Random thought - orbital defenses

@eugene-chin, on Apr 3 2006, 06:28 PM, said in Random thought - orbital defenses:

Say you had an armed spöb as the defense platform. It would have one weapon active to fend off daily threats. If you wanted to beef up the spöb's armaments for a specific event in your story, you could have an invisible, zero-speed ship placed on top of the spöb by a mission. You could say that the defenders are going to a higher state of alert.

That would be really cool in the Auroran storyline, when you ambush the Federation and everyone supposedly runs to their battlestations, but the LP just has one puny little railgun.

But you could probably combine Edwards' and your idea to make a kind of "makeshift defence system". Oh, the possibilities...

@orcaloverbri9, on Apr 3 2006, 02:52 AM, said in Random thought - orbital defenses:

I doubt it. You would only have a max of four missions active at any given time. In any case, with a limit as low as 32, I don't expect there would be any systems with more than one orbital defense system. That would mean that in those systems, the user could have up to 15 of their own missions. You could even go so far as to keep a dummy mission active all the time to make sure they don't go over 16 before entering the system.

What? Where does the max of 4 come from? Remember that each turret on a station requires one mission (no. of turrets you want is up to you), that you can't spawn ships at planets while you're in the system, and that you can't trigger anything on SystemEnter.

@eugene-chin, on Apr 3 2006, 01:28 PM, said in Random thought - orbital defenses:

If the defenses are worth it, it would take a campaign to remove them. That's when the author could get the greatest effect by slipping this little treat in. That's when you would see these defenses at their strongest.

I remember something like this from an EV TC. A mission would swap the system with a version without the station and have an uber powerful special ship as the station instead.

@guy, on Apr 4 2006, 03:58 AM, said in Random thought - orbital defenses:

...you can't trigger anything on SystemEnter.

You could fake it with nebulas. They have an on explore field that can launch a mission.

@eegras-studios, on Apr 4 2006, 11:42 AM, said in Random thought - orbital defenses:

You could fake it with nebulas. They have an on explore field that can launch a mission.

Unfortunately, that will only work properly the first time you enter the system, and worse yet, the OnExplore field fires every time you load the pilot after you explore it, not just when you first explore the nebula.
Now, if you wanted a reload counter...

Edwards

@guy, on Apr 4 2006, 05:58 AM, said in Random thought - orbital defenses:

What? Where does the max of 4 come from?

Well, I was thinking of one per spob. I suppose you could have more if you wanted, but...well, nope. I forgot that -5 through -16 work. Scratch all that. I was thinking one for each spob 1-4.

Meh.