So while I have gone ahead and added a bunch of tech topics already, I thought it might be good to pick people's brains for what they think might be good directions to expand out the science. Basically, if you think we should have, say, fixed-point defenses capable of providing air cover for the better part of a country, mention it here. You can propose applications for a technology (like the example I just gave) or you can propose new technologies to add (like nanoconstruction). The fixed point defenses one is already represented further down, I'll just go ahead and say that. Even if you don't know the original X-Com's tech tree, feel free to toss an idea or two out. Heck, even if you're not actually playing, feel free to suggest something. If I don't already have it integrated, I might add it in. Contributing factors to adding a tech include ease of modeling within the system, number of people who are intrigued by the idea, how much it makes sense (consistency with the setting), and my own personal preference, in roughly speaking diminishing order.

Actually I have been thinking exactly that just yesterday.

I was looking at the rules for missile defenses and trying to decide whether they're worth having. My first thought was that they didn't seem like much since they could only attack UFOs in my base hex, and took a -1 combat penalty compared to interceptors. My second thought was that they're actually incredibly useful just because of how CHEAP they are - a hangar alone costs more than a missile silo, nevermind the interceptor that's supposed to go in it (and as a corollary, any inferiority in combat can be compensated for by building several of them). My third thought was that despite this, they're still only applying to one hex, which is rather situational. Even a one-hex range would represent a sevenfold increase in utility.

So yeah, if I could get missile defenses with any range whatsoever, I'd like to put some research into that.

Well, typical military vehicle types we have: tanks, planes, APCs. Vehicle types we don't have: hovercraft, helicopters, ships, submarines.

Ships and submarines aren't all that relevant given there's no indication that sea combat can actually happen.

Hovercraft would be best-suited as air-cusioned landing craft, carrying troops but with better terrain coverage and possibly speed than normal ground transports. I think they'd be good in any kind of flat terrain (plains, desert, tundra, sea) and especially good in swamps (if only because they're the only ground vehicle that doesn't get horribly penalized there), can move through forests, jungles, and cities if they have roads but aren't too good at fighting there (it's cramped), and have trouble operating in mountains even with good roads.

Helicopters would be unable to fight UFOs but provide better or cheaper close air support than interceptors.

I might think of more (non-vehicle-related) stuff later.

Only half of the limitation--they can only fire on UFOs that are explicitly targeting the base for an attack. It can't fire on attacks aimed at the hex itself. These are dumbfire missiles, used because human tech can't track UFOs dependably yet.

Well, it would sort of represent a sevenfold increase in utility. Even if it had a range, it would likely be limited to 1 payload per turn, since alien activity is highly synchronized. But there's also the fact that, generally speaking, base hexes are more sensitive targets than non-base hexes. And the fact that base hexes generally have some built-in defenses.

While they aren't missiles per say, there are fixed-point defenses with range later on in the tech tree. So you're good on that.

Well, again, sort of. There will be advanced aircraft carriers later on down the tech tree. Haven't decided if they're hot war only yet, though.

So a specialized land transport that provides an FM bonus in flat terrain and swamps and can traverse water hexes, but provide no FM bonus in forests, jungles, or cities and can't traverse mountains. Sound right?

They'd be more expensive than the APCs already on the market, but probably cheaper than the air transport.

Sounds reasonable.

The thing about 'adding these to the tech tree' is that they're currently understood and employed by militaries. If anything, I'd be statting them out and adding them straight to the market. Which, if you guys are cool with, I guess I can work on.

Oh. That's even less useful.

That's perfectly reasonable. I can't use interceptors more than once per turn and there's no reason point defenses should be different. As long as they're still more cost-efficient within the range where they can operate, they'll be worth building.

Eeyup.

And Medikits aren't? Okay, they might be some sort of futuristic super-medicine.

I'll let you know if I think of more futuristic stuff.

Please no mecha though.

Sure, if you want to.

They were even less useful in the PC game, if you can believe that. They had an upkeep, took up limited base space, and only dealt a tiny amount of damage.

Being able to properly medicate weaponized plasma burns within a few seconds sure seems like futuristic super-medicine to me.

One 'no' vote for mecha, got it.

Although, funnily enough, a lot of the load distribution, balance, and general 'walking' problems would explicitly be solved by some of the alien tech present in the original X-Com, and the aliens did field some walking robot enemies.

Their height (around 10-12 ft tall) was a definite disadvantage. Large target area and not much viable cover.

If we were to involve military robots of some kind, I'd be more inclined towards this than this.

Okay, I'll add 'em in a moment.

How reliable is genetically engineering my soldiers going to be?

And before I start asking about possible tech, what kind of tech level are we looking at here?

Do you have specific applications of genetic engineering in mind?

As for possible tech--well, we have energy generation on a scale around that of fusion, minor gravitics (to null only), moderate to large scale plasma containment, very low scale antimatter applications, and super metallurgy. Any equivalents in complexity to those would probably be okay. Nanotech is probably too much.

Don't genetically engineered soldiers take a couple decades to be ready for deployment?

Ordinarily.

So there'll be a few prerequisite techs.

I think a key item that we've overlooked is the ever important self destruct switch. Further down the line you should even be able to create remote controlled self destruct buttons! =D

Helicopters and hovercraft are on the market now.

EDIT: Also should note that there is no such thing as a dead end or pure flavor tech anymore. Added in effects or unlocks for a bunch of researches that just added log entries in the original X-Com. So everything does something.

EDIT 2, BACK WITH A VENGEANCE: Genetic engineering has been added to the tree.

EDIT 3, THE UNTOLD STORY: I may have also added Dummy Bases with Self Destruct capabilities. Maybe.

Just to add stuff here:

-Railguns.
-Rail Gunboats.
-Plasma Gunboats.
-Psi suppressors (stealth suits).
-Jamming and E-War.

Are we adding naval combat?


I can't imagine a mass driver weapon of that magnitude on an airship ever being good idea. Conservation of momentum and whatnot.

Rail Gunboats are mobile aquatic anti-air emplacements.

And you raise a good point for it on aircraft. I'll remove it as an aircraft-capable weapon--think I put it too many places already.

Railguns on boats? Sweet. : )

And I want my air-rails!! I think I should be smartly quoting that air-punk game now, red something? But I never actually played it.

The problem is Newton's Third law. If your airship fires off something really fast, it's going to suffer the same impact as whatever it hits. Normally this isn't a problem with like say, bullets, because they are small and they aren't moving super fast.



...Railguns however...




Land and sea vehicles can use them better since they have the ground or water to support them.

That's when you start working on a recoilless rifle model that integrates railgun tech. Then mount it on aircraft.

Damn infantry ruin it for unskilled tankers in most games. : (

Not that I don't love recoilless rifles outside of FPSs. : D

Incidentally, I have no idea if the basic concepts are compatible here. I feel like an equivalent would require the rails themselves to be ejected out the back, which sounds stupidly dangerous.

You could fire shots in both directions at the same time. That sounds stupidly dangerous, too.

But yeah, I don't think recoilless rifle tech is applicable to railguns. Recoilless rifles pass their recoil onto the hot gasses from the gunpowder blast. Railguns don't have any sort of gas, just metals and electricity.

Then again, if you have antigravity tech, who's to say you can't nullify Newton's other laws too?

Funny you should mention that--that's one of the explicit solutions I used for the recoil problems for railguns with one specific application.

And electricity doesn't really carry mechanical momentum that well.

Well, but if we go that far, I feel like we're opening up a whole new can of worms. And by worms I mean directly militarily applicable technologies that I haven't quite thought of yet. If we come up with a few more that use pretty much this exact basic tech, then I'll put air railguns back in along with these new things.

So on another boat-related note, I've been looking and noticed that Kazakhstan is the only faction in the game to not have sea access (except for the landlocked Caspian Sea, which seems to be purely cosmetic since it doesn't include a single full sea hex).

Since nobody is playing Kazakhstan this game, we'll all be able to use ship techs, though my sea access is better than Mellhurst's.

If you start two shots off in the middle of the chamber and send them in opposite directions. That would make your shot at least half as powerful.



You couldn't just have two chambers firing in opposite directions however. You wouldn't have a net force, but you would have a net Moment/Torque. It's one thing to push your plane in a direction, but spinning it like that would undoubtedly cause it to crash.



I haven't been speaking up on the Recoilless rifles thing because I didn't really know how they worked. After a quick glance, yeah. They're not compatible.


What's wrong with good old fashioned self propelling rockets though?

You're assuming the people who set up the railgun haven't done some very careful calculations to make sure the path of the rail lines up with the center of mass of the platform.

Note I did not say 'aircraft'.

They already exist in the game. Nuclear arms work that way, and missile defenses, and demo gear.

Well, if you could just tell inertia to shut up and leave you alone, it might have armor applications (stopping an incoming projectile's momentum without that momentum being transferred into your body traumatically).

That happens anyway.

It is, however, to your advantage to have the forward-facing shot be smaller than the backwards-facing shot. Because action-and-reaction works on momentum (mass*velocity) while damage is based on kinetic energy (mass*velocity^2). Given that both shots will have equal momentum, you want more of the forwards-facing shot's momentum to come from velocity (giving it more energy), and more of the backwards-facing shot's momentum to come from mass (leeching less energy).

This is why most guns have the "backwards-facing shot" consist of the artillery platform itself, ideally anchored to something solid.

Not if the two guns line up. Sure, if a gun on your left wing shoots forwards and a gun on your right wing shoots backwards, you're going to spin. But if both guns shoot along the same line - and ideally but not necessarily one that passes through your center of mass - then you shouldn't spin enough to cause problems.

Anyway, I don't think this is really a practical setup, but spin isn't the reason :)

While certainly true, if we can come up with either some iconic or some stupidly elemental applications, that's when I'll say we go for it. Just trying to get it to a point where we'd get an overall branch of tech out of it, since it's manipulating a pretty basic law.

Big guns = cool.

Granted, but when I'm talking about an elemental application of the ability to eliminate or manipulate a basic force of the universe, I'm thinking more like, say, 'the Gravity Gun', or 'FTL travel through dividing by zero or bad calculus', or 'overcoming the need to floss through the proper application of nanomachines'.

It's real neat and admirable how you guys are good at science!
(Not that I don't understand most of what you're talking about.)

I just remembered, actually, that the way personal shielding worked in Dune was kinda sorta based off of this sort of idea of nullifying momentum over a given threshold.

Seeing as shielding doesn't already exist in-system, that could qualify as a means to worm it in if people think we should go for it.

Most of this becomes second nature the more you get into science. B)

Ideally with a mounted rail gun, the shot travels the whole distance of the barrel. Unlike normal guns, they gain a great deal of benefit from the length of the tube.

You do make a good point about larger back shot though.

(Not that I think that Air-Railguns would be a good idea. though.)

We should probably not be using shielding tech that encourages us to switch to fighting with swords.

I don't know, that does sound pretty cool looking. :rolleyes:


==> Text based game.


Alright, yeah nevermind that idea.

This would be the best game.

I think... alien swordfights... would be pretty cool! It would also explain why they don't just put autoguns on their landed UFOs and just blast us away. (not that the computer game ever had any defenses around entryways both hostile and friendly for some reason)

Do you know what's more fun than secretly discussing alien tech? Secretly discussing Human Technology.

Yeah, silly aliens focus their research on space exploration and resource extraction and fusion. Humans got Ipads! (Well, it's useful... from a sociological and comm fusion perspective.)

Giant Robots.

It seems you must fight to the death.

Oh, I kind of forgot about that.


I suppose when in doubt, we should go with the thing the benefits me. No giant robots after all. :rolleyes:




Oh, but once Mortal Combat has been called, it can't be uncalled. Milo, you're going down! :angry: :P