Modular Ships? = "Breaking of ships, piece by piece?"

[EmeraldReporter]

From the Fexus 2 Funding Site,

Spaceship Component System
Spaceships can now be composed of many different parts, allowing for powerful modular ships that can separate and recombine in different ways, and massive space stations which must be destroyed piece-by-piece.

Would that possibly mean that if one were to design a Basestar (Battlestar Galactica Universe) for example, would one of its "arms" be sever-able?

Or, if you designed a really big ship could you ram a smaller ship into it? Or would the physics, and all that particle stuff be too much, and melt your graphics card?

[The Old Dragon]

Hi there EmeraldReporter,

For the most part, I think this generally refers to space stations in the original game. You start off with a core section and then add the additional sections (or modules) to it to make up the station. I'm not sure if it works on ships however... would the modules move with the core section or be left behind?

There is a command to "SplitShip" . It basically takes a ship mesh and replaces it with a number of alternatives as specified within the command.

Ramming ships is somewhat unachievable at this time. Although we can get ship meshes to 'collide', there's no real way register said collision.

[Mazryonh]

As I said in my comment on the games-plant.com website for Nexus 2, modular space stations have already been featured in Nexus 1.  Noah battlestations had modular parts that could be destroyed piece-by-piece, and so could the Vardrag Starportal space stations such as that from the "Mechanoid Invasion" level.  Modular ships, however, have not been in the game thus far.  The only example of a ship splitting into smaller, independently moving and fighting pieces, are the Mechanoids, and that was only in the "Back to Earth" level.  Mechanoids can hardly be called ships anyhow.

In any case, ships that have parts that can be dismembered (though not ships that can split into pieces that can independently move and fight) is a feature that has already been done with Digital Reality's Haegemonia: Legions of Iron and Haegemonia: The Solon Heritage games.  Battlestations, Battleships, cruisers, and some other large ships in that game had parts that could be blown off from the rest of the ship (and those parts had their own individual HP counters).  Sometimes this would cause a ship to lose weaponry, and at other times a blown-off part was just for show.  Given enough time, however, those missing parts would regenerate (you didn't even have to go to a planet or support ship to get a replacement attached).  This meant that larger ships or stations could have their weapons targeted in order to soften them up for a big assault.  It didn't hurt that the Haegemonia used an engine with a much better particle system (at least when it came to blowing things up) so blasting ships apart looked much better than doing so in Nexus 1.

Modders of Star Trek: Bridge Commander (released in 2002) managed to get the "Multi-Vector Assault mode" on the USS Prometheus to work as well.  That ship possessed the ability to split into three parts that could move and fight independently--I believe a similar ability can be found on similar ships in the recent Star Trek Online MMORPG.

Regardless, if Nexus 2 does support sections of a ship that can be blasted away, it would be a nice new gameplay element since the ship's hull integrity may not be too bad, but now it's missing a chunk of weaponry and devices that were originally on the part that was severed.  Being able to control which modular parts of a ship or station actually get attached would also be nice for configuring them pre-mission as well.