Some Newbie Q´s

Fjord, thanks for your detailed and helpful reply. The information on Fuses looks most interesting, indeed. If I used custom models, though... would I need to somehow have a SUR file, in order to obtain the results I wanted- i.e., hits on specific parts would result in specific damage? Or would it be enough for each &quot;part&quot; (in this case, the &quot;pilot&quot; ) to &quot;steal&quot; a SUR reference from something with similar dimensions? As for the &quot;random factor&quot; added to shooting... there´s script available that has to do with rotating planets and other objects... I´ve seen this in mod XML files. Is it possible to apply such things to the player´s ship somehow? I´ve never seen any ships with *any* moving parts, other than guns, so I´m assuming this is a &quot;no&quot;, and that the guns cannot be scripted in any way... but it´s worth pursuing, maybe. Obviously, there are animation calls being made to open the &quot;hatch&quot; when cargo is ejected, so I´m wondering if it might be possible, say... to move the firepoints for a given gun around a wee bit very rapidly, using a script, so that while the shots would all converge at the &quot;max range&quot; point (which seems to be calculated based on the highest-velocity gun, based on some cursory tests), they would arive there on vectors that differed significantly enough to &quot;feel&quot; randomized, unless you happened to be flying at the point near convergence (in which case, you´d be having a really crappy day, hehe). I´ve already completed some experiments where I have guns that are ever-so-slightly slower/faster than one another (in my case, I used thousandth-of-a-second increments), which produces a much more &quot;machinegun-like&quot; array of bullets, because after the first shot, the increments keep cycling and putting the &quot;first gun&quot;, &quot;second gun&quot; etc. further and further apart from one another, timewise. As I already intend to have a system where players buy multiple guns which are identical in performance but are bought to increase the ammo load (i.e., Machinegun A can have 500 rounds and doesn´t share ammo with Machinegun B... just like RL), this &quot;time-synching&quot; of the guns is fairly close to the effect I want anyhow... I´d just like to make it even more random, so that I can have machineguns with somewhat-realistic velocities but not so pinpoint-accurate that all players have to do is hover and fire off a burst at anybody who shows up. Maybe... hmmmmmmm.... I could make machineguns that have a much longer effective range than people´s sight radii... that might solve this problem... I could just give them a long flighttime... then they wouldn´t converge nearly as much. Gonna have to test this assumption, of course... I´ll let you know the results <img src=smilies/icon_smile.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> As for the physics model... I´m going to need to test some of their assumptions pretty carefully. The sections where they´re talking about turn radii and stuff make perfect sense... what does *not* seem intuitive (at least, until I try some experiments) is their assertions about the relationships between thrust and mass. If I followed their arguments correctly (which is in some doubt, of course), then without the drag constant, there would be no upper bounds on speed (i.e., everything would act like zero-gravity spaceflight with thrust and mass, as opposed to the magical world of FL where everything has a maximum velocity created by drag)... so playing with drag, thrust and mass very carefully *should* theoretically result in getting the performance I´d like to see from my &quot;aircraft&quot;. They´d have a very low drag, but probably the engines´ drag would eventually cancel out the thrust at whatever seems &quot;reasonably realistic&quot; for the scales of the mod, so that the &quot;aircraft&quot; would be forced into somewhat-realistic banking turns, and would be put into positions where they would run into the &quot;ground&quot; even if users killed their engines right away, unlike the way it is in FL where doing so means that the drag almost instantly kills the velocity. In an almost-unrelated question... has anybody tried putting a *negative* number into thrust, to see whether it can kill speed, as opposed to increasing it? I´ll have to try that... maybe instead of &quot;emergency power&quot;... I could have &quot;air brakes&quot;... people would trade initial velocity for lower velocities, once they´d finished &quot;bouncing&quot; an opponant... just like real fighter pilots used their flaps to increase drag (and also increase their ability to turn quickly)... just some random thinking there, and it probably won´t work in FL´s engine anyhow... it probably doesn´t recognize negative floats. Edited by - Argh on 10/5/2004 8:12:50 PM

wow. u have thought through this verry carefully. I would like to see how this turns out, if it hasnt already Don´t run from the sniper, you´ll just die tired

To answer number 3, losing parts DOES change the ship handling, because each part got a specific mass. So an Eagle with no weap, no commmodity, no shield, no wing, etc... will turn better than a fully equipped Eagle <img src=smilies/icon_smile_wink.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle>

IF you give everything a mass, INCLUDING those components - then maybe it will affect handling...........

I´ll test components as soon as I get home this evening. I don´t know what, if any, effects will occur, but I suspect that their mass isn´t taken into account, either- it´s just the ship´s mass. If you´ve ever flown a ship that´s lost a wing... I have... and I didn´t notice any change in its flight behaviors. But that´s anecdotal at best... I´ll do some more scientific tests when I get home.

Things are different from my experience... Ppl I know fly Drakes without wings and they say it turns a bit better. For sure if you give it a huge mass it should make a difference, but it would be positive, not negative...