Elite / Frontier How would have escort missions worked?

boringnick

B
If you open up the FFE exe with an text editor you see lots of broken missions and features that didn't made it into the game.

One of them are the escort missions. Apparently therte were offered up in the BBS and you got paid for escorting a certain ship towards its destination.. How would that work out?

Given the realistic size of the universe and the physics, this would be next to impossible.

What do you think?
 

turwhitt

turwhitt
Sure, but how you would come to the ship's defence if attacked is unfathomable.
Fine, so you leave the starport at the time indicated. You see the ship's hyperspace signature and follow it to the target system. All good so far.
But unless you are in the same ship with the same engine, it is going to be impossible to stay close to him during travel to a port in the system. Actual battles are over in seconds or minutes real time, so even if you only drift a few tens of K away from the ship, you're never going to reach him in time. And with the distances in question, you ARE going to drift, especially if you use the stardreamer, which you will - assuming you don't want to sit there for 20 hours.
The most realistic solution would be to use the autopilot, but you will almost certainly end up crashing into the escort ship if you do.

There is basically no "follow" mechanic in place for escort missions, and that is probably why the idea was abandoned.
 

DraQ

D
I think escort missions would be quite possible but very tedious without station keeping autopilot mode.

I once tried intercept of an inbound Puma from planetary surface to randezvous point sevaral AU away from the planet and 'escort' back to the planet's upper atmosphere in GLFrontier and it was quite doable with some help from autopilot. Ship in transit won't generally change its course suddenly and gradual acceleration and deceleration can be handled even while using stardreamer. You will fly away a little bit, but assuming there was going to be workable long range scanner in FFE just as there was in FE2 (tracking ships in system map), you'd always be able to close in in advance after spotting potential hostiles.
 

Assimilator1

Assimilator1
Can you spot enemies on the long range scanner too then? I've played FE2 but not for more than 10yrs ;)

Re escort missions, realistically they would of needed to be able to get the slower ships auto-pilot to send commands to the faster ship to stay together (within a system).
 
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DraQ

D
Assimilator1 said:
Can you spot enemies on the long range scanner too then? I've played FE2 but not for more than 10yrs ;)
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Not in FFE. In FE2 they show up as dots coloured according to the same convention as on normal scanner.

They are also fully simulated when using time forward and backward functions in orbital map and move as they would assuming no thrusters firing, with orbital trajectories and stuff.

Re escort missions, realistically they would of needed to be able to get the slower ships auto-pilot to send commands to the faster ship to stay together (within a system).
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That would be perfect solution, but hardly necessary.
 

Assimilator1

Assimilator1
Yea I was talking about FE2, that's cool then! I had forgotten about that.

Seems FE2 was much more of a complete game than FFE was (bugs aside from the premature release), or was that a casualty of the early release too?

Re linked auto-pilots, yea it is necassary really, manually staying together would be a right PITA by the sound of it.
 

DraQ

D
Assimilator1 said:
Yea I was talking about FE2, that's cool then! I had forgotten about that.

Seems FE2 was much more of a complete game than FFE was (bugs aside from the premature release), or was that a casualty of the early release too?
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I'd guess so. Calling release of FFE beta would still be too charitable for its state.
 

rgmarett

rgmarett
Unfortunately the textures weren't great and made the game look messy. Earth wasn't coded properly and ended up as a brown ball. The clean lines of FE2 are much nicer.
 

DraQ

D
rgmarett said:
Unfortunately the textures weren't great and made the game look messy. Earth wasn't coded properly and ended up as a brown ball. The clean lines of FE2 are much nicer.
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Terrain elevation actually added to the gameplay, as for the Earth, I guess the problem was making even remotely right layout of the landmass so they've dusted it up and invoked asteroids/nukes.
 

rgmarett

rgmarett
DraQ said:
Terrain elevation actually added to the gameplay
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Agreed.

as for the Earth, I guess the problem was making even remotely right layout of the landmass so they've dusted it up and invoked asteroids/nukes.
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Probably the result of a rushed release I imagine. The guys would have been clever enough to create a proper Earth given the time.
 
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