Quote:There isnt a written rule that it has to be.
No but it prevents a ship from insta-exploding the moment you lose your shields.
And shields have the ability to regen so, you know, making shields the highest stat is kind of stupid, at least balance wise?
Besides, hull isn't "just armor", it's everything else in the ship, too, like the chassis, the cockpit, the engine.
All of these have "integrity"
Quote: it's meant to be treated as hull. maybe people would value their shields more if it were the only protection their ship has got.
See above
Quote:I'll bet there's a self-destruct sequence in ships of every intelligence faction or maybe order ships which have secret order tech that can't be captured. Why does this surprise you? If ships in disco were actually built to last then they would be stronger, and there would be severe death penalty so ppl stop dying so often.
Freelancer at its core is still a game.
I've rp-d permadeath characters, no joke, however that's already really costly.
Even back in vanilla Freelancer, it was implied people could have escape pods when their ships were destroyed. Assume someone finds you and picks you up and you have automagic insurance or something.
Or you make sure you have a spare ship, what the hey?
Quote:If I read the halo books correctly, Cortana was - "simply" a electronic replication of a human brain. The holodeck in star trek fully constructs its AI based on information of humans.
That coffee machine still requires a hell of a lot less programming due to there being less hardware involved. That requires some amount of coding too, it's not just the 0 or 1 that a switch is. It needs subroutines for a lot of things, especially the more hardware you add. The coffee machine will be expensive as hell and considering there's billions upon billions of pilots that are simply cheaper to train/hire and at the core are WILLING to die for their cause... it's not feasible.
And uh, think about what that will do to roleplay on disco. "noone is afraid of dying ever because they're not actually a living being."
Quote:Basically autopilot, navigations systems, auto aiming turrets and a whole lot of other stuff that doesn't sound too difficult (remember there's centuries of technological progression since then).
It still costs a lot to hire the team who's going to sit down and program this.
And all it takes to make it malfunction?
A single virus. Well programmed and a lot cheaper to make.
Your average (successful) pirate could probably afford one of these data packets if there's a black market hacker out there selling wholesale.
Quote:Consider how AI is achieved now
This in itself is my argument.
Just because it can be advanced doesn't automagically make it cheaper.
AI still does only what you tell it to do.
Which is why a lot of programmers have to start over from scratch with every project or their programme becomes a hideous mess.
tl;dr
Do you even script?
One of these days, there will be a clever, stylish and/or funny signature here.
This is still not that day, however.
