Cornflakes

what would definitely bring forward sectioned shields would be to have shield projectors not generate closed bubbles but only single polygons of shield "plates".
 
a single projector would generate a corner/vertex of a shield and it has to connect to other projectors to provide the other vertices for plates/bubbles.
the projection distance could be configured per projector to make the system a bit more flexible.
 
single projector -> point (pretty useless)
two projectors -> line (a bit less useless, but people are creative)
three projectors -> a closed triangular sufrace that provides protection against projectiles that would cross it.
 
four or more projectors could completely enclose a volume.
 
every projector could be part of multiple polygons to generate closed bubbles without gaps.
 
this would enable custom shield forms for any form of ship in a relatively easy to understand fashion.
(the whole wireframe shield bubble could be smoothed over afterwards to provide more pleasing shield shapes, if so desired)
and would also provide sectioned shields for localised damage modeling on shields.
in addition forcefield doors, shield domes and other uses with custom shapes would come for free with the system.
 
damage/power needs could be distributed per shield projector or maybe to shield generators by which the projectors have to be supplied from.

No they wont be.
Vehicles and buildings will be voxels, yes.
But functional parts and player equipment wont be player designed.
 
 
"On the other hand, crafting enables players to make gear and Elements. Those are non-customizable 3d models (meshes)."
 
https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/841-ask-us-anything-event/

Social interaction should improve the game, and not be a hard limiter

And a drop pod built from voxels cant fulfil your criteria... why?

English speaking forum mate, google translate at least shows good will :V

Why even bother with spaceships then, right?

not in this thread.
 
 
 
and direct stat manipulation completely removes the interesting part of the design system
the interesting part in the whole system as i advocate is that you have to think and tinker around with the sliders to get the actual gameplay relevant stats you want.
 
to reuse my gauß cannon again: 
there is no single part that affects efficiency, muzzle velocity, damage, or most of the stats that actually matter.
 
a bigger barrel isnt just "moar damage".
its heavier projectile, higher ammo needs, more size, more mass, more recoil, larger, less efficient coiling (which subsequently causes the bullet to be even slower than it would be from the increased mass), lower refire rate if you are power limited, and (if its a turret) lower tracking speed due to the increased mass and size.
 
and that was /one/ tweakable of /at least/ 5 or 6 that a gauß cannon would have.
 
there is no "one slider per stat" thing as you claim.
 
your system is the shallow and boring one because you can directly chose what you want, instead of tweaking the whole device to do what you want.

What does that have to do with how detailed/complex elements are?
All you described are features of the ship you mount elements into, the ship you build from voxels and the mesh elements.
 
 
 
What "physically based upgrades"?
There are only sliders.
 
Heater strength [---|-]
Propellant pumps [--|--]
Accelerator length [|----]
 
But theres no "thrust", "efficiency", etc sliders.
You'd have to mix and tune the design to what you want and need, and not just crank the sliders as far to the right as you can afford

Well, i wasnt saying that you chose /stats/ directly but /design features/ which affect the stats of the device.
There is no "efficiency" slider you crank up.
 
for example with a thruster:
When you want to increase propellant usage efficiency (specific impulse) you give the drive a longer/stronger acceleration stage or more powerful heaters which cause the drive to use up more power but to produce more thrust with the same propellant mass flow.
It now needs less propellant for the same thrust, at the cost of needing more power.

Of course it would be limited, maybe with some point system or similar.
Also a lot of the sliders wouldnt be a purely better/worse choice.
 
To reuse my gauß cannon example
 
Larger bore means more expensive ammo and lower rate of fire and muzzle velocity but gives you a harder punch with less armor penetration.
 
Longer barrel means higher maximum muzzle velocity, but more energy per shot and flat out larger gun.
 
More space for ammo feeder means smaller capacitor banks which translates to lower muzzle velocity and damage per shot.
 
Bigger support section means its simply a larger gun, which you have to fit into your ship somehow.
 
And so on and so forth.
A gun with all sliders to one side isnt an ubercannon, its a very special cannon with a certain usage field.

Use the RDMS for maps as well.
With individual constructs/asteroids/planetary hex sectors being the smallest unit and the rest being handled by sub-/groups and access rights.
 
With whole planets or systems being available to the whole faction but the positions of that surveillance ships not.
 
Or any other combination someone finds useful.

Haaaaaaaaave you met copyright laws and server stability? :V

Any system designed by the devs that limits a player's ability and the right to play, will not go well in general. When a player pays X dollars a monthly sub, everyone will expect access to the whole game 24x7, aside from normal maint downtimes.
 
We need to have other forms of punishment that doesn't prevent one from playing the game.

gates dont need to be hard-linked to provide limitations to travel, but dont need to be instant dial-anything to avoid a billion-and-three jumpgates in every system.
Have them take time to connect and disconnect stargate connections.
 
Important and high throughput connections will rarely or never shut down.
While the odd out of the way system would be dialed in on request or on a schedule from a secondary gate.

That's a fair assessment.

I hope that system exists as a detail to make the game rich, not as a problem to burn processors.

Of course it would be limited, maybe with some point system or similar.
Also a lot of the sliders wouldnt be a purely better/worse choice.
 
To reuse my gauß cannon example
 
Larger bore means more expensive ammo and lower rate of fire and muzzle velocity but gives you a harder punch with less armor penetration.
 
Longer barrel means higher maximum muzzle velocity, but more energy per shot and flat out larger gun.
 
More space for ammo feeder means smaller capacitor banks which translates to lower muzzle velocity and damage per shot.
 
Bigger support section means its simply a larger gun, which you have to fit into your ship somehow.
 
And so on and so forth.
A gun with all sliders to one side isnt an ubercannon, its a very special cannon with a certain usage field.

[Citation needed]
Flight time and whom i take with me arent much of an obstacle when i can just log off with that character and play with another for the duration of the flight :shrug:
 
It definitely is "suddenly, fleet" for the destination.
because they dont have any information about the big blob of ships incoming before it is in interplanetar-ish range.
So when they are already in the system.
 
 
 
If you look at the context im saying there that spool-up and spool-down times make it impossible to just switch off gates.
Not that NQ said they wouldnt be able to being just switched off
 
You definitely need some other form of interdiction for interstellar space:
Example:
Say you can detect a ship up to ten minutes away in FTL from your position and maybe two minutes of that range are interdictable.
from your own statements lets assume that a system is roughly 1 hour in radius, 2 hours in diameter.
thats about 1/12 of a systems diameter scannable from a single ship, which seems about right for me for large sensors and in-system play.
 
to guard a systems borders at the 1-hour-radius mark you'd have to keep an eye on 45000 square minutes of surface area.
a ten minute detection radius would have a cross section of about 314 square minutes (the volume of the detection sphere doesnt matter because the intruder has to fly through your cross section to be detected).
so you'd need 144 ships, which is
bit higher or lower because you cant fill a surface with discs but you can let your ships patrol which closes the gaps.
so lets assume that the 144 is a valid number. which is the ratio of system radius to scan radius times two squared
so you need (rsec/rscan)²*4 ships to cover a given system from intruders from outside it.
which gets highly highly uneconomical very fast
for 1h+10min warning time you need 14² ships or 196
for 1h+20min you need 16² = 256 ships
and so on.
 
its not economical to prevent any incursions into a system from the outside without any extra trickery.
 
 
 
 
 
 
when writing this i had an idea about how to statisfy both of us:
 
what if active FTL drives would produce a "streak" forwards and backwards along its current orientation, a streak you can detect "long" ahead of the actual ship (hours to days) when it passes through your sensor range?
it would keep the free movement and give defenders time to react to incoming fleets from outside their systems without making sensor ranges in general gamebreakingly long.
and for travelers into unsettled space it doesnt matter because theres no limitation on movement.
 
for traders it would introduce a game of deception and a bit of luck to avoid being ambushed in unsafe areas, as fling just straight ahead could lead you to an ambush of someone who already came across their streak, but changing course could lead to you being detected in the first place when you wave around that beacon.
 
maybe with a bit of an opening angle that aiming-a-bit-past-your-target is unfeasible.

Regardless: in terms of the OP's idea:
 
Maybe all elements could be generated based on rules and the parameters being tweaked by the player (with the magnitude of modification determined by player skills and used materials).
 
Kinda like the face/body editor from the sims, but for engines, weapons, etc.
 
With the model not being hardcoded but generated with parametric modeling and the stats being affected by the parameter tweaking as well.
 
 
For example a gauß cannon could have the amount of coils, the number of windings in each coil, barrel diameter, space dedicated to the loading systems (how fast it can be reloaded with projectiles), space dedicated to its capacitor systems (maximum energy stored), dimensions of its connector block (and thus volume available to caps and loading system), space for power electronics (how fast the caps can ideally recharge) and so on.
 
When done with enough tweakability a fighter rapid fire cannon and a capital artillery cannon could be the same "part" but with differently tweaked numbers.
 
No dedicated modeling tool needed for individualised parts, no multipart system either but it allows players to adapt equipment to their needs/preferences and would also allow visual identification of "custom" parts.

The ancient witchcraft the Thibetan Monks granted upon us. Text chat.

Why would stargates be the end-all of strategy if they were the only(useful) way to travel between stars?
 
environmental conditions apply without freeform interstellar travel as well.
A nebula or radiation cloud affects you the same when you are in orbit around a star as it does when you are in deep space.
(And the effects of black holes and asteroid fields make more sense in interplanetar ranges as well lol)
 
And without freeform travel NQ doesnt have to design a second balancing framework around detection and movement impairment whichs constraints are completely different than the ones for in-system gameplay.
 
For effective deep space interdiction you need sensors with light hours to light months or even years.
But for in system gameplay you definitely dont want sensors that can keep an eye over the whole system on its own.
Same for FTL disruptors and the like.
 
 
I personally dont see a way to reconcile one of those problems without completely breaking the other thing.
And honestly also see no reason to open that can of worms in the first place.
 
Why bother with building all those extra systems to prevent freeform interstellar travel from breaking the rest of the game when most of the gameplay works the same without it?
 
I know its cool and would be a nice thing to have (i actually want it myself). But it opens up such a huge can of worms that i'd rather have it not in the game (at release) than to make the rest of the game suffer for it because of the diverted resources.

http://hpashkov.deviantart.com/art/SARACEN-pipeline-328807128
 

http://hpashkov.deviantart.com/art/SARACEN-pipeline-328807128
 

*nitrous oxide.
Not nitrogen :V
Nitrogen is enough in the intake air

yeah, because /active/ detection gets annoying over a bit over a light second distance squared inverse square law and stuff
1/(r^4) gets very small very fast, but you are comparing the distance between your outstretched hand's fingertips with a 15km trip
4 orders of magnitude arent nothing, you know
 
and also considering that radar in modern /fightercraft/ has detection ranges of ~200km against 1m² targets, im pretty sure that that sky filling ship isnt exactly invisible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/APG-77
 
so, the radar has a peak power output of ~20kw (P) that makes 500*10^-9 watt that actually arrive at the 1m² (A) target at 200km ( r ), makes 12.5*10^-18 watt (Pd) that make it back to the aircrafts radar dish. (detecting that probably involves a lot of signal processing and classified trickery, but lets assume thats the irradiance of its own radar beam it can detect)
P/(r^4)*A=Pd
 
so, for simplicity i'll assume a spherical/circular spacecraft to detect with 8km diameter.
the area thats towards the radar has 4km radius which gives us (4*10^3)^2 * pi/4 = 12.5 million square meters of area to radiate against.
putting the new number for A into our formula above we get a range of about 12000km at which the radar could detect the ship.
thats about the diameter of earth
 
nothing from a physics point of view prevents you from detecting such a large ship at anything way beyond what would be visual range
 
 
and the framework i outlined in the post i linked earlier already includes optical detection in it, optical detection is just a small sliver in the total available EM spectrum.