Need advice for a Final Unity based torpedo mod

[Captain_Dalan]

Hello everyone. It's been ages since the last time i played and modded Bridge Commander. Early 2000's to be exact. In fact because of work and RL issues i have nearly completely abandoned gaming during all this time. But i have some little extra time on my hands over every other weekend and i decided to put it into making a long lost dream of mine come true. I was a great fan of the ST-TNG A Final Unity game and have always wanted to reproduce its combat system. First re balancing a basic Galaxy class and then going from there, many other ships. The main issue i had back then (we didn't have stable advanced technologies , thus no Breen energy drainers and stuff) was to make the photon torpedoes do very small amounts of damage to shields (roughly 1//10th of a 2s type X phaser discharge per torpedo) but vast damage to hull and systems.

So i would like to ask for your help. Can such a torpedo be created now? And if so, how? Does it require separate scripting using the advanced technologies pack? And is there any documentation  or guidelines on how to do the scripting?

Thanks in advance! Live long and prosper! 

[Captain_Dalan]

All right, as no one replied i had to learn some Python myself and this is what i got. Just add this into the projectile *.py:

"
def GetMinDamage():
   return 111

# Sets the percentage of damage the torpedo will do
def GetPercentage():
   return 275.1

def TargetHit(pObject, pEvent):
   pTarget=App.ShipClass_Cast(pEvent.GetDestination())
   MinYield=GetMinDamage()
   Percentage=GetPercentage()
   pHull = pTarget.GetHull()
   pShields = pTarget.GetShields()
   for ShieldDir in range(App.ShieldClass.NUM_SHIELDS):
      pShieldStatus=pShields.GetCurShields(ShieldDir)
      pShieldChunk=MinYield
      if (pShieldStatus<=Percentage):
         if (pHull.GetCondition()>3850):
            pHull.SetCondition(pHull.GetCondition()-3850)
            return
         pTarget.DestroySystem(pHull)
      if (pShieldStatus<=Percentage*10):
         pShieldChunk=Percentage
      pShields.SetCurShields(ShieldDir,pShieldStatus-pShieldChunk)
   return
"

Note, what this will do is make a torpedo barely dent a shield, if that shield is stronger then 2750 points. It will do more then twice more damage to a shield bellow that and will do 35 times damage to an unprotected hull. Also note that the damage is spread evenly across all the shields, and the damage to the hull is applied solely to the hull and not the systems. To add system damage, you can give the missile it's own "def GetDamage" a non zero value and a large blast radius. In my case i just took the 110 base damage and reduced the "GetMinDamage" to 1. This will or you can do any combination of the two, depending on how you want to balance the torpedoes. Mine are balanced around 2200 points of damage main phaser array (effective 1100 in game) for six seconds when fully charged, and a shield strength of 18000 forward and 11000 all of the others on a TNG Galaxy class (regeneration at 110/s) . That is as close as i could get it to vanilla Kobayashi Maru standards. The hull however, needs a boost. Namely a full 10 torpedo spread should severely cripple or even destroy (a lucky shot) an un shielded Galaxy or D'Deridex class ship, so i would advice setting hull points at over 38500 for those and then balance accordingly. DJGalaxy ships are set this way by default i think.

EDIT: i don't know how to upload any pictures, so i'll just type the values from ST-TNG A final unity database here:
Torpedo impact on bare hull -  875MJ
Torpedo impact on fully functional shield - 25MW spread over as a wide a surface as possible.
Phaser impact on fully functional shiled - 247MW for 6 seconds (main array).
Front shield power - 599.7MW - full recharge in 197s
All other shield arcs (except pylons - not simulated in BC) 299.85MW - full recharge in 98.9s

Also, weakened shields have a chance of leaking damage from torpedo blasts and phasers (which BC does simulate). Giving the torpedo a base damage value (while subtracting it from its min damage) simulates this as well, and it also makes the torpedo less "enveloping" (my personal preference).

Hopefully future generations will find this useful!
Cheers guys and live long and prosper!