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Anyone ever tried multi shields?

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Post Wed Mar 28, 2007 1:49 pm

Anyone ever tried multi shields?

Just for a bit of fun during spare, I decided to see what would happen (or if it was even possible) to turn an armored transport into a vessel worthy of battle. (Hey, if not, it would at least be an extremely powerful trader) So, first on the list was to see if it was possible to add more than one shield to such a ship. Turns out - you can! With a wee bit of tweaking, I yielded this:

http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i145/ ... reen15.jpg

Seeing as it worked, I decided to see how it made out in a fight. The result was incredibly odd, but incredibly cool at the same time. See, you only had one shield health bar, but once it reached halfway, you heard the shield down message, and could observe something really neat. As it turns out, one shield will only guard one side of the ship, while the other guards the other side. The result is a ship significantly beefier, but with a strange weakness. If you smash say the port side shield enough, you can shoot through them to the hull, but if you shoot from starboard, it'll be blocked by the remaining shield. So cool. I could turn this into a perdy cool mod...

http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i145/ ... /Neato.jpg

Post Wed Mar 28, 2007 4:03 pm

I am not certain if this has been done before, but I for one am interested. You said it involves 'some tweaking.' Could you be more specific?

MK

Post Wed Mar 28, 2007 5:38 pm

Well, tweaking wasn't that big of a deal. (It actually wasn't hard...) Basically, I added a couple lines to shiparch.ini under the armored transport (Actually, its in the Moo mod... I didn't even notice that I had it on until I went to run the game... sorry Bliggy I'll probably make a version out on vanilla to test it out...) just adding the shield hardpoint and link:

shield_link = bw_freighter_shield01, HpMount, HpEngine01
hp_type = hp_freighter_shield_special_10, HpEngine01
hp_type = hp_freighter_shield_special_9, HpEngine01
hp_type = hp_freighter_shield_special_8, HpEngine01
hp_type = hp_freighter_shield_special_7, HpEngine01
hp_type = hp_freighter_shield_special_6, HpEngine01
hp_type = hp_freighter_shield_special_5, HpEngine01
hp_type = hp_freighter_shield_special_4, HpEngine01
hp_type = hp_freighter_shield_special_3, HpEngine01
hp_type = hp_freighter_shield_special_2, HpEngine01
hp_type = hp_freighter_shield_special_1, HpEngine01

Then in Goods.ini, added this to the Armored transport package entry:

addon = shield03_mark10_fr, HpEngine01, 1

I used the armored transport, but it could probably just as easily be done with an actual vanilla ship. I'm thinking of making a quick little mod that makes all of the ships able to mount an extra shield... the tricky part would be to make the hud read it properly. Perhaps there is a way to make more shield indicators?

Post Thu Mar 29, 2007 3:46 am

that is awesome. In every multi sheild ship I have flew it simply had a doubly strong sheild. i think...

Post Thu Mar 29, 2007 7:10 am

Why not just mount this properly by creating a new hardpoint in HARDCMP called Shield02 instead of mounting it on the engine hardpoint? You can add as many shields as you want to a ship, just create the new hardpoints, and the entries in shiparch and off you go.

Post Thu Mar 29, 2007 7:21 am

Besides the fact that I have never used hardcmp? I just find it easier to do this.

Post Thu Mar 29, 2007 8:14 am

isnt the shield sphere based on the sur file?

Post Thu Mar 29, 2007 9:44 am

Shield .sur file or ship?

Post Thu Mar 29, 2007 12:20 pm

But you can modify the SUR to be dome-shaped...

Actually if it works just like the thread starter (forgot the name ) wrote, it is SO COOL! SWAT, maybe you could put something like this in CF?

Post Thu Mar 29, 2007 3:14 pm

Runtman. And look at the second screenshot, you'll see a shot reflecting off the front right, and a shot hitting the hull on the right side... its a little odd. I haven't tried to do it to a stock ship yet, I'm curious to see if it has the same effect.

Post Thu Mar 29, 2007 7:48 pm

Multiple shields are generally old news. Many mods have used them like EVO, Freeworlds and TNG.
However....they usually only just increase the shield regen and capacity. Not protect certain sides of ships.

I'm actually fairly interested in how you've managed to get it to do that though.

Post Fri Mar 30, 2007 2:43 am

ill have to test it and check for negative side effects before i decide to use it somewhere

Post Fri Mar 30, 2007 2:16 pm

This sure looks interesting, especially applied to capital ships. It could bring a great strategic part to battles with capships... I'm also interested in how to do this.

Post Sat Mar 31, 2007 2:49 pm

so far I've only seen the regular multiple shields where it makes them stronger
might be interesting to try getting it to work that way

Post Sat Apr 07, 2007 10:47 am

I'm very interested in seeing where this goes. In my mod Dark Frontier we are creating a new class of ship(Super Capital Class) and specific shields for certain areas of the ship would be a very revolutionary addition to it. So we could have say Fore and Aft, Port and Starbord shields aswell as special shields to protect critical areas of the ship like it's weapons arrays. Could you possibly experiment more on this with a larger ship say the Liberty Dreadnaught for example and see if this is possible? Afterall this is somewhat your discovery. I don't want to hop on it and claim it as mine after you have pioneered this discovery.

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