So I decided to jump in with you guys into the looney bin. I'm going to try my hand at a little bit of modding, but I wanted to ask you guys a few things before I jumped in. This is a long read, so bear with me.
First of all, I'm new to the SCP and it may take me awhile to get used to the whole modding thing, so don't do this to me
when I ask for a little help. The good news is, the mod that I'm doing first is essentially a table edit, with maybe a few tweaks on some missions with FRED. I've had a few conversations with Snail over this mod, where I was asking his help to make what I've call the "FS1 Overhaul" mod. And the concept behind it is this:
There's been some discussion about the discrepency between the Shivan ships in FS2 and FS1. I played FS2 first, and what made me want to play FS1 was when I first played the mission in the nebula where I you were to escort the Lysander and the Actium. The pilots had a conversation that went something like this: "Can you imagine what it must of been like during the Great War?" To which the other pilot responded, "Yeah. No shields, no beam cannons, no flak turrets." To me, this implied that the Shivans had all of these things, but we did not, which would make FS1 really tough, which sounded fun. So I went to CompUSA and got it, complete with the Silent Threat campaign.
After playing it for awhile, I started to notice something. Yes, we had no shields, which the Shivans had, but where are the Shivans beam cannons, and flak guns? Then it turned out there never were any flak guns, and only the Lucifer had a wannna be "flux cannon," which if you stretch your imagination far enough, you might call it a beam cannon. Indeed, it appears that
wants you to think this, because the intro cutscene to FS2 has the Lucifer clearly firing a beam cannon, destroying an Orion, which has to be the Galatea, during the battle of Deneb.
So, beams, along with shields, were according to canon taken from Shivan technology. If that's so, then we are expected to believe that only the Lucifer had beam cannons, and no one had anti-fighter beams nor flak guns during the Great War. So, the GTVA developed beam cannons and not only equipped their destroyers with them, but equipped all of their capital ships with them. At the same time, we are expected to believe that by some strange miracle of chance, the Shivans also developed beam cannons for their smaller ships along with the anti-fighter beams and flak guns and equipped all of their capital ships with them, too. This means that both sides had not only spontaneously invented new technology, but had given all their ships nearly identical armament schemes all without knowing that the other side was doing the same thing. This is preposterous! And when the two sides encounter eachother after being seperated for 32 years, neither one bats an eye at this incredible coincidence.
How is this possible? Answer: the coincidence never occured. If
had the technology, I believe we would have seen beam cannons and the like on all Shivan ships during FS1, but since such graphics technology wasn't readily available at the time, they either dropped it, or just invented it for FS2 and damn the consequence. My mod aims to eliminate these discrepencies.
This 'FS1 Overhaul' mod will make the Shivan ships more like their FS2 iterations. In other words, they'll all have Beam cannons, and anti-fighter beams. These beam-equipped Shivan ships will be similar to their FS2 counterparts, but the beam weapons will be individually slightly less damaging, and the armor a bit more weak to make it look like the FS2 versions had been 'upgraded' a bit. To make it balanced, I'll use Snail's table edit for his T/V War mod. His T/V War mod increases the firing rate, damage, and velocity of all T/V weapons, so T/V warships are actually capable of doing something besides just being big lumbering targets as they are in vanilla FS1. This will make the T/V ships quite formidable, but not quite so much as the Shivan ships. Other balance issues would just need a little tweaking in FRED to alter the missions to make them beatable. Essentially, the player will have to destroy Shivan beam cannons to complete his mission objectives.
Now we have the issue of the flak guns, and this is where I need all of your opinion. Flak guns always struck me as being a characteristically human weapon. They're projectile weapons that cause shrapnel damage, instead of big blobs of weird looking energy bolts that you'd expect from some sort of alien technology. I can't have flak guns be something that T/V forces have at the beginning of the Great War, because this would contradict that pilot who said "No shields, no beam weapons, no flak guns." So to close this particular discrepency, I have two solutions and I'd like to all of you to contemplate. The consensus on the scenario that's chosen will be the one that I'll put in my mod(s).
Scenario one: The Shivans have flak gun technology and it's present at the onset of the Great War, when they encounter the T/V forces. The T/V forces adopt this Technology from the Shivans.
Scenario two: The flak gun is developed by T/V forces sometime after the Lucifer is destroyed, but is either captured or studied by the Shivans before they're driven from T/V space. This would close this descrepancy, explaining why the Shivans have this technology when the GTVA encounters them again in Gamma Draconis. This would also work because, unlike beam and shield technology, it is never expressly stated that we adopted this technology from the Shivans. It's never expressly stated that the Shivans adopted it from us, either, so it could go either way.
I personally prefer scenario two. However, Scenario two would need a full campaign to explore, which I wouldn't be able to do by myself. However, we could go through with that campaign regardless of which scenario is chosen, because it deals with the end of the Great War and the beginning faction crisis after the collapse of the GTA. Later, I'll disclose the details of the concept for this campaign after the scenario is agreed upon. If there's enough interest from the community to develop it, then I'll work with you guys to make it.
