This topic was discussed awhile back, if I remember correctly—someone posed the question of making a ship that can only use afterburners. I'm not sure if a solution was ever reached, but I think that this might have worked:

• Make an invisible, damageless weapon with a negative recoil called "Engines". Set it to be a secondary weapon and to drain fuel.
• Also create a ship with no acceleration and relatively low mass.
• When the ship fires this secondary weapon, it will move forward.

This will have the side effect of giving the player infinite top speed, and I doubt the AI could use it properly, but I'm pretty sure it could work.

Mispeled, on May 8 2005, 06:22 AM, said:

This topic was discussed awhile back, if I remember correctly—someone posed the question of making a ship that can only use afterburners. I'm not sure if a solution was ever reached, but I think that this might have worked:

• Make an invisible, damageless weapon with a negative recoil called "Engines". Set it to be a secondary weapon and to drain fuel.
• Also create a ship with no acceleration and relatively low mass.
• When the ship fires this secondary weapon, it will move forward.
  This will have the side effect of giving the player infinite top speed, and I doubt the AI could use it properly, but I'm pretty sure it could work.View Post

Sorry, there's a bug in the way.

Negative recoil simply doesn't work for weapons the player fires. It works fine for the AI, though.
Other than that, that idea works quite well (try out Qaanol's reverse thrusters), although top speed will be the ship's top speed, not infinite.

Edwards

Argh, that's a bummer. Hopefully that bug will be fixed in 1.0.9.

I suppose one could still do a rear-quadrant turret, but that would be a bit awkward as your precision would be pretty limited, plus you'd have to always have a ship targeted.

Edwards said:

Although top speed will be the ship's top speed, not infinite.

I'd always assumed that recoil was like gravity where it ignored top speed.. hmm.

Thanks, anyway.

I don't know how afterburners work exactly, but you could always give the ship either/both 1 velocity and/or 1 acceleration.

I'm not sure how fast the ship would go, but I'd guess the speed would be negligible enough to force the player to use the AB.

Maybe you could give the ship 1 velocity and 1 acceleration, and then use an (invisible) outfit to reduce those numbers to 0 and 0.

But what do real afterburners do? I have a feeling its something relative, like temporarily doubling top speed and acceleration, and twice zero is obviously zero.

Has anyone tested a weapon that submunits instantly with -360 in the subtheta, creating two shots flying exactly backwards relative to the ship facing, then explode at the propper time (with a prox safety and such, plus blast hurts player).

This might uncap max speed.

What about just using negative inaccuracy? Give it a positive recoil and see what happens with an inaccuracy of -180.

No, recoil doesnt care at all which directions the shots come out, but mix our solutions, id forgotten about that. Use -180 inacc and shots that have a short lifespan, long prox safety and an impact. Just make sure there are no friendies just behind you when you fire.

How about reversing the ship graphics?

I'm not exactly sure if NebuchadnezzaR said this (I didn't understand his post) but recoil only shoots you back. Even if it's from behind, you go back. That sucks.

yeah, thats what I meant. Always exactly straight back, regardless of everything.

This post has been edited by NebuchadnezzaR : 10 May 2005 - 07:34 PM

NebuchadnezzaR, on May 10 2005, 05:33 PM, said:

yeah, thats what I meant. Always exactly straight back, regardless of everything.
View Post

Well... It's not quite perfectly straight back, but under normal conditions, it's very, very close:
A weapon's recoil will always come from the center of the area swept out by the current orientation of the ship. This means that for a four-framed ship, the recoil from its weapons will always come from 45, 135, 225, or 315° (what I'm talking about becomes very obvious if you actually make a ship with four frames in its sprite).

And reversed ship graphics would work fairly well, except that you would need to set all weapons that the ship(s) can have to have negative velocity/inaccuracy, and beams and guided weapons cannot be fired backwards.

Edwards

This post has been edited by Edwards : 10 May 2005 - 07:52 PM

What does "the area swept out by the current orientation" of the ship mean? Half a frame rotated clockwise or something?

NebuchadnezzaR, on May 12 2005, 05:10 PM, said:

What does "the area swept out by the current orientation" of the ship mean? Half a frame rotated clockwise or something?
View Post

Illustration time. (I admit that my wording was very abd. After seeing this, please make suggestions as to how I should change it.)
SpinSweep.jpg (3.23K)
Number of downloads: 14
While the ship's true heading is in the shaded area, it will display the sprite pointing in the direction of the black arrow. To extend this to more than four frames, simply evenly divide a circle into the same number of sections as you have frames, and attach each section to the arrow that parallels the section's counter-clockwise-ward side.

If you prefer numbers:
x=360° / (number of frames in the ship's sprite)
The ship frame showing the ship pointing in direction 1x will appear while the ship's true heading is from 1y to 2x - 1. The next ship orientation, 2x, will appear from 2x to 3x - 1, etc. Numbering starts at straight up (0x, or 0°).

Anyway, beams will point in the direction indicated by the black arrow, and recoil will come from the center of the shaded area. Normal projectiles will fire in the direction of the ship's true heading, regardless of how many frames its sprite has.

If there are only 4 sprites and the turning is kinda low, are little taps on the left/right arrow cumulative? And why wont I bother creating even 4 images to test this?

I think it's time for a single-frame sprite wherein the ship always appears to be facing straight up. Then take a series of screenshots while firing normal projectiles and/or beams, with arrows showing the direction of recoil.

Qaanol, on May 13 2005, 03:39 AM, said:

I think it's time for a single-frame sprite wherein the ship always appears to be facing straight up. Then take a series of screenshots while firing normal projectiles and/or beams, with arrows showing the direction of recoil.
View Post

Well based on what Edwards says, the recoil would come from straight down, thrusting you upwards.

No, Guy.

Edwards said that recoil would come from the center of the yellow, shaded arc in the image.

Beams would come from the black arrow.

Eugene Chin, on May 16 2005, 06:41 PM, said:

No, Guy.

Edwards said that recoil would come from the center of the yellow, shaded arc in the image.

Beams would come from the black arrow.View Post

No, Guy is right. In the case of a one-frame sprite, the sprite would always point up. The "shaded area" for such a sprite would be a complete circle, and thus the half-way point would be at 180°, or straight down. Recoil coming from straight down will push you upwards.

Edwards

Is an afterburner the only way to make an engine flare come on instantly without fading in and out as if starting up? As in, to just plain come on without delay? This is for a secret hidden evil project that has nothing to do with afterburners...

NebuchadnezzaR, on May 9 2005, 01:32 AM, said:

But what do real afterburners do? I have a feeling its something relative, like temporarily doubling top speed and acceleration, and twice zero is obviously zero.
View Post

This is random, but I just felt like answering this question (assuming it was a real question). An afterburner, as used by fighter jets and such, basically squirts extra fuel into the superheated exhaust coming out the back end of the jet, thus igniting it and providing more push and "more bang for the buck." They use up a lot of fuel by doing that, though, so in the case of Nova, they've got you spending jump fuel to run your afterburners (since the manuvering fuel is just assumed to be there unless you're disabled or something - as seen in the pilot info screen)
Here's a link describing how it works for a F-4 Phantom's afterburner.
EDIT: Make sure you've got a pop-up stopper.. I didn't notice it the first time I went there, but one pops up.. sorry about that
EDIT:EDIT?: For those of you who don't want to risk a pop-up or just want to see a cool, home-made afterburner, check out this guy's site.

This post has been edited by Cade : 17 May 2005 - 06:38 AM