Ship Roles

[CosmicDragon]

Will, when building will there be limits on how many specializations you ship can have.  Could I build a ship which has the ability to fill all roles in fleet doctrine, the composition of the fleet, perfectly?  I am not sure that some of the roles I am thinking of will be in DU but raw DPS surely will and even there you have the different sub-types, such as energy weapon based, or projectile weapon platforms, they should have different damage models, which if we look at other fiction, have different levels of effectiveness vs. defenses.  Ok, so DPS sub types aren't an ideal example, but I don't know of any other role of ship that is confirmed.  A general fantasy parallel would be a maxed out wizard who also is a max level cleric.    
 

P.S I hope this is understandable, I feel like its pretty rambling.

[Code24]

As this is a sandbox game, ship roles will mostly be defined by the way they are constructed. Weapon types will only be one factor. Say you want to build a Scout Ship; you should make it light, stealthy, and fast. A battleship might sacrifice agility for firepower and armor and so on... So in this way I think the devs will have very little to do in terms of defining ship roles. 

[KlatuSatori]

As code24 alludes to, nothing will stop you from building a ship that fills multiple roles. The kind of balancing that NQ are going for is at the design level. Size, power consumption, placement, mass, etc. So the more abilities you attempt to give your construct, the less efficient it is likely to be at each of them. Design decisions will have to be made on improving one aspect at the expense of another; strengths, weaknesses and mediocrity.

[krm398]

In other words, nothing can be perfect at everything. You cant build a ship that's both stealthy and fast like a scout and still have the firepower of a battleship. Its just not possible. so plan for the type of ship you truly like and go with that, because if every ship could be the best at everything, there would only be one design.

[Anaximander]

They have a balancing system in place. It's called physics, more precisely, mass. You know, if you build your ship with everything and the kitchen sink, good luck making it budge with a velocity not characterised as "Sitting Spaceduck".

[Shynras]

Ships are going to be made by hundreds of "interactive blocks", that will define the role of your ship. They are going to be about energy, storage, weapons, repairing, healing, speedboosting, managing, ia, and wathever. Those blocks are going to consume energy, to make the ship heavy or to take a lot of space, so you can't carry every single block in the same amount a specialized ship can. Some kind of hybrids will probably be possible, but they're not going to be maxed in every role.

And building a bigger ship to fit everything is not going to help anyway, since the bigger the ship, the bigger the needs it's going to have.