Now for something useful.
Criticial Hit
Method 1: Weapon submunitions into, say, ten homing weapons. Give the homing version an invisible sprite and a high jamming vulnerability. Give all other shďps an equivalent inherent jamming type.
Effect: Some of the submunitions lock on to the target and hit it; others are jammed and veer off course.
Drawbacks: Projectile is invisible after the initial round submunitions. If the initial round is intercepted by hitting a ship first, then it delivers full damage.
Patch: Use multiple launchers and "fire simultaneously" instead of submunitioning.
Drawbacks: Projectile is never visible.
Patch: Use shän weapon animation to simulate beam weapon to cover for invisible sprites.
Drawbacks: Beam length limited to maximum sprite length; beam will not "stop" when it hits a target; projectiles need to be configured to expire at end of visible portion of beam.
Method 2: Use a series of extremely rapid-fire or simultaneously launching homing weapons with a burst reload, of, say, 20. Equip defending ship with various PD weapons with different strengths and turreted blind spots.
Effect: Damage taken with then be variable depending the number of projectiles the PD turrets can shoot down; in turn dependent on ship's orientation relative to oncoming fire.
Drawbacks: Not truly random.
Method 3: Deploy a carried fighter to do the dirty work. Carried fighter has two weapons which it will fire: a one-shot visible weapon which will deal a very large amount of damage to the target, and a number of invisible jammable homing weapons as described above that provide negative damage (if this is possible).
Effect: Large ships will survive initial fire and then recover a random amount of shields from the impacts of the second weapon.
Drawbacks: 1.) Does negative damage work? 2.) Will AI ships fire negative damage weapons? 3.) Leaves an abandoned fighter lying around the system.
Patch: Issue 3 can be dealt with by using ammotype -999 on the last weapon to fire. Arrange this by making the regenerative weapon the primary, but give it a slightly slower speed than the visible damaging weapon, which should fire second and then destroy the dummy fighter. If timed correctly weapon exits will not be very far from the player's own sprite.
To be honest I'm at a bit of a loss on this one. I think you should upgrade the difficulty, personally - the groundwork for Escort 7 and Ship Hangar has been laid long ago (Jason Meltzer's "Dominated Planets" and general ncb voodoo, respectively) and are generally well known. Convincing a single weapon to behave differently each time it's fired is an entirely unexplored challenge. I'll hopefully have some better ideas tomorrow.
-reg
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"Oh crap. I'm going to hell - I put the Bible next to Mein Kampf again."
-Her Holiness, Pope Jenne "Kirby" Hubbs
