Thread: Aeroplanes

Suggestion:

the air-to air involves a bit of this:

Trailer:

HTML Code:

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VFX Trailer:

HTML Code:

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(Oh, naga, feel free to embed-ify the video)

Edited by Naga: Embedded as requested included VFX trailer

very good looking film...

Agreed, I definitely want to have a destructive control system, so if you get hit in the rudder enough you loose steerage. It would be really cool if players had to try and ditch if they wanted to survive. The higher-skilled pilots would manage it, the less-skilled would be killed trying.

Lots of smoke and flames would also add to the ambience.

ooh, cool VFX trailer. I like.

Thought you'd like that

Originally Posted by General Naga

Agreed, I definitely want to have a destructive control system, so if you get hit in the rudder enough you loose steerage. It would be really cool if players had to try and ditch if they wanted to survive. The higher-skilled pilots would manage it, the less-skilled would be killed trying.

Lots of smoke and flames would also add to the ambience.

Good idea, maybe the damage to the rudder/engine/whatever could be determined by a behind the scenes "dice roll?" Like an engine could stop working for x seconds, just be disabled or blow up and damage the plane (and wing) death spiral! A rudder could be damaged as you said and depending on the degree of damage either make steering less responsive or lose you the ability to steer altogether?

I'd be more tempted to instead of making it a dice roll if any part of the rudder was hit. I'd make it a certainty if the critical areas of the rudder are hit. E.g. the hinges and the control rods. If the main area of the rudder is hit the effect would be minimal in reality.

That sounds like a better idea, but what about the airships? Maybe if the envelope was hit the airship wouldn't be able to fly as high, the more times its hit the lower its max height becomes until its forced to the ground. Or will you just have it slowly losing height when hit?

Well *most* of the airships have armoured envelopes. So the number of penetrating hits is much reduced. I'd have thought we'd have it so you slowly loose height once a threshold of damage has been met. The more damage after that point the fast you fall.

We've been discussing the idea of having a variable mass for some airships (like in a submarine) so the pilot (or the computer automatically) could adjust the weight of the ship. This would be useful when landing for example when you want to be heavier so you stay on the ground. That's a little off topic for this thread though

Fair enough,
Just one (more) thing on the Armoured Airships........ Its not actually possible to have airships armoured all over since they plating weighs more then helium can lift and therefore they struggle to fly (if they can at all) an airship with a metal envelope was built once but that was aluminium and only about...um... 0.00008 (or so) inches thick. You could get around that issue by just armouring the bottom of the envelope so it would still be mostly protected, using propellers and the like to provide additional lift or assuming that the factions have found someway around that problem.

Anyway, back to topic. Would the tractionists be the only ones to have heavier-then-air craft? Will each side focus on different types of air combat eg. Airships or Fixed-Wing or will everyone have functional equivilents in the intrests of balance? (I never finished the series so I'm not entirely sure what happend there)


Thanks.