked out. The
>result was
>that a ship could lose most of its engines and still shoot, or it might
>lose weapons
>and try to run away. Or, a lucky hit could knock out life support and
>the ship would
>just drift through the battle.
>
>		Bob P.

I think it would be interesting to have more realistic engineering
failures, altho i'm talking a 3d sim. Things fail like:

- primary thrusters
- manoevering thrusters - e.g. can't yaw left, or stuck 'on'.
- fuel tank leak
- primary weapons 
- secondary weapons 
- radar 
- comm link 
- IFF fails, u attract friendly fire
- shield fail etc.

This is pretty easy to implement in the control loop, use a RNG to decide
what fails, might even have limited repair capacity.

grant

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