Big guns or not?

[CalenLoki]

Quite common suggestion: give us huge/spinal/capital weapons.
At first glance it seems like a good idea. After all all the movies have it.
But is it really good?
How does it improve the game?

IMO it would only dumb down engineering aspect of the game.
Right now there is huge difference between small and large ships. While fighters can be shoot to pieces relatively easily, and survive only thanks to speed and agility, really large ones can be only disabled (destroying external guns and thrusters). Thick armour forces attackers to board and fight on foot in order fully destroy or capture the ship.

Implementation of big guns would allow battles between large ships to be resolved just in ranged combat, without any boarding.
It would also make placement of external components less important, as aiming for core internal components would be much quicker way to get the ship out of combat.
Big guns, by nature slower to aim, would also push the meta further towards speed and agility. Thus armour (natural advantage of large ships) would matter even less.

What do you think?

 

[Killer_Rabbit]

there is an advantage with the fact that spinal mounted weapons use less people to use

 

[CalenLoki]

You can hard mount small weapons as well. Or slave multiple turrets to single fire control seat.

 

[sweer]

I mean what if you just equip the larger ships with a supermass of weapons this would change the design of ships so it dosnt shoot its self and make interesting things happen

 

[Burnside]

I'd just like to see more weapons options on the railcannon/heavy weapon mount. Like a heavy plasma caster/cannon, a Beam Laser, or a Gattling Cannon. Mind, a medium-weapon mounted gattling gun would fill things out too, but that kind of competes with the laser cannon's utility.

 

[dusty]

I'd picture a weapon like the plasma mortar of the Wraith tank from Halo: a relatively slow firing gun with a large and exceptionally slow projectile capable of devastating splash damage. This way, these mega-weapons are being used only against larger ships, as opposed to obliterating every fighter that comes within five kilometers.

 

[Burnside]

Agreed, if you take the plasma caster and merely extend its projectile lifetime, you get a fairly slow moving weapon that takes ~10sec to reach that 5km hard render limit. Absolutely ideal for big artillery duels.

 

[Tumbla]

give us a rail gun, or hypercannon like in gundam which one shots ships.

 

[The Tea Master]

what about mega weapons that would give people building halo rings and death stars a good reason.

 

[Tumbla]

that'd be cool, pulverize whole asteroid fields or moons

 

[STEALTH]

Think this game is in the right place without them. Seems like many folks are chasing and wanting to get the "cool" in the game with various suggestions but not really looking at the overall and larger picture. Just not seeing the need for the super duper Death Star weapon in the game outside "but it'd look cool"!

 

[Burnside]

give us a rail gun, or hypercannon like in gundam which one shots ships.

Megaparticle and Beam weapons don't just one-shot ships, they plain don't enjoy interacting with normal matter.

 

[Azelous]

I like the concept of large weapons. They serve a role in large ship vs large ship. I doubt that boarding will be irrelevant due to this, as a boarding team should be able to easily take down an undermanned ship. Additionally they’ll be practically useless against small agile ships, so not unbalanced. However, I’m not sure about large weapons vs stations..

 

[Burnside]

I think that's the primary feature of the safezone mechanic discriminating against 'military' ships. You can easily deploy your biggest and baddest platforms early and risk losing them to invulnerable station defences or hold your most powerful assets back until the safezone drops and risk never really getting the maximum value out of large weapons like railcannons. The interesting play is going to be seeing very small platforms like fighter/bombers that mount them in a low-count fixed capacity rather than the apocalyptic firepower of heavy frigates that will mount one or two XL multigun turrets.

 

[Verbatos]

I think huge weapons would be a nice addition to the game, but would need to not facilitate certain things like the smaller ones do, such as turntable compatibility. They would also require a large amount of power, would need some heavy armour plating to protect them and would be very difficult to successfully attach to a ship without it breaking when it flies. I think ship would have to be designed around the weapon so it could fill the criteria properly, it couldn't just be bolted on to a ship with no thought.

 

[Burnside]

I disagree, as long as the turntables react in a predictably semi-realistic way to larger and heavier objects, i.e. slowing down under heavier or more awkward loads, I'll be satisfied. At RC/Capital engagement ranges you're shooting at specks with little to no FoF besides coordinating over comms, having big guns in turrets isn't much of an advantage and we hope that smaller craft can, with good angles and decent numbers, close and engage inside of such a vessel's ability to orient their main guns on target and provide good effect of fire.

 

[Verbatos]

Big guns are the kind of thing that are only useful if everyone uses them, since they would be designed to take out large ships using similarly bug guns, if everyone flies in tiny little fighters instead of massive warships, the big guns are just going to be useless.
On the other hand, big guns would be good in taking out things like bases and stations (if that is possible), so if one group starts using them for that, their enemies would have to start using them to counter, creating a bigger influence for big guns.

 

[Quinc]

Yes, eventually but not for a good while after the early access release. I think the current selection of weapons is good enough for now, though eventually they should introduce larger weapons. For one thing, people will simply lack the resources to create large ships early on. The in game economy and industrial base will need time to develop. Ships big enough to justify such guns will exist but will continue to be rare for a time. Bigger versions of existing weapons would not be extremely difficult to program, but it would be necessary that they affect multiple components even if their smaller cousins only hit one at a time. If you deal 1 billion damage to a single piece you are still destroying the target one piece at a time.

From the videos and the wiki page on damage, if you can focus enough fighter level guns onto the same point they will have the same effect as a mega-cannon. Though getting a single mega-cannon to hit one spot is obviously easier. It isn't clear if you can even really control the thickness/strength of an individual armor plate. Large ships may simply have to have multiple hulls, or stacks of armor plates lining the outer hull. The scenario CalenLoki describes could happen with extremely huge ships, it would be rare. While boarding should always be a possibility, it shouldn't be required.

 

[Naija]

I agree with Quinc. There is already a decent array of ship weapons that will be available at launch. We need to see what players will build. Let people min-max armor and ship design. From dev videos ships look pretty fragile already, especially big ones, so mega weapons would be op. I'm in favor of playing the game for a bit with the current weapons available. See what meta develops, then the devs will have more info on if capital weapons should be introduced and how to balance them. They would also make for great content for an update. But balance is key. They need to serve a role in combat, not be overpowered making other weapons irrelevant.