The design of the Rock Dragon Mk3 in Corvos's own words.

Notes on the Rock Dragon Mk3 (large treaded rover): This one was designed in 1.06 beta (using the logical IFF) for the Quarry Battle scenario. It's an experiment with the use of sonar as a navigation system, and uses a rotating radar to detect enemy rovers that are outside the scan of the forward-facing targeting radars and the sonar fire control. Here are some of the design consideration for the various systems: 1. Navigation: two sonars are used, more-or-less the way you'd use track sensors if a track were available. IFFs (set to "other") detect walls on either side of the rover and "turnon-turnoff" information from these is sent to the track control. By adjusting the sonar angles and ranges and the track motion values, fairly good steering results. 2. Targeting: two long-range radars detect targets ahead of the rover, and IFFs connected to these steer the rover so as to center the target between the two radars. In addition, a simple rotating radar connected to an IFF scans 360 degrees to look for enemy rovers. This does a pretty good job of keeping the enemy rover from "ambushing" the Rock Dragon Mk3. When the rotating radar detects a target, information from its IFF is sent to the track control to turn the rover. Note that when the targeting radars detect a target, the navigation sonars are shut off via the tick timer. The navigation sonars are turned on again (via the tick timer) when a target is no longer detected by the targeting radars. While it's usually a good idea to detect targets at the maximum possible range, the ranges for all radars on the Rock Dragon Mk3 have been tweaked to minimize "sit and spin" behavior while still finding targets at a useful range. 3. Fire Control/Weapons: when the sonar centered between the forward-facing targeting radars detects a target with it's IFF, five machine guns fire. The outboard guns are set for a small degree of convergence. 4. Movement: to decrease overall weight and allow maximum firepower, a small engine with the throttle set to 100% is used. Speed doesn't seem to help much in the Quarry Battle, and the small engine has enough power to smartly spin the rover toward a target. Things yet to do: 1. Develop a control-feedback system for the navigation sonars, using techniques similar to those used for the track sensors on Sord's bEEtle (see the New Europa Workshop for information on this). This would make this navigation system more useful for scenarios such as Corridor Combat. While it will work for Corridor Combat, the rover tends to spend a lot of time traveling down dead ends and wandering around in non-productive areas. As it is, it works well enough to beat the default rover, but this is probably due to the decreased laser damage allowed in 1.06 beta. 2. Refine the rotating radar so it turns the rover directly toward the target rather than simply turning the rover until the target is acquired by the target radars as it does now. 3. Develop a system to set machine gun angles for convergence on the target as a function of range and (possibly) angle. The idea is to put the maximum number of rounds on the target, and for any given range, there will be optimum gun convergence angles. 4. Experiment with different weapons combinations, health sensors and engine power versus weapon balance. 5. Experiment with a bump sensor to see if this will improve performance under some conditions. Have fun, Corvos