defense drones instead of flares

Suggestions Visuals
1

don’t know of another way to describe this, but in an old arcade style plane shoot-em-up, you could pickup a powerup which created 2 spinning ‘orbs’ around your ship. looked kinda like the sony ericsson logo ;o anyways, these orbs would act as defense drones, absorbing any damage that hit the directly (but they were very small) and shooting with pewpew beams at nearby targets.

 

i’m just saying it would be cool to replace the flares with an active that creates 2 spinning orbs around your ship, that possibly glow a diffuse green, but are metallic spheres otherwise. retain their current functionality, or you could change it to them shooting down missiles with a certain probability for 5-10 seconds, then disappearing. with a 25-35 sec cooldown.

 

flares are so ‘not cool’ in a space sim since it’s like 7th century technology ;o fireworks, magnesium powder, etc… lol.

 

in any case, the simplest thing you could do is change the description from IR flares to something like ‘phalanx drones’ or ‘sentinels’. and change the icon to reflect this. personally, i think sentinels fits better in this context.

2

Flares actually make a lot of sense in space. Remember space is a vast, cold, empty space - so counter measures versus missiles are even more effective than they are within our own atmosphere.

 

Plus, it looks cool and is visually easy to recognise for pilots.

 

We could instead adopt a more ‘radar/guidance jamming’ type approach (electronic counter measures, etc) but this is much harder to represent visually.

 

Defensive drones/sentinels are a good idea but only for larger vessels. On interceptors and fighters they make little to no sense due to the scale of the ship involved.

 

As for the ‘orbs’ - that sounds a little too ‘fantasy based magic mmo’ for my liking. Not really appropriate for the setting and too high-tech to really fit in with the rest of the modules.

3

Flares actually make a lot of sense in space. Remember space is a vast, cold, empty space - so counter measures versus missiles are even more effective than they are within our own atmosphere.

 

Plus, it looks cool and is visually easy to recognise for pilots.

 

We could instead adopt a more ‘radar/guidance jamming’ type approach (electronic counter measures, etc) but this is much harder to represent visually.

 

Defensive drones/sentinels are a good idea but only for larger vessels. On interceptors and fighters they make little to no sense due to the scale of the ship involved.

 

As for the ‘orbs’ - that sounds a little too ‘fantasy based magic mmo’ for my liking. Not really appropriate for the setting and too high-tech to really fit in with the rest of the modules.

 

trust me, if we made it out to space we wouldn’t be using IR guided systems. we’d be using something FAR more complex which included optical recognition, which is obviously outside of the InfraRed range… in fact, we already have had such missiles for ages now. flares have little to no effect these days…

 

the ‘orbs’ are drones, which circle the ship… don’t you already have drones?.. they look pretty round to me, with some boxy corners :\ and i don’t see why they would only be for larger ships, don’t see what that has to do with ship size…

 

it’s a drone… like in star wars… that floats in the sky and shoots freaking lazer beamz at jedis… seems like it fits in with the sci-fi theme pretty well… also, homeworld cataclysm has drones called ‘sentinels’… nostalgia… because it wins over gamers…

 

sentinels are a much better idea than flares, since flares won’t even burn without the presence of oxygen. now, sure you could pack oxygen in with your magnesium powder, then watch in horror as the oxygen instantly vaporizes in the confines of space as soon as you ignite it… i mean, this is a physics discussion for another day…

 

then again, you could say theyre made of some of material, a plasma… still, does little to dissociate it from the name ‘IR flare’ which has the connotation of it being InfraRed magnesium powder ;o

4

You could have a red sign flashing over the enemy’s missiles that said “Jammed” if you wanted to implement an electronic counter-measure type feature.