| 10 JAN 2005 | ||||||||||
| The Halo Array | Tim has gotten back to me very quickly and confirmed that what I want to do can be done. I am waiting on one little tid bit of info back from him to be certain. If I go through with this, then I think that the moveable version of this "ship" will be a towable item only. My intention is NOT for this to be a ship that is launched on its own. This is a purely defensive bit of fleet and not meant to be sent out on it's own. | |||||||||
| The Fleet in General | I spoke to Tim about the speed of
the fleet. He told me that speed 90 is what he uses for "slow" - I
am thinking about raising the speed to 80 then. This would be a
fleet wide increase including the fighters. The current fleet max is
50, but for playability this is probably too slow. If you look at
the Echo Cluster map, then indeed 50 is a bit slow. If you look at
3rd party maps, you will find that quite often 50 would leave all alone on
one planet for a long time, many maps are set up with between 100 and 300
LY between planets....I will adjust the speeds as I go along. Reviewing the speed of the fleet, there are several ships that are faster than the 50 speed limit - I will probably maintain some these at a reasonable speed (80 had been the speed, perhaps 100 or 105 now) |
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| Ships | The Wormrider, Thumper, and Providence have been altered to reflect the new view of the fleet. Noteably the Wormrider and Thumper are 2 of only 3 ships able to travel faster than 80 LY/turn, the third being the Wormsign class Scout - also to go 100 LY/turn | |||||||||
| 08 JAN 2005 | ||||||||||
| Back Again! | There is nothing quite like letting work progress at its own pace. However, in the interest of sharing this work with the rest of the world, I thought it might be a good idea to put some real time into this again and get it done. I've been working on the art - nothing to show you yet, but there is progress. Despite what Crayons had to say to me about my thoughts on doing the art, I'm going to do it my way anyway, so I will ask you all to please be patient (besides, Tim is not ready to code up more 3rd party races anyway). I'm also working on cleaning up the stats on the ships, fighters, and ground units as I go along. I'm not sure how the economics of this race are going to work out, so unit costs will be a bit tough for me to guess, I'm sure that these will require changing once I have something to play test. | |||||||||
| The Halo Array | Okay, I said that we were getting back into this. Start at the top right? Well, more or less. I've increased the Crew to 10 - since the race does not use intelligent computers (AI's as we know them - a la The Butlerian Jihad of DUNE (many thanks to Mr. Herbert for writing a saga which changed my life) - I think that this adds a bit of interest to the race. It also means that I need larger crews than I had thoguht since many things that would be automated are now manual, or at least more manual than they would be. I'm also toying with an idea that this would be a "convertable ship" That is, with a device "active" it would have the stats listed here and be gravitationally anchored (read: no tow), but with the device "off" it would have different stats. My idea was that the central "control node" would actualy be a little bit more - it would have an engine and a bridge and all that fun stuff that makes a ship go through space....and a large docking structure where the outlying nodes could be stowed for transport. Maybeit should just become towable at this point. I don't really want this to be a "ship of the line" that can go around on it's own. I have to run this idea past Tim, I think that all that would be required is that when the host code kicks in, the hull ID number in his datastructure is changed so that the stats change, but the name, Object ID#, cargo, orders etc stay the same....the device would work at the very end of the host cycle. I also played with the stats a little | |||||||||
| 26 MAY 2004 | ||||||||||
| Reality Check | Well, imagine my suprise when I went to add this update and tried to scroll UP to the next most recent update since the end of 2002 ..... and there wasn't one. Well, I've fixed that by adding a link to the 3rd Party Survey Vote at Crayon World. Please be kind and vote well. | |||||||||
| 14 NOV 2002 | ||||||||||
| Ground Units | Sand Worm Battle Tank is being replaced with the Harvester. The Harvester uses Sonics to effectively reduce the ground in front of it to particles and then it can suck it up for processing. For solid rock, it carries several micro laser mining drills. Removing all items of value. The Harvester also acts like a giant Zamboni and resurfaces the ground that it crosses, extracting items of value and storing them in large hoppers. The Harvester is completely sealed from the climate and can operate in or out of water. By it's very nature, the Harvester is a monster, as it works primarily as an earth moving device, it is virtually impervious to small arms fire, and the devices used to work the soil are more than capable of taking down ground troops. Incapacitating them and then ingesting them and processing them...it's rather a gruesome site. There is no chance to resurrect any enemy ground troops killed in this manner (such as the Borg who are "de-borged") ... it's hard to reconstitute hamburger. | |||||||||
| Spotter/Survey/Scout unit added. This unit works in conjunction with the harvester to increase the efficiency of the Harvesters actions by directing it to rich areas and around potentially destructive topographical features - such as high cliffs which are not good to drive off of. It carries 2 small vulcan cannons for protection and use in military encounters. It also sports a rail launcher which is normally used to launch smoke flares and marker beacons to guide the Harvesters. In combat these can also launch fragmentation grenades and antipersonnel mines. | ||||||||||
| Fighters | Have begun the rework of fighters starting with the Carryall | |||||||||
| 09 NOV 2002 | WE ARE BACK !!!!! | |||||||||
| Sorry for being away so long, Real Life got in the way as it often does. However, work has never stopped and there are so many new thoughts and concepts to incorporate that we hardly know where to begin. So, as a wise man once said, 'Begin at The Beginning' | ||||||||||
| Lots of changes are in store, they
amount to an effectively redesigned race. I'll have them up on
the pages as fast as I can. Some of the stuff that really
doesn't fit has been done away with, like the AT (Advanced Technology)
Ships. I really like them and sort of came up with those 3 ships at
the same time as the race concept, and as all first time creators want to
do, it was all in there. I have seen the light (Mark hit me with it,
and Sir_AdB tossed a few desk lamps in for good measure) and these ships
are out of the list. This has been done already. Other
changes to the ships in the list will be coming along. I have made
some changes to the Racial Abilities page in the area of Prescience.
More, many more, are in store. The basic flavor has not been changed, the Divine Protectorate will remain a slow race, now truly slow, with the exception of the Transport ships. However, this ability is nothing like the standard Jump Point Generator ship. Prior to the host changes to Hyp, the use of this mode of moving fleet units would result in the transported ships sitting in one spot for 200 tics. Now it is only 100 in the new spot and 100 in the old spot, and this is not a racial oddity any longer. There are no changes planned to compensate for this. There is currently no way for the fleet to be transported and then run in (run???? at speed 50?) and smack you down. Moreover, if the transport ships are captured, they do not become another version of the dreaded PAX....there is no JPG Device involved. The TRANSPORT ability follows the hyper model since that is the part of the basic host code that will be implemented to make it all happen. An additional major change is that HDP cannot use alien hulls. They can capture them, but they can't make them go. There is a reason for this and it will be explained in the pages as I make the edits....can't give it all away now :) It has also been decided that alien races cannot use HDP ships, or even build them. There are no computers on these ships, at least no computers in the sense of the Federation, Borg, or Robot fleets, all the heavy computational lifting is done by mentats (read HG) or Navigators (read HG again). Therefore, in order to even navigate these ships, any other race would have to retrofit them with all sorts of jury rigged stuff. If they were built from scratch, a nearly complete redesign would be required. The Exorcist Missile device for instance has no way to even hook up a targeting system, even for the HDP it does not work without a mentat/navigator creature to point it properly. Of course, any and all of this may change before it's done. |
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| 13 JUNE 2001 | ||||||||||
| Exorcist Device 2nd cut | Ord use increased, %hit changed, more | |||||||||
| Hellfire Modified | Warp drag /sig increased to 110/100 from 80/60 | |||||||||
| Ord and Fuel capacities reduced (slightly) | ||||||||||
| Spice Fury Downgraded | Max speed down from 300 to 190 | |||||||||
| Gravitonic Accelerator removed | ||||||||||
| HG bonus multiplier for AT ships down from 5x to 4x | AT ships have been removed from fleet | |||||||||
| 13 JUNE 2001 | ||||||||||
| Removed Tachyon Emitter from Hellfire, increased cost from 500 to 1000 and increased mass from 300 to 430 | ||||||||||
| Added almost final artwork for the Tithe Class Tug - The Great Maker is in the final touches..... | ||||||||||
| I will create a rotating version in larger format (read high bandwidth) of the Tithe so that you can see all detail, I need better angles. | ||||||||||
| (Still looking for Drew's Mug Shot) | ||||||||||
| 12 JUNE 2001 | ||||||||||
| Modified Water Collector Utility Barque |
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| Modified Divine Judgment Carrier |
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| Reduced speed of Spice Fury from 380 to 300, Reduced Shielding from 1,500 to 1,000 may be reduced to 900 | ||||||||||
| Reduced Tithe scan range from 200 to 100 | ||||||||||
| To be addressed - Scan Range: Problem is that scanning ability is racial trait | ||||||||||
| Tithe Class artwork almost complete | ||||||||||
| 6 JUNE 2001 | Changed name of Apocalypse to Brimstone to avoid confusion with the flag ship of the Children of the Apocalypse | |||||||||
| Changed name of link from Templar's Compound to Ground Structures since there are 2 now. | ||||||||||
| Added new ship - Tithe class Tug | Graphics for Tithe are almost complete | |||||||||
| 30 MAY 2001 | Modified description of TRANSPORT | Removed ability for free wings to dock for the ride, wings must be in pods or in bays | ||||||||
| Removed combat restriction - undocking happens after jump movement, docking before | ||||||||||
| Modified description of Prescience | Jump Point Generators are useless to
Protectorate HG required for hyperjumping Grav wells/mines still maintain effectiveness |
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| Modified Exorcist | Activation will effectively set the command code to NCH, ship will not travel via Fleet Chunnel or Jump Point Generator or Travel through Jump Gates, this does not prevent TRANSPORT of a ship with this device | |||||||||
| Modified Acolyte AT Cruiser | Set hyper range to 0. This ship has a pod and cannot be allowed to work as a Transport | |||||||||
| Modified Spice Addiction | Increased happiness drop to 30/turn if cities do not have the 10kt of spice per turn per city | |||||||||
| Modified Templar's Compound | Raised to tech level 6, added Spice Vault | |||||||||
| Created Spice House | See Templar's Compound page | |||||||||
| 23 MAY 2001 | Added Additions and Changes page | |||||||||
| Modified ship stats | Raised cost of Spice Fury from 2,000 to 7,000 | |||||||||
| Raised cost of Apocalypse from 2,000 to 5,000 | ||||||||||
| Raised cost of Acolyte from 850 to 2,000 | ||||||||||
Changed Pilgrimage
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Changed Jihad
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| Added TRANSPORT to racial abilities | ||||||||||
| Added preliminary graphics for the wormrider frigate | ||||||||||