Starfighter, Inc. - it talks the talk, but does it deliver?

[DAL59]

4 hours ago, KSK said:

Count me out then. A marvellous, photorealistc galaxy to explore and the only gameplay they can work around it is space combat? And space combat where you actively have to comb through goodness knows how many star systems to deliberately rain on somebody's parade. How incredibly deep and inspiring.

A game based on exploration, the logistical challenge of building and maintaining the space infrastructure to support an interstellar empire, meaningful diplomatic and political interactions with either your own colonies or any alien worlds you come across, preferably skewed towards peacekeeping, cooperation and freedom rather than conquest. A game about the technical and scientific challenges of surviving on strange new worlds. Bonus points if any aliens you come across are more original than your standard, feline, reptilian and ethereal space elf tropes.

Its mostly exploration and mining.  

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Briefly

Spaceflights
Use real physics for interplanetary flights - computing orbits, acceleration/deceleration burns, landing on planets and taking off, docking with mothership or space station. All can be done using autopilot or manual controls.

Exploring
Using telescopes, radars, spectrometers, etc. to obtain data about stars and planets from distance. Mapping a planet's surface by orbital survey: landscape model, mineral distribution, atmosphere composition and properties. Launching automatic probes to quickly mp all planets in the system. Deploying landing probes, taking ground/water/air samples. Driving remote controlled rovers. Landing on a planet in an aerospace shuttle, flying under the ocean surface with aircraft-like controls, walking in a space-suit, driving in a rover, and using ground buildings.

Harvesting
Collecting hydrogen from gas giant upper atmosphere for ship's engines with magnetic ram-scoop. Collecting minerals from asteroids/planets with harvester ships and transporting them to building sites.

Building
Constructing modules for the mothership or an entire ship on orbit using minerals from harvesters and nanoassemblers (nano-robots) or "3D printer". Constructing/upgrading mothership with dockable modules. Constructing utility ships or small modules in onboard nano factories. Constructing ground buildings with nanoassemblers using local materials. Self-repairing of constructions using smart nanomaterials or nanorobots. Manual repairing in some difficult cases.

Colonization
Building bases, domes, cities on planets or building space stations. Building passenger ships and transporting NPC citizens to new colonies. Building orbital fuel stations, a fleet of harvesters, orbital factories, etc. Probably: terraforming.

Development
Importing new models and scripts, with moderation on the main site. Development of scripts for autopilot, defense systems, and warships. In-game exchange and trading of created content between players.

Player-To-Player interaction
Exploring, harvesting, building, colonization in cooperation. Help with repair and evacuation. Server database will save the name of the pioneer of a system/planet and names that he/she gives to them. Trading with ships, colonies, resources, new models and scripts, and programs. Player-vs-player fights in space or on a planet using realistic physics (very hard and expensive).

Details

The player starting with a big starship with a certain degree of autonomy. The ship can make interstellar flights to nearby stars (or rather, to the stars whose relative speed is not greater than 50 km/s - more on that below), carries a bunch of probes and 1-2 shuttles to land on the planets, and has a small onboard plant for the production of equipment and modules. During the game, the ship can be upgraded, but up to a certain limit. When a player accumulates enough money, he can buy a better ship, with a greater degree of autonomy and "range" of flight. Some ships have a modular design, i.e. theoretically can be completely reconstructed, some do not allow upgrading (e.g., atmospheric shuttles). A player can have a lot of ships and manage them remotely from the ship or station, where he is today (like in strategy games). Communications are instant regardless of distance.

The center line of the gameplay is research. The ship is equipped with multiple scientific instruments - telescopes, radars, spectrometers, descend probes, etc. To explore the planet, you have to launch several probes into its orbit, and wait a few days of real time while probes will make a lot of turns around the planet and will map the entire surface of it. The longer probed the planet, the more detailed information you will get (eg, elevation map and distribution of minerals). To get detailed information about the surface conditions - temperature, pressure, etc., you must launch several landers, including remotely controlled rovers, or land yourself using the shuttle (if the environment is not too extreme). Probes can be destroyed by high pressure and temperature, acid clouds, etc. The accuracy of the data depends on the equipment available to the probe. It is possible to take samples, including biological, and bring them to the main ship's onboard laboratory for more detailed investigation, or move to the other players or to a planet with NPC scientists.

The main worth are unusual and new discoveries - the planet with extreme conditions, planet with life, planet suitable for colonization, double black holes, etc. The player can give names to stars, planets, geographic features he have discovered, and type descriptions for them. This information is stored on the server and displayed to other players when they come into the system. Through the server, you can search the planets and other objects by any set of parameters, i.e. the ranges of size, weight, distance to the star, etc, like in the Star browser in the current SE version. But in the game, the search will perform only in a database of objects which was studied by players. The player may decide not to add his discovery to the open database system, ie make his discovery private, but then the rights to name the planets will be given to another player if he accidentally discover this system independently.

In addition to research abilities, the ship will have ability to manufacture various stuff using 3D printing and nanoassembly. In particular, good plants can produce the parts of a new plants or a new ship, which then can be assembled by robots. A bunch of various resources are necessary for production - different chemical elements that can be extracted from asteroids, comets and planets using bots or harvesters. The plant can also be built on the planet. In addition to the plant, it is possible to construct various buildings, ranging from the climate station and ending with a full-fledged colony or city. Construction time depends on the amount of work and on the speed of delivery of the resources. For example, a small probe can be made on the ship within 10 minutes, but a colony on the planet is built for many months or years (of real time). Stopping of delivering of some resource suspend the construction.

Colonies are populated by NPC people and can bring certain benefits to the player. For example, cheap or very fast refueling, repair and construction; set crew for expeditions (affects the speed and quality of operation in laboratories and factories). Transportation NPC's to populate the colony from another planet on a passenger ship (including automatic ones) also makes a profit. The quantity and quality of suitable NPC crew members depends on the population of the colony. In dependence on natural conditions and level of development of the civilization on the planet, it may have a small base with two robots or a thousands of cities with a 10 billion population. The most populated planets in the beginning of the game are the Earth and 10-20 its first stellar colonies.

Physics of the spaceflight is the realistic as possible: Newtonian mechanics, gravity, aerodynamics. Main engines are jet, antigravity will not be used in SE universe. The realistic physics yields to the concepts of the specific impulse, the propellant expense rate, orbital maneurs, etc. Therefore, the complexity of any research or resource extraction will be determined by the delta-V quantity - the total changing of the ship's the speed needed to complete the mission. For example, to exit from the Earth's low orbit to the interplanetary flight, you need 3 km/s of the delta-V. For take-off from the surface of Mars to its orbit you need 3.5 km/s (orbital speed) and additional 2 km/s to lift up and exit the atmosphere. To harvest ammonia from that comet, you need 18 km/s and 6 months of time, but to harvest ammonia from this icy moon, you need 45 km/s and just 2 days - the choice is yours. Nearby stars are moving at a speed of 20-30 km/s relative to each other, but there are stars as fast as 100 km/s in solar vicinity. Stars on the other side of the galaxy in general are moving at a speed of 500 km/s relative to the Sun. The hyperdrive allows the fast (several minutes long) flights between stars, but it will save the physical speed of the ship. Therefore, if the maximum delta-V of the ship is just 50 km/s, these fast or distant stars can not be reached (more precisely, you will have not enough fuel to brake your ship near their planets without using air-braking). The amount delta-Vis determined by the fuel tanks volume, by the specific impulse of the engines, and by the vehicle's weight (so thin framework constructions are more benefit than heavy shielded hull).

Controls over the ship can vary from hardcore fully manual (in reality it is almost impossible and very risky to control the spacecraft manually) to fully automatic - the player simply selects the target, ask the computer to calculatу the most evvective or most fast course, and launches the autopilot. It also will be an "intermediate" solution - semi-automatic mode, where player will make some actions manually, but with prompt from the computer (like in Orbiter). In some cases, manual control is more convenient (for example, an overview flight over the terrain in the shuttle). During the long automatic flight, player can switch to control another ship factory, colony, take analysis over the data collected by the probes, communicate with another players, etc.

In addition to resources for construction, you need a working body (propellant) for ship's engines. Normally this is a hydrogen, which may be produced or collected in different ways. The easiest way is purchase it at a orbital fuel station near Earth or any advanced colony. But rather good ships can collect it themselves - extract hydrogen from ice of a comets or icy moons using harvesters, or collect from atmospheres of a gas giants with a magnetic air intake. Different methods and different models of the ships could do it at different speed and efficiency. The fastest way is to replace an empty propellant tank with a full one at a fuel station (5 minutes), the longest way is to collect hydrogen from atmosphere of a gas giant (many days). At some point, the player could build their own fuel station with a fleet of automatic harvesters running between the station and gas giant or icy moon, and take profit from other players by allow them to refuel on his station. But in the long expeditions in an unexplored system, you have to carefully monitor the propellant expense rate, to prevent finding yourself with empty tanks without the possibility to return to the civilization.

In such case, you can switch to another ship and bring it to the one which is stuck without fuel, and refuel it. Or you can call the other player to help you. The ship can be damaged or even destroyed, if you pilot it careless. Ship can perform minor repairs by itself, but serious damage may require the assistance of other ships or players (for example, if the ship can not move due to destruction of the engines). If the player's character was in the ship when it was destroyed (for example, by an unsuccessful landing or docking) he dies, and his property (ships, stations, bases) goes "inheritance." This mean what player can create a new character with new name, which will inherit the property of the died one. Also, ships and space station, bases and colonies on the planets can be damaged and destroyed by natural disasters, such as meteor shower or volcano eruption.

 

It has only one dev, so it will probably be several years till release

However, this isn't vapor ware, because it has been around and has been continually updated for years.  

 

[KSK]

Well hot-diggety. Note to self - before commenting on something, go read up on it first.

Thanks @DAL59 - if that's ever released it looks like something I could get thoroughly engrossed with. In single player mode for preference - I don't have a lot of faith in cooperative multiplayer in a persistent shared universe where not being cooperative is also an option.

[Gkirmathal]

Bit off topic, my apologies!

On 12/14/2017 at 3:57 PM, Nibb31 said:

Because any semi-realistic space-sim is going to need time warp due to the distances, and N-body physics makes time-warp near impossible, and a time warp mechanism in an MMORPG is going to break the gameplay.

I do not think this would mutually exclusive.

But a plot device for "faster than light travel" is needed (albeit a logically limited mechanic) to make a The Expanse MMO environment work. Like you say, speeding up time is a no-go solution for a semi-realistic space-sim MMO.

I say logically limited, with a good background story (you read the books I hope so you know what I'm pointing at), otherwise it will become too much of an arcade like mechanics as we see in SC. This would not do honors to The Expanse universe and where it came from.

 

 

 

 

[DAL59]

6 hours ago, Gkirmathal said:

But a plot device for "faster than light travel" is needed

The expanse has the ring.

[regex]

On 12/15/2017 at 12:15 AM, KSK said:

Not as I understand it, although I'm saying this having never played the game. At least at launch, NMS seemed to be all about the exploration, with some personal crafting thrown in for good measure. Not so much about the infrastructure building, or meaningful interactions with other worlds. NMS actually looked quite fun to me, its just something I never got around to playing.

At launch NMS was a decent walking sim, I put in about 70 hours on release, pretty enjoyable if you're into that thing.

Recent patches, of which I put another 70 hours or so into, added infrastructure and fetch quests, kind of tedious all told but it did get me back into the game. It was much harder to get things fully upgraded.

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And the miserable failure seemed to me to be a classic case of a hype train out of control with every gamer and his/her dog fondly imagining what the game was going to be despite having very little evidence to support those fond imaginings. Then, of course, when it turns out they were largely deluding themselves, the backlash began.

This exactly. I had a feeling it was all a hype train on purchase and thus was not disappointed, even if it should have been a $30 game for the content.

Edited December 17, 2017 by regex

[tater]

If fighters in space are a thing, it’s not “hard sf,” period.

[Gkirmathal]

22 hours ago, DAL59 said:

The expanse has the ring.

Yes indeed. But that still leaves in system travel distance and time (game time)

Lore wise: it would not be "far fetched" that a few decades later in the story line, a breakthrough propulsion technology is invented, that is back engineered from protomolecule tech.
This would be the FTL "plot device" that is needed, to make long in system distances vs time, viable in an MMO setting. "Epstein plot device" would be suited for all distances maneuvers.

Couple that with a scaled down universe (regretfully needed imo) and one can make it MMO viable.

[tater]

MMO games in a space or naval setting cannot use time compression if it is to be even slightly realistic, IMHO. It breaks everything.

Have a persistent universe, set your ship on the heading, and have it send you a text alert if sensors detect anything. Yeah, that real time 2 week trip within the solar system is gonna take a while. FTL can hand wave as needed, obviously. 

Single player can have time warp, obviously.

Edited December 18, 2017 by tater

[DAL59]

4 hours ago, tater said:

If fighters in space are a thing, it’s not “hard sf,” period.

Not necessarily,i f weapons are powerful enough to take out a ship in s one shot, it makes sense to have many smaller ships.  Of course, they have to obey Newtonian physics, but if they do, its fine.  Though they will probably be drones, not Starfuries.      

2 hours ago, Gkirmathal said:

Yes indeed. But that still leaves in system travel distance and time (game time)

Lore wise: it would not be "far fetched" that a few decades later in the story line, a breakthrough propulsion technology is invented, that is back engineered from protomolecule tech.
This would be the FTL "plot device" that is needed, to make long in system distances vs time, viable in an MMO setting. "Epstein plot device" would be suited for all distances maneuvers.

Couple that with a scaled down universe (regretfully needed imo) and one can make it MMO viable.

It only takes days to go from Earth to Mars at one gee.  With 1/10 scale solar system, it is possible.  

[tater]

40 minutes ago, DAL59 said:

Not necessarily,i f weapons are powerful enough to take out a ship in s one shot, it makes sense to have many smaller ships.  Of course, they have to obey Newtonian physics, but if they do, its fine.  Though they will probably be drones, not Starfuries.      

What's their payload mass fraction, and how much dv could they possibly have?

A "fighter" needs to get within weapons range, fire, and then RTB. You can have fighters, but the total dv minus some reserve, divided by 2 is as fast as they can possibly go, and is likely measured in hundreds of m/s at most.

[DAL59]

13 minutes ago, tater said:

What's their payload mass fraction, and how much dv could they possibly have?

A "fighter" needs to get within weapons range, fire, and then RTB. You can have fighters, but the total dv minus some reserve, divided by 2 is as fast as they can possibly go, and is likely measured in hundreds of m/s at most.

If the payload fraction is the same as the mothership, delta vee is the same.  

Fighters would also be cheaper and more expendable.  

[tater]

29 minutes ago, DAL59 said:

If the payload fraction is the same as the mothership, delta vee is the same.  

Fighters would also be cheaper and more expendable.  

If it's a fighter, it by definition has a person inside it, which is absurd, since then the craft requires life support, etc. With rockets, bigger is better, and with a crew vehicle, there is a minimum ante of equipment required. LS for the crew, the mass of the weapon system, engines, etc. You figure can very quickly become quite large in return for almost no capability. What benefit is a fighter that can do, say, 10km/s of total dv? That's enough to leave an orbit and maybe go someplace, but the trip might be quite long. Generally with think of a "fighter" as we do now, not as a place the pilot might spend months.

If a fighter is going slow enough to actually maneuver (think of a B5 starfury making passes on a target craft, then coming home), then it will take forever to get anywhere more than a few km from where it left.

[DAL59]

40 minutes ago, tater said:

If it's a fighter, it by definition has a person inside it, which is absurd, since then the craft requires life support, etc. With rockets, bigger is better, and with a crew vehicle, there is a minimum ante of equipment required. LS for the crew, the mass of the weapon system, engines, etc. You figure can very quickly become quite large in return for almost no capability. What benefit is a fighter that can do, say, 10km/s of total dv? That's enough to leave an orbit and maybe go someplace, but the trip might be quite long. Generally with think of a "fighter" as we do now, not as a place the pilot might spend months.

Yes, I know.  I was thinking more along the lines of drones.  

[tater]

Note even drones. Missiles.

There is no way you can send a vehicle towards an enemy at any reasonable velocity, and also stop, then come back. Of course the faster you go, the less you can change your aim point.

[DAL59]

@tater, If the ships are within a few thousand kilometers, having drones would allow you to send lasers closer, or fight their drones.  Also, they could be used for electronic warfare, or boarding a vessel(spaceships are expensive.  You probably want to capture your enemies ships, not destroy them.)          

[tater]

Just now, DAL59 said:

@tater, If the ships are within a few thousand kilometers, having drones would allow you to send lasers closer, or fight their drones.  Also, they could be used for electronic warfare, or boarding a vessel(spaceships are expensive.  You probably want to capture your enemies ships, not destroy them.)          

Any laser powerful enough to fit on a small craft might be nuclear-bomb pumped, anyway (boom!). Fighting drones? Meh. Once you get a drone close to a "real" target of size, the fire control solution to hit the drone 100% of the time with a laser becomes trivial (not enough time to randomize the target position during the travel time of the laser pulse such that a miss is possible).

Boarding isn't a thing unless the target vessel is already entirely disabled I think. Evading is too easy, and any sufficiently powerful engine on a spacecraft is also a weapon. On top of that, any target on an intercept trajectory is a 2d fire control solution, the boarding ship will get hammered.

That said, I can see the equivalent of "striking the colors" being a thing in the right SF universe... crewed ships are vulnerable, and the loss of life would tend to be submarine-like.  Either most live, or everyone dies. In that sort of binary outcome situation, you'd think reliably surrendering might become a thing.

[DAL59]

Making lots of small ships is also better if, say, you were invading all of jupiter's moons at once.  

[Hypercosmic]

You don't have to stop your drones when fighting with the enemy. Just send them on a collision course and there we go: KKVs with guns

[DDE]

8 hours ago, DAL59 said:

Making lots of small ships is also better if, say, you were invading all of jupiter's moons at once.  

You’d be an idiot, though: never spread your forces thin like that, stick to ‘moon hopping’, swarm each target sequentially. The comparative effectiveness of a fighting force grows exponentially with size 

As to drone lasers and E-War, both suffer badly from being scaled down. You may have much better results at the same range with multimegawatt installations on the mothership.

Edited December 19, 2017 by DDE

[DAL59]

4 hours ago, DDE said:

You’d be an idiot, though: never spread your forces thin like that, stick to ‘moon hopping’, swarm each target sequentially. The comparative effectiveness of a fighting force grows exponentially with size 

As to drone lasers and E-War, both suffer badly from being scaled down. You may have much better results at the same range with multimegawatt installations on the mothership.

The problem is money.  A single missile or kinetic impactor could take out a large ship, so you want to have many small ones.  Maybe instead of tiny drones, some medium sized ships might be better.  

[DDE]

1 hour ago, DAL59 said:

Maybe instead of tiny drones, some medium sized ships might be better.  

Perhaps, but there are further advantages for larger ships. For example, the square-cube law seems to make armor dramatically more efficient. Plus bugger lasers end up in the kinetic-penetrator-melting territory.

I’m not entirely sold on the supremacy of small ships.

[tater]

As in any debate about a SF warfare premise, the underlying tech needs to all be on the table for a given setting. I was responding regarding it as a realistic thing. If the game has magical space drives with tons of dv in a tiny package, etc, then realism is out the window, but small craft might in fact be more useful.

OTOH, if you make fighter-sized craft capable of huge dvs, then I need to know how much dv I can potentially give any spacecraft in that SF universe. What % of c can I obtain with their drives? "Fighters" start looking like KE weapons pretty quickly. Also, crew is pretty pointless. Crew don't direct any weapon system in space combat, the computer does. Crew only weaken the capability of the craft, frankly.

[DAL59]

5 hours ago, tater said:

crew is pretty pointless. Crew don't direct any weapon system in space combat, the computer does. Crew only weaken the capability of the craft, frankly.

That's why you might have one heavily defended crewed ship(for decision making without lag), and lots of smaller drones, or a few unmanned large craft.   

[tater]

At the point any of this is happening, you have AI, probably.

[kerbiloid]

A hard sci-fi movie in naval setting with no fighters. Just place it into space.
Any sail-propelled fighters?
Btw, durations are almost the same.

Spoiler

 

23 hours ago, tater said:

If it's a fighter, it by definition has a person inside it, which is absurd

Unless the pilot's brain is the organic part of the fighter computer, pilot's body is a supporting frame for it, and the pilot is a depersonalized moron even not realizing what happens. Why not?

22 hours ago, tater said:

Note even drones. Missiles.

Enough intellectual missiles become drones. And who needs stupid space missiles?

21 hours ago, tater said:

Boarding isn't a thing unless the target vessel is already entirely disabled I think.

Or its crew is demoralized or unconscious, or its batteries are discharged, or its electronics is critically supressed.

21 hours ago, tater said:

In that sort of binary outcome situation, you'd think reliably surrendering might become a thing.

And here we again come to the "International maritime signal flags in space".
How could a ship tell that it is surrendering when it even has no rope to rise a white flag?

21 hours ago, DAL59 said:

Making lots of small ships is also better if, say, you were invading all of jupiter's moons at once.  

I would first try to hit the Jupiter magnetosphere with a superbomb. Maybe, it would be enough.

8 hours ago, DAL59 said:

so you want to have many small ones. 

A hedgehog-shaped gamma-laser. A heavy one. Requiring a large ship as a tug.

6 hours ago, tater said:

Also, crew is pretty pointless. Crew don't direct any weapon system in space combat, the computer does.

Just temporarily.
Once the space weapon will be using quantum uncertainty effects, you'll be requiring a trustworthy observer (a pious witness) to resolve the uncertainty and collapse the wavefunction of the gun-target system.
Believe me.

39 minutes ago, DAL59 said:

That's why you might have one heavily defended crewed ship(for decision making without lag), and lots of smaller drones, or a few unmanned large craft.  

 

17 minutes ago, tater said:

At the point any of this is happening, you have AI, probably.

I'm afraid, you are both right. The ship will be having AI containing the crew species hivemind .

Edited December 19, 2017 by kerbiloid