Ideas for rewarding smart ship design

[kiiyo]

Ello. New post. I was recently thinking about ways in which smart ship design could be subtly rewarded in-game.

This is not a suggestion for some sort of magical feature that tracks "good design" points and then rewards you with "good boy designer" points. Not at all.

A more accurate example of what I mean would be some sort of system that would incentivize players to build their ships in a way where the propellant tanks can be swapped rather than using the refueling bridge (both remain a viable option, instead having opposing pros and cons that would give interesting choices to design for).

Maybe refueling manually would be cheaper than via bridge? But that makes no sense logically and price is an extremely poor balancing point. I don't have a concrete solution - I'd also argue that as a player it isn't really my job to do so - but I think that it would be interesting if certain design decisions would be re-opened to players instead of being completely superceded by new features (like how there's no reason to leave your prop tanks accessible if you can just... refuel via bridge).

What do you think? Any of these "design challenges" that you think could be incentivized in any interesting ways?

 

[Recatek]

Smart ship design is pretty subjective. If anything, I'd consider it smart design to not expose your fuel tanks, considering it's easier to refill them now with resource bridges. Personally I'm not sure what penalizing that with a refill tax would add to the game.

 

[ChaosRifle]

I think ships in starbase are flying bombs by in large. Unless you go big, the name of the game is dont let ANY shots into the ship. True tankyness comes from being able to take hits and live with it, but with so many things so explosive, and the current explosive mechanics just murdering everything in range, its extremely hard to build a ship that isnt a flying bomb.

 

[kiiyo]

Smart ship design is pretty subjective. If anything, I'd consider it smart design to not expose your fuel tanks, considering it's easier to refill them now with resource bridges. Personally I'm not sure what penalizing that with a refill tax would add to the game.

I guess I mean encouraging taking risks in design, since you do make a good point. In the fuel tank example, creating hatches to your tanks is an additional design challenge, one that is nonsensical to undertake unless there is some sort of benefit to doing so - what type of benefit I don't really know, but I wanted to discuss how encouraging these sort of pro-con balancing situations could look like.

 

[Agonarch]

Concealing fuel tanks under hatches has precisely that advantage - concealment: if someone shooting at you sees a fuel tank, they're going to aim for that.

Refueling via connector requires some reasonable infrastructure too, as well as having a similar risk (being on the outside, those connectors are often prone to having a duct broken somewhere if you've taken some shots - if it's damaged and you can't access your tank, you need to fix one or the other before you can refuel, which buys a hunter more time to find you hiding in a cloud).

There is some stuff I'm not sure about, but I think it's temporary - I like making 'core miner' ships which dig a little hole and let you take the good stuff out of an asteroid, rather than eat the whole thing - the ability to select and remove all means there's not a lot of point in a ship like that over a 'ring-gobbler' mining ship. It's a convenience and QoL thing that's reduced the usefulness of a whole category of design, and that's the kind of thing I think they need to be careful of (though it's the only example I can think of and I think it's a temporary stopgap until inventory 2.0, I'm not genuinely complaining).

I think there's a pretty good balance set up at the moment, you can specialize a ship in one thing but it's going to be worse in another: a ship with unarmoured external tanks is going to be lighter but much more vulnerable to attack simply by virtue of having visible targets, and you have to decide if that tradeoff is worth it. Some light decorative plates can conceal them without costing too much mass, but that won't actually offer any protection if your enemy knows where to aim or gets lucky. Armouring obviously means increasing the mass considerably, so you either slow down, carry less payload or add more engines and reduce range. I couldn't honestly tell you which was the 'best' of those options, though a long-range explorer ship will almost certainly want exposed skeletal tank structures and a combat ship will almost certainly want armoured ones, even there that's not 100% clear cut (a fighter might opt to use engines themselves as 'armour' for its tank so it can divert the mass to more guns or shift the plating elsewhere, for example).

Then you've got secondary stuff like redundancies and the look of the ship to consider - I noticed at EOSCon that even with the most specific builds such as Amphitrite clones and long range, high-speed plasma haulers the ships are coming in similar, but not the same, and I think that reflects well on the options if even ultra-specialized 'meta' stuff comes out with some variance (and where a meta really counts for limiting options, in PvP, it's really hard to find a perfect balance - what's the best fighter design? Good luck answering that one!)

 

[kiiyo]

I didn't really mean armoring/not armoring tanks - close those gens and prop bottles up, it's worth it. It's having a hatch vs not having one. It's entirely viable to just not have one and instead connect 1-2 resource bridges to your ship's system, which makes refueling much faster and much more convenient, to the point that I would argue that not doing that is just plain pointless.

There is some stuff I'm not sure about, but I think it's temporary - I like making 'core miner' ships which dig a little hole and let you take the good stuff out of an asteroid, rather than eat the whole thing - the ability to select and remove all means there's not a lot of point in a ship like that over a 'ring-gobbler' mining ship. It's a convenience and QoL thing that's reduced the usefulness of a whole category of design, and that's the kind of thing I think they need to be careful of (though it's the only example I can think of and I think it's a temporary stopgap until inventory 2.0, I'm not genuinely complaining).

Yep, I think that's also another valid example of "QoL feature supercedes design choice". I haven't really seen a "core miner" type design but it does sound quite interesting. Though its main advantage - collecting minimal shell material - is just gobbled up by select-and-yeet

(and where a meta really counts for limiting options, in PvP, it's really hard to find a perfect balance - what's the best fighter design? Good luck answering that one!)

best fighter design is whatever you can fit the most rear surface area onto because dev say that thruster spam is fun

 

[Agonarch]

I got that, but the tradeoff there is infrastructure isn't it? If it's not a hatch it's tougher, but you can only refuel at tankers and stations - if it's a hatch there's a big weakspot where the plate is mounted, but you can refuel from ice when you're in the belt?

Am I missing something there?

 

[ChaosRifle]

in PvP, it's really hard to find a perfect balance

Its actually really easy due to the lack of combat mechanics, the best ship (assuming you can afford innitial costs) is 30 LC's, large plates (ideally tris) thick enough that voxel damage doesnt go all the way through in one shot, made of charo, thruster spammed to get 150.1m/s in a direction, limiting height and width profile to be a more tubular design in order to limit crosssection, and enough pitch/yaw thrust to exceed angular velocities of 150.1m/s at ~75m distance. Setup your controls to have high medium and low speed of pitch/yaw to be controllable. Put non-explosive parts on the exterior of the build, explosives on the interior. if large enough space the parts to not chain-react. Use redundancy where possible. Sequence your batteries and prop tanks instead of using them in parrallel to reduce likelyhood of being explosive when shot.

Recently they patched using ship hulls for pilot seats, so the number of guns that is optimal might have changed due to pilot durabillity changes, producing an abnormally weak spot. The issue is no combat mechanics make you do tradeoffs between for pro's/con's. The only downside of said gunships is torps, which don't work, and are difficult to deploy against a moving ship anyways. Given that ships can pitch/yaw so agressively, in 1v1 its rough to get a hit even if they dont move because the volume of fire shoots the torps down most of the time because the warhead is always armed.

 

[Recatek]

At the same time though, I think that any changes to create more engineering tradeoffs/choices have to come from mechanical pros/cons rather than arbitrary cost penalties or extra fees for the "wrong" way of doing things. It's very easy to create frustrating and pointless false choices in this sort of situation.

 

[DivineEvil]

Well, at this point there's only so much "smart" design ideas that come to mind with the game at its current state. To really have a discussion about smart ship deign, we'd first have to specify what we would consider a bad design. Let's say that some signatures of a bad design would be:

- Exposed internals. This is not penalized because SB still does not have environmental hazards, that would force the players to design ships with isolated components and compartments depending where they're supposed to operate. Either you have a non-combatant ship without any plating, or you have a combat ship that have everything packed as close together as possible and covered with plates.

- Poor repairability. This is penalized only marginally, because the problem for the designer is abstract, and only real for the player that gets the ship damaged. Because of the previous point, you have to really try to make a ship unrepairable, because a players never have to expose itself to danger in order to repair something, and so isolated service hatches are entirely meaningless as well. Since we also now have ship repairs on the Origin stations, people can easily restore any received damage and eliminate any wear that might have accumulated previously with a ship being repaired, and thus most of the effort to create ship that is easy to restore is now wasted.

- Internal composition. Like have been mentioned, spacing anything is pointless because not taking critical hits is better than taking one and surviving. There are no internal components that can take a hit without immediately crippling the ship - fuel rods explode, propellant tanks explode, batteries explode, MFC/FCU makes the ship inoperational. Everything else have to be partially exposed to work. Civilian ships mostly come down to miners and haulers, and both have no fighting chance anyway, so where you'd put what is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is how much of it you have.

- Low efficiency. This is essentially negated with the existence of community-made calculators, that can help anyone figure out the balance of speed, range and functional tonnage of any ship. Unless making a mistake in these calculations, there's little to no margin of error, because no tradeoffs exist for tiered components (they're both more efficient and more powerful), and the rest of components have no variety (only one type). More recent Plasma Thrusters are pretty much the only existing exception due to their initially modular design, and they do not function as regular thrusters, so 9 out of 10 times you're still better off with dumb-as-rock regular thrusters.

- Cost efficiency. Completely irrelevant in the current economy. Lack of refining and alloy mechanics makes the cost of the complete parts the same as the ores used to fabricate them, which also make salvaging entirely pointless. Because of that, people who take the lack of wipes as a promise have accumulated so much value, that they sell 1000+ crate miners and hundreds of ore stacks in-bulk. Since everyone have the same production capacity, there's no means to make the same ship with lower costs without just making it weaker in some degree. Honestly, I don't really see how SB can now have a "second coming" after the anticipated updates without a wipe or the economy being completely demolished from the day one.

Overall, the ship design comes to three core aspects: aesthetics, magnitude and balance. Aesthetics is pretty much arbitrary because it always sacrifices the efficiency of the ship, and neglecting it improves the other two. Magnitude is just a measure of how many stacks or guns you want to carry - there's little room here to be smart, since getting bigger or better is just a matter of materials. Balance is a measure of core parameters arranged together - again, very little to consider here apart from the role you want your ship to perform. There's only so much you can (or need) to push for speed, there's only so much mostly useless armor you can layer-up, and there's only so much functionality you can place on top before the ship becomes too easy of a target.

To be frank, all the "smartness" of design comes down to making unique aesthetics that does not punish functionality too much. I can hardly imagine that being changed by some subtle rewards.

 

[Foraven]

- Poor repairability. This is penalized only marginally, because the problem for the designer is abstract, and only real for the player that gets the ship damaged. Because of the previous point, you have to really try to make a ship unrepairable, because a players never have to expose itself to danger in order to repair something, and so isolated service hatches are entirely meaningless as well. Since we also now have ship repairs on the Origin stations, people can easily restore any received damage and eliminate any wear that might have accumulated previously with a ship being repaired, and thus most of the effort to create ship that is easy to restore is now wasted.

It still matters if you want the ship owners to be able to make some field repairs so they can bring the ship back home for that full repair job. That means making it easy to remove and replace parts without breaking more stuff while doing it.

- Internal composition. Like have been mentioned, spacing anything is pointless because not taking critical hits is better than taking one and surviving. There are no internal components that can take a hit without immediately crippling the ship - fuel rods explode, propellant tanks explode, batteries explode, MFC/FCU makes the ship inoperational. Everything else have to be partially exposed to work. Civilian ships mostly come down to miners and haulers, and both have no fighting chance anyway, so where you'd put what is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is how much of it you have.

Fuel rods don't explode unless they are hit while producing energy; so it's smart to design ship so the fuel chamber breaks before the rod so no explosion occur. Batteries explosion is centered around the bottom of it so you can ensure the explosion does less damage by cleverly placing the bottom toward the outside of the ship. The front of a combat ship is more likely to take damage so not placing any explody bits and fragile parts there is also a smart move. Using tanky parts like box thrusters to shield gas tanks and radiators is also a good way to make those parts last longer.

- Low efficiency. This is essentially negated with the existence of community-made calculators, that can help anyone figure out the balance of speed, range and functional tonnage of any ship. Unless making a mistake in these calculations, there's little to no margin of error, because no tradeoffs exist for tiered components (they're both more efficient and more powerful), and the rest of components have no variety (only one type). More recent Plasma Thrusters are pretty much the only existing exception due to their initially modular design, and they do not function as regular thrusters, so 9 out of 10 times you're still better off with dumb-as-rock regular thrusters.

One thing calculators can't do is balance the ship weight around your ship. Center of mass and center of thrust don't tell the whole story and sometime just adding a new plate or changing what it is made of can unbalance a (small) ship enough to lose thruster efficiency. Also, poor thruster placement or weird ship shapes can confuse the mfc/fcu and make it waste lots of propellant trying (often pointlessly) to balance it.

To be frank, all the "smartness" of design comes down to making unique aesthetics that does not punish functionality too much. I can hardly imagine that being changed by some subtle rewards.

Making a ship that is both functional and not looking like a box is a reward in itself in my opinion.

 

[Recatek]

Making a ship that is both functional and not looking like a box is a reward in itself in my opinion.

There's also nothing wrong with people making ships that look like boxes, either.

 

[pavvvel]

It still matters if you want the ship owners to be able to make some field repairs so they can bring the ship back home for that full repair job. That means making it easy to remove and replace parts without breaking more stuff while doing it.



Fuel rods don't explode unless they are hit while producing energy; so it's smart to design ship so the fuel chamber breaks before the rod so no explosion occur. Batteries explosion is centered around the bottom of it so you can ensure the explosion does less damage by cleverly placing the bottom toward the outside of the ship. The front of a combat ship is more likely to take damage so not placing any explody bits and fragile parts there is also a smart move. Using tanky parts like box thrusters to shield gas tanks and radiators is also a good way to make those parts last longer.



One thing calculators can't do is balance the ship weight around your ship. Center of mass and center of thrust don't tell the whole story and sometime just adding a new plate or changing what it is made of can unbalance a (small) ship enough to lose thruster efficiency. Also, poor thruster placement or weird ship shapes can confuse the mfc/fcu and make it waste lots of propellant trying (often pointlessly) to balance it.




Making a ship that is both functional and not looking like a box is a reward in itself in my opinion.

How to make the fuel chamber break earlier than the fuel rod? Please give examples

 

[Distuth]

How to make the fuel chamber break earlier than the fuel rod? Please give examples

To make it happen always? Not a lot. But you can reduce the chance a lot by angling the fuel rods "tops" towards each other. That is, have them facing each other on opposite sides, so that enemy damage has to go through the generator first. There's nothign stopping it from hitting the next one after that other than preventative armoring, etc.

 

[Foraven]

How to make the fuel chamber break earlier than the fuel rod? Please give examples

That one is easy. The only time fuel rod will blow is if it get hit directly, if the shot has to get through the chamber the chamber will most likely break (a device stop working once enough voxel gets removed from it, i think it's 50% but could be less) before any remaining damage gets to the rod. So the idea is to either have the head of the rod face inward the ship or toward the rear of the ship (on a combat ship the front and the sides are more likely to get pummeled unless you attempt to flee). Also, if you place batteries next to the chamber and the battery gets destroyed, the damage may destroy the chamber before the damage reach the rod, thus preventing the rod explosion. Well, there is also the case of coolant loss due to radiator damage that could turn off the generators and prevent rod damage from making it go boom. And last, if all generators are damaged before it reach the rod, there may no longer be energy produced to cause the boom.