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Outdated Avali: Augments and Assortments 1.0

Provides more content for those fluffy space raptors!

  1. RyuujinZERO

    RyuujinZERO Supernova

    Didn't really seem nessecary to comment as I've covered most of these topics many times in the past <.<

    Bow that shoots an energy projectile: Doesn't really make any sense, the design of a bow is for the purpose of building up and transferring a large amount of kinetic energy into a smaller missile. Energy weapons advantage is that it's shot is massless and does not need kinetic energy or physical munitions. If you start using some kind of accelerator to launch the projectile you can do away with the bow arms entirely.

    Buster example of a gun with bow physics: The "Firelance" anti-materiel rifle already uses the bow charging rules. Holding the trigger animates a laser rangefinder and increases effectiveness of the shot.

    Weapon for traditional hunters: Bows have never been a traditional weapon for the Avali, their prey animals are huge compared to them. There's a reason people used to hunt elephants with spears, not bows or darts ;)

    Hard-light arrows:
    [​IMG]
    That's not to say you can't go ahead and make one or publish it yourself as you've done :p - Just that it doesn't have any basis in canon lore (It looks great BTW)
     
    Last edited: Aug 7, 2014
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  2. Quilavabom

    Quilavabom Oxygen Tank

    I agree with Ryu here. A bow just doesn't fit the context. Maybe (MAYBE) they'd have something like whaling harpoons, but those aren't exactly portable.

    The bow does look pretty sweet, though! At first I thought you shot the meteor, but then I realized you just headbutted it like a boss.

    Just so you know, this mod's probably going to be on a short hiatus. Ryu's picked up development on the avali again (REJOICE), and there's a little bit of a time crunch with school season right around the corner. Ice and I have another project we're working, and there's a lot that goes into it.
    We've still got a few ideas for this mod, but I kind of want to wait and see what Ryu makes first so we don't end up making similar things (what good is a content mod if the contents already exist?).
     
  3. RainbowShy

    RainbowShy Pangalactic Porcupine

    You know he could just explain it differently and it makes it okay, even after keeping the same mechanics. He just says that when the bow is drawn back, the arrow is formed from the same orange material the weapons use, but we can't see it cause the Avali's wing blocks the process, then it works like a traditional arrow.
     
  4. Quilavabom

    Quilavabom Oxygen Tank

    Ryu's probably going to ninja me on this, but oh well.

    That orange stuff would be aerogel, which is strong and light, but also strong and light. In other words, it lacks the mass to be an effective projectile.

    Think foam tube with a suction cup on the end vs a bullet. Well, aerogel is even less dense than foam.

    Even if it could be an effective projectile, it must be manually loaded AND drawn back continually by the user--extremely impractical for a race with guns that can reload themselves thousands of times in the same amount of time it takes to draw a bow.

    That's not to say the bow isn't cool; the animation is very well done. Much better than what I can do.
     
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  5. Ulithium_Dragon

    Ulithium_Dragon Space Kumquat

    I thought I mentioned that the aerogel tube is filled with plasma (may have been too tired). The intended effect isn't so much as to have the aerogel tube penetrate the target, but to have it shatter/break and splash the plasma all over the enemy. This is more of a launcher type weapon than a bow.
     
  6. Ulithium_Dragon

    Ulithium_Dragon Space Kumquat

    Would it make more sense lore-wise to say that it was created mainly as a trade item? I can't seem to find too much info about the Avali's economic dealings with the other races, but surely they trade with all the other FTL-capable races (my character sure does lol, and when the update comes out, space stations will be quite the vendor hubs!). I think Florans especially would prefer a bow over a gun! :]

    The "bow arms" are essentially the firing trigger. Pulling back on the string materializes the projectile, and releasing fires it.

    Also, on a planet where they evolved the ability for limited flight or just "gliding", you can't tell me that primitive Avali culture didn't have *some* kind of projectile weapon! n.nU
     
  7. Ulithium_Dragon

    Ulithium_Dragon Space Kumquat

    You really can't see it "materialize", which is sad. Here's what it really looks like:
    [​IMG]
     
  8. Quilavabom

    Quilavabom Oxygen Tank

    The thing about plasma is that it's just gas with the electrons stripped off the nucleus; typically, plasmas require very high temperatures. Aerogel may be an excellent thermal insulator, but in order to prevent recombination it'd be so hot that it'd likely melt the capsule, assuming a thermal plasma. As for nonthermal plasmas, you'd probably be better off using a taser.

    This discussion reminds me, though... @RyuujinZERO, what are your thoughts on aerosolized thermite being used as the explosive agent in a grenade? If some nonaerosolized thermite were allowed to burn before melting through a capsule containing aerosolized thermite, the explosion would hurl both shrapnel and molten slag all over the place. At least, that's what it looks like on paper.

    If used on avalon, the flash-evaporation of the plentiful surface ice might provide an on-the-fly means of aerosolization, potentially making for thermite 'land mines'. Lead the prey over the mine, remote ignite, blam, dead. The practicality off it, though, I'm uncertain.
     
  9. RyuujinZERO

    RyuujinZERO Supernova

    On a low gravity world you can throw a spear a very long way ;) (And spears are kind've a requirement if you want to put a decent hole into something the size of an elephant as per the native fauna). Primitive Avali hunters were natural Dragoons on their homeworld ;)

    I'm not convinced an aerosol of thermite mix would actually explode as desired. The mixture used in thermite has to reach over 1,400 celcius before it ignites. Once the heatted gases from the pre-mix enter the aerosol chamber, the explosion would blow apart the aerosol capsule and scattered the mix before it can ignition temperature (The same problem you get with crude anti-matter bombs and why they wouldn't work as intended), whereas if the reaction chamber was only able to break down after the contents had ignited, the contents might not burn for especially long. An grenade like White Phosphorus would achieve more desirable results, and achieving similar temperatures (By a wide margin of the term "desirable", the use of White phosphorus as a weapon is considered a war crime)

    That's not to say a conventional anti-materiel thermite grenade wouldn't be a cool idea in Starbound. I can imagine a daisy chain type burning explosion that burns down through a few layers of blocks and leaves a dense pool of flame would look and function great :3

    For the unitiated this is thermite:



    It's actually a very simple mixture of magnesium, alumninium and iron. (You can literally make a thermite device in your back yard), magnesium burns easily and burns hot, which ignites the aluminium (Which can in fact burn), alumninium is quite hard to burn but once it burns it burns even hotter. Finally that gets so hot the iron ignites, yes, did you know iron can be set on fire? You do now.

    Once the iron burns, it can exceed 5,000 celcius.

    Thermite has a number of specialist applications, welding together railway tracks, scuttling damaged military hardware, or building grenades that can melt through a tank's engine block
     
    Last edited: Aug 7, 2014
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  10. Ulithium_Dragon

    Ulithium_Dragon Space Kumquat

    I'm a bit (not sure what the right emotional word is here) that everyone seems so keen to poke holes in the bow's "effectiveness" and "realism". While I do really want to find the most Avali-lore-friendly reason for the bow's existence, I think when you start to try and reason with its effectiveness as per the weapons damage or usability, or the properties of how plasma functions in real life, you start to stray VERY far from:
    Also, what are your thoughts as to the bow being created mainly for trade with other races? I mentioned above that I can't find any info on the Avali's dealing with other races (I suppose there may not be any "official" information on the topic).

    Another thing: As techincally-inclined as the Avali seem to be, I would assume they would have worked out early on that there are much more effective spear-like weapons, such as The Atlatl:
    [​IMG]
    These are much more accurate, and you can throw them much further and with much more force.
     
    Last edited: Aug 7, 2014
  11. RyuujinZERO

    RyuujinZERO Supernova

    Because you need bare in mind the roots of the Avali.

    They are foremost an original race, who also got a bit of their story told in Spore, and as a personal amusement and experiment, i implemented them in Starbound just to see if i could. Against all my expectations they proved insanely popular in Starbound and so I could either shrug and disappoint folks, or take up the unique opportunity to draw people's interest and attention to them, so chose to add lot more of their content to it. However they are not fundamentally written from a Starbound perspective, in the same way the Halo Mod is not written from a Starbound perspective. Hence I refuse to endorse or canonise anything very "soft", because it strays from the intended setting and vision.

    That's not to say I will rule out people adding soft stuff or RPing soft stuff, how people want to play their game is up to them. Just the core canon is very hard on the Moh's Scale of Sci-Fi Hardness and if I start endorsing soft aspects it'll cause me mroe headaches down the line

    As for the spear thrower, yeah, quite aware of their existence and yes they would have used something similar.
     
  12. Ulithium_Dragon

    Ulithium_Dragon Space Kumquat

    I get that, and it's your right to shape the race you created. What I'm not hearing, though, are any suggestions to make it a bit more "canon". I asked several times if there was any lore info about how the Avali dealt with other species in trading. I could just say that it was made primarily as a trade item. I think Florans especially would prefer the feel of a bow! :]
     
  13. Ulithium_Dragon

    Ulithium_Dragon Space Kumquat

    I can't find any specific information as to the melting point of aerogel, so this kind of comment seems like pure speculation. I have a hard time believing that the Avali, as advanced as they are, haven't found a way to utilize plasma for some purpose!
     
  14. Quilavabom

    Quilavabom Oxygen Tank

    Its melting point is 1,473 K (1,200 °C; 2,192 °F)

    Google "Melting point of aerogel".
     
  15. Ulithium_Dragon

    Ulithium_Dragon Space Kumquat

    Fine, but that's modern aerogel by our "primitive" (from the Avali's viewpoint) standards. Since aerogel can be made from quite a few different chemicals, I just presumed that the Avali had much better aerogel than we have in real life right now.
     
  16. RyuujinZERO

    RyuujinZERO Supernova

    That would be highly dependant upon the type of aerogel you're using, there's many versions, silica based, carbon based etc. but yeah, the melting point is crazy high in most cases, and up til that point they have are crazy effective insulators to boot. Obviously Avali aerogels are somewhat more refined, but I still wouldn't expect their melting point to be significantly above that (more than a few hundred degrees greater)

    If you looked on the wiki it's all there. Simply put, they don't.

    They don't have a fiat currency system of their own, and only engage in limited trade with other races. When they do trade is typically surplus supplies/resources, rather than specialised "trade goods". Now, the Avali civilization covers many worlds each with their own sub-cultures and numerous individuals. I don't doubt somewhere in the colonies, you'll find some Avali who like using and designing bow-like weapons. But they'll probably be based on designs borrowed from other races,. Not vice versa.

    You're more likely to find an Avali, importing a floran bow and getting excited over the alien craftsmanship, than Avali trying flog bows to the florans ;)
     
  17. Ulithium_Dragon

    Ulithium_Dragon Space Kumquat

    I'm not sure I like the new ore changes... Rubidium -> Cerulium? Voilium -> Impervium? Steel needs Oil? Durasteel needs Uranium Rods? Also... the higher level materials are *gems*? That really doesn't make sense for the kinds of things they're used for. Gems can't be heated and molded - they shatter, and melting them will destroy their crystalline structure...
    [​IMG]
     
  18. Ulithium_Dragon

    Ulithium_Dragon Space Kumquat

    Hmm... I suppose I could say that it's a kind of "black market" item created by another species by reverse engineering stolen Avali tech and then applying that knowledge to weapons their race prefers. Or I could remove the plasma aspect just say it was developed by a splinter faction of Avali pirates who needed a weapon that could be used on planets with very volatile atmospheres full of highly combustible gases! :]
    I may just do that - I'm having a very hard time trying to figure out how to keep the vanilla plasma explosion effect but remove the tile damage... It seems that the explosion's .config file needs to have "explosiveDamageAmount" set to something other than zero, or else it the projectile won't do any damage on direct collision half the time... I also tried setting "inheritDamageFactor" to something really low but it didn't help!
     
  19. Quilavabom

    Quilavabom Oxygen Tank

    Now we're talking about chucklefish, which does putty soft science as default, which, to be clear, doesn't bother me.

    But to address how I feel about it, it doesn't bother me.. I'm glad they renamed "Rainbow Rock" though. That name was duller than a blade on a 20-year-old razor. It's refreshing to see oil added and the fuel rods being put to use, too.
     
  20. Ulithium_Dragon

    Ulithium_Dragon Space Kumquat

    Heh, it's fine, I just don't like change in general. Don't mind me! :]

    I just hope they don't do something really stupid like "refine coal for oil". I don't necessarily mean because it doesn't make sense (when you suspend your disbelief in a sci-fi game, it makes more sense than most things), just that it would seem very lazy...
     

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