When will the Dreadnoughts come?

[GGExploder]

It is a question of mine that I have been pondering for quite some time.
When will ships so large and so expensive that nobody will take them out of port in fear of losing them and along with that millions or 10s of millions of credits (or more), recreating the WW1 conditions where the British and German navies would keep their dreadnoughts in port, then have one battle and keep them away from danger for the rest of the war. When will there be ships so large and with such firepower that the costs to maintain the ship let alone use it in combat are a huge strain on the economy of a warring faction?
My question is when the game is out, what would you say would be the most cost effective ship?
A few wings of fighters carried near combat by carriers and then sent out to deal with the enemy like carriers today?
Would destroyers and frigates dominate space in warfare?
Would Battle ships, albeit being cumbersome, be able to take the punch and throw a harder punch back whilst still being reasonably priced?
Or would massive dreadnoughts be the meta of Starbase, without them knocking out any economy of any faction that would dare use such expensive ships?

I would love to hear everyone's thoughts on this.

 

[PopeUrban]

I think there's a relatively low practical limit on ship size that prevents this. FB has said that this limit is mostly arbitrary at the moment as they work out foundational features, but even if it is expanded there's still going to be a practical limit to ship size due to the physical size of docking platforms.

If your ship is too big to dock, you're probably not going to build it.

That said, given what we know about the intended final combat balance of "easy to disable but difficult to destroy" it seems that larger ships are positioned to be pretty viable options due to greater surface area creating space for more redundant systems, especially for those with a consistant crew to man them, but given the sluggishness of code based automation and the seemingly relative ease of boarding it seems unlikely that they'll push small single seater craft out of the meta.

As for the price, the interesting thing about Stabase in comparison to similar MMOs is that the building system allows the price of a ship to be really flexible and as such you're likely to see a lot of "evolution ships" that grow in scope and change with their owners needs. In this system a ship isn't really "finished" when it leaves the initial assembly line, and unlike real vehicles can be quickly and easily expanded with very little downtime or testing.

While some ship of the line designs will certainly pop up where there's heavy fighting I think you're going to see a model that more closely resembles a militia model, where every battlefleet is going to look like a collection of different designs of whatever ship participants happen to have rather than a uniform design, and where "flagships" and regimented ship roles are an unnecessary contrivance due to the limited need for central C&C vessels and general chaos as a result of the nonexistent targeting and comms hardware.

 

[Azelous]

Well, the game is not available to the public, so we can only guess. We do not know the price of building a ship, but we do know that the large imperial ship built by the devs is close to the limit of the physics engine as of last we heard. They have said that the size limit will be based on performance, so here’s hoping for improvements to the game engine!

 

[Burnside]

Practical size limit places the largest ships built so far in the corvette classification, which goes up to around 128m and abuts the typical lengths of frigates, destroyers begin somewhere around 160m. Given parts counts expand geometrically as length increases, breaking into anything near cruiser-sized hulls is going to be a meta-engineering feat and will likely require strong use of station-scale parts to reach sufficient sizes, which dovetails into the meta for carrier construction principles. Dreadnoughts, being all-big-gun battleships with equally heavy armor, are going to be out of our scope for the foreseeable future. However the issue of the "ship too valuable to lose" may rear its head as carriers within the escort hull classifications (corvette, frigate, destroyer) begin seeing development and the same can be said of "Heavy" Corvette and Frigate designs especially the plans for artillery arrays and "arty slabs" in the BVR proponents.

 

[Maximum777]

Okay now that's a decent question and one that I plan to get to the bottom of and so far, here's my answer. I predict there will be two main styles of fighters, little ones that are more maneuverable, just like what we saw in the developer battle vid. (but I think their maneuverable in the wrong way from what I can see from the vid but I'll get back to this point in a sec) Big ships, IE what was in the developer vid, that have only one real goal and that is to just be gun boats, big, relatively slow and just all around scary looking, intimidating, but still however weak because I suspicion, at least for a while, big ships will not be the most well thought out things, they'll likely be reasonably weak in the terms of catching them by surprise (I see awareness to be the biggest issue in fights of any size) rendering it as basically a sitting duck if you can sneak up on it, and I guess that's my point, if a ship is so big, its a sitting duck that can't take too many shots if attacked precisely. So likely, big scary ship, for a while, is going to fit into the class of way too much investment to risk.

Now to my maneuverability point and what I personally think the Meta will be. So I think an effective ship in a battle will be something along the lines of an armored bullet sponge that's maneuverable specifically in turn rate , so I would say that attack ships will be the meta for this game, at least early on before people truly understand how to build big ships well. So explaining my def. of attack ships, think of it like boom and zoom capable, armored ships that are capable of taking big hits, but mainly of out turning their opponents and landing their shots, taking shots strategically seems to be the way to do things as the smaller ships are viable because their small and hard to hit AND can dodge stuff yet when hit in the right spot are/seem, really easy to kill based off of the dev. battle vid's. So if you ask me, an optimized fighting ship will be one that can take a surprise attack, go evasive, then proceed to wip around and land every shot it takes, I think other useful attributes to an attack ship will be along the lines of, the ability to strafe at high speeds, turn and shoot at a target, facing all your armor towards them, while not moving in the direction your facing as a confusion tactic, and the ability to take a lot of hits, head on, with no troubles. Front armor will be an emphasized part of destining a ship like this as well as a forward CG for an increased turn rate. Ships like this will make for battle winning ships that are super capable if everything works like I hope it will, as of now though I truly think we just need to play the game and learn how these things can fly before we make these decisions. Also one final thing is a confusing ship that can move unexpectedly will be likely incredibly good because it will be very hard to properly lead shots on it, all in all if you can change directions on a dime and hit your shots I think you will be an overwhelming force to ships of all shapes and sizes. Starbase ship fighting is going to be nuts.

 

[MixCTATNCT]

Read the comments and agree here with the following statements. First, at the beginning there will be current small ships. But then they will morph into larger ones. And as we say, through the stump of the deck, there will already be something more. By that time, the engine will be finalized and something large will be.

Also, on the issue that the launch pad will not accommodate large models, I think not a problem. In other games, I have solved this by creating separate modules and then assembling them.

Additional problems are that it all depends on the question of additional benefits from a large size. It has already been mentioned here that what if there is an attempt to capture the ship? So we need barrier modules. Different type. Reinforced armor. Size and weight in exchange for protection. Also, large hemograms in 3D on which you can make a command base with the ability to distribute goals. The same powerful radar. Something like Hyper engines for fast travel. Powerful field of invisibility, or powerful silencers against missiles. That's when you can think of big ships.

Also, let's count how many people we need. Let's say 2 pilots, captain 1, 2-3 more people to work with equipment and coordination, and shooting and aiming from the main guns. 5-8 shooters. 2-4 maintenance and repair. It turns out about 10-15 people. But that's not all. In fact, 1 such ship does not fly. This is necessary for 2-3 more ships of the destroyer class 4-8 crew members, and a link of fighters 1 and 2 local. And this is the minimum. Need a landing party? 10 more people. A landing ship? Another 1-2 people. Against boarding team need to? 10 people. Fighter maintenance? Another 2-3. As well as support, logistics and logistics vehicles. Haven't you heard? I'm sure you will. Another 3-5 people. Don't you want a staff? From 5 to 8 people. In General, it turns out for a circle of 50-100 people. In other words, of course it will be measured with pipiski who have a bigger and thicker ship, of course they will. But this will be current for large clans. The rest will be able to talk, from the side to swallow drool.

 

[Burnside]

If landing pads can't support holding large ships inside of savespace, that's actually a nice emergent balance against the greater force projection they might allow, a fleet needs to invest in keeping their larger vessels in a physical dockyard or an enclosed drydock and actually protect their assets. I approve.

Second point of argreement, and I'm probably repeating myself here, is that keeping a squadron of one or two-man ships organised requires good organisational leadership and the recruiting of dedicated team players, running a larger ship magnifies that need tenfold because you'll have positions like Engineering and Damage Control or a Flight Deck/Flight Control Officer and similar highly logistical positions that don't see lots of action in an engagement and are mostly busy with mundane supervision, maintenance, and accounting tasks, but will be essential to a large vessel being effective in combat. Being economically able to field a large ship and put bodies on it is not the same as having the team discipline and good leadership to fight effectively in one. A poor crew will get a ship sunk just as fast as enemy weapons.

 

[TheEmperor1237]

Larger vessels are cool and very fun community projects in games like this, but in the end they are not really practical. There are plenty of reasons listed above through other posts but the biggest one will also be the game engine. A larger ship is more things to load in, render and calculate. It just slows everything down.

You then factor in resources to build it and player requirements to effectively pilot and crew it... it gets messy. Even in modern warfare today, battleships have been phased out being replaced by the cruiser or even destroyer. There just really isn’t a need for ships like that anymore. Why build one super big ship that can only be in one place at a time when you could build a dozen smaller ships that can be many places at once?

If we are talking about just for fun... I would love to see a large ship in game, but I wouldn’t want to be the faction responsible for taking care of it. As a community project it would be a good challenge. As an asset of wartime operations, it’s to big of a target and to easy to work around.

 

[M1 Abrams]

Larger vessels are cool and very fun community projects in games like this, but in the end they are not really practical. There are plenty of reasons listed above through other posts but the biggest one will also be the game engine. A larger ship is more things to load in, render and calculate. It just slows everything down.

You then factor in resources to build it and player requirements to effectively pilot and crew it... it gets messy. Even in modern warfare today, battleships have been phased out being replaced by the cruiser or even destroyer. There just really isn’t a need for ships like that anymore. Why build one super big ship that can only be in one place at a time when you could build a dozen smaller ships that can be many places at once?

If we are talking about just for fun... I would love to see a large ship in game, but I wouldn’t want to be the faction responsible for taking care of it. As a community project it would be a good challenge. As an asset of wartime operations, it’s to big of a target and to easy to work around.

The reason battleships got phased out in the Navy is because they changed from relying on naval guns to using fighter jets from carriers and guided missiles, both of which have a much longer range. So now the optimal strategy in real life is small, fast ships (or submarines) that can evade detection and launch long-range missiles from anywhere. That won't be the case in a game like this; it might be that big, tanky ships are king; we just don't know yet. Y'all are forgetting something too: if I'm reading this (under Weight Multiplier) correctly, the damage calculations currently take the entire mass of the ship into account. So larger ships will be able to take more hits even on top of the fact that they have more armor.

 

[CalenLoki]

Ship is not an object (in terms of game calculations). It's a blob of objects.

Single armour plate, beam or thruster component is.

So no magic buff for big ships.

And we can have fighter jets launched from carriers, that evade detection and launch guided missiles/snipe with railguns...
Sounds like exact IRL scenario you just described.

Superior firepower matters much less if you're missing most of the shoots.
Superior armour is only as strong as the weakest parts of it: exposed weapons and thrusters.

 

[M1 Abrams]

Ah. Guess I did read it wrong then. So that means even things like the computer parts and stuff have an "armor value"?

And we can have fighter jets launched from carriers, that evade detection and launch guided missiles/snipe with railguns...
Sounds like exact IRL scenario you just described.

I didn't say you couldn't. I said that's why big guns on ships became obsolete in real life. Our modern guided missiles are superior in every way (except maybe cost lol).

 

[Burnside]

If you read some articles on historical and modern ship classing, the modern missile cruiser easily outguns classic battleships and qualifies as one in its own right and the missile destroyers come in at a very close second.