I know I saw a movie somewhere of someone giving planets shield bubbles (presumably by making an invisible, motionless ship centered on the planet), so this is kinda an extension of that idea. Instead of the ship being invisible, have it have empty normal sprites with "orbiting" special frames, to give it the appearance of a satellite orbiting the planet. As an added bonus, the satellite can launch attacks at the player!

It's a shame you can't force ships to be at a particular location without requiring the player to demand tribute from a planet. Otherwise you could make a "destroy ship" mission where the target ship is protected by a series of rotating walls.

That would be neat.

For the planet, you could just give it 0 acceleration and turning and make a mission that causes it to appear over the planet all the time. I don't think you can have satellites that go "behind" the planet, but you could have a fixed satellite (in, say, geostationary orbit, since the planets don't really move in EVN).

Well, there's one orbit I was picturing, which is namely the top-down circular orbit. It's not realistic, sure, but the basic idea is there.

For best results, of course, mount planetary defense weapons on them. Enormous Blaster Turret, 400mm railgun, and so on.

EDIT: Oooh! You can actually make ships appear surrounding a special ship using fighter bays. Duh! Okay, now someone has to remake that old game where you have to fire a shot through holes blasted in rotating walls...what was that called again?

This post has been edited by Derakon : 17 March 2006 - 04:05 PM

There is a way to make a ship appear on top of a planet, but I can't recall what it is. Maybe has to do with a mission. And you could easily have a satellite pass "behind" a planet, simply by having it grow smaller as it moves sideways, then disappear at the "edge" of the planet (actually loop a little wide and disappear on the way back) then reappear on the other side, grow larger and cross the face of the planet, and so forth.

EDIT: Here we go. From the Nova bible.

ShipStart       Defines where in the system the ships will start
                -4    Appear on top of nav default 4
                -3    Appear on top of nav default 3
                -2    Appear on top of nav default 2
                -1    Appear on top of nav default 1
                0     Appear randomly in the system (as usual)
                1     Jump in from hyperspace after a short delay
                2     Appear randomly, cloaked

The trickiest part would be using the shän resource's x, y, and z compress values to make the exit-points follow the satellite. There would be problems with shots appearing behind or before the planet when the satellite's on the other side though...

This post has been edited by Qaanol : 17 March 2006 - 04:15 PM

Hmmm....

Max Simultaneous Missions   16

I think this could be a problem...

Incidentally, does anyone know of the game Derakon is mentioning? I forget the name...

Er, I don't see any way of lining up the exit point with an orbiting satellite. Exit points only move when the ship moves, not when it animates idly or something.

You could use nebulas and visbits so when you leave the nebula, the mission autoaborts, and when you enter the nebula, the mission starts. The nebula, of course, needs to be above the system.

I think, however, that geostationary satellites would be a boatload easier.

Actually, someone with lots of free time could probably make one of these for all of the planets (not stations) that fire on you. How else would a planet shoot something (due to something called escape velocity, pun unintended) unless it was in orbit?

This post has been edited by Yellow : 21 March 2006 - 05:51 PM

@yellow, on Mar 21 2006, 04:50 PM, said in Random thought - orbital defenses:

I think, however, that geostationary satellites would be a boatload easier.

Actually, someone with lots of free time could probably make one of these for all of the planets (not stations) that fire on you. How else would a planet shoot something (due to something called escape velocity, pun unintended) unless it was in orbit?

simple lol the guns/weapons are on the planets surface...

1purevengance1, what hes saying, is at the speed that it seems in Nova, the shots wouldnt be fast enough to escape the planets gravity (escape velocity) thus would end up hitting some city on the same planet.

@eegras-studios, on Mar 19 2006, 12:24 PM, said in Random thought - orbital defenses:

You could use nebulas and visbits so when you leave the nebula, the mission autoaborts, and when you enter the nebula, the mission starts. The nebula, of course, needs to be above the system.

True. That would work. Still, the resources...

the resources would be HUGE. 1 nebula for every system that has orbital defences, 2 crons (on/off), 1 mission just for 1 orbital platform.

Good lord. Brain into overdrive here... on a completely different topic.

@eegras-studios, on Mar 25 2006, 01:43 AM, said in Random thought - orbital defenses:

the resources would be HUGE. 1 nebula for every system that has orbital defences, 2 crons (on/off), 1 mission just for 1 orbital platform.

No, they wouldn't. At the very most, it would use 32 nebulae, 64 crons, and 32 missions. Presumably, they wouldn't have that many systems with orbital defenses.

Just had a cool idea:
Make a station with visible gun emplacements on it, the sprite will show these as being destroyed. For each gun you'll need another spob. This is solely to mark the location of the gun - they should be underneath the station where you can't select them. Next make some ship sprites that look like the big gun turrets for the station. You could have some variations - gun, launcher, beam etc. You could have variations of the ships too - eg, for the launcher type turret you could have one ship armed with rockets and another with missiles. The ships should all have large quantities of ammo, 0 speed and accel, very high shields but very low armour (we don't really want to be able to disable them so you should only have a couple of points max). Now put them all into one dude and set up missions to make them appear at the gun emplacements. These will just sit there and fire at enemies but the AI can also destroy them which will reveal the destroyed version underneath. Then you can set up some crons to regenerate them one at a time.

Pros:
Multiple weapons per station
Weapons can be destroyed
Weapons can be random
Weapons can have finite ammo (you could even have fighter bays)

Cons:
Uses up simultaneous missions. You could only really have a couple such stations active at any one time in the game.
Hailing the station will always show the destroyed gun emplacements. To avoid this you could make the base sprite with the turrets simply missing instead of destroyed. (EDIT) Another thought: Make the base sprites of the ships show the destroyed turret and the alt sprites show the working turret. Give the ships a death delay of 0 and with any luck, when they get destroyed the disabled sprite will be left stuck on the screen.

This post has been edited by Guy : 03 April 2006 - 02:34 AM

It also causes problems because there's a limited number of crons you can have.

Of course, you'd probably not want to use a plug like this during a major string (which could result in too many crons being active) anyway, since it would probably make it harder.

@yellow, on Apr 2 2006, 01:50 PM, said in Random thought - orbital defenses:

It also causes problems because there's a limited number of crons you can have.

Of course, you'd probably not want to use a plug like this during a major string (which could result in too many crons being active) anyway, since it would probably make it harder.

Umm... No and no.
There is a limit on the number of crön resources you can have (512), but it is too high for a minor use like this to have any effect. There is no limit on how many cröns can be active at any time.

However , there is a low limit on active missions (16), and that very well could cause problems. If you don't mind having your turrets randomly scattered in a circle, I'd recommend using the "defence platform ship" feature of the game, and make the ships 0-speed Warships (and created using one of the düde fields in the s˙st resource). That will cause them to appear in a circle around a spob, about 100 pixels out. Note that they can appear around any spob, friend or foe, so this can only be used if all the spobs in a system are the same government.

Edwards

Crap, did I forget to mention that? Fixed now.
Special feature you say? Cool, I never knew that! You could have like a circular rail and the ships randomly appear somewhere along it. Though they'd still look funny if they overlapped.

(EDIT): Say, you might be able to rely on fleet formations to do something similar. Of course you'd have to make the lead ship (platform base) indestructible else you could destroy it and leave the turrets floating around behind.

This post has been edited by Guy : 03 April 2006 - 04:28 AM

@edwards, on Apr 2 2006, 10:41 PM, said in Random thought - orbital defenses:

However , there is a low limit on active missions (16), and that very well could cause problems.

I doubt it. You would only have a max of four missions active at any given time. In any case, with a limit as low as 32, I don't expect there would be any systems with more than one orbital defense system. That would mean that in those systems, the user could have up to 15 of their own missions. You could even go so far as to keep a dummy mission active all the time to make sure they don't go over 16 before entering the system.

(Edit) D--n but I just keep editing this...

I just thought of something:

Say you had an armed spöb as the defense platform. It would have one weapon active to fend off daily threats. If you wanted to beef up the spöb's armaments for a specific event in your story, you could have an invisible, zero-speed ship placed on top of the spöb by a mission. You could say that the defenders are going to a higher state of alert.

If you have that mission's objective as "Destroy special ship," and you put a Yxxx operator in the OnShipDone field, then if the special ship gets destroyed, you'd destroy the spöb, and shut off the main gun as well.

If the defenses are worth it, it would take a campaign to remove them. That's when the author could get the greatest effect by slipping this little treat in. That's when you would see these defenses at their strongest.

This method only uses one mission to run, gives the spöb the added arsenal of a shďp resource, and gives the author a degree of control over when the spöb goes to "High-Alert."

(Edit again) Depending on how you set up the graphics, you can even animate the guns. Say you have a station with a circular rail or indentation around it, a set of gunports around the middle. Set up the Ship's graphics so that it looks like a set of guns that always fall somewhere along this circle. If you set up the shän right, you've got animated weapon exit ports for your defense platform.

(And Again) Just thought I'd toss this out: Unfolds to fire. Now the pipedream is complete.

And, just to keep the player on his toes when demanding tribute, the spöb would have a defense fleet of One.

This post has been edited by Eugene Chin : 03 April 2006 - 06:31 PM