3-D SFB Proposals
Star Fleet Universe Discussion Board: Star Fleet Battles: SFB Proposals Board: New Rules: 3-D SFB Proposals
  Subtopic Posts   Updated
Archive through November 23, 2002  25   11/23 01:33pm
Archive through August 17, 2004  25   08/17 06:17pm
Archive through August 31, 2004  25   08/31 06:41pm
Archive through October 10, 2004  25   10/10 03:09pm
Archive through December 02, 2004  25   12/02 12:38am
Archive through December 03, 2004  25   12/03 03:30pm
Archive through December 07, 2004  25   12/07 12:41am
Archive through December 08, 2004  25   12/08 12:52am
By Loren Knight (Loren) on Wednesday, December 08, 2004 - 12:58 am: Edit

Alan is right. Zero strength webs don't block anything. But it doesn't take much to get it functioning as a 1 strength web does.

By Steven E. Ehrbar (See) on Wednesday, December 08, 2004 - 01:44 am: Edit

Sorry, this has really gotten off topic. My reply about web-enabled GBDP is in the Tholian Tactics thread.

By Ken Burnside (Ken_Burnside) on Wednesday, December 08, 2004 - 09:54 pm: Edit

OK, on a diversion...

I'm doing up TCs for my own amusement on this.

I currently have the Fed, Klingon and KR done.

Bypassing the Tholians for now, what's the next TC people think I should do?

Please make a recommendation, and include where you think the phasers are (top or bottom of the hull), whether or not the 30 degree arc segments can allow some interesting firing arcs (like with the Klingon disruptor arcs listed in the archives)

By Adam James Villatorio (Merlinfmct87) on Wednesday, December 08, 2004 - 11:19 pm: Edit

TFH or Andro are my votes. Of course making the Dis Dev work in 3-D could be tricky, what with the changed movement dynamic(3-D, and the new way of handeling Turn Modes).

But we won't know until we try, right? .

Merlin

By John Trauger (Vorlonagent) on Wednesday, December 08, 2004 - 11:34 pm: Edit

Ken,

You DO realize SVC is looking for something he doesn't have to produce custom SSDs for, right?

By Loren Knight (Loren) on Wednesday, December 08, 2004 - 11:50 pm: Edit

Gorn or Kzinti would seem logical. If not them then the Orion.

By David Lang (Dlang) on Thursday, December 09, 2004 - 12:31 am: Edit

John, the problem is that the firing arcs in 3D are something that needs to be shown somewhere, they are vastly different then in 2D (for example a 360 phaser can't fire everywhere in 3D, it's on eitehr the top or bottom of the ship and can't fire through the ship)

what can be done is to define the firing arcs for weapons positions on the standard hulls and that will cover most varients as well, but some of them will require additional arc diagrams

By Ken Burnside (Ken_Burnside) on Thursday, December 09, 2004 - 01:01 am: Edit

OK, next are the TFH and Gorn

Where are the phasers on these things? Anyone got a miniature they can eyeball? I need a list of weapon numbers/letters and "Are they on the top or bottom" of the hull and whether other parts of the hull could reasonably block fire.

John: This is mostly for my own amusement at this point. I honestly don't see anyone wanting to run major fleet actions in 3-D with SFB. As an experiment with just the tourney ships? Maybe.

David: One of the things i hope to do is get finer resolution on the firing and launch arcs in 3-D.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, December 09, 2004 - 09:55 am: Edit

Gorn.....

The phasers are of two types, those on the wings and those on the bubbles.

The ones on the bubbles are at about 11 and 1 o'clock in front and 5 and 7 on the back. They would be able to fire straight up and down and would cover every vertical target in their 180-degree arc, except for a blind spot for the rear ones caused by the engines.

The ones on the wings are a little tricker. There is basically one on the top and one on the bottom of each wing. Each one has a 180 degree flat arc, and would cover all targets up or down (not both). Tricker still, the right-top wing phaser could fire to the left over the top of the ship at a 30 degree angle above the horizon. And so forth. The phaser-3s are on the wing edges so they have 180 degree arcs up and down but not backwards.

By Loren Knight (Loren) on Thursday, December 09, 2004 - 11:05 am: Edit

To make the ships work with such localized weapondry I would suggest allowing them pitch and yaw a good 20 degrees without counting it as movement in order to bring things into arc. The problem is that in 3D to get an alpha strike like in SFB would be near impossible. It will be very rare to line targets up on 0°. The pitch and yaw movement would allow you to choose a line up degree with in a few of your actual.

Say my target is 5° port and down. There is several weapons that just would not make it that would in SFB. But Pitch and Yaw correction bring it with in the limit.

You could limit the number of movements to bring weapons into arc to one, two or three corrections.

If you don't do this you might find that ships become less balanced as there might be some good blind spots you could approach a ship from that you normally (in SFB) wouldn't.

By Ken Burnside (Ken_Burnside) on Thursday, December 09, 2004 - 11:16 am: Edit

Loren, right now the way the 3-D turn modes work, we may not need that. I will say that every ship (even the Klingon) have some odd gaps in coverage with weapons.

Steve, are the Gorn plasmas on the top or bottom of the wing? I seem to recall them being on the top.

And, do the Kzinti pod-phaser 3s (the ones on gantries out from the hull) do the same top/bottom split as the Gorn?

By Loren Knight (Loren) on Thursday, December 09, 2004 - 11:20 am: Edit

Ken, the plasmas are on the outside edges of the wings...and on the corners. There are well placed for 3D I'd think.

By David Lang (Dlang) on Thursday, December 09, 2004 - 11:34 am: Edit

Ken, when posting the AVID stuff besides the top-down view you posted here earlier you should also post figure C-23 from your rulebook. I've found that to be the key to understanding things.

Loren the dead-ahead firing window covers +-15 degrees horizontaly and verticaly so I think the arcs cover you already

By Ken Burnside (Ken_Burnside) on Thursday, December 09, 2004 - 04:03 pm: Edit

Gorn is finished. Each phaser got its own firing arc diagram, for 10 total, plus one for each plasma torp.

I expect the Kzinti will be about the same level of complexity.

Anyone got a list of where the phasers and plasmas on a TFH are?

By Adam James Villatorio (Merlinfmct87) on Saturday, December 11, 2004 - 05:01 am: Edit

A List? No.

I did find some pics on the web though. Look here:

Romulan Hawk class page

You have to rclick and select "view image" for this site, he had to shrink the images for bandwith reasons.

FHK top view, Mike Raper model

FHK, Bottom view, Mike Raper model.

Might be enough to get you started at least. I've also found several Andro mini pics, but none from the bottom.

Another thought you can try is this:

SFC Model Viewer

and it's official cousin...

Taldren Model Viewer(FilePlanet link)

I'd recommend getting both. There are places where the first one will crash and you will need the Taldren viewer to get a good view, but the first one has a menu that allows you to select the background color and give you an exact Top-Bottom-Left-Right-Forward-Back view. There are several TOS mods around, you should be able to find one and get some of the ships you need. I'd recommend SFB-OP 04, as that has Andromedans and Tholians as well(I believe LDR/WYN are included as well, but I'm not sure.)

Firesoul might be able to help you further here.

Merlin

By Stefan Lenfest (Himosan) on Saturday, December 11, 2004 - 07:05 pm: Edit

I'd suggest just looking at the Paint Guides on this very website. They usually show exactly where the weapons are.

By Adam James Villatorio (Merlinfmct87) on Saturday, December 11, 2004 - 08:38 pm: Edit

Actually, that was the first place I looked. I didn't see one for the NHK/FHK, which is why I kept looking for mini pics.

On closer examination, the Romulan "Color Paint Guide" does seem to cover that hull type. The top half only, but still. I missed that entierly. .

It at least provides a nice scematic to look at the other images.

Merlin

By Ken Burnside (Ken_Burnside) on Friday, April 29, 2005 - 12:34 pm: Edit

Xander Fulton wrote:

Quote:

[N]ot from a perspective of 'SFB in 3-d', as that really wouldn't work too well.



Aside from webs, 3-D SFB works reasonably well - it was still recognizably SFB, though seeking weapons got somewhat wierd (mapless, for instance).

My design goals:

1) Change no box on an SSD. Use standard SSDs with additional information.
2) Don't change energy allocation for SFB, even though the AV:T energy management system is simpler.
3) Where movement is concerned, aside from vector mechanics, use AV:T's nomenclature to modify SFB's.
4) Where firing arcs and shield arcs are concerned, map the SFB firing arcs to the AV:T system, which is much higher resolution than SFB's. Map shields to the AV:T orientation symbols, making shield 3 top, and shield 5 bottom.
5) After one experiment with moving drones on the map with 3-D SFB, I adapted AV:T's seeking weapon mechanics to 3-D SFB instead - for two drones, it's more work. For 20 drones, it's less than 2-D SFB.

Now, in terms of balance - it needs more testing. For instance, it's easier to run away from seekers on a fixed map, because you can go up and down and drag them out along the diagonal. On the other hand, all the ships now have oddball firing arc blind spots.

As to 3-D, once you've got everything set up to make 3-D work, 3-D is no more difficult than 2-D, and a lot of thorny SFB issues (split shield boundaries, the odd discrepancies between weapon firing arcs and shield arcs, sideslips, and directed turn modes for mauler firing arcs) go away.

By michael john campbell (Michaelcampbell) on Saturday, April 30, 2005 - 02:19 am: Edit

I'm not sure that the shield boundary problem evaporates or just moves.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, January 15, 2006 - 07:30 pm: Edit

If Ken wants to submit a proposal for this product, both as a full-up boxed game and as a "limited run 20-copy thing for mail order grognards to test", I'll review it.

Add a Message


This is a private posting area. A valid username and password combination is required to post messages to this discussion.
Username:  
Password:

Administrator's Control Panel -- Board Moderators Only
Administer Page | Delete Conversation | Close Conversation | Move Conversation