Also, here is the ship we will probably be doing a five minute thing for 25 days if we want it. Please insert your favorite Fifth Element joke here.

http://imgur.com/a/f2ioC

And yes, it has smokestacks.

S.

--- Philip

	Philip J. Moyer Contributing Writer, Editor and Artist (and Moderator) -- Eyrie Productions, Unlimited CEO of MTS, High Poobah Of Artwork, and High Priest Of the Church Of Aerianne -- Magnetic Terrapin Studios "Insert Pithy Comment Here" Fandoms -- Fanart

What else were you expecting from the crack naval architects of Buy 'n Large?

--G.
And I do mean "crack".
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

It's just yachts all the way down.

And actually if you look really close that thing in the center of the park area looks to be a giant horga'hn statue. So apparently anyone in visual distance of this ship is invited to jamaharon. Not sure what that really says about the ship.

Also there are some people who are absolutely begging to actually be able to wonder around the park area in the ship and use all the Risan only stuff, like jet packs and,apparently, swimsuits. No clue if that will actually happen given that all special ships only get a bridge and nothing else up till now.

... maybe that is the bridge.

I see the U.S.S. Jimmy Buffett in Momonga's future...

In that fight, it was as much the suddenness with which everything happened as anything else. I registered the tractor beam at the same time I saw the torpedoes (salvo of three heavy plasma torps) coming at me, when I was just a bit over a kilometer from the ship. My next glance was at my shields, which I saw were almost down on that facing (just a sliver of red left), and I just didn't react fast enough when I realized how much damage I was about to eat.

I'll have to remember that about Brace for Impact, in particular; the whole "Cryptic isn't just the studio's name, it's a mission statement!" thing means that, even with a solid year of regular play under my belt, there's still plenty of things I'm learning. Not only that, but, as I said upthread, I'm used to playing space whales, so I'm very much a novice to the hit-and-run glass cannon of a Raider. Learning to use that cloak effectively is probably going to take me a lot of messy deaths.

(And I have Attack Pattern Omega on the tactical boff I have in the Commander universal station, too. Will have to remember that.)

Yeah, that one I knew. :) In that case, my shields had been stripped so fast that Tactical Team I didn't even have a tick or two to compensate. The whole thing happened very fast.

Rule number one, you're Klingon, act like it and use your cloak if you can.

Rule number two, always attack the sides.

Rule number three, have Fire at Will (beams) or Scatter Volley (cannons) ready to go. Those heavy plasma torps can be shot down if you have enough time to do it. If you want to spend EC, KDF can buy a point defense console that destroys heavy plasma torps, fighters, etc when you activate it. Search the Exchange for Console Pack - Subspace Jump / Point Defence (KDF get the point defense, Feds get the Subspace Jump, while Feds get the point defense from the C-store ship, and same with KDF and subspace jumper ). Looks like they are going for about 3.2 million at the moment.

Also of use, jam sensors, scramble sensors, Grav Well.

Sorry for the data dump, I've been on a more than usual STO kick.

Focus blur or something like that (I'm at work, so I can't exactly fire up the client and check). Also, they reset all the graphics settings, AIUI, so you'd have to redo all of those anyway (oh yay).

Reset, hell, they've jiggered the config menu all around. I've been messing with it for a little while now, but everything's jaggy as fuck. It hasn't finished downloading yet on my desktop system, so no data there yet. My laptop was pretty marginal before, I had to run it with most stuff turned off and it didn't look great, but it was serviceable. Now, not so much.

--G.
And they probably redesigned the whole sickbay, too! I know engineers, they love to change things.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Well, that part should work fine - I mean, that's just menus - but the game environment looks a bit dire on mine. It's worth noting again, though, that mine is fairly old - I bought it when I started college version 3, and I'm just finishing my fourth year (no, not graduating yet) - and, as I said before, the game looked no better than "acceptable" before the update. (Also, upon further review, I think part of the problem is that the new ESD design has arseloads of angles in it of the kind that exaggerate iffy texture resolution and/or missing antialiasing.)

Oh, and while I'm bitching, I'd just like to thank the rest of the user base for making it impossible to appreciate the ESD redesign on my desktop system either, even though the graphics work fine there, because every gonk in the fleet is busting out some kind of compulsory disco ball in there. I mean for fuck's sake.

--G.
humanity must be destroyed
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

For what it's worth, with Season 9 they now confer some sort of minor bonus for a half hour or so after you experience their effects.

In Dental, we have taken to referring to this as "Emergency Power to Party".

Hoping that gets fixed today.

Also they broke Joystick support ^_^;;

S.

I still don't understand why one would want to play STO with a controller, let alone how, given the sheer number of abilities there are that one would reasonably want immediate access to.

They've not broken controllers, just joysticks. I fly with a Saitek X52 Pro which has more than enough knobs and buttons for everything I need right now, and I use keybinds for a few things I don't need right now.

If the Saitek programmer and/or STO weren't quite so stupid then I could ditch the keybinds too.

Also (a) it's a spaceship game; spaceships are like 'planes and are flown with a stick (b) variable turn rate / run speed are really quite handy. Sadly STO doesn't handle throttle on an axis properly so I have to quantize that so only get 10 throttle settings easily accessable rather than fully variable.

S.

I've seen complaints on the official forums that support for X360 controllers (which is basically the Windows game controller default assumption) also broke with this update.

>spaceships are like 'planes

*TWITCH*

*TWITCH TWITCH*

>(b) variable turn rate / run speed are really quite handy.

I can see that, although what with STO being an MMO with MMO-style combat (aiming doesn't matter, just facing, and it's a minor miracle cover matters), it seems rather limited utility.

Yeah, since the patch this afternoon I've spotted people who had said their controller was working now saying it wasn't. *sigh*.

Thinking about it, if the controller software will handle it, there's probably enough buttons on an X360 controller for a chord-keyboard style setup for everything you need. I wouldn't want to use it though.

>>spaceships are like 'planes
>
>*TWITCH*
>
>*TWITCH TWITCH*

Yeah, I know, only "like". You can't stall them and you can't Immerman; but on the flipside the 2.5D model STO uses makes them a bit more like 'planes than they would otherwise be.

>>(b) variable turn rate / run speed are really quite handy.
>
>I can see that, although what with STO being an MMO with MMO-style
>combat (aiming doesn't matter, just facing, and it's a minor miracle
>cover matters), it seems rather limited utility.

It's minor; but if you add in that I really really can't handle mouse-based controls<1> and that I had the stick already...

S.

<1> Some ports of Elite had a comment about some NPC being the only person known to go back to keyboard operation after mastering the MOUS. That wasn't me, but it sure felt like it ought to be.

I don't hate myself enough to even want to contemplate such a set-up.

>Yeah, I know, only "like". You can't stall them and you can't
>Immerman; but on the flipside the 2.5D model STO uses makes them a bit
>more like 'planes than they would otherwise be.

That's... the other direction entirely from what I was thinking, actually :).

Spaceships move in an environment that has (a) microgravity* and (b) a vacuum, and there's no reason at all they should move the way they do in STO (or in canon, for that matter), which is somewhere between a wet-ship, a submarine, and an airplane, depending on the specific vessel. They'll keep going in one direction, at an unchanging velocity, until and unless an outside force acts upon them -- a gravity well, a physical object, the ship's own engines. Orientation is completely arbitrary.

But STO ships bank to make turns, and only move when under power -- shut off someone's engines, and they stop moving, which is actually saying that shutting off one's engines applies acceleration of a vector and magnitude such that it cancels out the original velocity and vector, making them stop dead in the current inertial frame. (Well, that may actually be an effect of the inertial dampeners, of course.) Also, every ship ever defaults to the same orientation on the X, Y, and Z axes, with orientation only going off that plane when a ship is dead in the water (so to speak), and, most importantly, you can't actually pitch more than about 70 degrees off the plane of the ecliptic, so you can't even make a loop. If you want to reach some point that's directly below you on the Z axis? You'll have to spiral downwards.

That's just weird.

Of course, it's all to match up with how this stuff usually works in the canon, and, further, having Descent-style space mechanics could get really weird.

* Gravity affecting spaceships is a lot more complicated than assuming that it's immaterial once you're outside of a planetary gravity well, of course; using the gravity of various celestial bodies to affect vector and velocity is vital to our real-world space exploration, for that matter.

And let's not even get into the impossibly dense asteroid fields...

Millions of years ago, there were Drunk Q. They're still not sure exactly how they made those.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

So there are impossibly dense Q, too.

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

Well, I was going with the old theory of mine that anything in the setting that is more fiction-science then anything (Dense asteroid fields, the Badlands, impossibly compressed nebulas) can easily be blamed on the Q messing around with things.

... Although your line could refer to some of the Continuum in Voyager, really.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I'm reminded of two separate space combat games now. One of them was the Babylon 5 Starfury game in development around 2000 or so. Like all Babylon 5 items beyond the original series, it choked and died, and that might well have been a good thing in this case. The only thing I remember about it was a preview I saw in a PC Gaming magazine, where the reviewer said he started at the jump gate, pointed the fighter at B5 and hit full acceleration. And was delighted when nothing happened. He claimed that the fact it took twenty minutes to fly to Babylon 5, because REAL PHYSICS, was proof that this was going to be the greatest space fighter sim of all time.

The other thing I'm remembering is from an article on Star Citizen, where the developers commented that they're making it 'realistic, within reason'. They commented that, when experimenting with earlier builds, they went overboard, and found the end result to be too complicated and boring as all hell.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

>He claimed that the fact it took twenty minutes to fly to Babylon 5,
>because REAL PHYSICS, was proof that this was going to be the greatest
>space fighter sim of all time.

... yeah, one of the things that will make me instantly like any given MMO more is if traveling between Places Where I Can Do Stuff does not consume subjectively more time than actually doing stuff. (STO, at low levels, can have painfully long travel times here and there, but (a) I can set autotravel and walk away to use the restroom or get my drink, or just alt-tab to watch a cat video on YouTube or something. And there's also the fact that I can click on a single button and be instantly warped to wherever I need to be, if I so choose, though sometimes doing so requires spending some EC, and sometimes a somewhat non-negligible amount.)

Upthread, I was more bugged by the general assertion that "spaceships are like airplanes" (which, in reality, they're not, although a transatmospheric craft would make that somewhat more ambiguous); while I'd like to have somewhat more freedom of movement in the third dimension (not to mention being able to mess around with orientation if I'm so inclined), I don't object to the general aesthetics of spaceship flight in STO at all. For fuck's sake, it's Star Trek, where space combat and movement should occupy a space somewhere between wet-navy battles, submarine battles, and cinematic aerial dogfighting (as opposed to real-world dogfighting, where you're almost certainly never going to even see your opponent as anything other than a radar blip), based on whatever's cooler. (Same thing with Star Wars stuff, for that matter.)

>The other thing I'm remembering is from an article on Star Citizen,
>where the developers commented that they're making it 'realistic,
>within reason'. They commented that, when experimenting with earlier
>builds, they went overboard, and found the end result to be too
>complicated and boring as all hell.

Indeed -- see, when I think about finding the balance of "respects physics and dynamics of space combat" and "actually playable", I think about some of the combat scenes in B5, such as one in the first season when Sinclair leads a wing of Starfuries in an operation, and one of the maneuvers is to do an attack run, and then, after they pass the target, use the orientation thrusters to spin around without changing vector or velocity to launch another volley.

Actually, as I was recently informed/reminded, "I've Found Her" is still out there, though it's still pretty much as it was the last time I saw it, ten years ago. A visit to YouTube can provide some more (visual) details.

On the pen-and-paper front, the Battletech people released a space combat module (called variously over the years Battlespace, Aerotech, and probably something else now, and it takes the term "logicistical nightmare" to new and exciting places. There was a separate worksheet just for tracking the velocity vector and fuel consumption of your ships, and it was every bit as un-exciting as it sounds.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

Ha haaa, Aerotech was FASA's fun and easy space fighter battle game next to Renegade Legion: Interceptor.

--G.
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Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

All I can say is, yikes! To wrap back around to (vaguely) the topic at hand, was FASA the ones who made the fiendishly complex Star Trek combat sim, or were there two bands of rules-crazed lunatics running around back then?

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

Both. FASA did indeed make a Star Trek RPG, and it did indeed have some pretty crazy space combat rules, but you are probably thinking of Star Fleet Battles, a weirdly-unpursued unauthorized game based on Star Trek fanon as of just before The Motionless Picture. (Wrapping back around on itself, the gameplay in the Starfleet Command games, which were properly licensed, is, I am told, Eerily Similar to some parts of the Star Fleet Battles experience. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

It's not unauthorized, it's just that its license is very tightly constrained to TOS and TAS (which is why the Kzinti are in its version of the Trek universe), and there's probably strict limits on the specific canon characters they can use (if any -- I've never read any of the books myself). Not only is it still in print, it's got a bunch of spin-off products, including several versions of a tabletop RPG. Paramount watches them like a hawk, too -- as I recall, one supplement released referenced something in TMP, and Paramount got that specific supplement recalled/pulped/whatever for copyright infringement.

That, as others have said, is Star Fleet Battles (yes, two words, not one, very legally two words instead of one) and it at the very least has the virtue of being intuitive in addition to being complex; the rules flow logically into each other so at a certain point you flip over from "aaaaaaaa so many numbers to" to "oh! I see exactly how I can use these numbers to get my space murder on." It's been a called a game designed by engineers, for engineers, which means that after thirty-five years or so it's gotten pretty balanced.

I do not recommend exposing people to it raw, though. You have to gateway drug them into it, and the way it was done to me (by fellow forum dweller Croaker, in fact) was to start with Federation Commander, which uses a stripped-down and in many ways more elegant and cinematic ruleset and has nice friendly cards depicting your starship you can mark all over with dry-erase markers and other things to make play more friendly. If a person ends up taking to it, they often come to wish for more granular control over things like phaser fire, boarding parties, shield facing, etc etc. and that's when you smile and drop a copy of the SFB rules on the table.

-Merc
Keep Rat

In fairness, "Star Fleet" was two words in Star Trek until the movies, too. In fact, in early episodes it's "the Star Fleet".

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

S.

Also, I still love the sprites/FX they had for plasma torps.

I wish I could get SFC working on Win 7; but no cheese so far :-).

S.

S.