Aircraft Carriers?

[Keon]

Look, BBE tanks are a stretch. Watercraft would never be used. Give me one time you would use a boat when you could fly there at ten times the speed in an atmospheric fighter/dropship/frigate.

[fr0stbyte124]

Doesn't matter; the engine is game-agnostic. Assuming it is ever used for anything beside Futurecraft, boats/submarines will either be possible for every mod, or they will be possible for no mod.

[҉]

Equally important to this discussion is the fact that watercraft are virtually non-existent in science fiction. I can think of a couple, but they're rare because they're pretty useless.

[Chairman_Tiel]

Futurecraft isn't purely sci fi, though. "The journey is the reward" was what I got out of the original plan, plus moar when one gets to space.

If watercraft become useless, they get scrapped, just like irl. I think basic 'Destroyer', 'Cruiser', and 'Carrier' seaborne hulls should be added with a simple rock paper scissors relationship. But, it'd be nice if there were uses for them, like being able to function fine when an EMP goes off while spacecraft just drop out of the air, or something like that.

As an afterthought, Jedi, Star Wars has boats, at least according to Galactic Battlegrounds. Command & Conquer makes extensive use of them. Can't think of anything else, but they can serve a purpose in the mod as cheap, ocean-only fire support when you can't get a carrier down into the atmosphere.

[fr0stbyte124]

Supreme Commander has awesome boats.

[҉]

As an afterthought, Jedi, Star Wars has boats, at least according to Galactic Battlegrounds. Command & Conquer makes extensive use of them. Can't think of anything else, but they can serve a purpose in the mod as cheap, ocean-only fire support when you can't get a carrier down into the atmosphere.

I know they're around (There's Aay'han from Republic Commando, and the gambling submarine that gets blasted out from under Han and Lando in... NJO, maybe? Too lazy to look it up.) But they're not useful and common the way spacecraft are.

[Chairman_Tiel]

Aay'han's technically a spess-ship. I don't get how a submarine could possibly qualify to be one to this day.

But, it's not like this will take a SOOPER DOOPER EXTRA amount of coding to accomplish, just modify copernicus code to not have ascent or descent for these particular hulltypes, make the ship cores much cheaper and require to be afloat on water to work, and bam. Seaborne ships.

[҉]

Aay'han's technically a spess-ship. I don't get how a submarine could possibly qualify to be one to this day.

But, it's not like this will take a SOOPER DOOPER EXTRA amount of coding to accomplish, just modify copernicus code to not have ascent or descent for these particular hulltypes, make the ship cores much cheaper and require to be afloat on water to work, and bam. Seaborne ships.

Well, the requirements for a deep-sea submarine are really pretty similar to the requirements for a spaceship. There are some differences, of course, but it's the same basic idea, being a pressurized metal thing that very carefully separates inside and outside, because if outside and inside are the same you have a bad problem and will not go to space today or maybe ever.

And, I dunno. If it really isn't much harder, then by all means. But what I was getting from Fr0st's posts was that it would take a fair bit of work to get it right, and realistically it wouldn't add that much to the mod.

[fr0stbyte124]

The problem isn't making a ship go under water. The problem is making the water not be there when you do. The water blocks have to stay physically in place, so you need to get entities to somehow just not interract with the water when they are contained within the submarine. Since vessels are not actually vessels, but moving terrain, this is not a particularly easy rule to define.

Imagine your "submarine" is just a giant bucket made of blocks, which you put into the water. Not only can you not render the water surface inside the bucket as you submerge, but you have to tell the entities within the bucket that they are in the air and not in the water. As far as the engine is concerned, there is no functional difference between a bucket and a submarine.

[Error]

Watercraft could be useful, but only in certain circumstances.
Like starcraft aren't so good at clearing underground caverns (without removing the ground).
Like infantry have issues cleaning up the bottom of an ocean.

[cats]

Watercraft would be much cheaper to operate than aerospace craft. You could employ NPCs to pilot from place to place with no player supervision, ferrying large amounts of tanks and fighters in a small amount of time. Ships could be used as mobile defense platforms as well, protecting from an assault on your seas. Maybe you could place a small boat on a dropship and drop it in an ocean of your enemy with a load of infantry.

[Chairman_Tiel]

Wait, what? I thought we were talking about Carriers, not submarines.

[fr0stbyte124]

I think we've pretty much covered the bases on carriers. The topic is now boats.

[҉]

You've got the same problems with boats as with submarines for the most part, anyway. If you can do one you can do the other.

[Luna]

I've sparked up many topics that i didn't even mean to.