Damageless beams with recoil

I have been successful. This afternoon I tried my hand at making ships fly in reverse with smooth motion and effortless controlability: it worked.

I can stop without turning around, change forward velocity quasidynamically while turning, adjust backwards velocity to maintain firing distance while Monty Pythoning an adversary, dodge railguns with extreme ease by coming in sideways and zig-zagging without wasting time turning, and outmaneuver fighters that by rights should outmaneuver me. The best part, though, is the sheer überness of seeing thruster exhaust flames leaping out of the front of my ship.

Drawbacks include not being able to fire secondary weapons while accelerating in reverse, and the necessity of more than one version of the weapon to let ships of different mass classes have similar performance results.

The principle is simple. You slap on a few pipes heading forward from your fuel tanks, hook them up to an afterburner-style device pointed off the bow of your ship, run some wires up to a big red button on your control deck labeled "Reverse Thrust", and sit down to watch Seinfeld reruns, which are mysteriously the only electromagnetically stored pieces of data passed down through the generations to have survived the destruction of the hypergate system totally intact.

I made three beam weapons and three corresponding outfits. I named them Reverse Thrust 1, 2, and 3. Version one is the weakest, having the least recoil and burning fuel the slowest, designed for use of fighters and other ships of minimal mass. Version three is the strongest, with a brighter beam and faster fuel consumption, being suited best for use on capital ships whose great mass prevents them from being accelerated perceptibly by versions one and two, and which also have huge fuel tanks ready to be wasted.

Version two was the first one I designed, and it is fine-tuned for use with ships in the Valkyrie's weight class. It consists of a 0-damage beam weapon with 40 recoil, fired by the second trigger, and using 400 fuel (4 jump's worth) every second (you didn't expect me to create an unfair advantage for myself, did you? :p). It fires every frame and lasts for two frames, making both your course and the beam's image be adjusted smoothly. The mechanics of flight are indistinguishable from normal piloting.

I made the beam's length 20 pixels, and its width 4. I colored the center a yellowish orange and the corona a propane-flame blue. What with the inaccuracy of 8 I gave the weapon, it looks very similar to a large candle flame surrounded by small welding torches.

As well as my thrusters work, there are some minor quirks (or bonuses, depending on your point of view.) Inertialess ships do not fly backwards at all, and are summarily unaffected by my thrusters. AI ships only fire their thrusters when within its range (20 pixels) of their target, meaning they don't make good use of their altered maneuverability. The exception to this is that an AI fighter bearing down swiftly on its target can use a high-powered thruster to "bounce" off the target. This can be very amusing to watch, as well as very annoying to be on the receiving end of, if the fighter in question has a BioRelay Laser or two trained on you the whole time.

The "thrust" caused by recoil is only applied in reverse. Negative recoil does not , in my testing, accelerate you forward. Also, the recoil is backwards regardless of the direction of the beam: a turreted beam's recoil, for instance, accelerates you in the opposite direction your ship is facing, no matter what direction your target is or the beam is firing. That fact quickly dashed my hopes of a Point-Defense Reverse Thruster that automatically maneuvers my ship away from incoming fire.

sadness

Yes, I know I could muss about with BlastRads and Knockbacks on pseudo-beam turreted weapons, but that lacks class and sophistication.

Anyway, I can't upload the plugin I made because it's at my house: my home computer doesn't connect to the internet. What I can do, however, if there is interest, is to print from home and then type and post here as text the data with which I filled in each field in the wëap and oütf resources, so that you can recreate the exact effect on your own.

Spiffy.

Will the creative abuses of the EVN engine never cease?

NebuchadnezzaR, on Mar 31 2005, 05:30 PM, said:

Spiffy.
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Thank you. One other useful side effect I forgot to mention is how the down arrow behaves. Since holding it down makes your ship spin to face the opposite direction from which it's moving, with reverse thrust this makes it so you can realign yourself to continue accelerating in the same direction, only backwards, if you choose.

Bryce, on Mar 31 2005, 07:53 PM, said:

Will the creative abuses of the EVN engine never cease?
View Post

Yes. Yes, they will never cease.

Okay, here are the data for the wëap resources for the 3 beams I made. Omited fields are to be filled in with 0's. I have put an asterisk next to those rows for which the data in all three columns is not the same.

Name:         R. Thrust 1   R. Thrust 2   R. Thrust 3
Reload:             1             1             1
Count:              8             8             8
MassDmg:            0             0             0
EnergyDmg:          0             0             0
Guidance:           0             0             0
Speed:              0             0             0
AmmoType:       -1005         -1020         -1040              *
Graphic:            0             0             0
Inaccuracy:         4             4             4              *
Sound:             -1            -1            -1
Impact:             0             0             0
ExplodType:        -1            -1            -1
ProxRadius:         0             0             0
BlastRadius:        0             0             0
Flags:          $0002         $0002         $0002
Seeker:         $0000         $0000         $0000
SmokeSet:          -1            -1            -1
Decay:              1             1             1
BeamLength:        15            20            30              *
BeamWidth:          3             4             6              *
Falloff:           15            13            10
BeamColor:  $00DD8822     $00EE9933     $00FFAA44              *
CoronaColor:$002266BB     $004488DD     $0066AAFF              *
SubType:           -1            -1            -1
Recoil:             5            40           320              *
ExitType:           3             3             3

The oütf's for each thruster are simply pointers to the wëaps, and have masses of 2, 5, and 10, respectively, in the logical order of ascending thruster power.

I have tested the light thruster with a Fed Viper and a Nil'kimas Manta, the medium one with a RVCV and a Mod 'Bridge C, and the heavy one with an Unrelenting and a Fed Carrier. In all, the Fed Carrier looks coolest due to the location on the ship from which the beam emanates.

This post has been edited by Qaanol : 04 April 2005 - 12:53 PM

In EVO you could do a similar thing by using backwards sprites and negative speed on ships and weapons. You would appear to behave normally except that the afterburner now works in reverse. I don't think the AI took to it very well though.

While the basic mechanics remain unchanged, I have modified some unimportant details to make the reverse thrusters better. For starters, I made them weaker and less fuel-consuming, to be more balanced in the Nova universe. Far more importantly, though, I made the beams stay onscreen longer. This I did after testing them with the Manticore, so they would not flicker.

For anyone who has ever used T-Head lances on a Manticore, you know how cool unguided beams look on that ship. My thrusters are even cooler looking. The Manticore (as well as Leviathan, Thunderhead, and Fed Carrier) looks truly awesome with reverse thrust engaged. All other ships look good too, but nowhere near as good as a Manticore. Sometimes I boot up Nova just to fly around backwards in a Manticore.

Anyway, blatant self-praise aside, you are correct, Guy, about afterburners. Another side-effect I had neglected to mention in my previous post is how autopilot behaves. You can use autopilot to face an enemy ship and then thrust directly away from it. Or you can target a spöb and fly to the exact opposite corner of the system from it.

So far the two best uses for reverse thrust I've found, besides combat maneuverability, are slowing to a stop over space objects and disabled ships, and stopping after exiting a Hypergate, so as to reenter it immediately.

Two words: Totally Bitchin'

That must be one of the coolest things ever, holy cow. With my Reb Starbridge E, it's almost unfair how much fire I can dodge. My spearheading tactic is now more like a "Give the entire crew motion sickness" tactic. This is quite cool. Thank you very much, Qaanol.