There’s no single simple answer to the question: it depends on the capital ship’s ability to sustain more acceleration than the planet’s gravity, which means that it will be possible for some capships and some planets but not others, or even for the same capship, it’ll be possible on a low-gravity moon such as Mars, but not a higher gravity planet such as Earth.
To that equation you also need to add atmospheric density, since higher friction means a faster entry will sustain damage to the ship. So if you try to fly a cruiser in a dense atmosphere at 5 Km/sec, you’ll burn the ship; but if you do the same with an interceptor, you might only sustain minor damage.
This implies it’ll be possible to get some capital ships into a situation where they are doomed to descend to the surface and never escape. That doesn’t sound like a great user experience… care to elaborate @INovaeFlavien?
Obviously if they utilise orbital mechanics they’ll be able to descend and then ascend out of the gravity well again which could be a rewarding thing for skilled players to pull off.
There will be an alarm and some warnings before you reach the critical altitude. If you ignore them, well, you’ll suffer the consequences. I can’t imagine any other alternative other than forcing an artificial explosion ? But I’m not sure that’d be a better user experience
Yes, warnings will help alert to the danger. Equally, perhaps higher speed will allow lower flight and an escape back to safe altitude (depending on flight model).
No to enforced explosions please. Punish people in scientifically plausible ways for their stupidity!!!
That sounds awesome, imagine a fleet of smaller ships banding together and pushing a capital ship out of orbit… We need grappling hooks! (or tractor beams).
A big ship using its tractor beam to keep a smaller enemy ship from fleeing would be an awesome thing too.
Is damage from ramming ships planned? A severely damaged capital ship could try to ram an enemy capital ship in a kamikaze action.
There are several strategies other vehicle-based games implement to help combat team ramming. The most simple and effective is to kick a player from the match whenever they destroy a certain amount of friendlies in a session. This works to fight other methods of griefing as well. In I:B, I imagine it would have to keep them from joining the same match or also prevent them from joining any matches for some time.
@TARS Tractor beams or some method of latching onto ships sounds like a cool utility item and could enable repair/salvage playstyles.
Do you mean that ramming could be a cost-effective strategy, or just that crashing your crippled ship onto another as a last ditch effort would cause some damage?
The critical altitude will vary with velocity… sounds like an interesting user interface problem to communicate that effectively.
@lolsparta4 greifing wouldn’t be limited to team killing. As @Argopeilacos says, ramming the enemy with a fresh ship probably shouldn’t be a cost effective strategy… it should only be a last resort.
I suppose another source of griefing would be crashing fresh ships into enemies/surfaces. The devs could measure the average rate of ship loss, and if you’re a certain amount higher than that, you get kicked. If the rate is high enough, bad players don’t get punished, and if you’re terrible enough to lose ships at the same rate as a griefer, you’re doing as much harm.
Most multiplayer games of this nature have a replay system and moderators who can enact bans. In I:B this would only be possible through community volunteers.
The goal is to reasonably account for the amount of kinetic energy that would be transferred in an impact. Whether or not it’s economically viable will depend on your cash reserves, the size and relative velocity of the ship doing the ramming, and the size of the ship or structure being rammed. “Size” is a bit of a generalization for mass, armor rating, etc given that larger structures and ships will usually have more mass and thicker armor.
I imagined something like a yellow critical trajectory warning when your end position approaches that minimum altitude and goes red once you’ve passed it. A seasoned pilot would know it’s just an estimate and burn forward with a bit of AoA to lessen the velocity loss until you get a yellow warning again.
I thought it was an interesting problem so I sat down and did some math to try and solve a ‘simple’ case of an atmospheric dive and I’m not sure how you could do that without iterating through your trajectory beforehand. That sounds computationally expensive to do every time ships approach a planet and recomputing every time they change their position/heading. I suppose it wouldn’t be so bad because this is only necessary for the larger ships and their should be fewer, but I’m not so sure it’s the best way to do it. It would be the most accurate though! With this approach you could really push your ship to the limit.
If it’s done differently it sure would be nice to have the ability to add it as a script for a personal flight computer as a mod and with options to turn off the stock warnings. It could be done pretty simply with a python script as long as we have access to planetary body information such as mass, radius, atmospheric density curve, etc
Battlescape calculates parameters so that it can know when to damage the ship. Call it a “stress” value that goes from 0.0 to 1.0. When it hits 0.5, the ship starts taking minor damage. By the time it hits 1.0, the ship is taking catastrophic damage.
Show that value to the player. Via glowies, instruments, camera shakes, whatever.
That will be sufficient for players to quickly learn what’s possible and what’s not. Assuming that players won’t start out in capitals, they’ll learn about atmospheres in the smaller ships first, and be properly informed by the time they’re in capitals.
Just give them the essential information and they’ll figure it out.
One thing to keep in mind is that capships, just like smaller ships, have stronger propulsion on the back than on the side thrusters.
If a capship goes below the minimum altitude, it might still be possible to avoid attraction to the planet by correctly orienting the ship upwards and firing the main thruster’s propulsion. Of course they turn pretty slow so I’m not sure if that maneuver will even be possible, but if it works that might lead to ackward situations where a masive ship is trying to escape a planet’s gravity by behaving like a rocket.
I’m trying to think of reasons why a capital ship would want to descend to low altitude or land on the surface of a planet. Perhaps a planet has such high speed wind processes that anything smaller than a corvette would be seriously hindered/thrown about. For example if base capture requires ships to fly/sit near a base, capitals would have to do it.
Also I doubt capital ships would be unable to escape any but the highest gravity worlds. Their main thrusters are so much larger than the small ships’ and could probably reach most escape velocities. Of course, if a capital is built for high warp speed and low normal speed (carrier could be) then it might perish.
