Ships with no shields in X2 & XOT

General discussions about the games by Egosoft including X-BTF, XT, X², X³: Reunion, X³: Terran Conflict and X³: Albion Prelude.

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Mercenary
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Ships with no shields in X2 & XOT

Post by Mercenary »

Something that's always been a bit strange, see if you agree.

Shields are required on ships not only to protect them against lasers and missiles but also against "small impacting objects" like micro meteorites... bits of debris from all those other ships you just destroyed..

In XBFT the teladi ship gives you a 1MW shield as without it you were going to die.

Now when you capture a ship in XT as often as not it has no shields. But unless a pirate takes a pot shot you can fly it any number of sectors without shields and nothing bad will ever happen to it.

What I would like to see is an element of chance that yes you can capture ships but unless you transport a shield to it then it has a very real chance of being destroyed by these small objects. Not that they have to be actually flying through space, just that the software recognises a ship without shields and by random occurance determines that its been hit by something either causing more damage or ultimately destroying the ship...

8)
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Post by X-Warrior B AS »

Well... I believe there's going to be 'hull integrity' in X2. Without shields, they could make this drop slowly due to small space debris... would be interesting. Of course there should be no damage at all when shields are equipped.
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Post by Jericho »

As far as I can remember it was possible to sell the shield in XBTF wasn't it? I thought I used to sell that straight away as it served no usefull purpose, and gave you some extra spending money. I used to manage okay without it.

If we are going to have the random chance of micro meteorites, then we should also have other random events like engine failure or incorrect calculations (A quick look at the NASA history shold give many examples of incompetance as a guide).

I used to hate the engine failure in Elite ending up in Witch-Space. I know alot of people liked it, but I didn't as I would always either die from thargoids, or be stuck in the middle of nowhere.
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Post by Gandalf The White »

Hi. I think, that the way it's done at the moment is rather silly. Because, you could have an M0/1/2 ship with no shields, yet with 1 shot from an Alfa IRE, would destroy it.
Mercenary
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Post by Mercenary »

Jericho wrote:As far as I can remember it was possible to sell the shield in XBTF wasn't it? I thought I used to sell that straight away as it served no usefull purpose, and gave you some extra spending money. I used to manage okay without it.

If we are going to have the random chance of micro meteorites, then we should also have other random events like engine failure or incorrect calculations (A quick look at the NASA history shold give many examples of incompetance as a guide).

I used to hate the engine failure in Elite ending up in Witch-Space. I know alot of people liked it, but I didn't as I would always either die from thargoids, or be stuck in the middle of nowhere.

Don't know about engine failure as I agree with you it was a pain in the arse in Elite. You had to keep an eye on the date all the time and if you had a big ship chances are you'd make the jump and just before you reached dock the damn thing would blow up as soon as it hit a year after the previous service. As if that's really going to happen and if the things that unreliable it would have been designed with an emergency backup of some description.

It also meant you couldn't go really far out from the outermost sector as you were either limited by fuel (if you put in the military drive) or if you had a fuel scoop the ship would take a few months just having to fly to the nearest sun and getting enough for the next jump...

But those are just my thoughts on Elite...

Perhaps in this instance when ships get destoyed you should be able to scoop up debris, call them alloys for selling :)

But small impacting objects would increase the difficulty when attacking pirate stations to capture ships as this means the chances of getting them to safety is much harder...
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Post by Mercenary »

The Doctor wrote:Hi. I think, that the way it's done at the moment is rather silly. Because, you could have an M0/1/2 ship with no shields, yet with 1 shot from an Alfa IRE, would destroy it.

Agree with you and hopefully they've covered that with damage to ships. Shoot a capital ship that's lost it shields with a small weapon and you get a corresponding amount of damage..
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Post by Jericho »

Merc,
Yeah I see what you mean now, destroying a capital ship by shooting at it with a pea-shooter is stupid. I slightly-misunderstood your original post.
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Post by silentWitness »

I hate the idea of ramdon failures on anything... engine failures would be a pain and would genrally put me off the game, after all how long has everone been in space??? Are you trying to tell me that in all this time no one has developed anything more reliable than the challenger space shuttle???

As for small impacting objects... That's why you have armour in the first place degridation would be over several days, or weeks... unless you fly into an asteroid belt your ship is pretty safe! atleast That's the theory behind our entire space effort! (unless an astronaught puts another wrench into orbit... the international space station doesn't have too much to worry about :wink: ) shields should be protection against lasers, Missles and places where large scale debree fields would occour, i.e. dust clouds, asteroid fields, nebulars, Etc... Think this give the unshielded ships a free reign? Have you seen Argon Prime lately!!!! it's dusty!

Dammage where it's due, not in open space!

As For Armour Yes bigger ship more armour... Not sure how the dammage is worked out... I hope it's locational... If it's not then I hope it's released in the next 3 months...
Last edited by silentWitness on Fri, 22. Nov 02, 22:30, edited 1 time in total.
Gandalf The White
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Post by Gandalf The White »

Hi. When it came to Elite, certainly elite to and FFE, I liked the idea of having to service your ship. I lso liked the idea of having to refuel your ship as well. Thought that made it very realistic.
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Post by RustiSwordz »

I agree with SW.

Capital Ships indeed any ships should have the abillity to withstand weapons/ metieor impacts without shields.

Obviously a Disco hit by a Ghept will be blown away.

But say a Mamba or a Prommy hit by a Gire will need several hits to kill it with each hit causing increasing damage to systems depending on where the ship was hit.
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silentWitness
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Post by silentWitness »

The Doctor wrote:Hi. When it came to Elite, certainly elite to and FFE, I liked the idea of having to service your ship. I lso liked the idea of having to refuel your ship as well. Thought that made it very realistic.
Well As Long as it can be turned off... servacing my ship unless I've gone through hell and back does not appeal...
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Post by Gandalf The White »

silentWitness wrote:
The Doctor wrote:Hi. When it came to Elite, certainly elite to and FFE, I liked the idea of having to service your ship. I lso liked the idea of having to refuel your ship as well. Thought that made it very realistic.
Well As Long as it can be turned off... servacing my ship unless I've gone through hell and back does not appeal...
Hi. Well, it would be no different if you had a car. You would still have to do that every year, that's why I liked that idea in FFE. It added to the realism. But yes if people don't like that, then there should be a disabling option.
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Post by nobbystyles »

refueling in Elite was okay because all trading stations had fuel and the fuel was pretty cheap. If i had to pay a visit to a refueling station then i would have been annoyedand i also found the whole 1 year out of dock the engines shut down or fling you into deep space. which basically means you are stranded. so hope lack of service has less drastic effects like maybe recuced speed and accelearaion rather than complete shutdown.


anyway.


in XBTF i found that i could fly at normal sped without shield but once i hit the turbo the ship would shake and then kaboom.
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Re: Ships with no shields in X2 & XOT

Post by pjknibbs »

Mercenary wrote:In XBFT the teladi ship gives you a 1MW shield as without it you were going to die.
Yeah, but you could then go and sell the shield at the nearby equipment dock and fly around without it for hours if you wanted to--whatever the Teladi said, the cold-blooded %$^£&£&! were lying. :-)
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Brianetta
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Post by Brianetta »

The Doctor wrote:Hi. When it came to Elite, certainly elite to and FFE, I liked the idea of having to service your ship. I lso liked the idea of having to refuel your ship as well. Thought that made it very realistic.
That also made exploration impossible, because you could only fly a year from the furthest outpost. It was not possible to reach any system that had not been explored (the special case scripted mission ships from FFE being the exception).

I don't mind servicing in principle, but you shoulld be able to successfully take chances with an unserviced ship, and you should be able to get a specialist ship that can service itself to an extent, allowing for very extended voyages before returning to dock.
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Post by UncleKnobby »

I think servicing would be good, in X2, However make it realistic.

Look at our world now, a friend of mine drives a classic Capri, and he has to twiddle with it all the time.
I drive a Saab, and it gets serviced every 18,000 miles.

My car is 10 years newer than his (He also own's a Volvo but we won't go there :) )

The point, newer or better tech need's less looking after.

If my car doesn't get it's service on time it doesn't just stop, or explode, it carries on, it run's fine.

Although I expect if I ran it for 30,000 miles it would drive like a bucket of sh*t, and need a lot of work to put right.

So, If my Mamba needs a service, I want it to carry on as normal for a while, and then slowly start to lose performance, until it's sorted.

As for fuel, in X you get those docking arm thingies at every station. Let's just imagine they are a kind of fuel nossel, and it's free.

After all the ships probably run on hydrogen, and it's the most abundant element in the universe.
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Post by silentWitness »

fuel makes everything way too complicated... think of the split... they'd have to conquer the gallexy to get a good supply of space flies (btw how many space flies to the gallon???) and you'd have to feed them nosdrop! owning a split craft would quickly become impossable! (no more mamba's guys... is it really worth it???)


As for servacing lets get into another arena, space craft... VERY advanced space craft... NO gravity... few cerrosive forces... shields that prevent organisums attaching to the hull... as I said before were not talking about the meir space station here! space craft are not cars!

Well As long as these things can all be turned off...

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