AWESOME!

ManSh00ter, for extra randomness you can make it so weapons are no longer 100% accurate.  You can find the lines for that in the gameplay.constants file.

But then you add more weight into the specs required for the mod to run!

Personnaly with a quadcore he he, I'd have no problem running it but imagine people with barely the minimum requirements and now the game has to calculate EVERY SINGLE shot fired x the number of ships x lengt of battle. pretty hard on a not top-notch pc!

I'll play around with the setting and of course, when the mini-mod goes live it will serve as a sort of "pre-beta" for the Last Stand. I'd like to have weapons have a slight miss chance... even more so if that can be altered via buffs so that some ships can have an ability which would boost the accuracy of the entire fleet by a percentage. But even without that, accuracy shouldn't be spot-on perfect even in the space age, especially with everyone flying around like maniacs and people trying to prod your reactor core through the bridge by means of giant lazers...

Hopefully the devs let us vanilla guys have fighter physics for our ships so I can play this mod.

This should be interesting to see!

Everything that makes space battles what space battles are! +_+

Mind signing me up to help you?

My suggestion is that they are random events that occur during battle, for example, engine problems, weapons problems etc and they have to fall back for repairs

I would also be willing to help you in your efforts as I am an incredible fan of MOVING SHIPS!!! HELL YEAH! I created tens of planets, around 50 abilities and 30 ships (no meshes though...) so I know my way around entity files and string files +_+!

Pretty please!

Ok, I did some preliminary work on the motion characteristics of ships, and I have to say I am quite pleased with the results, they're very promising. The ship handling stats are actually quite flexible, its a shame they're not used more extensively in vanilla Sins. But that's about to be fixed!

To show off the differrence between normal play and the new dynamic battles, I've made a video containing a short (3:20) battle with the ultimate test subject, the pirates.

If you want to see all the nifty details like a twisted bar of metal spinning past a speeding attack frigate, you can download a hi-res version from the link below:

Download (Mediafire, 67.46Mb) 

Note that this is just an early WIP. For example, all ships have vastly increased mass to create a notable inertia effect, but some of them need tweaking which is obvious when you see a couple of light frigates "skidding" in a turn (its actually kinda cool, but it makes them go out of the action for too long so its gotta go). Battles now last longer, simply because fewer shots are being fired consistenly. Some ship types, as mentioned in the OP will have to have their weapon stats modified (and possibly armor/shield amount as well), for example the LRF's are dominating the battlefield simply because they just turn about instead of maneuvering. Their turn rate will be reduced even more to make them really sluggish to align. And so on.

But all in all, I noticed there will be very little actual tweaking needed when it comes to most ships. The initial testing makes me optimistic about this.

Thanks for the feedback! When I finish basic tweaking, I'll upload an open beta of the mini-mod so that people can playtest it and help polish it up.

-turrets; I think they're basically the same as other stationary ships like LRF's. So on one hand I could try what you suggested, but there is also a posibility of drastically lowering their turn rate. That way turrets cannot track as efficiently which means they'd have to switch targets often (which they do, actually). I need to test both ways further before seeing which is the better one.

-true about micromanagement; but should I preemptively nerf someone's ability to actually micromanage a fleet in the chaos that ensues when the fight spans almost half a gravity well? I *think* it would be extremely difficult to pull that one off, though certainly not impossible. I also noticed a nifty thing, and that is that the ships themselves, when not specifically ordered to attack a certain ship, tend to switch targets which are on their approach vector, if the original target is not in range and the weapon is ready to fire.

-those smoke trails *are* from the Volumetric mod, slightly tweaked. Unfortunately, Sins particle emitters have a hardcoded tick between particle emissions, so you cant have, for example, random blending to create smooth trails, but its not too bad. Can't nitpick too much.

i love the new look and as some are worried about the gav cannons you can ture it off to local area or hold position and than your units woundlt fly about or atleast i feel they shouldnt given you both the option to stay in close formation or to dog fight wether this is how it is or not i feel it is how it should be.

 cant wait for it Any idea of a release date