weapon platforms, weight ratios and modding questions

[orev_saara]

I'm in the process of creating my own personal mod, and a thought struck me Last night: Why weapon platforms? They really make no sense. For projectile guns and missile launchers, you have all of that gravity to overcome. Launching a missile out of orbit uses tremendous amounts of fuel. As for energy weapons, you have atmosphere to get through, which would degrade just about anything, espacially those projectile guns. A depleted uranium cannon firing from ground, through atmosphere, and escaping orbit? Ludicrous. Not really impossible, but far costlier than putting a similar launcher in orbit beforehand. The whole concept of planetary weapon platforms is somewhat fanciful, but they can have a huge impact on SE games, especially if you allow any WP range extending mounts. If anything, there should be WP range-decreasing mounts. Maybe someone else already said all of this.

The reason that I thought of all of this is mostly that I was trying to reason out how much cargo Earth could reasonably carry without any gigantic "cargo storage" cities. I figured that even if we go with Earth being large, 8000 kt is awfully light. And then I started wondering about fighters too. 20 kt for a fighter? Not sure about that, and probably nothing I can do about it. I'm sure someone has noticed that before.

Those are just comments, I know my options there, but what I wanted to know was where I could find some tutorials about data files, especially AI files. Some of that stuff makes NO sense to me. I just downloaded the available image MOD stuff, I think that's a great idea, but the AI construction queue (that word doesn't look right) files are complete Greek to me.

The mod itself has no specific focus, just trying to create more options in the game. I don't even have a title. I'm mostly expanding the tech tree, creating new components, new facilities, new mounts, kind of at random. A few tweaks. I doubt I'll ever make it public, as I've stolen from about a dozen other mods done by others and I wouldn't know where to begin with credits. I do have some shame.

Oh, yeah, and does anybody know where I can find more pictures of ships and such for existing races? Thanks.