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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.

(Sorry for my English) I propose to implement 1. In-game software store that would allow you to buy lua programs written by other players. Now programs can be distributed only through the forum or other resources. 2. Software packages that are automatically installed on construct (event handler registration, etc., maybe like autoconf). At the moment, all the code you need to install yourself through lua editor. 3 (Maybe). Physical storage for packages (USB stick for example)