more realistic material properties

[Moonshot]

 The material properties for honeycomb material are too unrealistic. As an illustrative example, carbon fiber and wood have basically the same stats (https://dualuniverse.gamepedia.com/Material). Zero resistances across the board and comparable HP and weight. Gold is the toughest stuff in the game, despite the fact that IRL, it's a soft metal. The reason for this is presumably because carbon is a Tier 1 mat and gold a t4, but I would argue that for honeycomb materials, the tier shouldn't matter. There's enough of a reward built into the game mechanics for mining higher tier ores in the manufacturing process of parts. But if you want to balance it a bit to incentivize the use of higher tier ores in hull design, I would suggest doing what you've already done with carbon fiber. Namely, you need specialized equipment to make it from carbon (3d printer). That's pretty much all I use that medium sized piece of equipment for... If you want to make it yield less carbon fiber, you can adjust that process accordingly, or require you do what you need to do IRL and mix it with an epoxy, that you also need to manufacture, which perhaps includes some higher tier resources. But carbon fiber should be tough and light. It should be more useful than either wood or gold in hull design.

 

Bottomline, if you want to make the gameplay feel more like real world engineering, the materials need to behave more like they do IRL. Carbon fiber should be light and strong, especially since even within the game, you need to use basically dedicated machinery to make it. Please consider rebalancing material stats to better reflect their real life properties.

 

 

[Moonshot]

also, might be cool to make some of these resistances more lopsided. For instance, it's a common idea to use reflective surfaces to defend against lasers. Here, mats either have decent resistances (with slight variation type to type), or they don't. If you want to incentivize the use of higher tier resources in hull construction (and fight the current cube pvp meta), then consider making something like a gold alloy great as a reflective coating, but then once it gets tarnished / damaged that resistance goes down. Other materials could be better at absorbing kinetic rounds. This would encourage hull designs with a shiny outer layer and more kinetic resistant inner layer, and could lead to more sensor types that detail hull composition, and combat tactics that involve using different weapon types depending on the exposed hull material. Also consider perhaps electromagnetic warfare, such as radar scrambling / EMP. Perhaps you could add a faraday cage concept that involves surrounding the sensitive electronics with a highly conductive material. I guess what I'm getting at is that different materials should have specific benefits, which would lead to more dynamic / creative multi-material / layer hull designs, instead of just steel / gold cubes, like discussed here: