More Than Disabled Cruise

I don't know if it's possible, but it would be a nasty thing to do to someone.
Imagine if you were playing online and it was shot at you, how would you defend yourself?

If it were possible, the thrusters would probably still work anyway.

Are you makin EMP? That would be cool, maybe there is a way do damage the other guys power or disable that instead, then he can still fly but not fight.

Even could make that all engines require a little power then he could only fly once power is online, but then hes totally stuffed. hmm. Well, i guess it must be made possible before anything else.

How to add a power damage/disable to a munition though.

OK, I won't even pretend to know how ionic current affects these engines, but it sounds pretty darn interesting.

So if all the engines are ion drives and this weapon delivers said ionic current then how does that disable the engine? (I know this aint chem class, just curiosity man.)

Moreso, how would you implement this? It sounds like quite an undertaking.

Quote from "Alfa Astrix"

I'm not talking about on your own ship, I knew about that. I'm talking about taking out the enemy's engines.

I think it's impossible, I never saw what any mod can make it to work.

Almost what I meant first time, if its possible to make a weapon munition that does power damage then nothing would work so long as the engines need a constant power supply. But I don't think its possible.

I don't wish to bring alive a dead topic, but I'm 100% sure this is plausible. Not necessarily easy to do, but certainly plausible. Here's how I know:

One time while I was messing around with a near-infinite armor upgrade on my custom ship, I had my shields down and destroyed and all wings and weapons also destroyed, and the NPC's were using good ol' Tizona del Cids while trying hopelessly to kill me. One thing about this ship though: I didn't have the skills to correctly place the replacement models for destroyed sections of the ship, so there were gaping holes in the hull of my ship where my wings used to be that light and projectiles could get through. Anyways, whenever one of those Cid blasts managed to get through a hole (and I expect hit some mount or something inside my ship) my available power would decrease about the same amount the Cid's energy damage was.

So, theoretically, if you created a beam-type weapon (which I believe you are?) that does a large amount of energy damage, set shields, weapons, cruise and engines to always use energy (which they generally do anyway), and somehow get the special part of the ship to be hit all the time by this specific weapon (maybe make a permanent shield on every ship that only this ionic weapon could penetrate that surrounds this special part, whatever it is), then yes, that would be exactly what you're looking for.

As for keeping the thrusters from working as well, I wouldn't know, but everything else you certainly can put to an abrupt halt with such a weapon.

Also of note: I had two engines on this ship, completely separate and they were destructible separately. Lose one and you retain your top speed but lose half your acceleration (I didn't test the acceleration, but I remember it being slower, it was several months ago), lose both and you have no thrust whatsoever except for your thruster, but you can still use engine kill in combination with thruster to move. You of course still have control of rotation of your ship.

By the way Alfa, I don't know why but the imagery from what you said here made me absolutely bust a gut laughing: "In short, an electrical current will turn a light bulb on, but an ionic current will blow it up and electrocute everything else in the room." Hehe, I'm still chuckling...

From what I remember, all cruise disruptor projectiles have a property called "energy_damage". This is basically for letting the projectile steal some of the targets energy from the energy pool. This can be edited in the weapons.ini, as far as I can tell. So, if you can set an engine to use power from the player's power supply( I think there's a property for that, too) then set the disruptor projectile to take away a huge amount of energy. Then, because the modified engine must use energy, it might disrupt? Might work I'm a bit rusty on this area. My two cents.

Quote from "Alfa Astrix"

Also, from what you're saying is that I'd have to make all custom ships that allow the engines to be destructible?

No, not at all. That was just a side note that removing the HpEngine mounts from the ship actually removed the engines themselves and you only had your thruster to generate forward movement once they were removed.

What I'm saying is when something that is generally inside the ship, I'm not sure what, gets hit by a projectile that has an energy damage assigned to it then your available power is decreased by an amount equal to the energy damage of that projectile. Come to think of it, actually, I'm not even sure if it was only the Cids that were "damaging" my energy, their class 9 neutron blasters (it's been so long I can't even remember the name of them) were also causing my energy to decrease, so it could be that all you have to do is hit that special internal part of the ship.

Conzul has a point that generates a new idea: because what you have to hit is inside the ship, and because weapons can't penetrate the ship to get to it, perhaps you could create an explosion with energy damage with a radius large enough to hit that mount or whatever inside the ship.

This idea piquing my curiosity, I performed the following test: Using vanilla FL I edited the Wasp's energy damage to 10000, edited my character to have an engine that required energy and be in a hostile part of space, removed my shield, launched and engaged cruise to get an NPC to fire a Wasp at me. BAM!! My energy was completely gone! And, since I set the energy required by the engine to be higher than the recharge rate of the power plant, I could only go about 25kps because I didn't have enough power to fully run my engine.

Conclusion: In no way, shape or form is this idea of a weapon impossible. In fact, it's rather easy to do. Simply create a beam weapon (which I have done, it's not that hard) that has an explosion effect, set the radius of that explosion to be 50m (the radius of the Wasp's explosion), set it to a high energy damage and viola, there's your ionic current weapon. In fact, I'll post code for such a weapon as soon as I can compile it.

Tee hee, I love it when I can solve a problem like this. On to compiling that code... I'll also post the code for my beam weapon just in case I mess something up in making the new gun code.

Still working on getting the code working, I'm having difficulty getting energy weapon effects and an explosion at the same time, any hints?

In the meantime, here's my idea for the beam effects:

A note about the beam effects: the closer you get to your target the thinner they get, and if you get too close they disappear entirely. Just FYI.

Ooh, alive indeed. Just one thing though.

Energy_damage is shield damage, nothing more. All weapons and mines and missiles etc have this below the hull_damage entry. Some weapons have 0 energy damage, and if your shield_damage_factor (something like that) in constants.ini is left at 0.5 then a weapon with 0 energy damage will do half the hull damage by constant default.

Disruptors have a unique line (which can be used on weapons also) cruise_disruptor = true. So thats the only *extra* thing that can be added to a weapon, as far as I know. I haven't done too much with weapons.

I am interested though in this invisible object that got hit, hmm. Needs a looksy.
Perhaps it was the power device itself and FL is somehow coded to not allow the powerplant to be destroyed when fired upon but just *leak* power.

Aden,

If I hadn't conducted that test where that modified Wasp missile disrupted my engines, power and cruise, I might agree with you that "energy_damage" is shield damage only, but guaranteed it drains power. Try the test yourself, you'll see that I'm not faking any of this