Jump to content

XS ships need a lot of changes to be like the star wars fighters that they were designed to be


Shaman

Recommended Posts

in theory , xs ships could actually be pretty powerful. their 60 minute lock time from L ships means that you can just hit and run in and out of range of the enemy with 0 damage, and are loads cheaper than L cores. In practice, this doesn't work for many reasons.

 

  1. damage is too low. not only do they do 8 times less damage, since they are controlled by a pilot seat you can only add 4 guns maximum, meaning that you would need a swarm of them to harm an L core. getting 2 pilots in an xs core is far less efficient than putting 2 pilots in an L core, not even mentioning gunner seats using remote control units. The damage multipliers between core sizes should be nerfed greatly, to the point where there barely is a difference. Of course this means that it will take quite a while for L ships to destroy one another, but imo the should be like that anyway. They are L cores after all, they can cost over 150 million quanta, destroying one should be a long process. It would also be cool if cockpits had 2x the capacity than hover seats as well, to give them an actual use.
  2. xs ships are too flimsy. this would be ok if tracking on larger ships weren't so great, but unfortunately they are. the same goes to small and medium ships as well, they are just too weak. a fix for this would be to either fix tracking, or yet again nerf the damage on larger cores.
  3. xs ships are mostly glorified gunner seats anyway. There is practically no difference, apart from the fact that you can drive as well, which is something that remote controls do anyway. Making something where guns track where the player points, and then shoots where you aim would be far cooler and more useful. Using real time hitscans to damage ships might not be possible (as we discussed in an earlier thread) so I suggest that instead you click on a point where the guns should fire, and then deals the damage as soon as the other client recives the hit.
  4. Range and speed is far too high. The current range of xs ships needs to be the range of L cores, and the speed limit should be limited to 2000km/h. of course, adding a speed cap of about 2000kmh would disrupt almost everything else in the game, as it would make the already slow trip to other planets even longer. To counteract this issue there should be a unit that makes you accelerate past the speed limit, but disables (and rapidly slows you back down) as soon as you enter combat, a bit like warp drives. There should also be a unit which has a very high range (maybe even higher on smaller cores) that disrupts them to help catch those super fast ships.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1.   Fighters are as effective in Starwars as they are partially because plot requires them to be (because if you look at the numbers too hard for anything in Starwars basic logic causes the universe to fall apart), and partially because it was based off of WW2 combat (where there was a gravity-imposed cap on how much armor you could put on something before it either sank or weighed too much to move with available motors). 

 

-Aircraft in real-life maintain their effectiveness against heavier targets by virtue of being able to mount up-sized weapons (hint, that thing NQ should have just nerfed slightly rather than almost totally in to the ground like they did), because their weapons in real life generally are designed to penetrate a target's armor rather than expending all of their energy in to its surface (as they currently do in game), and because there is still a gravity-imposed cap on how much armor you can put on something before it either sinks or weighs too much to move with available motors.

 

-Finally, hover-seats mount fewer weapons because there isn't an XS radar, if there was then we'd see just as many xs weapons per gunner seat on an XS ship as we see L weapons per gunner seat on an L ship. I'd like if NQ would add an XS radar (100 cap-cost, 37.5km lock range, 20-ish hp, 20-ish L volume, 90-ish Kg weight, at least 1 level in "Radar XS Target Upgrades" required to lock a target)... and fix the capacity cost on S lasers...

 

2.   Tracking on larger ships is generally abysmal, but seems to be based on the target's angular velocity relative to the attacking ship. At the ranges larger ships fire at it usually isn't hard for the ship's pilot to just re-orient the entire ship to compensate for the poor tracking of that ship's weapons (the pilot of the larger ship is compensating for poor weapon tracking).

 

3.   The weapons are more or less hit-scan as far as projectile speed is concerned, the randomized bits are chance to hit and location hit. It would be nice if it were possible for an XS to choose (to some degree) where to land that hit, but I don't think linking that to where they have the mouse pointed when they fire would be at all practical at even the ranges of XS weapons in space. The best I can come up with for making such targeting work would be to have some manner of "targeting scanner" that permits a gunner to have the weapons try and focus on specific types of elements (perhaps with some manner of drawback to rate of fire and a cone of effect that would require it's placement to leave it easily vulnerable to return-fire). 

 

4.   Range and speed are fine(ish), the issues are mass/acceleration. Large ships accelerate way to quickly, resulting from voxel weighing next to nothing (less than 2-ish percent the solid weight of a material if I remember right) and being easily produced en masse. I need to wrap a sizeable ship with a narrow profile (making the armor shell weigh that much more relative to the interior) in 3 meters of armor all around just to make the steel voxel get close to weighing as much as the elements. If voxel weighed a lot more (say 10 times as much, putting it in to the 10%-20% solid weight range), fighters with their thin-ish armor would still be quite fast, cargo and exploration ships that already just have a skin of lightweight voxel would keep most of their speed, and the war-ships fielding armor thicker than a fighter is long would be slow enough to give the fast combatant niche back to smaller craft.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...