Starship Grudge Match

[Pu-239]

Applet doesn't seem to fit the space allocated to it on Linux (AWT widgets here are usually bigger than on Windows- why's it in AWT instead of swing anyway? )

[Mad]

Two major questions I don't know the answer to: 'how long does it take SW capship shielding to recover after total shielding failure' (I'm using a really low TESB estimate right now, which forces up the shield capacity estimate due to ROTJ requirements) and 'how much damage does a self-destructing ISD do' (haven't seen that happen in the EU, that I know of).

That may depend on how the shields are taken down. If the projectors are burned out, then the projectors can be replaced within a matter of minutes. This situation would occur if the shields were downed quickly by a massive power spike. (In The Bacta War, Wedge feared that a Victory-class Star Destroyer could lose its shields to a torpedo volley, roll to present fresh shields, lose those shields to a second volley, then roll again to present repaired shields for the final torpedo volley.)

Losing the shields from other methods may take longer to repair, and I don't know of any estimates for those. If the shields were shut down because the generators were overheating from constant attacks more quickly than the heat could be dissipated, then it might depend on how long it takes the shields to cool down and on how much physical damage they sustained from overheating.

[fusion]

Requests:
-Option for no sheild; not every scifi have sheilds even though they are debated also that decreases the need for computing power
-possibility to make a "flak" mode for weapons (good for point defense and taking out hundreds of ships in one shot (fromStar Crossed)
Other wise keep working on it!

[Starglider]

Applet doesn't seem to fit the space allocated to it on Linux (AWT widgets here are usually bigger than on Windows- why's it in AWT instead of swing anyway? )

Swing is ok for large stand-alone apps, but it's somewhat bloated (particularly to initialise - though it's gotten a lot better as of 1.6, it used to be horribly bloated) for applets, plus I like using widgets that actually look like they belong on the OS you're running (less relevant for Linux than for Windows and MacOS). I'll put in a check for applet size for now, if I do a whole new interface I'll fix it properly. Thanks for pointing out the problem - should've occured to me to run it in applet mode under Ubuntu. I admit I've been spending a lot of my limited free time reading the SDN archives (and various linked material) than working on this.

That may depend on how the shields are taken down. If the projectors are burned out, then the projectors can be replaced within a matter of minutes.

Currently I've got the ability to target and destroy shield emitters if the shield emitter type is set to 'discrete', but they don't take physical damage on overload. Another thing I could design a mechanism for in the next version. A more serious missing feature is shield facings and multiple independently or semi-independently powered shields in general ('we've lost bridge deflectors...', 'set shields to double-front'...), as well as different properties for particle and ray shielding. This first applet is turning out to be more of an exploratory prototype for 'excessively detailed starship slugfest simulator v3.1' I guess Please do keep quoting any relevant references from SW, ST or anything else you'd like to try modelling.

Losing the shields from other methods may take longer to repair, and I don't know of any estimates for those. If the shields were shut down because the generators were overheating from constant attacks more quickly than the heat could be dissipated, then it might depend on how long it takes the shields to cool down and on how much physical damage they sustained from overheating.

Looks like I should eventually model heat buildup and both radiative cooling of subsystems (currently I'm just modelling radiative cooling of armour) and centralised active cooling.

-Option for no sheild; not every scifi have sheilds even though they are debated also that decreases the need for computing power

Just leave the shield capacity and dissipation at zero. It doesn't take a significantly greater amount of computing power. This initial code isn't terribly optimised anyway (aside from resembling a spaghetti mess at the moment, but that's ok for exploratory prototypes).

possibility to make a "flak" mode for weapons (good for point defense and taking out hundreds of ships in one shot (fromStar Crossed)

How exactly would that work? Bolts/projectiles that explode at a fixed range at radiative explosions? I could start modelling shrapnel (physical or smaller energy bolts) from explosions as a spherical pattern of projectile shots, though even if I did it using intercept area averaged frequencies it'd be fairly compute-intensive. I could also put in laser (and MIRV) heads on missile warheads, if I just assume X% of the blast energy is divided between Y laser rods. Ideally I suppose there would be a 'missile designer' dialog where you can select the guidance (including multiple), fusing, propulsion (including staging) and warhead, with the option to select premade types such as 'X kilos of antimatter' or something as detailed as 'specify EM and particle type/energy spectrums including time decay rate of detonation point' for custom warheads.

But at that rate it'll take me at least a year to complete, (very) part time

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Is it supposed to be functional yet? Because I hit the start button and it said targeting was disabled and none of the ships shot at each other.

[Starglider]

No, sorry, the broken stuff isn't enabled in the web-accessible applet otherwise people would be flaming me about bugs and bad results. At the moment that means it doesn't work at all, because targeting is disabled so no shots get fired. Should be fixed soon, hopefully.

[Starglider]

Mini-update for people who were interesting in this; technically I am still working on it, but I find myself spending all my free time on other things (commenting so much here for one thing) recently, plus I got bogged down in constantly finding modelling inadequacies and bolting new bits on. I need to refactor and start again with a clearer idea of the level of detail. I am considering starting with a simple 3D ship designer, that lets you scale basic primitives (spheres, cubes, cylinders, cones, prisms etc), glue them together and add pylons, without needing any 3D modelling skills (just lists of parts and sliders for angles and proportions). That should make it possible to make a basic model (good enough for recognisability and ballistics calculations) of things like the Constitution class and the ISD in 60 seconds or so). Sound interesting? Don't hold your breath though, at the current rate of progress.