TripHammer + Heavy Shields = Fun

So I'm cruising around Sol with my Thunderforge disabling Fed ships. I'm carrying 6 Firebirds for fighter defense. So I disable a Flagship Class Carrier and tell all 6 freshly launched fighter to attack. A few minutes later all 6 return to the bay out of ammo. Hu? I think. So I repeat on another Carrier, same thing.

It took a few minutes but I think I know what's wrong. When you disable a ship without touching its shields it retains it shields even though its lifelessly sitting there. Shouldn't a ship's shields drop when disabled?

Interesting. Does it really count as a bug, though?

Oh I don't know...

Although I did a quick calculation and now I wonder why my Firebirds couldn't kill a Carrier:

A Fed Carrier has 1400 Shields and 1000 armor. A single Firebird has 2 hail chainguns which fire 10 shots per unit of ammo, and a Firebird carriers 50 units of ammo. Chainguns do 1 shield damage per shot and 4 armor damage. So 50 X 10 = 500 X 6(Firebirds) = 3,000 Shield damage max for my fighters. So it should take ~140 units of ammo to kill a Carrier's shields, leaving ~160 (~640 armor damage) units to deal with armor, which should be far more than enough to kill a Carrier which at most has 333 points of Armor left (assuming Carriers are disabled at 33% and not 10%, I don't remember which it is...)

Ragashingo, on Jun 22 2005, 10:20 PM, said:

A few minutes later all 6 return to the bay out of ammo.View Post

Just curious...did they automatically return, or did you happen to notice a lack of "brrt brrt brrt" sounds and recalled them?

Anaxagoras, on Jun 23 2005, 09:52 AM, said:

Interesting. Does it really count as a bug, though?
View Post

Well, not to encourage too many of these, but I reported a "feature that doesn't work like it seems it should" to pipeline, and it's listed in the Nova 1.0.9 progress log as changed to my suggestion. I suspected it was an easy fix, and since it made it in I guess it was. There's no harm in reporting rather major "wait, why does it happen like that?" type oddities, I suppose.

Ragashingo, on Jun 23 2005, 10:01 AM, said:

Although I did a quick calculation and now I wonder why my Firebirds couldn't kill a Carrier:

(snip)View Post

You seem to assume their aim is perfect.

Weepul 884, on Jun 23 2005, 05:50 PM, said:

You seem to assume their aim is perfect.
View Post

I know from observation that the AI can miss even if the target isn't moving. It also tends to be liberal with its shots. I doubt that every unit of ammo hit.

No, I let them actually auto return.

Oh sure their aim it actually pretty bad, I'd think they hit the Carrier with ~70 % of their shots, maybe less. So there is a small chance that just the missing brings it down enough, but probably not...

Actually 1 fighter misses probably around 30% of the time, but if you have all 6 out most swarm around and are much better shots, probably hitting 90% or better.

This post has been edited by Ragashingo : 23 June 2005 - 04:55 PM

PBoat101, on Jun 23 2005, 01:30 PM, said:

I know from observation that the AI can miss even if the target isn't moving. It also tends to be liberal with its shots. I doubt that every unit of ammo hit.
View Post

I doubt that any of the shots hit. I think their missile jamming systems were the right type to make homing projectiles return to the person who shot them.

Hu? We're talking about chaingun fire, which is unguided and not jamable... The only reason the fighters miss is because they either move too fast or attempt to fire while flying by at funny angles...

Besides, jamming stops as soon as a ship is disabled.

This post has been edited by Ragashingo : 23 June 2005 - 06:54 PM

Try making the carrier disable at 10% instead of 30 and see if the same thing happens again. Sounds like a bug to me though - I'd report it.

Also, I have noticed if you disable a ship with a shield piercing weapon, then capture it, its shields stay at 100% too.

Interestingly weird bug.

We don't know exactly how Nova shields are supposed to work, or what they're supposed to be made of, so we have no reason to believe they would disappear when the ship around which they are located is disabled. Heck, we don't even really know how 'disabled' is supposed to be quantified except in terms of armor.

Well I assume shields go down when a ship is disabled because you can dock with a ship to board it...

You can dock with a ship that's not disabled in the refueling process...

When an aircraft is refuelled in mid-air I wouldn't exactly say the planes are "docking" with each other.

The Shield Recharger desc mentions a power source so they obviously need power of some kind.

As far as the energy transfer thing goes, I think that it is just one of the kind of unrealistic things about Nova. I can see no way that a ship can give you energy through space in the game-- you would have to dock in order for it to make sense. After all, when the player gives energy away to the AI, they have to dock with the AI ship-- the ship disables (do its sheilds stay up?), the player gives it energy, and it becomes "un"-disabled, with 100% sheilds, I might add.

I think that the energy transfer thing is just something that was small and basically unimportant in the creation of the game compared to the mission strings, etc....

Also, when the player is hit by a weapon that goes through sheilds (Nanites) the sheilds remain up when disabled. Just making the point.

My opinion: it isn't technically a bug, it's just something that no one really worried about when making the game, they had more important things to do.

Ragashingo, on Jun 23 2005, 06:53 PM, said:

Hu? We're talking about chaingun fire, which is unguided and not jamable... The only reason the fighters miss is because they either move too fast or attempt to fire while flying by at funny angles...

Besides, jamming stops as soon as a ship is disabled.
View Post

No, I meant that if the fighters had a certain type of jammer, they would make missiles return to the ship that shot them. Isn't that feature cool?

It's possible, although not with the jammer - it's with the weapon.

EVNEW has a checkbox on the weap resource that's labelled 'May hit parent ship if jammed'.

Set it up, and some missiles wil slam into the original ship.

Ryuu, on Jun 24 2005, 09:52 PM, said:

It's possible, although not with the jammer - it's with the weapon.

EVNEW has a checkbox on the weap resource that's labelled 'May hit parent ship if jammed'.

Set it up, and some missiles wil slam into the original ship.
View Post

Ah. Thank you.
:wub:
I mean that in the most heterosexual way possible.

Disabled is probably weapons and engines broken. Generators to the power reserves are also broken, though not generators to the shields.

Derelicts or any other governments set by plugs to have ships "start disabled" are just as hard to kill as a non-disabled ship. Of course, it does not tell you where the shields are at, it just says "disabled", but I think they are there.

Did this bug get reported?