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Increase a cap's speed, and you increase the range of nukes.

Those two belters missile frigs were eyed all the way through 2 sectors and flew into a massive camp of 8+ heavy ints. They never had a chance, and that is because they were used poorly.

A MF is not a tank. It's a glorified bomber with some nice special features. If you fly it into a camp with 4-5 min warning, expect to see what happened there.

Random idea that may or may not have been proposed:

Make cap ships tougher, but not all on the ship itself. In fact, it mostly wouldn't be on the ship itself.

It'd be the shield. Make them have a massive amount of damage absorbsion, except against a few items - Killers, EMP, and Galvs come to mind, especially EMP - so that they can be a "Tank" in a sense.

You could attempt to balance this with massive sig increases as well - So that Ass ship would be vulnerable while it is sneaking around because it doesn't have a shield up because the shield's a massive sig increase - And you could put a price on the shield itself. Perhaps have that be an "Assault Shield" type thing rather than a regular Large shield.

Psychosis wrote:QUOTE (Psychosis @ Jun 4 2009, 11:22 AM) SY in the MS releases was something we saw a bit more often, It would be very interesting to revert to that system, BIOS SY RUSH FTW

People complained about SY never being used a lot during MS times.

The only time they were ever really common was a period during Beta. I'm sure pkk or someone still has the changelog's, but one of the things I remember was that back then there was a Skyripper was ammo based and there was also a mk2 version so that Devestators. One of my first games in Allegiance consisted of me getting repeatedly owned by a pack of Dev's wiping the map.

Adaven wrote:QUOTE (Adaven @ Jun 6 2009, 07:44 PM) The only time they were ever really common was a period during Beta. I'm sure pkk or someone still has the changelog's, but one of the things I remember was that back then there was a Skyripper was ammo based and there was also a mk2 version so that Devestators. One of my first games in Allegiance consisted of me getting repeatedly owned by a pack of Dev's wiping the map.

http://www.freeallegiance.org/FAW/index.ph...282000-05-19.29

Give their turrets higher RoF and make them eat ammo really fast, so ammo economy, time management and supplies become critical factors.

A capship with turrets shooting happily at 2k range random targets on its way to the enemy sectors deserves to die a painful death.

On the subject of destroyers - I was thinking, what if we make hunter-killers able to target in any direction, instead of just straight ahead? I've tested lock radii greater than pi, they seem to work just fine. We could make it just pi, in which case it would take forever to lock something behind, or we could make it say 99, so it would be nearly as fast to lock something behind as it is to lock something in front.

The upshot is that the pilot can focus on maneuvering his destroyer or IC frigate, and not have to worry about trying to aim at the interceptor boosting across his bow. That way he can actually escort another ship, rather than trying to hang back and target stuff. Yes, this is vastly different from the much-loved Rix destroyer, but missiles will necessarily be different: bullets can't be spoofed, and ideally they're easier to dodge at such long range. A missile without full lock will miss fairly often, but hopefully a fully-locked h-k will hit most of the time if not spoofed (I haven't used them enough to know).

For the record the chance to spoof hunter-killer of any tech level (same as hunter 3) is:
CM1: 37.5%
CM2: 55.6%
CM3: 70.4%

If we assume that all missiles which are not spoofed hit, then the number of missiles required to get a 90% probability of a hit is -1/log10Pspoof:
CM1: 2.35, Phit for 3 is 94.7%
CM2: 3.92
CM3: 6.56
...assuming the target does not run out of countermeasures. Keep in mind that the number of missiles required for 100% Phit is infinite.

Now consider that for many small craft, two hits are required for a kill. Thankfully, the target should have (mostly) run out of countermeasures by then.

Since it takes 4 seconds to reload and 2 seconds to lock XRM 1, this gives us a means of comparison to other weapons:
XRM1 vs 4xCM1: Let's say 4-5 missiles to kill a typical small craft (not on average, but to do so reliably), and incidentally 5 is the number of XRM H-K per rack (still assuming unspoofed missiles hit).
2 seconds lock, 4 seconds reload, so 20-26 seconds spent killing a typical small craft, unless you suck at aiming, in which case lock time is longer. Removing the aiming requirement would keep lock time down, among other things.

How long does it take to kill a Hvy Int or Adv Fig with Lancer 1? Or for that matter, with one to three Skycap 1 turrets?

Hunterkillers locking outside the screen is a nifty idea. They are a sweet piece of tech, and I'm sad they are never used.

XRM are not AFAIK for killing light craft.

DasSmiter wrote:QUOTE (DasSmiter @ Jun 11 2009, 02:42 PM) XRM are not AFAIK for killing light craft.

actually, that is exactly what hunter killers are for