Recently, a small group I've gotten together has figured out how to make Armada 2 phasers do damage in a similar manner to Bridge commander phasers. They do damage as long as the phaser is hitting the target. They cause damage every 10th of a second. I had to figure that out so I could calculate what I must change the amount of damage to. We've also figured out a way to get blue, hull tight shields as seen in Star Trek: Nemesis. We are preparing to work on it right away. The way around to get blue shields is very backwards and actually avoids the old way of shielding completely.

It's too bad they won't be in Fleet Ops. Of course, we could be persuaded to tell the secrets though.

That would be a big help. You sound sort of like Phantom, he has developed it too, you don't happen to be him do you?

No, I'm not Phantom. I've heard that Phantom had a few things he was working on with shields and such. I'm not sure of A1 can do, but I know it can be done with A2. The method is a bit complicated. It would require someone to make a sod that fits around a ship. That wouldn't as difficult as making the ship itself, as the shields don't need to have the exact contours as the ship. Anyway, you have that and... I can't really say anymore without giving away the secret.

With this method, you can also allow Voyager to "deploy" its armor. I've got it all in my head right now. If I have enough time today, I'll be able to test the voyager armor. Once I finish that, I'll be 99.9% certain that the shields will work properly. This is the first method I've come up with that hasn't run into any bugs so far.

I did not complete the Voyager armor experiment yesterday, due to the fact that the model of the armored voyager and the intrepid model did not match up. I won't be able to complete that until I have an armored model exactly the same as the non-armored model.

As for the shields, things seem to be going along nicely. I'm going to contribute a shield mesh to the project soon. I need to find Operative34997 as he will prove without a doubt to be valuable to this endeavor.

I encountered one problem with the new phasers. Whenever they fire on a planet, every planet on the map becomes visable. This isn't to hard to stop, as they do not do the same to ships (very lucky thing too). Of course, the new phasers would look very out of place in fleet ops, as they would not regesiter on fleet ops shields. They only amount to anything with the new shields that we are developing.

Elrond (another person in the group) is already ahead of me in the amount of work. He doesn't know that yet, I just need to catch up is all... That's why I'm commiting myself to making sure all the bugs are worked out. I'm also setting up a "dummy" test shield. Elrond is also working on damage caused to ships during combat. This includes chunks flying off the hull and what not. Apparently, you can reveal mesh parts and other animated junk when a ship is damaged and attach them in a similar manner to damage textures.

If only Doca Cola and Optec could see what we were seeing... I'm sure they'd be interested.

I think I have a vague idea of how you do it with the hardpoints and all but mines only a theory, and I don't know if it'll work or not.

draconis_sharp, what do you want out of this if DOC agrees to your terms whatever they may be?

Booth blue and skinny shields won't be that useful cause not every race has blue sheilds and not every race has skinny shields. were you able to find a way to apply a individual shield set to every ship? well that would increase poly counts a bit but it would be useful for a voyager-like armmor, we already figuered something similar like this out, but that's for version 4

we also had bc-like phasers in our dev version but - at least with out method - this takes to much computer resources. so far we are heappy with our phasers, simple but efficient

Never underestimate the mighty FO team lol