[MOD][NEW RELEASE] Sonata 7a TC

[thashepherd]

Over break, I've thrown together a bunch of new weapon images - managed to finish all 8 of the UE guns over the past few days. This is some of the content that will be in 7.1.

Would anyone on this board be interested in seeing articles on the new content as it's completed, as well as some comments on its tech/lore/development in universe? Sort of a show & tell. The format would be an article on ModDB as well as a cross-post here, and all would include a significant amount of new game content.

Around two "yes" votes and I'll throw one together.

[Kieve]

I find it very difficult to argue with new content.

[BrenTenkage]

I abstain, but if you set it up, I'll check, if not, I don't care. Just do what you think is right

[Mj64]

You know, I'd been looking at Endless Space a while on steam wanting to buy it but never got around to it. After playing this mod, I finally got the urge to buy it. Loved it so far, and I hope this mod gets close to as good as ES.

[thashepherd]

Are there any Hindi, Russian, or Mandarin speakers on this forum?

Man of the future, naturally, is brown. Nations came together as the United Earth - and, as more and more settlements clung to the soil of alien worlds, UE came to stand for a United Empire that was not exclusive to Earth at all. But this humanity, however unified, was Chinese and Indian and American in culture - somewhere between a melting pot and a salad bowl of all of the beautiful little things that make the nations of today so unique.

So why should English be the sole language of humanity? Well, it is. As the 22nd century ground onward, English had been the lingua franca of engineers and diplomats for longer than any living human could remember. It was taught in all the schools of any quality, with Farsi and French and Spanish and German consigned to the dustbin of history. Students in elite academies tore their hair out over Cyrillic and gendered verbs and other oddities, much like the students of the 20th century furrowed their brows over Latin's seemingly infinite declensions. They'd whine to their friends - why learn a dead language? And their parents bemoaned their lost heritage, as much as they appreciated the benefits of a common tongue.

But only a fool would say that the tower of Babel's influence had lost its sway. English absorbed thousands of words and habits, from the Spanish 'r' to the Japanese style of adding a bit of respect, where due, to a man's name. Internet era English would sound as quaint to a citizen of the United Empire as Locke or Jefferson's words do to us today.

That is not to say that the words of the past were forgotten. Clarke, Kagan, Adams - even Meyer - were mentioned in the same breath as Mahan, Shakespeare, Aristotle, Homer, Valmiki. Grandparents bemoan the loss of the strength of character that humanity once had - back when men were men. Back when you had to type on keyboards, and needed to carry something called a "cell" to communicate, and everything was powered by dried-up peat moss. Times were truly better then, weren't they?

The past has a way of making itself known, and those who do not learn their history are destined to repeat it. One of humanity's strength is its diversity, and a common tongue does nothing to diminish that.

The point of this post, I suppose, is that I've tried to secret a bit of our shared culture into Sonata's art. The kanji for "Pirate" is fairly obvious, but far from the only reference. How many can you find?

[thashepherd]

Quick update - thanks to some of DCChuckle's hard work, "Verne" a Sophon Kilo-class science vessel, is now in game! Armed with a Thermophotonic Xaser and highly advanced shielding technology, this is the vessel of choice for seeking out new life forms and civiliations - and kicking their asses if necessary.

Other improvements include a new sprite for the Non-Baryonic Torpedo launcher (thanks to DC), as well as new sprites for all 8 of the United Empire weapons. I'm thinking hard about holding off on 7a - updates for Sonata 1.03 - and rolling everything together into Sonata 7.1.

Media should be forthcoming soon.

[BrenTenkage]

Quick update - thanks to some of DCChuckle's hard work, "Verne" a Sophon Kilo-class science vessel, is now in game! Armed with a Thermophotonic Xaser and highly advanced shielding technology, this is the vessel of choice for seeking out new life forms and civiliations - and kicking their asses if necessary.

Other improvements include a new sprite for the Non-Baryonic Torpedo launcher (thanks to DC), as well as new sprites for all 8 of the United Empire weapons. I'm thinking hard about holding off on 7a - updates for Sonata 1.03 - and rolling everything together into Sonata 7.1.

Media should be forthcoming soon.

Let me know when its ready, and I'll have a lets play up and going on the same day

[thashepherd]

TL;DR Custom UE weapons graphics and technological explanation; Humans are badasses; Humans are dicks.

UEWeapons.png

Much like the Mercator projection is a solution for rendering a 3D globe onto a 2D surface, in Sonata, dozens or even hundreds of years of technological development are rendered into a set of weapons at one point in time In Endless Space, for example, weapons are researched as you advance through time. I'm a nice guy, so you get ALL of them.

Believe it or not, kinetic weapons represent the best bang for your buck even hundreds of years into the future. Mass-y objects, when fired at realistic space combat speeds, often carry far more kinetic energy than a particle weapon using the same amount of power. Humans, a very pragmatic species, have maintained kinetic weapons in their front-line arsenal.

However, chemically propelled weapons - "sluggers" - have a number of disadvantages. They generate heat when fired, require complicated loading and extraction mechanisms, and require bulky propellant. There are many solutions to these problems, including caseless cartridges or the liquid explosives used heavily by the Sower. The United Empire military has long since investigated and mastered these technologies, but prefers a more...elegant...solution.

The Mk 1 mod 3 Accelerator, linear is about as standard a railgun as you'll find in space. Over a decade of heavy front-line use, the United Empire military has of course refined the design - hence the "mod 3" designation. Basically, an electric current is run down one rail and up the other, with a sled carrying the projectile completing the circuit in the middle. It's counterintuitive, but the net magnetic field created by this current is at a right angle to the barrel, and this creates a massive force driving the projectile due to something called the Lorenz force.

As with any weapons technology, there are drawbacks. The sled generates a lot of friction when fired, and needs to be retracted after every shot. The rails erode, and there are immense forces pushing the rails apart. The Mk 1 Driver is a modification of the standard railgun concept in which the rails are mounted much closer together and the sledless projectile surrounds them. This allows coolant lines to be run through the rail assembly, as well as a reduction in friction and stronger construction. The rails are closer together, which drops power, but the increased firing rate provides other advantages.

After some decades of development, however, the United Empire seemed to reach an upper limit in the power of their railguns. Military intelligence agents noted, however, that there seemed to be no similar limit to the power of Sower armor or Sophon shields - a new weapon was needed.

The Mk 2 Driver was the result of a "black" UE crash program to upgrade destroyer lethality. Rather than using rails, the helical driver is more akin to a coilgun. The Lorenz force is out, and the propulsion mechanism is simpler, but there are a lot of problems when trying to drive REAL power. As a prototype weapon, the helical driver is not much more powerful than the Mk 1 Driver, but is able to fire even faster. The United Empire grew addicted to the lack of rail erosion or friction from the projectile, since (due to the coil) it can now easily be suspended electromagnetically. The Mk 2 Driver was far from a perfect weapon, but it set the tone for all of the Empire's future weapons development.

The Mk 1 Gauss Gun is a weapon as synonymous with the United Empire as the M-16 was with the United States of America, or the Ak-47 with the CCCP. It is, quite simply, several coilguns mounted in sequence one after another. Although this refinement might seem obvious (and it was), the weapon is a technological triumph. Power conduction, firing sequence timing, and circuit hardening posed immense problems that were only overcome by the application of the United Empire's massive military-industrial base. This weapon is now the standard armament of almost all Empire vessels capable of fleet action.

A civilian software engineer noticed that the principles used to suspend a Gauss projectile in the center of the barrel, and the principles used to propel it, had much in common. In his free time, he created the prototype of a weapon which thousands of IHTG traders can now thank for saving their lives. Almost all medium turret weapons in the Empire merchant navy now use the Gauss principle. Where a massive, straight-line weapon was previously necessary in the Mk 1 Gauss Gun, the Mk 1 Gauss Driver has been modularized such that power generation, aiming, and even parts of the weapon's barrel no longer have to be colocated.

At this point, the UE is comfortable designing weapons using basic implications of the Electro-weak theory. Although the fundamental forces of electricity and magnetism had been unified by the electromagnetic theory since the early 20th century, it took until the late 23rd century for the Weak atomic force to be unified with electromagnetism. In layman's terms, this allowed the partial weaponization of bosons - force carrying particles. The first stage - a baby step, really - was the development of the Mk 2 Gauss Gun by an Empire skunkworks team. Utilizing all sorts of miraculous Treknobabble, the force carrying properties of 'Z' bosons are used to increase the already stratospheric muzzle velocity of an otherwise-stock Gauss Gun. Although these weapons were considered a stopgap, they are not uncommon among Empire forces.

This would be the chronological point at which the Sophons' ears perk up (do the Sophon even have ears?) and notice Human weapons technology. Of course it is crude by their standards, and even the most arrogant Human scientists admit that the Boson Gauss was a sophomoric effort. To paraphrase an 18th century Human naval hero, however, the Humans had not yet begun to fight.

Shit gets crazy in the heady realm of particle physics - and, as any programmer will assure you, in 80% of all source code. It was a government-driven collaboration between physical and computational scientists that created the Mk 2 Accelerator, which represents THE weapon that scholars point to when claiming Humanity's place among the greatest scientists of the galaxy. Few know how it works; it's top secret. What IS known is that the term "Mk 2 Accelerator" is a misnomer, a name chosen to confuse enemies, much like the "tank" in the early 20th century. It fires tachyons, and is known to be exceedingly deadly, although there are rumored to be causal side effects after each firing.

One of the most powerful human weapons never developed the air of mystery enjoyed by the Tachyon Accelerator, perhaps because many confuse it with the Mk 2 Gauss Gun. That would be a mistake, as the Mk 2 Gauss Driver uses substantially different and more sophisticated technology. Although unification of the Strong Force still eludes all known races (except, perhaps, the Sophon), the Empire has managed to weaponize it.

I shit thee not, the United Empire would figure out how to weaponize a fucking vineyard if they thought it would help them throw a better wine tasting next Thursday. Humans love to fight.

The Proton Driver, as most civilians call it (because its military nickname is far too phallic for polite conversation), represents an evolution in the Gauss Gun's projectile rather than its firing mechanism. For decades, Empire weapons simply fired slugs of dense metal; at the speeds we're dealing with, explosives actually reduce the damage potential of a given mass. That is no longer true; creative fusing technology, miniaturized particle generation, and hilariously advanced algorithms are used to convert all atoms in a radius around the projectile into Hydrogen on impact. In layman's terms, this is magic.

Only a human would then light the Hydrogen on fire. That's just a dick move.

[BrenTenkage]

...ok awesome

[Kieve]

I see I'm not the only one in a weapons-crafting mode lately. Pretty slick! And I love the treknobabble to go with.

Only a human would then light the Hydrogen on fire. That's just a dick move.

Oh god yes. I'd be there holding the match.