GH2: Spaceship Mechanics

[Ephafn]

What would be the scale of the spaceships? SF-2 or SF-3? If they are SF-3, then they shouldn't receive that much damage from the SF-2 weapons of the mechas.

[Epsilon]

Quoting: Ephafn

What would be the scale of the spaceships? SF-2 or SF-3? If they are SF-3, then they shouldn't receive that much damage from the SF-2 weapons of the mechas.

I believe Spaceships are supposed to be SF:3

That reminds me, ship-sized weapons: what's their scale multiplier? SF:0 is x1, SF:1 is x3, SF:2 is x10. Does that make SF:3 x30?

[Zereth]

Quoting: Joseph Hewitt

This still doesn't entirely solve the problem, though. If a PC has a lot of companions with mecha, he might find it more convenient to travel the world map on foot rather than dedicate enough cells to take everything. This is a bad thing- what's the point of having a ship if it's more convenient to go places without it?

Well, in my GH2 experience so far, travel in the Space World Map is pretty much impractical, because unless I've missed something, you can't find your way around. So the reason you'd devote all the space nessecary to transport your party around in your ship is so you can actually get where you're going rather than get hopelessly lost and starve to death in deep space.

[SharkD]

Absolute values for Damage Class are scaled depending on the Scale Factor of the weapon.

If SF = 0 → DC = DC
If SF > 0 → DC = DC * 2
If SF > 1 → DC = DC * 5 ^ (SF - 1)

The effects are cumulative, so a hypothetical SF:4 weapon (REALLY HUGE!!) would have an absolute DC of (DC * 2 * 5 * 5 * 5). Assuming the weapon's base DC is 3, the text description of the weapon would read 'DC3x250'.

SF:1 is DCx2.
SF:3 would be DCx50.

Maybe the mini-map should have a Zoom key assigned to it.

[Joseph Hewitt]

A bit more about how things are modeled internally...

The spaceship is normally just a SF:0 scene, like any building. When a spaceship "docks" in a city it generates an entrance gear that represents the exterior of the ship.

When a spaceship takes part in combat, a "combat representation" of the ship is generated. This representation is a multi-part prop. The individual props that make up the whole are all SF:2, the same as the map they're placed on; installed weapons would be SF:2 as well. The design and equipment of this combat representation is generated based on the layout of the spaceship scene. Within the megaprop, certain parts are designated as weapon points. This is where the weapons are to be placed.

Initially, I had hoped to leave the weapon upgrades vague- the more weapon upgrade cells you install, the better the weapons at all the weapon points will be. I should have guessed that people would want more detail.

Here's an idea. The superprop layout associated with a spaceship design has a certain number of parts designated as weapon points; at the ship customization shop, allow the player to select what kind of weapon battery will be mounted at each point. Big weapons will take up one, two, or even more cells from the interior.

All ship weapons used in ship-vs-mecha combat will be SF:2. The ships may have bigger weapons available, but these will not be usable at such close range. The default ship weapon is a laser battery with DC:10, Rng:8, and Spd:3. I'm hoping to simulate the anti-mecha guns seen in anime and Star Wars.

The "skill" used by the ship's weapons also has to be determined. Fire points have two skills- an attack skill, and Initiative. The attack skills should maybe come from the higest attack skills of the people left behind on the spaceship; Initiative should maybe be set to an arbitrarily high number, so that the speed of attack will only be affected by the rate of fire of the installed weapons.

Quoting: Machina

"Heavy" would function in part like you thought for the ship props, preventing critical hits, with an added bonus of additional damage reduction and offsetting armorpiercing and armorignoring, with the tradeoff of reducing reaction time (Initiative and Mecha Piloting penalties).

I think this could be a good idea for mecha, though a percentage decrease in reaction time would be a huge deal in GH2. How's this as an idea- a capped reaction time in exchange for a reduced criticals? That sounds a bit like how armor works in 3rd Ed Dungeons & Dragons; anyhow, I think it could be a good mechanic.

Quoting: SharkD

I can render them using spherical projection if you prefer that.

I'm playing around with it now. A stationary starfield behind the action is disorienting when the playfield moves. So, I've made the background rotate as the camera rotates. It would look best, I think, if the starfield also moved in an up-and-down direction depending on the camera position but I don't know a good way to do this yet.

[Michael]

Quoting: Joseph Hewitt

That said, I'm not entirely happy with the anti-spaceship arena mission that I've been working on. Quite simply, the enemy ship isn't impressive enough. One problem is that props don't usually dodge, making the ship extremely vunerable. I could change things so that props do not suffer critical hits, just like most other inanimate objects. This would have the double effect of making the ship more durable and also making the "Gate Crasher" talent far more useful.

One way to make ships more powerful, without introducing any new violations of physics, is to specify that they are covered by hundreds of Beam Shield like devices.  So while it's trivial for an SF2 mecha to hit a ship, the local shield will absorb the hit.  To actually do lasting damage, the ship must be hit again at the same point (which is a smaller-than-SF2 target), before that specific shield recharges.

While a ship is too massive to dodge in the usual sense, spinning the ship semi-randomly would then have the practical effect of dodging, since this would make it hard for attackers to target a single sector.

The ship could also be covered in point-defense batteries, making it unsafe for an enemy mecha to land on the ship and try to burrow in with melee weapons.  This also gives it a further save against Interceptable weapons.

Quoting: Epsilon

I believe Spaceships are supposed to be SF:3

I'd say SF4 or SF5.

They can't be bigger than SF5 because that's the scale of a city.

SF3 sounds too low. SF3 suggests a mega-mecha that could fit one SF2 mecha inside.  A single cell of a spaceship can hold twice that.

[SharkD]

Yes, but if you look at the spaceship it clearly can't fit that many mecha inside it.

[Erathoniel]

If you want real galaxy-style space pictures, I've been playing around with PoV-ray and some stuff I found on SharkD's site.

[Michael]

Quoting: SharkD

Yes, but if you look at the spaceship it clearly can't fit that many mecha inside it.

I suppose you're referring to the screenshot.  True, that ship looks like it could only hold three or four battroids -- assuming they were lying down and the ship had no other innards.

However, I do not think the in-game screens are to scale.

At any rate, Joseph has declared that ships have multiple cells, and a mecha bay takes one cell to store two SF2s.  He also intends that the player will be able to fit his whole lance onto a ship.  So it looks like it will be possible to put several mecha on a typical spaceship, even if it doesn't seem to make geometric sense.

[macksting]

They're in hammerspace.

[Erathoniel]

Actually, couldn't mecha fold up or be disassembled to allow them to fit in a ship. A space ship is generally as large as a building, and mecha garages can store mecha (correct me if they are in the parking lot outside or something). A DIY Buru-Buru kit shouldn't be so big that a person couldn't assemble it from scratch with no extra helpers (though maybe heavy equipment). The same should go for taking them apart for easy storage. And a ship could automatically reassemble them in minutes or seconds (in a special bay).

[EuchreJack]

I agree somewhat about the mecha folding up, but disassembling a mecha in the game currently would require a good "mecha engineering" skill, otherwise most of the components would be destroyed on disassembly.  Also, it occurs to me that humans are much smaller than mecha, so most of the space in the ship would be devoted to the mechas and engines, with the "cockpit" section (which I'll define as the area the crew moves around in) only taking up a very small part of the ship.

[macksting]

Euchre, Era:
The cockpit isn't the only concern in a space-going vessel. You'll also need room for either food storage or food production, housing (which could be pretty darn small, if one's willing to use every surface as a possible bed), and the production and cycling of air. That's just a few; an uninhabited spaceship wouldn't need, for instance, to be as thoroughly protected from stellar radiation.
Now, if you had a tiny damn little scooter of a ship with an air recycler and food renderer that had standardized, compatible jacks to link with an artificial environment suit, then you could dispense with all that and just have people in spacesuits on a ship-size air and food supply. The ship would be much smaller. However, the solidity of a ship-size, inflexible environment, while expensive and large, provides a considerable buffer of safety; if anything goes wrong in a suit, you're hosed.

As to assembly/disassembly, consider old carrier aircraft. What you're talking about is an extreme example of a Folding Wing. Basically, you deform the completed vehicle to fit it into a space more efficiently than its fully stretched out form would allow.
Ideally, you'd want to reduce it either to a ball or to a cube; a ball for best surface-area-to-volume ratio, a cube for best ability to stack up and match the way humans build rooms. (Granted, rooms in a spaceship could be honeycomb shaped or even weirder; I really like this idea. However, that's for a non-roguelike game.) Assuming this level of compacting isn't feasible (Autobots, transform and roll out! You too, Cubeon!) you could go for a happy medium, such as designing the legs and arms to fold into the body nicely for storage.

That said, these are special design considerations. I'd think any robot made to disassemble and reassemble harmlessly would compromise its structural integrity under attack.

[Erathoniel]

Yeah, you do need food, that's a granted. However, keep in mind that mecha are generally (at least by my characters) patchwork jobs containing many mecha worth of parts. Generally, if mecha are so custom-built that the original  mecha is only 30% of the systems, the danger caused by disassembly is very low. Also, potentially, you would only need to take off some parts of the mecha. And the ship, with its near-omniscient AI cores (at least, moderate intelligence AI cores) could have libraries worth of information and warehouses worth of equipment. Also, in GH, I focus mainly on avoiding fire, not taking it (with a couple exceptions). Most mecha also have external armor which could be removed and put back on, meaning that only some integrity would be lost, because the armor plating would cover it. Of course, that mainly applies to custom mecha, so the more mainstream factory-fresh mecha would suffer some, but still, for the cost, it's worth it.

Folding up is a nice idea, though, and I would prefer it if not for the physical implausibilities of anything than a Strongarm that had any hands or guns on it. Let's face it. The poor generator would have to fold into two. Folding in is cool, but doesn't go with most giant robots. Imagine getting an Atlas from Battletech (the huge 100-ton grinning skull mechs) to retract its arms or legs. Also, customization shoots both those down, because the added guns or limbs or wings or whatnot would get in the way of the folding. Disassembly has none of these problems... except that the 200-ton mega mecha would still be pretty large. But that's taken for granted with 200 tons of metal. Also, keep in mind that disassembly is not, for the player alone, harmless, but in zero-G and with enough machinery, the pieces could even be melted apart then welded together.

Edit: Did I use the abbreviation "Era" here before? That's my preferred abbreviation (Erath sounds so bad).

[macksting]

Quoting: Erathoniel

However, keep in mind that mecha are generally (at least by my characters) patchwork jobs containing many mecha worth of parts.

I think that's just the player's mecha, not the ones usually found in the hands of warriors in the setting.

Quoting: Erathoniel

...the danger caused by disassembly is very low.

Nah. Uninstalling and reinstalling is pretty much always hazardous in GearHead, for the possibility of damaging the couplings. You're still going to either risk permanent damage every time, or you'll need purpose-built couplings which will reduce general durability. (Besides, wearing armor over your mecha usually reduces their ability to dodge by more than the absorption helps.)
My advice? Generally, don't melt and weld your myomer.

An Atlas. Well, first off, the Atlas kinda sucks, especially compared to a Daishi. Still, you have a point...
Not retraction, though. Why retract? Besides, the Atlas isn't designed to fold.
Besides, if you don't like things folding up into themselves, why are you playing GH2, which will shortly include multi-mode transforming mecha?