Tractor Beam + Ramming Ship = Death |
I've been playing with the Borg ship set(as in using it, not fiddling with it) and I've made a small sphere ship used to board and capture enemy ships. My design for these ships has evolved. Initially, I realized in the simulator that enemy ships could outrun(actually keep pace) my ships but outrun the boarding party shuttle. So I got better engines, but they were still outrunning the boarding party. To compensate for that, I added tractor beams. That solved the problem nicely, the ships might start to pull ahead, but then the sphere would draw them back into range giving the shuttled boarding party a chance to board the enemy ship.
Having a bunch of these ships had a funny effect. If I had nine or so of these spheres(really only need more than 2) they would start throwing this ship around like a calf caught by a pride of lions. The effect was to slingshot the ship out of range as a result of the combined tractor pull from all the ships.
Not really a big deal, a simple solution was to use fewer ships to keep them from throwing the ship around the map.
But then a new problem surfaced, I would tractor beam an enemy ship and suddenly my sphere would explode. I investigated the schematics of the enemy ship to find no weapons, but their armor had taken damage. I conclude the ships are ramming my spheres and since they are bigger they're blowing them up without being destroyed themselves.
Which poses a problem. Why don't tractor beams have enough sense to hold the enemy ship out of range? I realize there are repulsor beams, but adding those on seems counter-conducive to what I'm trying to do--that is to get the ship in range for the boarding party. It seems that if I were to just add a repulsor beam, it would bring the ship into range and then throw it back out of range--and that's not what I want at all.
So, is there really any need to pull an enemy ship so close that it would ram you? I don't know any futuristic sci fi where a tractor beam works quite like that, it pulls and tows, but it also holds you at a distance.
Am I wrong on my assumptions on how the tractor and repulsor beam would work in conjunction? Is there a work around this?
Re: Tractor Beam + Ramming Ship = Death
I've got no idea how the tractor beam and the repulsor beam would work in tandem, so no help there.
But an IDEA occurred to me while I was reading this. Why not place a tractor beam on a kamikaze ship? heh heh heh. You want it to ram anyway and this would up the odds of your ship hitting the other ship.
Just a thought. And worth every penny you paid for it. 
Directive 721: Cover your own a$$ first. Solo
Re: Tractor Beam + Ramming Ship = Death
Is there a way to deactivate the beam? You can tell a ship to stop targetting, and manually switch specific guns on and off, so why not pause and stop targetting when you're getting too close?
All that is done before the naked stars is remembered
Re: Tractor Beam + Ramming Ship = Death
One thought is to mod the 'damage' done by tractor beams to be such that it is always less than the range to the target -- if the damage was always, say, 5 less than the range, I think that would make it pull the ship to a distance of 5 ls with each hit.
Re: Tractor Beam + Ramming Ship = Death
Hmm, idea: Huge ship with organic armor (so it would regenerate) with tractor beam as adition to other weapons. It would grab ships and crush them
I think, that easiest solution to your problem (not managing to capture ships faster than X (iirc, its around 13), would be increasing speed of capture shuttle with level of boarding parties component. (Or better, depending on prop. tech available)
Re: Tractor Beam + Ramming Ship = Death
Seems like Tractor Beams are [size=40pt]BROKEN[/size].
WTF would anyone WASTE their time messing around with tractor beams when their use is so EXCLUSIVE to a particular use?
Isnt there some way we can mod this useless text of a component in a manner that would make it worthwhile to research?
Re: Tractor Beam + Ramming Ship = Death
This is actually the first thing that came to my mind when I read the thread title.
For the actual issue at hand, what about putting a large mount Tractor with a normal mount repulsor? This way the push damage from the tractor should exceed the pull damage from the repulsor and you wont run the risk of it pulling your target to range 0.
Engine-Damaging Weapons
Have you tried using engine-damaging weapons? It seems like that would be a more natural fit for ships with boarding parties.
Re: Tractor Beam + Ramming Ship = Death
Hey, not a bad idea...load a big ship up full of shields and 1 tractor beam and just have it going around bashing into ships.
Your lord and master (below Foamy) LordHavoc
Re: Engine-Damaging Weapons
Engine damaging weapons don't skip armor, iirc. So first, you need to get the armor down, then the engine, then stop the weapon that destroyed the armor from destroying the whole ship. Too much work.
Even if you did go through all that trouble, you'd have taken control of a ship with no engines...
Re: Tractor Beam + Ramming Ship = Death
I believe in the new patch or at least in the new balance mod, things that you would expect to skip armor will skip armor. So that will be cool. Prior to the patch, I liked Toxic Injectors for boarding ships. Once the ship's crew is dead, it slows down and it's an easy takeover for the boarding party.
Re: Tractor Beam + Ramming Ship = Death
Note that "Only" type weapons did skip armor before in the Balance Mod, but because they only penetrated 90%, multiple armors on the target ship would absorb much of that damage - since the skip effect is applied against each armor. In v1.10, it's 100% skipping, so there's no loss anymore with "Only" type weapons.
Re: Tractor Beam + Ramming Ship = Death
The trick for using older components is to make a design with the low level components. Obsolete it, since it's just a placeholder.
Later on, you can set your filter to show obsolete designs and edit the one with the older components. It's a chore, and you're out of luck if you don't have the right class of ship archived.
Hopefully, some time in the distant future we'll be able to downgrade individual components during construction. Of course it'll just be another advantage for the human over the AI, but it'd still be handy sometimes.
Re: Tractor Beam + Ramming Ship = Death
Read this last night, and it gave me an idea.
If you feel up to modifying the components.txt file, go in to it and go down to the Tractor Beam.
Now modify the damage lines in it to look like this:
Weapon Space Min Damage Modifier Formula := iif([%Range%] >= 20, (10 + (([%Level%] - 1) * 1)) - (([%Range%] / 10) * 5.00) - iif([%Range%] > Min(90, (([%Level%] - 1) * 10) + 30), 10000, 0), 0)
Weapon Space Max Damage Modifier Formula := iif([%Range%] >= 20, (10 + (([%Level%] - 1) * 1)) - (([%Range%] / 10) * 5.00) - iif([%Range%] > Min(90, (([%Level%] - 1) * 10) + 30), 10000, 0), 0)
(Copy and paste those to notepad to make them easier to read.)
That should make it so that if your target is below 20 in range the tractor beam will not fire. Technically, if the range is less than 20 (picked that arbitrarily, could be whatever) then it sets the "damage" (the suck factor of the beam) to zero (which is "do not fire" for the game engine).
This won't cure all the issues with this component, but it should help with pulling them in to ram you.
NOTE:
Weapon mounts can be used with tractor and repulsor beams. When you put a tractor beam on a weapon mount, it will be REALLY powerful. A side effect of the above change is that the minimum activation range (20) will increase if the mount increases the weapon range. This is good, as it will give the game some more distance to bleed off the "drift" that will come with such a powerful suck.
At any rate, because of this post, I think I'll include a heavily modified tractor beam with the next version of my mod. Thanks for the idea.
Re: Engine-Damaging Weapons
Engine damaging weapons don't skip armor, iirc. So first, you need to get the armor down, then the engine, then stop the weapon that destroyed the armor from destroying the whole ship. Too much work.
Even if you did go through all that trouble, you'd have taken control of a ship with no engines...
actually with newer patches "only engine" damage skips armour...
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Re: Tractor Beam + Ramming Ship = Death
What about using the "slow down" or "Timed control loss" damage types instead?
It'd be nice ot leave the engines intact if you're looking to analyze.
Re: Tractor Beam + Ramming Ship =
That'd be a seperate weapon. Maybe have an UBER tractor beam at a higher level that did both?
Re: Tractor Beam + Ramming Ship = Death
The tractor beam should behave as you suggest, but alas, it is single minded. Likewise with the repulsor. It would be great if these two weapons were capable of more fine control than they currently are.
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