One thing that bugged me/New Propulsion

[3drts]

Quite simply, How the heck do you make a thrust vectoring jet fighter, when you don't know how to make a jet turbine engine, and your best engine is just a fuel injected piston engine?

Gas Turbine should be a pre-req for VTOL propulsion, not vice versa as it currently is.

Making VTOL require gas turbine, would push them way down the tech tree, making early AA (such as hurricane, and maybe even cyclone) pointless.

The solution would require an old concept, a new "helicopter" propulsion that unlocks where VTOL propulsion used to unlock.
A slower, cheaper, stronger(more hitpoints) VTOL.
If there are "slots" to support it, Helicopters could be more resistant to AT fire, and maybe be more vulnerable to AP fire? Sort of fits with reality where high flying jets are more vulnerable to SAMs, and most of the time they are out of reach of small arms MG fire, whereas helicopters, flying lower over the terrain, are more likely to evade sam radar coverage, but are also much more likely to get brought down by machine-gun fire.
Make AP damage do 100% vs Helos, and change AA guns to the AP category, while sams and cyborg Lancer/scourge would stay AT and instead be more effective vs VTOLs and less so against Helos. - maybe cyclone would stay AT, while whirlwind becomes AP, so late game you may want to use a mix of cyclone and WW in case of helos or VTOLs, if you don't have sams

Helos should all suck at shooting down VTOLs- if they carry scourge, it shouldn't make an effective Air Defense Fighter when linked to an early warning/WSS tower -> give them standard vehicle weapons? no ammo limit? then what would they need rearming pads for? A new group of Helo specific weapons? ok I dont have this all worked out, and it may require a lot of work to implement in a satisfactory way.

I don't know when hover was changed to a speed of 300 instead of 200 (making it not much faster than wheels), but if hover were lowered to 250, we could set helicopter speed at 1/2 that of vtol -> ie 350, and still have them be significantly faster than ground units.

On top of that you could differentiate the propulsions by making Helicopters better at carrying a large payload (modern VTOL fighters often cant take off vertically with a full payload, and must instead do a rolling takeoff and use their payload and fuel on the mission, so they can land vertically back on the VTOL carrier)
They would have better thrust to weight ratios than VTOLs, so heavy or light bodied helis could carry really heavy bombs better than VTOLs, but would top out at a much lower speed when carrying light weapons.
Of course, VTOLs just plain shouldn't take off when weight is above a certain amount, once they get into horizontal flight, carrying the payload should be easy.

I also have some ideas for a non-VTOL jet propulsion, but I think thats far too much to ask and too hard to implement for now


As an Aside:
I sort of liked the old Upgrade path, when you could skip turbocharged engines, if you just teched your research UGs high enough to unlock gas turbine.
Gas turbines don't really follow as a result of piston engines, they are almost completely different, but this is not my main point.

[Dylan Hsu]

I like it.