Hey everyone! I know this forum is still a little dead, but I was wondering about interest in a plug idea. For a while I wondered what it would be like to be one of the station gunners, or fight with stations. At the time, I was playing with PlugPack V18 installed, and I thought about the defense drones. So after a little bit of effort, I got myself a defense drone, as my own ship, and turns out, it's actually kinda fun to act as a defender for a stellar object. So my thought was, what if I created a new storyline in the Nova universe?

The system Obatta always has pirates attacking traders and such, with few Feds or Associated Traders there to ward them off. I've started by creating a newly discovered system in the middle of the Obatta Nebula, system SPC-8021. I set up this system with a station called Outpost 9. It's a station the same style of Spacedock III. It has a small shipyard, an extensive outfitter, and a bar. The primary goal of this station is to defend traders against pirates and marauders, and prevent incursions into Fed space from enemies. When you begin this storyline, you are "assigned" to a "station defense position", but what really happens is you're forced into a defense drone that is heavily upgraded, that is supposed to be part of the station. You're given access to some Fed tech, and a large daily salary to help with costs of ammunition. Unless I ask for permission to use the graphics from PlugPack v18, I still have yet to make my own for the drone.

Those are the basic mechanics.

The storyline will probably be of moderate length, possibly 50 missions if I can figure out ways to do it. I was thinking that just for fun, the player could defend the station in the "turret". Missions could be available from the bar (where you receive the first mission), the Mission BBS, or occasionally at the spaceport. These missions will gradually get harder. Most of them will probably be "defend the station, try not to die, kill the enemy", all of different difficulties. I'm also thinking of trying to have a mission where an important figurehead of the federation is visiting, and you have to defend the ship from assassins as the ship comes in to port. Some missions might be battles between fleets where you as the player are supposed to be the deciding factor.

Also, the storyline will be played from a fed perspective, and will line up with certain elements from the regular Fed storyline. A possible example: When the Polaris send the Raven in to destroy everything, it's possible that they sent assault fleets towards other key defensive systems, and one just might be SPC-8021. Stuff like that.

I have a few questions.
Has this been done already?
Would this be interesting to play, if done correctly?
Anyone have any suggestions as to how to make it correctly, maybe other mission possibilities?

Any help is awesome and appreciated, thanks!

This post has been edited by Article : 17 December 2014 - 01:17 PM

I've never heard of this being done before. Actually, I'm not even certain it's been considered before. If done correctly it could be interesting, but I honestly am not sure how to go about actually doing it correctly. There are a lot of factors to consider.

For one thing, not being able to move makes dodging hard. This means you'll need a lot of health to survive enemy onslaughts or a lot of long-range weapons to kill them off before they get to you. It would also probably need some sort of jamming and/or point defense to keep off hostile guided ordnance. Also, since you can't move, if ships end up drifting too far away in the middle of combat, you won't be able to do anything. There's also the issue of impact from enemy weapons. Even if you give the drone a truly massive value for its mass, there's still a chance you could end up drifting away from the station with no way to stop yourself. If the battle goes on long enough, you could end up too far away and not be able to land again. Plus it would look weird for a station's own turret to suddenly detach but continue to fire. There's also the monotony of sitting in the same spot over and over shooting ships. Any storyline revolving around such a task would rely heavily on the writing to be fun.

In the end this might be possible, but I doubt it would be easy.

DarthKev couldn't you give the ship something like the mass of a Raven so it wouldn't drift away? I know you can plow into a Raven all day and it won't affect the trajectory. Article if you're serious and you want an original sprite I've been tinkering with adding ships into Nova for a while and I've gotten to the point where I can sort of emulate the graphic style of Nova. Check out some of my ships here for reference.

Inertialess ships don't drift. That's an easy problem. A tougher one is making the drone spawn at somewhere other than the center of the station. One solution would be to have several invisible ports at the defense points.

This post has been edited by Geek : 17 December 2014 - 03:44 PM

Well in order to take on the challenge of drifting, which I encountered early, I made the mass of the drone 32,000, and inertialess after some tinkering. I find it best to stick with the single spawn point in the middle of the station, despite the graphical concerns, so the player is always in the same spot when taking off. I have the plug attached below, where I have addressed a lot of the concerns brought up by Darthkev. I initially gave the turret emplacement two of the TAM PD lasers included in PlugPack V18. I also used two of the Energon Cannons, and 6 100mm Railguns, which is helpful if ships drift out of range of other weapons. It has 2000 shield and 2000 armor, which holds up well, but it depends on how what you're fighting. Despite not being able to jump, it still has enough energy for 6 jumps to compensate for fuel consuming weapons, as well as a high fuel recharge rate, as I expect a station would have. That's the stock version. Also borrowed from PlugPack V18, the defense drone sprite/shan/spin, and the Energon Cannon sound.

Edit: the file is too large to upload, so I'll work something else out when I get home later.

Edit II: I also found out that it's hard to shoot past traders that are docked at the station. Possible to fix with a longer turret spin and exit points?

Edit III: Corndog, if you want to whip up a model, I would certainly appreciate it. I don't have near your graphical capabilities.
Alsoo here is the link to the plugin:
https://www.dropbox....0Drone.zip?dl=0

Warning: plugin is archived, and is for Mac.

This post has been edited by Article : 17 December 2014 - 07:42 PM