Kind of a neat idea I thought, How bout an L port weapon that drops gravity wells. They are like mines, except anything caught within a 1000m radius of the mine is drawn towards it and cannot escape 1000m of it in any direction until A. It runs out of juice, or B. you kill the guy who dropped it. Its effect should also effect the guy who dropped it, as to stop drop n runs.

EDIT

Possibly make the area in which you can get grabbed larger, but the effective area it constrains you to smaller, say a 500m radius.
You could even eventually make it effect things like mines, missles, rockets, weapons fire, etc, having it exert a pull on those objects too.

i would like a 'real gravity well', not some artificial thing thats mutated to fit gameplay. just something that does F=GM1M2/r^2 like in real life.

and what exactly does this "real gravity well" do? How exactly does it fit the gameplay when there aren't any large objects you can get close enough to for the gravity to make a difference?

Well I can see a practical use for the weapon...

Restricting duels to specific areas within a sector.

Drop a mine, both players get sucked in and duel under the influence of the mine. There you have it. Arena battle.

a weapon like this would be exyreemly usefull for pirates.

of course... if its heavy, the pirate would have to bring a friend, as he/she would be a sitting duck.

Would make trapping worm holes extremely easy. I can just here the traders bitching now. But it would be fun to have in game, and would definitely mix things up a bit. I would hope that you could use it though to temporarily accelerate past max speed do to sling shot effects from the gravity.

crip

a 'real gravity well' doesnt have a fixed boundary for its effect, and it doesnt 'trap' anything at some arbitrary point.

of course there is 'escape velocity' .. so if you designed the well properly, centurions could escape while the tunguska mineral marauder might be stuck in a degrading orbit ... then again it could be used as a 'slingshot' by either one if they aim just right... but that means wed have to alter the '240m/s maximum speed' thing... but whatever.

As for trapping people at wormholes or stations, just make it so dropping them in monitored space instantly causes a strike force and temp KOS that lasts until the mine is destroyed AND you leave monitored space, not just that sector.

wow, gravity wells at stations when the strike force comes after you... sounds like a good way to keep them off your back :)

not to mention it's effect of ctc convoys. (take that you speedy itani convoy!)

sounds like a cool idea though :)

obviously ananzi's never heard of a little something called Event Horizon. But i hope we aren't making a gravity that strong, as ships would have to be destroyed in those.
anyway, the boundary must exist, but it has to be rather large. second, it's a mine, it should work that way. If if you cross a point where v = sqrt(kg/r), k being however strong this mine will be, you have to eventually be sucked into the middle and hit the mine. I say, it has impact detonation.

This could probably be done pretty easily. Just instead of having a positive force exerted (like the concussion mines), use a negative force. What would be really cool would be if were like the big green glowing ball in Unreal2 that sucks everything in when it's detonated, so if you blow it up you get people flying all around the place towards it.

Im not after scientific accuracy a damn bit. I just want a cool new toy. If people decide to nitpick about it being a "Gravity well" Im perfectly fine with calling it tramshed's uber space glue.

ohhh orgue, thats a good idea for the graphics, and yeah, I figured it woudlnt be too hard from observing concussion mines

This is a cool idea. We had something like this in Earth and Beyond. Where the gravity well didn't immobolize the enemy from all movement, but you couldn't warp out. So how about it just decreases your speed and if you don't have enough speed it sucks you in.

Also you can't hyp out of it, and it would have to have an effective range of at least 1600. Since I believe the rails range is around 1500 and this would make rails really powerful. (On second thought... since the rails aren't living up to their potential, leave the range at like 1k for the grav well) :P

That will be interesting.

/givemoney Devs 2c

That reminds me on the 'Gravity Vortex' i know from the Chaos mod for Quake II (or the Unreal-mod ChaosUT2). Some kind of a short-living (5-10 seconds) black-hole generator that will suck in everyone nearby (and kill him in this process).

Btw: i want proxies ;-) and minigun turrets of course ;)

ok, just kidding...

I'm sorry to spoil everyone's fun, but first, any object with a great enough gravitational force to attract a ship like that would have to be EXTREMELY dense, and simply carrying it in the payload of a ship would probably rip that ship to pieces with the forces exerted on it. Second, what happens when you hit the mine? Therefore, we have to substitute a mine not nearly as strong, and with no event horizon, making it of little or no practical use.

Once again, sorry to spoil everyone's fun, but the physics just doesn't paralel the game.

[Edit]
And no matter how many years into the future the setting is, it's one of those laws of physics, that just don't change.

Weeeeeellll... if we want to get technical about the physics, we have stable wormholes, which means we have some ability to manipulate the curvature of space via means other than just sheer density. So, a short term gravity generator is not out of the question, it warps the local space.

Person.
The mine itself isn't dense.
It uses it's magical powers to create an ultra dense effect (heck make it a big magnet and it'll still work).

/givemoney Devs 2c

ok for those of you woried about the physics of gravity wells let me clarify. According to Einsteinian physics gravity is not a force at all. in fact it is a resault of space-time curvature. normal matter causes changes in the curvature of space, but there is no reason that matter has to be present for there to be gravity. it would just require something (in this case most likely a specific energy pattern) to manipolate the shape of space-time.

as for event horisons, they are the point beyond which the gravity around a singularity is intense enough to prevent the escape of light. since our starships can't get even close to the speed of light there is no reason that the gravity well would be nearly intense enough to create a true event horison.

moving right along to slingshot manuvers. they only work when the gravity well is moving and when an apropriate parabolic coarse is ploted using that movment to prevent the gravity from undoing the boost gained on the way in while you leve. in short slingshot manuvers wouln't wook the way most people think the would. even if it were posable it would take an exelent pilot to execute the manuver.

concerinig escape velocity, the general consensus is fairly acurate. escape velocity would depend on proxcimity to the center of the gravity well, and depending on the mass, thrust and coarse of the ship, different ships would be able to escape with different levels of sucess.

with regards to game-play and development issues, the bigest problem is that creating an acurate representation of a gravity well generator would probably be a bit more dificult than people seem to think. the foce applied to each ship, is continualy changing based on proxcimity to the generator, and to the mass of the ship. However the devs could esily "fake it" and simply create a constant force applied to everything within a certain range band. thus any ship xm away would have force y exerted on it. the consequencees of that version are that lighter ships will have a harder time escaping than a heavier ship.

anyway i still think this would be an interesting addition to the game, and sorry if any of this is porely typed/presentd, it's nearly 2am.