Pods

[nerfman]

One early game strategy that I have been using more and more lately is to use transports w/ satellite bays as makeshift combat units. That has made me think.

If any of you are familliar w. the Honor Harrington series, you will recall that as the series progressed, the strategy of using towed missile pods was key to many Mantie victories. With that being said, this is what I envision:

A component that allows a ship to tractor so many satellites behind as pods. Based on the current tacical combat interface, I have no idea how you actually pull this off, but that would be a great idea.

[Lerchey]

Nerfman,

The biggest problem with that (though I'd love to have missile pods too!) is that you can't actually use tractor beams to TOW things. All you can do is to push stuff around in tactical combat. If the tractors actually let you tow, you could create large sats full of CSMs and drag 'em around with battlecruisers and dreadnaughts, and do the Manties proud.

It would be cool... though I don't want to see salvos like some of the ones in the books where they popped multiple THOUSANDS of missiles in one shot! At least not from the receiving end...

Lt. Col. John

[Phoenix-D]

The closest you could get for this would be to make special storage bays for sats that could dump a large amount per combat turn, but none in strategic. Give it a decent amount of storage- enough to hold the amount of sats it could launch in one turn- and mark it as "armor". That way, once the shields go it gets hit first, and if it goes so do the sats in it.

Or you could make a special CSM commponent, also marked as armor, that is very small but fires only once per combat (I think I'll be doing this in my mod, once I get done with the Primitive one).

The problem with both of these: while they represent the "Harrington" class (ships built around launching pods) nicely, both take up space, which towed missile pods do not. On the other hand, you don't need to install tractors, so it somewhat evens out..

I think HH style missile-pod battles would make SE4 puke, though WAaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy too many missiles flying around (I seem to recall one having 14000 missiles launched in the first salvo..with more in space by the time that one hit. Can we say "range check error?")

Phoenix-D

[Matryx]

I read this and thought it'd be quite interesting to try and mod.

It doesn't seem too hard to do either.
If you think about it... what does it in effect do... it adds to what you can store on the ship (i.e. size) but it should be stored behind the ship (i.e. armour component)

Now it's not a very vision of your description but could you not have a component like this :-

Name := Battle Pod
Description := This is an external rigging strapped to the outside of a ship that can effectively give the ship more space.
Pic Num := 3554
Tonnage Space Taken := -50
Tonnage Structure := 50
Cost Minerals := 1500
Cost Organics := 350
Cost Radioactives := 600
Vehicle Type := Ship\Base\Sat\WeapPlat
Supply Amount Used := 0
Restrictions := None
General Group := Pods
Family := 3524
Roman Numeral := 1
Custom Group := 0
Number of Tech Req := 1
Tech Area Req 1 := Armor
Tech Level Req 1 := 1
Number of Abilities := 2
Ability 1 Type := Armor
Ability 1 Descr := Is damaged before any other components on a ship.
Ability 1 Val 1 := 0
Ability 1 Val 2 := 0
Ability 2 Type := Standard Ship Movement
Ability 2 Descr := Because of the extra bulk, the pod slows down your craft.
Ability 2 Val 1 := -1
Ability 2 Val 2 := 0
Weapon Type := None

Note the size taken is negative. With this the ship *should* be able to add what they want *inside* the pod (i.e. being towed behind)
The only disadvantage is there is no way of saying that the stuff towed behind is to be destroyed first.

To stop the Users from creating millions of these on a single ship you could edit VehicleSize.txt and insert the following line
Requirement Max Pods := X <-- where X is the number you want to restrict it to depending on the ship size.
Also, you may have noticed that the pod has a -1 to ship movement (not sure if this would work)

[EDIT: For reference, this does not work.]
[You cannot have a - to Tonnage Taken]

------------------
DM Matryx
Author of Dominatio Cosmicum

[This message has been edited by Matryx (edited 08 May 2001).]

[Nitram Draw]

As was suggested below, you could do this with 3 new items. Create a small pod vehicle, special pod missiles and a pod launcher. Make the pod vehicle small in size, 5kt or so and add a small missile component, 1-2 kt in size. Make a small, 1kt or so, launcher that could store enough pods so that you could launch a massive amount in tactical combat only. Since storage capacity is not related to the physical size of the storage container this should be workable.
You might need to differentiate it from a mine so that you couldn't launch those tons of mines in combat, but I'm not sure how many people launch mines in tactical combat anyway so it might not be a problem.

[This message has been edited by Nitram Draw (edited 08 May 2001).]

[This message has been edited by Nitram Draw (edited 08 May 2001).]

[Oggy ben Doggy]

Pods, as done in the HH books, were single shot. So if you did custom componenents, you should have a reload rate of 30.

Has anyone tried using a tractor to tow a satillite? I imagie it won't let you target your own unit.