Should possible weapons load be related to voxel volume, or ship mass?

[Cavilier210]

Its common in the real world for ships to be broken into weight classes. While I agree to the knee jerk "it's an arbitrary definition" Its my thoughts on the whole heavy fighter meta. You can slam a lot of pew into a small box... box... ugh.... Anyway, Ships will be getting larger over time, and 30 weapons for any size ship will always favor the tiny ship that is nothing but a gun brick.
Other solutions exist in my mind as well. Like exorbitant power requirements, making weapons large, or very heavy. I'm ok with anything, so long as it breaks this heavy fighter meta and make large ships competitive.

Anyone have thoughts on this idea or have ideas of their own?

 

[five]

I agree, they should up the power requirements. I dont want guns with wings to fly around but i also would appreciate if the meta didnt turn into who has the largest ship with the most cannons like a dreadnought

 

[Dommy]

Maybe an extra fee, dependant on how much VV something is in the ssc, could reduce the usage of heavy fighters, even if they are meta. However, this would just make smaller crafts more price efficient than larger ones, which does not only include large fighters, but also multi-crewed ships.

 

[XenoCow]

One change that could help to limit the gun only little ships could be to add recoil. This would limit the weapons used on small craft (if they want tons) to laser cannons. It might make sense to then increase the power draw of laser cannons, while leaving the rest the same. So, they could have many laser cannons and shoot in bursts, or a few other weapons and shoot more frequently.

As for the massive fighters that turn on dimes, I think that some sort of inertia could help to combat that meta. If you make your ship super heavy, you can't accelerate too quickly else tear yourself to shreds. I talked about this idea more in another post. Essentially, the strain on beams from high G maneuvers would slowly damage them until they finally break under load. This allows for small bursts of high G, but over time it could be dangerous.

 

[EckFaun]

Limiting weapons by voxel count or mass are both arbitrary measures that shoehorn ship design into predetermined classes, which I don't think is good game design. Rather, the limiting factors in ship design should be related more to actual ship mechanics. For example large weapons should have recoil or huge power draws so small ships will struggle to fit them and use them effectively, but not outright stop them from fitting them.

If someone wants to have a fighter-sized ship with powerful weapons, they will have to sacrifice by having enough power generation to run those weapons, or have enough thrusters mounted to counteract the recoil of a weapon so the ship can still maneuver. It should be a design choice to have a small ship built around a railgun for example, and there should be design challenges around powering the weapon and using it effectively.

To get more to your point of making large ships viable and breaking heavy fighter meta, we need to look at what the real issue is: it's almost impossible to properly armor and protect ships from weapon damage. Nearly every weapon can pierce plates and destroy the fragile devices within ships. The mechanics of the game so far lend themselves to glass cannon pvp like this which can only really be realized by fighter sized ships. What needs to change is a rebalancing of weapon damage to make it so plating is more effective, or a rebalancing of armor values so they withstand more damage.

 

[Cavilier210]

Limiting weapons by voxel count or mass are both arbitrary measures that shoehorn ship design into predetermined classes, which I don't think is good game design. Rather, the limiting factors in ship design should be related more to actual ship mechanics. For example large weapons should have recoil or huge power draws so small ships will struggle to fit them and use them effectively, but not outright stop them from fitting them.

If someone wants to have a fighter-sized ship with powerful weapons, they will have to sacrifice by having enough power generation to run those weapons, or have enough thrusters mounted to counteract the recoil of a weapon so the ship can still maneuver. It should be a design choice to have a small ship built around a railgun for example, and there should be design challenges around powering the weapon and using it effectively.

To get more to your point of making large ships viable and breaking heavy fighter meta, we need to look at what the real issue is: it's almost impossible to properly armor and protect ships from weapon damage. Nearly every weapon can pierce plates and destroy the fragile devices within ships. The mechanics of the game so far lend themselves to glass cannon pvp like this which can only really be realized by fighter sized ships. What needs to change is a rebalancing of weapon damage to make it so plating is more effective, or a rebalancing of armor values so they withstand more damage.

I think another problem is that the lasers and autocannons are almost useless in comparison to the rail cannon and plasma cannon. 2 weapons you would think are for fighters are eskewed by people running fighters.

Plus, Collectives ship they use is a tanky bugger, but its a box.

 

[Venombrew]

this may of been answered before in the past, but what guns require a power source to fire? a power line hooked up to it or w/e. reason im asking, guns needing power sources to work wouldn't all that be counted under ship mass?

 

[XenoCow]

what guns require a power source to fire?

All weapons require power to function. Rail cannons take extra power to charge and hold their charge too. The power is passed through a wired hardpoint to the weapon mount.

 

[Cavilier210]

Maybe power sources need to be larger? Most warships are equipment with living spaces smashed in where they fit. The power equipment is rather small comparatively. The increase in power usage by the thrusters is a good direction to go in that case.

 

[PopeUrban]

Weapon mass seems like the best tradeoff to me. You should be able to slap a ton of guns on a relatively small frame, but the tradeoff in maneuverability for doing so should be the primary consideration if you're strapping tons of armament on a small and therefore lightly armored ship.

 

[Verbatos]

I think the best way to cut down on the gun bricks would be to add inertia like what @XenoCow said.
I think the best way to do this would be uncapping the speed limit, then having ships tear themselves apart when they get too stressed, and having stress damage components and frames over time. It would force ships with weak frames to cut down on their thrusters or risk accidentally deconstructing their ship mid-manoeuvre

 

[pipvac]

Weapon mass seems like the best tradeoff to me. You should be able to slap a ton of guns on a relatively small frame, but the tradeoff in maneuverability for doing so should be the primary consideration if you're strapping tons of armament on a small and therefore lightly armored ship.

This.

If we take naval warfare as an example, the mass of the weapon, and the ammunition and support services required to support it, plus the handling of the vessel all led to decisions and compromises on size, caliber, and maneuverability. This is not represented in the current meta. Applying appropriate mass should impact maneuverability (and stress) on the ship. More mass less maneuverability, or more power and engines needed to overcome those issues. This also drove clever and innovative design decisions, which would be lovely to see in this game. Or we could all fly bricks with massive guns on. This is the way!

 

[RyuShihan]

I like the mass idea, imagine a rail gun on a fighter, it gets 1 shot off but due to mass it flys backwards and isn't in range again to fire. Making it useless in combat. So weapons have a counter recoil, minus laser, which would need a larger power source. Same laser for all ships but more power means more dmg. A large ship with a large generator should do more damage than a fighter only having 1-2 generators on it.