Lazy Panda said:
Whether it'S intended or not, the Scimitar's Viper Cannons pierce capship phase shields.
Sounds to me like someone hasn't read the UE fiction
.
Actually, the viper cannons' ability to damage capships is one of the things I'm most ashamed about when it comes to UE. For two opposing reasons, even:
1. It's really horridly fanboyish. Confed has the plasma gun that damages capships but can only be carried by Devastators, and we gave the BW a gun that can damage capships but can be carried by anything. But then again, the viper cannon is fanboyish even without this ability - stat-wise, it's almost a clone of the dust cannon (in the very earliest versions of UE, it
was the dust cannon), which isn't even in use in Confed yet.
Of course, this doesn't really matter too much, because UE didn't even try to keep in line with the canon (a BW Bengal?
), and the vipers
did make the Scimitar a wonderfully fun ship to fly. I can't help thinking, though, that ultimately UE could have been more interesting, and just as fun, with a little less fanboyism.
2. Ignoring the whole issue of canon-correctness and such, the vipers' ability is something we completely failed to make any use of. In fact, we had to impose special restrictions on some missions just to avoid having to deal with capship deaths:
-Destroy the Fralthi in Mission 1 (never tried, that would be failure for sure)
Impossible - I think I made the bridge invulnerable. From a storyline point of view, this makes no sense - destroying the Fralthi
should be a valid strategy (for example, if the marines get killed) to make the losing path a bit easier - there should be a mission 2C where you only have to deal with the Ralari.
-In the escort two convoys mission, destroy the Orca at the final navpoint.
Not possible, because I made the Orca's engines (or bridge, or something) invulnerable. Again, storyline-wise it's very, very silly - we force Daniels to keep the Orca alive, just so that when he gets back to the Dauntless, he can worry about whether he's got enough fighters around to muster a follow-up strike.
...And then, of course, there's M9, where one of the reasons why we give the player a choice of Banshee and Epee is precisely to avoid the headache-inducing question of whether the player should be able to get out of our oh-so-clever (urgh!) Squid-launching-Hydra trap.
In all cases, the main reason for disabling this ability is technological - we simply didn't want to deal with the need to have three or four variants for each mission, the need for additional alternative fiction, et cetera. But whatever the reason, the end result is that the vipers' capship-killing ability is nowhere near as neat or useful as it should have been.
Let that be a lesson to future modders - it's fine (necessary, even) to impose some restrictions on the player, but you'd better make sure they make sense storyline-wise. Sometimes, it's worth a little extra work.