At this point, many of us realize the dangers of XS core sniper ships. For those that don't know, these are XS ships + Gunner seats that are typically equipped with something like a Space Radar L and Large Railgun L. I want to talk about the math and logic behind a scenario associated with these little bastards.
Let's start with the math given a scenario involving an XS core sniper aggressor (A Team) against a fleet comprised of an M core freighter and and two XS core sniper escorts (B Team).
A Team can lock and fire at the B Team freighter at a range of 160km. BOOM! That's a lot of damage! Of course, B Team also has XS core snipers as an escort so surely this battle is about to turn... right?
Not quite. The B Team sniper could be an exact replica of the A Team sniper but unfortunately, B Team can only target the aggressor's XS core at a mere 40km. That's a big 'ole 120km difference between defensive and offensive distances (don't flame me on this comment just yet, read the next lines).
While traveling in the big void of space this isn't too much of an issue. Logically, you could just have the escorts run 120km in front of and behind the freighter. The snipers could see and presumably handle anything coming up in front or approaching quickly from behind during tavel acceleration to 30km/h. But what about when there are aggressors spotted during the approach to the destination? Does the lead escort suffice in managing a flanking situation at the destination?
The deceleration distance of freighters (even with a bunch of retro brakes) is measured in SU given the time it takes to slow down. We're talking several hundred km when our Space Radar L can only see out 400km. Is it too late at that point for the freighter to attempt an abort? Does the freighter just smash that WARP NOW button to zoom off to safely and say, "Several million in warp cells well-spent!" Does the freighter pilot just cover every spare inch of the ship with Retro-Rocket Brakes like he's making a pepperoni pizza at home? is this a moot point and none of this matters?
We can debate all day about if pirates flying XS cube ships with L Railguns have any class or not (spoiler: they don't, cubes are lame), but I think we can all agree that the current iteration of PvP has plenty of problems.
Current Problems:
Lock-on range is only determined by core size
Some weapons have ranges that are greater than the minimum Lock-on range
Weapons have no/minimal accuracy falloff with increasing range
Weapons have no/minimal accuracy loss for high transversal velocities and accelerations
My Proposed Solutions:
1: Lock on range needs to be based on different parameters. The current meta of L guns on XS ships is problematic, since S and M ships (even if they also have L guns) are outranged and don't even get an opportunity to fight back. I propose splitting lock-on into 4 separate "Radar" units:
Radar - lock-on range based on sum of ship's 3 cross-sections (already calculated, and doing it as a sum encourages non-cube ships)
Gravimetric - lock-on range based on ship's mass (already calculated, makes heavy ships easier to detect whether its cargo or armor)
Thermal - lock-on range based on magnitude of the ship's maximum thrust in newtons (already calculated, makes ships with lots of engines easier to detect)
Electromagnetic - lock-on range based on power capacity and shields (obviously only useful when/if those systems are added)
Balancing the ranges from the 4 methods will take some trial and error, but overall it would make detection more "fair" by adding more control handles for NQ to balance.
2+3: Weapons being able to shoot far is very reasonable, and is really a necessity for the BVR combat caused by the velocities of ships in space. With the lock-on changes above, #2 becomes less of a problem. However, just because your weapon CAN reach that far, doesn't mean it should have great accuracy at doing so. Weapons should be able to fire when they are locked on, regardless of range (maybe missiles would be an exception to this), but should have accuracy falloff due to that range. Additionally, lasers should have damage falloff with range. I'd like to see the weapons rebalanced accordingly:
Railguns - high accuracy, low rof, moderate damage
Cannons - moderate accuracy, moderate rof, moderate damage
Lasers - high accuracy, high rof, damage falloff at range (low damage at long range, moderate damage at short range)
Missiles - moderate accuracy, low rof, hard cap range limited (high damage at short range)
4: Unless you are exactly in the target's flight path, you shouldn't be able to hit someone blazing past at 30k kph, aka "0.99c". Accounting for transversal velocity forces pursuers to match velocities in order to have high hit chances, not just reduce the distance. This means that weapons need a "tracking speed" property, so that some are better than others. While tracking speed should vary by weapon type, it should primarily vary by weapon size so that Large weapons have low accuracy at high transversal velocities. This solves the "the ultimate ship is the biggest ship covered in the most armor and cannons" problem, by making it hard for large weapons to target faster moving ships. While that can be overcome by adding a ton of engines to make "the ultimate ship" accelerate like a fighter, it will also drastically increase their Thermal signature thus allowing smaller ships to plink them to death from out of range. Additionally, if transversal acceleration and facing cross section were taken into account, small and quick ships like fighters would be harder to hit.
Now some of you are going to say "but SGCam, that sounds a lot like the combat mechanics in EVE." And you are right, it does. But as with many things in DU that take inspiration from EVE, Lock+Fire combat is one of them. That system overall works pretty well for EVE, and the more granular and customizable nature of DU means that it can be even more effective here. I'm also looking forward to warp interdiction and tackling, but that would be a whole other post.
Overall, the more complex the mechanics, the less all-around advantage "meta" builds have. They may be powerful in certain situations, and that's ok - as long as they are weaker elsewhere due to their optimization. Adding tradeoffs opens up the design space for more varied and interesting PvP, and will hopefully prevent us from playing "Cube Gank Squad 2020" going forward.
I'm not really sure how Cargo Containers will affect a ship's Stats tbh.
Depending on the ammount of stored cargo,will the weight of the container increase?
And if it does,would these weight variables affect a ship's overall thrust capabilities?
Hi guys,
I heard NQ will think about an element which allow your ship to be "docked" to a station, like some kind of plug in/out system.
But wouldn't it be cool to have a a ship attached to another ? Like if you have a big one you may want to attach few smaller ship to it or any DCU construction. If you can even make the LUA script interract with different DCU it would be a whole new world of possibilities... Like automatic fuel reload or reconstructible ship, would be a great thing for the market as well as you may upgrade just one part of you ship very easily (let's say new thrusters) as long as they are provided by the same company or so ...
What lethys said is accurate in terms of how it works, and also in a large space battle even a small timer on despawning projectiles could cause server lag, and would create lots more stress on the node server architecture of having to simulate bullets and check for impacts rather than something being told that it has been impacted. Also, you will need people to man most turrets on ships anyways as it has been said AI targeting will have a drawback such as vastly reduced damage on a per turret basis. Also, if they had both but projectiles had small damage outputs, it would be near pointless for any ship to use them as lock and fire chance to hit will be based on what a projectile chance to hit would be affected by, as lethys said above.
