Bridge Commander Central
BC Forums => BC General => Topic started by: Anew9 on April 07, 2010, 11:03:46 PM
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Something I thought of recently, in BC the scripts have recharge rates for each shield vector and I recently recalled in Voyager Equinox that Ransom claimed it takes 2 seconds for the shields to fully recharge if she were to turn them off... does that mean that in the star trek universe shields behave on not only being worn down but on recharge rate?
Like for example, a Galaxy class ship can take (lets say) 5 photons in one vector per volley before collapsing. If I stopped shooting weapons in that vector, the shields would return to 100% in 2 seconds. This would make more sense seeing that in Star trek its more about penetrating shields that wearing them down. Janeway keeps saying to lay down fire whenever she fights people, so I assume that she's trying to saturate a vector with so much fire that it collapses and Voyager can hit the ships hull.
Would this seem to make sense?
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I have no idea what it is you're asking, can you be more clear?
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Do shields in Star trek recharge slowly or fast? When a ship shoots at a shield, is it eating the shield slowly away or is it battling with the ships recharge ability?
In BC, I wanted to make shields recharge fully in 2 seconds when not under fire, is this idea canon? So basically when a ship has "weaker shields" it basically means it cant take alot of punishment before collapsing and fully recharging. If I shoot a Quantum torpedo at a Galor class ship, the shield vector will collapse FULLY after 1-2 shots which leaves it FULLY open to attack for 1-2 seconds before the shield raises/recharges again.
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Do shields in Star trek recharge slowly or fast? When a ship shoots at a shield, is it eating the shield slowly away or is it battling with the ships recharge ability?
Slowly. While the weapons are indeed fighting with the shields recharge ability, the rate of damage is much, much higher than the recharge rate.
In BC, I wanted to make shields recharge fully in 2 seconds when not under fire, is this idea canon?
Far, far from it. I watched "Equinox" a few days ago, and don't know where you got two seconds from, Ransom actually said it would take 45 seconds to fully recharge the emitters. However dropping shields in BC will not speed up there recharge rate (I've tried it many, many times).
Here's a breakdown of how BC's shield system works:
If your recharge rate is set to 30.000000, that means it will regain about 30 hit points every second, weather or not it is being attacked. The thing that makes it hard to notice the recharge rate is that the weapons are usually doing about 600-1700 damage per second to the shield. The recharge rate doesn't speed up or slow down past the value in the hardpoint if the shields are down or not, or if they are being attacked, so the only way you'll be able to achieve the effect you're looking for is to play with your hardpoints and set the recharge rates pretty high.
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Yes that's true that Ransom says 45 seconds to recharge, but Worf keeps referring to "reassembling the shields" especially during the Ent D battle with Husnock . He says "shields down" like 4 times, how can the shields go up then down after every volley?
The only conclusion I can think of is that the shields recharge very fast but can only absorb an equal amount of energy it outputs per volley. IE If a shield has HP of 4000 it can only absorb 4000 HP in one volley then it fails.
When the tactical officer says, "Shields down to 70%." They are referring to how much HP is left from that volley, in order to collapse the shield more firepower will be needed. Its more about penetrating shields rather than by wearing them down.
Another example would be in Voyager's Unimatrix zero part 1 when Kim says, "Foward shields are down." Then 3 seconds later the cube is seen shooting at the foward shields... it's probably just a continuity issue but that Husnock fight may prove otherwise.
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I suppose it can go any number of ways, every incarnation of Star Trek from the Original Series to Voyager never handled shields consistently, so at the end of the day it comes down to the fact that its your install, set them up however you want. :)
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Ya I know, but it just is a little frustrating that when I balance my ships my research becomes contradictory depending on the resources. Like for example, when I balance my Sovereign, how am I supposed to determine how many torpedoes it can take before its shields collapse? How about how many torpedoes to destroy its ablative armor then its hull? It doesnt say anywhere on how the shields work on the Sovvie or how strong they really are.
In some episodes Star trek ships seem to defy their own specs just for the sake of the plot for example Unimatrix zero... Voyager assaulted the Tact cube for a good 4 minutes without being destroyed yet it wasn't a match for a Malon frigate in the Night episode.
I took it that the Borg have spectacular defenses and dont really care about offense too much, so basically Voyager did no damage while she was hitting the cube yet was being slowly worn down by the cubes weapons slowly.
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Eh I would take what was seen in Voyager's later seasons with a grain of salt, at least from a tech point of view. After DS9 ended the Voyager writing staff pretty much stopped caring about continuity, ESPECIALLY regarding the Borg.
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Shields are a pain in BC and any Sci-Fi series in general. Mainly because it's a made up concept that has no practical working out. I found this a pain balancing the Stargate ships. In that series there were occasions where the shield seemed directly proportional to the power gong into them, essentially once the batteries ran flat the shields went down.
The best explanation I have is that 'energy shielding' in general works along the principal of creating an energy bubble around a ship with the aid of emitters installed along various points on the hull. Shields therefore absorb energy opposed to simply forming a solid barrier. In essence, shield have an energy absorption level. When it comes to recharging, its all to do with emitters. The more power you feed into them, the higher the energy absorption level rises, but that in itself has limits. An example would be trying to charge an iPod with a car battery, it would just explode if you put that much power into it.
Same analogy with that TNG ep. When the Shields drop, they have been overwhelmed, but they constantly recharge. The thing to also take into consideration is BC can't manipulate ship systems the way they should, ie you cant divert power to forward emitters to recharge them faster. In theory it's also possible to move the power from the aft portion to the front, so drop the rear to raise the front.
As for Voyager, yeh the tech on that show was never consistent. I will go far as to say in its defence that over the year it accumulated so much Borg/ 29th Century Borg tech that there was no way to guess what kind of power it had.
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Shields are a pain in BC and any Sci-Fi series in general. Mainly because it's a made up concept that has no practical working out. I found this a pain balancing the Stargate ships. In that series there were occasions where the shield seemed directly proportional to the power gong into them, essentially once the batteries ran flat the shields went down.
The best explanation I have is that 'energy shielding' in general works along the principal of creating an energy bubble around a ship with the aid of emitters installed along various points on the hull. Shields therefore absorb energy opposed to simply forming a solid barrier. In essence, shield have an energy absorption level. When it comes to recharging, its all to do with emitters. The more power you feed into them, the higher the energy absorption level rises, but that in itself has limits. An example would be trying to charge an iPod with a car battery, it would just explode if you put that much power into it.
Same analogy with that TNG ep. When the Shields drop, they have been overwhelmed, but they constantly recharge. The thing to also take into consideration is BC can't manipulate ship systems the way they should, ie you cant divert power to forward emitters to recharge them faster. In theory it's also possible to move the power from the aft portion to the front, so drop the rear to raise the front.
As for Voyager, yeh the tech on that show was never consistent. I will go far as to say in its defence that over the year it accumulated so much Borg/ 29th Century Borg tech that there was no way to guess what kind of power it had.
Well I have the boost shields mod installed on my BC so I can divert power to reinforce weakened shields but I am struggling with recharge rates and shield HP's. Me personally I have not watched DS9 so Im not too clear on the tech shown in that show apart from what I have seen on youtube with the Defiant. I watched the First battle of Chintoka with the orbital platfroms and saw the defiant take direct hits on her shields yet she showed no damage but when a logically stronger ship like a Galaxy class got shot at she was ripped to shreds in 1 volley... how can a tiny ship like defiant outclass flagships like the Galaxy class?
... I never really liked that ship, it seemed way too strong/cheap.
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Saw the defiant take direct hits on her shields yet she showed no damage but when a logically stronger ship like a Galaxy class got shot at she was ripped to shreds in 1 volley... how can a tiny ship like defiant outclass flagships like the Galaxy class?
Easy the defiant is faster so it can maneuver around some of the weapon fire better than the larger ships it also has new armor... so it's hull is slightly stronger.... but it isn't invincible. I can also explain away the galaxy getting its ass kicked by saying it was in a firefight before we saw it and it's shields were taken down quite a bit. I may need to watch the ep again but I think simple tactics can explain this... I think I'd want to focus on the heavy hitters first lol.
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how can a tiny ship like defiant outclass flagships like the Galaxy class?
DS9 actually explained the Defiant pretty well. It was built specifically to fight the Borg, and its crew accommodations are probably only a leg up from those found on a shuttle craft to make room for weapons, shield generators, and it has pretty durable hull armor. It can also dodge incoming fire easily, unlike the Galaxy (being the behemoth it is).
The Galaxy may be well armed, but its older, and it was designed and built before the Borg and the Dominion threats emerged.
When you think about it the Galaxy is sort of a flawed design technologically. When it was introduced it didn't include any new innovations, only a culmination of current technology. Only a few years after it was introduced the Borg came along and made the Galaxy's technology obsolete almost over night.
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Saw the defiant take direct hits on her shields yet she showed no damage but when a logically stronger ship like a Galaxy class got shot at she was ripped to shreds in 1 volley... how can a tiny ship like defiant outclass flagships like the Galaxy class?
Easy the defiant is faster so it can maneuver around some of the weapon fire better than the larger ships it also has new armor... so it's hull is slightly stronger.... but it isn't invincible. I can also explain away the galaxy getting its ass kicked by saying it was in a firefight before we saw it and it's shields were taken down quite a bit. I may need to watch the ep again but I think simple tactics can explain this... I think I'd want to focus on the heavy hitters first lol.
Again, I have not seen the show fully so I don't know what happend before or after that battle. IF this is true, then I need to rebalance my ships AGAIN! How long before the Chintoka scene was that Galaxy in a fight? Im trying to create recharge rates for shields based on the show...
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Well if it helps Galaxy's did fare quite well in the Dominion War, after they had been upgraded. DS9 only showed the Odyssey being destroyed in the second season.
How long before the Chintoka scene was that Galaxy in a fight?
It was in the first battle in its entirely, the battle was won. The Galaxy just took damage.
Despite DITL's reputation, its article on the Defiant-class is actually 85% reliable, along with the Galaxy-class. I'd suggest taking a look at those.
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So basically your saying that the recharge rates on shields are slower than I am stating. The HP of shields needs to be dependent on what ship I am using. Sigh, Unimatrix zero makes balancing the Intrepid almost impossible unless she had equal shielding to the Galaxy class which is retarded since she had problems with the Kazon...
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what makes you think they didn't divert power from other systems or from shields facing away from the side in battle :/
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what makes you think they didn't divert power from other systems or from shields facing away from the side in battle :/
So basically your saying that SFC3 shields are canon in comparison to BC. Can someone make a mod like that, have the ability to reinforce shields so they are 2x stronger at one vector and have the opposite shield become 50 - 70% weaker?
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IIRC I think there was a mod like that made.... and I think it was defiant who made it.... it might be in KM.
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Sigh, Unimatrix zero makes balancing the Intrepid almost impossible
Honestly dude, the best way to make your life easier is to simply IGNORE that battle, or, if you don't want to do that, I just rationalize it by assuming the Cube wasn't going all out on Voyager (they wanted to assimilate it, not destroy it, plus it was only one ship, so they didn't need to use so every weapon they had). I know you're going for canon, but that battle was just a plot device, don't let it determine how your whole game is balanced.
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You can make this. I played with HPs recently and I made the shields like that:
2000 shield strengh and 180 shield recharge and It was pritty same like in star trek. If I Fire 5-6 Photons at one time, I can penatrate the shield and damage the hull sevearly and It was tough, but If I fire torpedoes slowly, the battle took very long, and It was very cool :thumbsup:
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You can make this. I played with HPs recently and I made the shields like that:
2000 shield strengh and 180 shield recharge and It was pritty same like in star trek. If I Fire 5-6 Photons at one time, I can penatrate the shield and damage the hull sevearly and It was tough, but If I fire torpedoes slowly, the battle took very long, and It was very cool :thumbsup:
Ya I already did that and the battles felt awesome but everyone here is saying it isn't canon... the battles felt like conserving ammo to maximize volley damage in one blow and to eat away at ships hulls in passes, not just spamming phasers to eat away at shields slowly then hitting them anywhere after shields start failing.
I also set ships shield generators and subsystems to low HP so that if I disabled the shields, I could cause ALOT of damage to ships because subsystems got disabled very easily.
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but everyone here is saying it isn't canon...
it's your own install - make it however youd like to your enjoyment; doesnt matter if it is "canon" or not it is how you enjoy your gameplay :)
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but everyone here is saying it isn't canon...
it's your own install - make it however youd like to your enjoyment; doesnt matter if it is "canon" or not it is how you enjoy your gameplay :)
I guess... but Im a purist and I like to have things as close to the original idea as possible regardless if I think I can improve on it.
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Most of the people who have been playing this game for a while will tell you that canon hardpoints don't necessarily make for good gameplay. BC's scripting and engine makes canon difficult (and in some cases a liability) to implement in most hardpoints. You can get pretty close with a lot of ships, but the only ship that you can really use a canon hardpoint on is the Defiant, in my experience.
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Whenever I played around with balancing my game, I always tweaked my ship hps so that the shields would recharge enough to replace about 1/6 of damage from the average phaser (2 sec burst firing) per second. I remember setting my game ship's (except Borg) phasers to deal an average of about 250 (or 85 for disruptors) damage per second. The shields could recharge that amount in about 6 seconds. This enabled ships some time to keep the strong shield arcs toward the enemy while recharging weaker shields. The only difference between the shields of different ships is the strength (or max charge), where larger ships would have stronger (or longer lasting) shields than smaller ships. I say this to give you a pretty good idea about trying to balance it out.
Sure you can set your shields to fully recharge in 2 seconds, but then you would have to sacrifice repair rates of every damagable subsystem, depending on how strong your shields will be. Shields that are too strong won't even appear to be weakened as they would recharge almost instantly. Too weak and you might as well not even have shields in the first place with all the shield status flickering you will see as they fail and recharge within those 2 seconds. If you really want to follow through with the 2 second shield recharge, then you should probably start out by having a difficult rate of repair for all subsystems and also set the shield strength (max charge) slightly less that the damage of your average phaser. Example: phaser = 250, shield strength = 240, recharge = 120. This way, a torpedo impact will be the only way to cause any real damage to your ship subsystems while still having a chance to take some damage (however insignificant) from phaser fire. But also be aware that by using this example, taking damage from a volley of torpedos that does an average of about 500 damage on impact will almost certainly cripple your ship in no time. Tweak to where you would see fit.
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To be fair, I think while BC has its flaws, it's still pretty canon when coming to Trek battles. It just can't simulate everything in a true Universe battle. It's standard knowledge that almost all Trek battles fall along the principle of 'Shields taking damage' Okay so 'Divert all power to forward shields'. Even in films like Nemesis, when there was a break in the battle they started to recharge there shields, but this didn't bring them back to full strength.
If BC allowed you to divert energy into the shields from all non essential systems, like life support, replicators, holodecks etc all those other systems that BC just can't take account for, then things would be more canon. If you could transfer the remaining 32% of Aft shields to the fore, bringing them to full strength, it would be more canon. These things you simply can't do. Even BC's Adv. Power Distribution doesn't take full advantage of this. I could be wrong but I don't think upping shields to 200% makes them recharge 2x faster or make them 2x stronger.
I would also imagine that in Trek battles, the more overall damage the shields would take, the slower the recharge rate. That's just not taken into account in BC either.
Essentially I think my point is. BC is canon, but only to a point where power systems simply aren't as editable to make battles as dramatic as things seen in the series. In Voyager the could come up with any sort of idea to make them last longer in battle. We could assume that they lasted longer against the Tactical Cube because they were prepared for this battle, they had boosted shield strength by re-routing it through the deflector and harmonising them with Borg specific modulations, perhaps they even plugged Neelix directly into the Warp Core to boost efficiency!
All of these (well nearly all) are possible. BC just isn't that advanced
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To be fair, I think while BC has its flaws, it's still pretty canon when coming to Trek battles. It just can't simulate everything in a true Universe battle. It's standard knowledge that almost all Trek battles fall along the principle of 'Shields taking damage' Okay so 'Divert all power to forward shields'. Even in films like Nemesis, when there was a break in the battle they started to recharge there shields, but this didn't bring them back to full strength.
If BC allowed you to divert energy into the shields from all non essential systems, like life support, replicators, holodecks etc all those other systems that BC just can't take account for, then things would be more canon. If you could transfer the remaining 32% of Aft shields to the fore, bringing them to full strength, it would be more canon. These things you simply can't do. Even BC's Adv. Power Distribution doesn't take full advantage of this. I could be wrong but I don't think upping shields to 200% makes them recharge 2x faster or make them 2x stronger.
I would also imagine that in Trek battles, the more overall damage the shields would take, the slower the recharge rate. That's just not taken into account in BC either.
Essentially I think my point is. BC is canon, but only to a point where power systems simply aren't as editable to make battles as dramatic as things seen in the series. In Voyager the could come up with any sort of idea to make them last longer in battle. We could assume that they lasted longer against the Tactical Cube because they were prepared for this battle, they had boosted shield strength by re-routing it through the deflector and harmonising them with Borg specific modulations, perhaps they even plugged Neelix directly into the Warp Core to boost efficiency!
All of these (well nearly all) are possible. BC just isn't that advanced
Well what I did as a result to this conversation was take the max charge for my shields on an Intrepid to be about 7000 HP (my shield vectors all have different strengths with the foward and afts at 8000 and my ventral at 7000 for the warpcore protection and the rest at 5000). My recharge rates for shields are 200 for the foward and afts, 180 for ventral and 150 for the rest. Type X phasers do 1000 damage and have a max charge of 1 and a recharge rate of 3 so battles are quick and fast paced. Photon torpedoes do 1400 damage and Quantums do 2800. If my Intrepid took a volley of federation torps the shield vector would fail, if it took a multiple phaser blast from a Type VIII phaser it would start failing, but it needs to be pounded continuously.
In my battles with the Nova I gave her type 8 phasers and photon torpedoes, and she causes Hull damage at almost every pass she throws torpedoes at me. If I keep my shields to her phasers she pecks through them in intervals depending how many phasers she shows me at once. My kazon dont do any real damage as they have too weak weapons to penetrate my shields. My intrepids hull is at around 10000 but I gave subsystems a high disabled percentage (to keep with Trek canon that systems are very fragile). But I don't like to have systems destroyed because then I can't repair them if I need to run. If a ships cuts through my shields and hits my shield generator to disable it, Im in BIG trouble since my weapons do ALOT of damage.
It works very well and I think portrays battle pretty well in the Trek universe. But my only problem is balancing ships like the Galaxy, Sovvie and Defiant. My Defiant chews everything up because her pulse phasers and quantum torps are capable of punching through any shield vector my ships have and I dont want to weaken her because she's such a powerhouse in the battles I've seen in DS9. She's so strong that she gives the Galaxy a run for her money... is this accurate?
I know about her fight with the Lakota but the Lakota was a old Excelsior refit with Quantum torpedoes and they barely lost. How can a ship that stomachs orbital weapons not completely outclass a busted down Excelsior that didnt even use her Quantums?
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It's a problem. While I've been editing and 'trying' to balance the ST and SG ships the problems of Nukes comes up often. If a weapon is very powerful, say like your 2800 Quantums they tend to allow for 'bleeding damage' or 'critical hits'. What this basically means is that depending on how fast the aggressor and defender are travelling and how fast the projectile is, some weapon damage passes through the shields and in rare cases all of it.
In a game where say an Intrepid has a hull strength value of between 15-20,000 and then has ultimate recharge shields. There will be a fierce battle to drain shields and gain a hull hit, but when that does happen, the weapon can unrealistically obliterate a ship.
Also, another thing to consider is 'damage radius'. If on your projectile this is set to a value such as 0.1, on a hull impact the photon will do the named 1400. However, increasing the radius causes more damage, both as a form of damage multiplier and if the impact radius affects other system ie. the shot damaged the hull, warp core, shield generator and sensors, the damage taken is also much greater.
On the Stargate Hiveship, one Nuke currently does 10% hull damage, but if that nuke detonates around the area of the ship where the Power Generators are it can raise up to 25%.
I'm with you on the subsystem damage. On my install my Intrepid has a hull value of 20000. I've balanced the hull strength according to the ship size and then take into consideration the technology level. In a lot of battles ships can take a lot of hull damage, it's when a subsystem is targeted/affected that problems arise. This can be seen in battles such as the first encounter with the Breen in the Dominion War. Once all the ships were disabled, they took a good deal of Torpedo damage before the ship exploded.
The Lakota may have been an old design, but that ship was pretty heavy. I supposed an analogy would be driving around on a push bike with anti tank missiles welded to the sides, at the end of the day it will still blow up tanks. In that battle though the Defiant was still clearly in a league of its own, and they weren't really trying to blow it up. The Defiant has immense fire power, it's not unrealistic in my view to have it level out with a Galaxy at all.
I think though, that the idea and strategy your applying to you install is brilliant, but I don't believe it to be canon. In the Trek battles, ships simply didn't have the ability to recharge their shields to 100% that quickly. Early episodes of Voyger like 'Basics' had hit and run tactics from the Kazon attacking a single shield vector to drain it. The ship couldn't just recharge that area. I think I'm right in also stating that in numerous DS9 episodes such as the finale, once the Dominion broke away from the initial fight and regrouped at Cardassia there were hours of waiting and when the Defiant was giving a tactical update, their shields were still pretty low.
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Dkealt, I have found the PERFECT balance of shield recharge rate and HP for ships systems and hulls.
I have standardized ALL the ships to have a max recharge of 200 on ONLY front and aft shields, 180 on bottom and 150 on the rest. The only difference between ships are the HP's of shields. My Intrepid has 7000 fore shield HP while the Galaxy has 20000 and BOTH have 200 recharge for the same vector. The BEAUTY of my system is the TACTICAL nature of fights now.
I was an Intrepid against the Galaxy class, a fast ship vs a slower and less maneuverable ship. Instead of attacking the Galaxy head on, I held my fire until I was at the bottom shields (18000HP). I also made ALL ships have the EXACT same HP for subsystems, which is at (normally) 5000 HP which disable at 70% HP. The Galaxy shield generator is located on the deflector so I headed for a weaker vector and focused my weapons on that. The Galaxy has ALOT of phasers on her belly so I took some damage but kept focusing fire on the underside generator. It took a few minutes and my ship took 30% hull damage and lost some weapons and systems but I eventually disabled her generator and kept hitting it till it was destroyed.
Then I started taking out weapons then engines. My Galaxy can take ALOT of punishement hull-wise (40000HP) but I eventually was able to disable the ship system by system then target the core and destroy it. Just to make sure I wasn't unbalancing the game I assumed command of a Galaxy vs an Intrepid and I absolutely ROCKED the Intrepid with a full spread (10 torps from the foward launcher) via a head on attack. I was SUPER happy with the battle. My fights are no longer class vs class but tactic vs tactic.
The highest shield HP I allow on ships is 22000 (Sovvie) but her recharge rate is the same as the other ships plus she has ablative armor (8000HP standard for all armored ships) and strong hull strength (43000HP). :yay:
Again, I base my weapons on fast recharge low max charge and type for damage. For example, type 12 phasers do 1200HP, Type 10 does 1000 etc. I love how my torpedoes are working, they look and feel fantastic in game and I am still tweaking the pulse phasers a bit.
I am very happy with what i have right now, and I'd be more then happy to post some scripts for you guys if you wanna try them out.
I really want to show you guys my photon torpedoes, they are heavily "tweaked" versions of existing weapons released by the modders of BC but I am very proud of what I have worked on. My quantums are still "works in progess" though.
BTW Dkealt, I LOVE your Sovvie photons, they look absolutely perfect in the game and am very happy with them. Your whole torpedo mod is amazing man!
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Haha, thanks. I forgot about that release, woah just checked that was in 2005!!! I didn't stop then, I should release a 3.0 version.
That really does sound awesome. The only thing I wish we could add to that type of battle is a more realistic power system. ie. that when your reserve power drains to 0% then the shields and phaser fail completely. I reckon that would be good, but ultimately impossible I'm led to believe.
I've recently been editing all my recharge HP's. I've been working on the tactic inherent in BC, of a battle that will gradually completely drain a shield. What I noticed was that even in KM1.0 all the ship recharge rates were the same?! It took me a while to understand what this means, so like your Intrepid and Galaxy. What that means is that a Galaxy will take twice as long to recharge a vector to 100%. I've kept ships with shield HP's at 6000-9000 at 15, then 10000-14000 at 25 then heavy ships at 15000-20000 at least 30.
I also forgot to mention that I'm pretty fond of the 'Recharge Shields' part of the Adv. Repair Options. it's just like the Equinox episode. You have to drop shields completely but they recharge at a very quick rate. Just wasn't sure if it's part of KM1.0 or not.
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Actually all my Alpha Quandrant ships have the same recharge values and subsystem HP's, they only differ in hull strength and Shield HP.
I didn't know that KM already did this for their ships... interesting.
And Dkealt, if you DO release a 3.0, would it be possible to maybe edit the flares of the torpedoes to have consistent colors with the torp core so that when it fires the core and flares look continous? Your torpedoes have amazing glow textures but they don't animate when they are fired, maybe doing what I proposed may help with that.
I'll post my photons so you can kind of get a feel for what I am aiming for but since I am unfamiliar with editing TGAs so far, maybe you can improve on my efforts.
FYI I didn't include SFX and make sure you backup your original tactical textures because I couldnt find the right flare TGA so I just included all of them.