Number of ships in bay..?

How does one set the number of ships that fits in a single bay?

In order to fix something in my plug, I went to look at what was wrong with my bays... Unable to find anything, I decided to look at nova data files 4 to see how they were set in the stock scenario. I must say, I found something rather surprising... the maximum amount of fighter "outfits", the "ammunation" of the bay "weapon" is actually always set to 9999. Why? How am I supposed to determine the amount of fighters each bay can store?

The wëap resource has a "Max Ammo" field - in EVNEW, it's in the second column of stuff, towards the bottom. For fighter bays, it's set to the maximum number of fighters you can have in your bay. (This stops you from being able to buy the maximum number of fighters, regardless of the number of bays you have, as is the case for missiles.)

Oh man... Can't believe I missed that... Thanks!

Ah, thanks.

I thought it was limited by the max number of outfits that restored the fighters you had.
In EVN no matter how many Chainguns you buy, you can only have 2000 rounds of ammo. But presumably this uses MaxOutfits?
So can you limit it by both the number of outfits and the MaxAmmo, or should you use one of them. If so which should I use, the MaxAmmo presumably?

You can use whichever you like. Typically, the MaxAmmo field of the wëap resource is used when the ammo is stored only within the weapon, as is the case for fighter bays, while the oütf resource's Maximum field is used when the ammo is stored in a separate magazine (and hence you can max out on ammo regardless of how many of that weapon you have).

@belthazar, on Aug 23 2006, 09:25 PM, said in Number of ships in bay..?:

You can use whichever you like. Typically, the MaxAmmo field of the wëap resource is used when the ammo is stored only within the weapon, as is the case for fighter bays, while the oütf resource's Maximum field is used when the ammo is stored in a separate magazine (and hence you can max out on ammo regardless of how many of that weapon you have).

I can see how that might be useful from a balance standpoint, but from a conceptual point of view, I never really understood that. Why can't I buy more than one magazine if I have the space?

You can also accomplish both. I'm getting a little off-topic here, but...
You can make the ammo take up mass. This can be a problem if your ammo represents small projectiles that wouldn't nearly be one ton apeice.
So, if you wanted to represent 10 rounds to the ton, what you would do is make the burst count 10, and flag 'use ammo at the end of burst'. Then a point of ammo won't be deducted until you fire 10 of them. This way, you can hold as much ammo as you can fit in your ship, without requiring each ammo item be huge. It can be helpful to name your outfit "Pellet Round (x10)" or something, so it shows up as "4 Pellet Rounds (x10)"

Also note, the Nova will track these fractions of an item even if you land on a planet, or warp into a new system.

Another way, is to look at this post on how to keep ammo in storage. You can even add a property to limit the player to only loading one outfit of ammo at a time if necessary. In the linked example, you would have outfit 129 also ModMax outfit 128, and give the weapon a max ammo property of 1. This way, you won't be able to pull a new ammo box out of storage until you use up your current box.

This post has been edited by Desprez : 25 August 2006 - 05:05 PM

For more than one magazine, it could be done easily with an invisible "increase maximum" outfit. Of course, it would be best (and easiest) done where you have to buy a magazine to get X amount, and no magazines means no ammo. Obviously, ships that had a certain weapon would come with at least one magazine for it.

Hell, it could be done with a weapon outfit. But increase maximum would be better for developers that want to see how you did it or for when you're going through your work - the same reason people comment their code.

Wow, thanks alot guys. You given me some good ideas on how to build my TC, enhanced it's realism mostly. I always wondered how to make it seem better - (eg. Radar and IR Missiles weighing nothing, but a delivery of 20 tonnes (Fed String))...

Thanks for the hacks orcaloverbri9 and Desprez and for the original answer to my query Belthazar.