Away team support from your orbiting ship?

[Captain.Hunter]

Just wondering if anyone has heard whether or not we will have "control" of our vessel while on an away mission planetside.

What I mean by this is will we always have a link, control bar, interface, communicator button, something that allows us to use/access our ships resources while we are on the surface of a planet. For example, if I wanted to call down a shuttlecraft at any time during a mission, could I? If I wanted to call a phaser strike from my ship on a planetside target (such as Kirk did against the Val temple in TOS), could I? How about just beaming down a security detail?

These events were commonplace throughout Star Trek. I'd hate to think we would be locked into a script on every away mission we went on (i.e. things only happen at a pre-determined time), only being able use our ships abilities if and when the script allowed us to. I mean really, as a starship commander, I should always have quite a few support options available to me - especially from a starship I have parked over the planet.

[billybob442]

Yeah, but even in the series they'd have timing issues - well when the script called for it. The ship is constantly moving in orbit, so it may be overhead and can help you right now but in a few minutes it will orbit around and be on the other side of the planet. For game purposes I suppose you could have a really long cool down time for ship to ground actions to simulate this. Or better yet have set usable windows for having your ship interact in combat. That would have some interesting tactical affects on ground battles.

There's bound to be some good ideas on how to integrate that stuff into the game.

[knightofhyrule730]

hasn't been said yet, but im assuming that as soon as you enter ground mode your ship vanishes. way too much lag if they just let ships float around parked.

however, in terms of abilities, again, i doubt they will be happening. when you are on the ground you are on your own (plus 4)

[ngille]

Yeah, but even in the series they'd have timing issues - well when the script called for it. The ship is constantly moving in orbit, so it may be overhead and can help you right now but in a few minutes it will orbit around and be on the other side of the planet. For game purposes I suppose you could have a really long cool down time for ship to ground actions to simulate this. Or better yet have set usable windows for having your ship interact in combat. That would have some interesting tactical affects on ground battles.

There's bound to be some good ideas on how to integrate that stuff into the game.

I like this idea. It would work out really big for pvp as well. Different ships will be in different orbits which means a different window for each player.

It adds realism as well as a bit of fun.

[perfect_nosferatu]

I'd love to see my ship if I looked through a telescope like Cochrane sees the Enterprise on First Contact!

[WikiUltimate]

Yeah, but even in the series they'd have timing issues - well when the script called for it. The ship is constantly moving in orbit, so it may be overhead and can help you right now but in a few minutes it will orbit around and be on the other side of the planet. For game purposes I suppose you could have a really long cool down time for ship to ground actions to simulate this. Or better yet have set usable windows for having your ship interact in combat. That would have some interesting tactical affects on ground battles.

There's bound to be some good ideas on how to integrate that stuff into the game.

that's what geo-syncronus orbit is for. For those who have not heard the turm it is when a object or satalite is always over the same position. Example would be a satelite that is always located above Washington DC.

[MajorD]

Orbital Bombardment and Orbital Support Fire are attacks I almost desperately want for the game. I can think of several ways it can be done.

Orbital Bombardment
You have a map view of the mission area and get a reticule that relates to the ship's weapons, allowing you bombard specific locations within the map.
You get a view of the entire planet visible from the ship with a reticule, allowing you to target entire mission maps as a whole.
Both options are desirable for different situations and Trek weapons are perfectly capable of either kind of attack thanks to raw power and adjustable yields. Imagine you find a structure on or underground while you are in orbit and it is either shielded or so deep underground that transporters won't function. So, you open the mission map and target the specific structure, either dropping its shields or digging a whole.

For the latter option, imagine an extremely hostile alien of great power, a virus, a parasite, or otherwise very hostile civilization. They have to be eliminated for the safety of your crew and of the Federation as whole. So, you target the entire map and wipe it off the world with a single torpedo. Both the above situations have happened in various episodes giving all the more reason to have such abilities in the game.

Orbital Support Fire
You whip out a tricorder and use it to guide a narrow beam from orbit, allowing you to sweep the beam where ever you point the reticule.
You hold your tricorder on a particular target, be it a person, vehicle, or structure, and the ship automatically determines what is needed to kill the target.
You click and drag a circle with the tricorder, targeting a specific location on the ground and determine the radius of the phaser strike.
You target a person, vehicle, or structure and drag the radius of the circle, using the stationary or moving target as the center of the strike with an area effect of your choosing.

We've seen abilities similar to these in episodes and and movies which answers whether such powers can be in the game, why they should be in the game is because they would be awesome, fun, and useful.

The weaknesses of such attacks would be the minimal safe distance at which you can use those abilities. Starship weapons are extremely powerful, although, torpedoes do seem to be able to confine their energy to target shields without an area effect, so torpedoes would be good against hard targets such as vehicles and structures. Phasers have dangerous area effect, but would be faster responding and good against soft targets, people and unprotected vehicles, especially groups of soft targets.

I think the real weakness of these attacks would be the fact that if you are setting up to use these, then you aren't firing on the enemy. It should take a few seconds to get these attacks going, and in that time all it will take is a few phaser hits to put you down. So, that will limit orbital support fire mostly to when you are fighting really large groups, or when you have the element of surprise so you can set up an orbital ambush. If you don't know where the enemy is, then you won't be able to use orbital support, although, with a general idea and a wide enough attack, you could get some lucky hits. Even so, if most combat is indoors, it will simply be too dangerous to try using orbital support fire, since you could collapse the building on yourself, but it would be awesome if you did need to call support fire on yourself to get out of a shielded building or ship.

[knightofhyrule730]

i highly doubt youll see either of those abilities free to use whenever you want. however, i could see something like that being used for a specific mission or something.

[cjfs]

How about just beaming down a security detail?

"Enterprise, yeah it's the captain again, no... no, vaporized this time. Yeah I'll need four more. Send that annoying one that always talks about his fish. Captain out."

[spiderdude1]

"Enterprise, yeah it's the captain again, no... no, vaporized this time. Yeah I'll need four more. Send that annoying one that always talks about his fish. Captain out."

"And don't forget to send down some more expendable red shirts down while your at it. DON'T ARGUE WITH ME JUST DO IT! Captain out"

[Loekii]

I think any interaction with our ship, while on an 'Away Mission' will be strictly controlled by the flow of the Episode.

In otherwords, if the Episode is planned to have you 'call down a shuttle', then that would be the time you are able to do -- maybe in a 'pop up' confirmation or something.

When 'calling down a shuttle' is not part of the Episode script, we players would have not 'means' to do such -- ie no action, button, option, etc to make the 'call'.

[ransomwk]

It wouldn't make much sense to not have any access to the ship at all. Exactly what that access entails ought to depend on what the ship can do, and the circumstances under which it is asked to do something.

[MajorD]

It wouldn't make much sense to not have any access to the ship at all. Exactly what that access entails ought to depend on what the ship can do, and the circumstances under which it is asked to do something.
Exactly, the developers have to take into account the abilities of the ship and characters, and base missions around those abilities. If they ignore them, or, worse, use particles of the week, or elements of the moment to disable certain inconvenient abilities, then they're just being lazy and should be flogged with wet noodles. Ignoring those abilities and circumnavigating them are a couple reasons why Star Trek had been going downhill. It's also insulting personally that they think I wouldn't notice, and insulting to the Star Trek universe that they feel they can't handle those abilities. There are a bunch of episodes where simply remembering transporters exist would have fixed things in a moment, where proper exploitation of sensors could have revealed an intruder's location, or where a few well placed timely shots from orbit would have saved the day.

[billybob442]

I think any interaction with our ship, while on an 'Away Mission' will be strictly controlled by the flow of the Episode.

In otherwords, if the Episode is planned to have you 'call down a shuttle', then that would be the time you are able to do -- maybe in a 'pop up' confirmation or something.

When 'calling down a shuttle' is not part of the Episode script, we players would have not 'means' to do such -- ie no action, button, option, etc to make the 'call'.


I certainly hope they don't take this tack. I don't like it when game developers make all the critical decisions for the player ahead of time and it's just our job to watch how their clever thinking unfolds. There should be enough openness to allow players to resolve the mission in their own way with the tools that would reasonably be at their disposal.

Of course there are still going to be times when such things are unavailable for valid in-game reasons. Orbital strikes or obvious transporter usage on a pre-warp planet would be a blatant violation of the Prime Directive, ship intervention in the Federation-Klingon neutral zone breaks the Organian Treaty, an orbital strike would be off the table during a diplomatic mission... etc. Even when they are available it's not unreasonable to think that Starfleet command wouldn't punish a captain that uses excessive force on friendly or neutral worlds (i.e. non-PVP worlds).

Now from the point of bandwidth it's not unreasonable to have a set limit to a party size (I believe it's 5). But there's no reason why you couldn't swap out NPC crew members with your orbital ship

[knightofhyrule730]

*does the "its a game, not a sim" dance*

its not going to happen unless the mission calls for it.

[Captain.Hunter]

I certainly hope they don't take this tack. I don't like it when game developers make all the critical decisions for the player ahead of time and it's just our job to watch how their clever thinking unfolds. There should be enough openness to allow players to resolve the mission in their own way with the tools that would reasonably be at their disposal.

Of course there are still going to be times when such things are unavailable for valid in-game reasons. Orbital strikes or obvious transporter usage on a pre-warp planet would be a blatant violation of the Prime Directive, ship intervention in the Federation-Klingon neutral zone breaks the Organian Treaty, an orbital strike would be off the table during a diplomatic mission... etc. Even when they are available it's not unreasonable to think that Starfleet command wouldn't punish a captain that uses excessive force on friendly or neutral worlds (i.e. non-PVP worlds).

Now from the point of bandwidth it's not unreasonable to have a set limit to a party size (I believe it's 5). But there's no reason why you couldn't swap out NPC crew members with your orbital ship

Very well put.

[Loekii]

I think Ground Content will mirror what we have seen in the series.

We did not see the Enterprise 'Orbital Bombard' ground targets much at all, so I don't think Cryptic is going to let players do it everytime they come up on a Romulan encampment.

Same thing with over use of the transporters to get past obstacles.

I see Ground to ship interaction to simply mirror what was seen in the various episodes of the series. It was far less a common tool, and more a special tool for special circumstances.

We have to remember this is a game first, and trivializing content 'just to be realistic' is just as bad as 'perma-death' just to be realistic. There has to be a happy mix, and being that this is a Star Trek MMO, I think mirroring what people saw in the series, to be that happy medium.

[Manx]

I'm inclined to agree with Loekii. Think what orbital bombardments would do to ground based PvP; taking out a five man party would be an easy task for a starship, and personal shields aren't likely to help much against that kind of fire power. It would just become a case of 'first person to call down a torpedo wins'.

Being able to interact with your ship at all while on an away mission would make things too easy IMHO. Run out of phaser power packs or hypospray cartidges? Just have them beam down some more. One of your party eat a disruptor blast? Send him off to medical and call up a replacement.

It would certainly be handy to be able to call upon your ship for aid, and I like the idea of orbital bombardments as much as anyone with a passion for pretty explosions; I just don't think it is such a great idea for STO.

[billybob442]

I think Ground Content will mirror what we have seen in the series.

We did not see the Enterprise 'Orbital Bombard' ground targets much at all, so I don't think Cryptic is going to let players do it everytime they come up on a Romulan encampment.

Same thing with over use of the transporters to get past obstacles.

I see Ground to ship interaction to simply mirror what was seen in the various episodes of the series. It was far less a common tool, and more a special tool for special circumstances.

We have to remember this is a game first, and trivializing content 'just to be realistic' is just as bad as 'perma-death' just to be realistic. There has to be a happy mix, and being that this is a Star Trek MMO, I think mirroring what people saw in the series, to be that happy medium.


Loekii, you are totally right, the most important thing is keeping that whole "Star Trek feel" in the game. It's main selling point is that it's like being in a star trek series. If that's not top priority I don't see the game lasting long. There're already a lot of descent sci-fi games out so it's not going to stand out otherwise.

I don't think I explained my point very well in that last post. I get a little unfocused, which is probably why I think you've misunderstood me. Let me try to correct my error.

Part of that Star Trek feel (in my opinion at least) comes from over coming obstacles with ingenuity and a little outside the box thinking. However linearity kills creativity. In linear game play the devs are saying "You've got to reach this goal with these resources by this set of steps that must be done in this order and in this way." Which is what's used in a lot of FPS's for obvious reasons. Instead STO should have a completely open world where they say, "You've got to reach this goal. How you get there is your problem." Optimally, from there you do whatever you want. You want to grab the secrets from that Klingon base with a frontal assault? Go for it. You want to wager the intel on a challenge for single hand-to-hand combat with their best warrior? Go for it. You want to surgically slaps some ridges on your head and try to waltz through the front door? Go for it. You want to dress the Tellerite up as Orion slave girl and have him seduce the base commander? Well, you can always give it a shot.

I may have gone a little far on that last one. :D
Anyway, it's not about making the game "real" (I can't remember the last time I calibrated a phase coil) nor about smashing things from orbit, but about preserving that aspect of Star Trek. Too that end the player should have a tool box of resources he's collected over his career that he can pull from to complete his missions. These tools will no doubt have reasonable restrictions attached - such as the litany of reason I gave for why orbital bombardment would be off the table on most missions (face it, Starfleet would only allow such things in open warfare). To arbitrarily narrow this to a single tool "just because", is a bad idea. They shouldn't take an option off the table unless it's totally justifiable that they do.

Sorry if I got a little long winded here.

[MajorD]

Certain things weren't done or were done out of a lack of imagination, or for reasons of contrivance in order to achieve certain story goals. If the game is designed correctly, the mission/episodes will play out much like the shows, while still giving us all the abilities available at all times, and with us determining how the stories play out. Handicapping our options just because it may not fit certain stories is the wrong way to go.

[Sobekeus]

Why are people talking like there will be tons of ships around single planets all doing away missions at the same time?

I for one hope that won't be the case.

[billybob442]

Why are people talking like there will be tons of ships around single planets all doing away missions at the same time?

I for one hope that won't be the case.

There's a possible issue with PVP planets collecting a sky full of ships, but otherwise I doubt it will be a problem.