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Flares/Electromagnetic weapons

#1
Flares


I haven't seen much discussed about the idea of flares.

Missiles, apart from being finite in amount, are apparently quite powerful methods of destroying your foes.

I think there should exist a countermeasure like some sort of flare that "explodes" and the blast can destroy missiles pre-emptively before they actually hit their target, reducing or nullifying any potential damage.

They could be conventional (missile, more effective) or electromagnetic (emitted from shields or the like). They'd of course take up a hard point or two, but could be very useful for missions like reconnaissance/assassination, where you have to infiltrate a large group or hostile territory, and plain ol' useful if you find yourself in a battle you're definitely needing to run from.


EM weapons

I was thinking that some weapons could be designed to "debuff" a ship, reducing available power to targeted systems. See early videos where there's manual energy allocation to each system. These weapons could temporarily reduce that allocation.

Suppose I am in a battle with a large flagship and its fleet. While your flagship is highly armoured and hard to destroy even if its shields are down and my weapons kind of suck, I can reduce your firepower and available power to your thrusters by using this sort of weapon, while the rest of my crew can mop up while you're moving at half speed.

This idea I admit comes from some Borg tech from star trek lore. Some of their weapons are specifically designed to temporarily reduce the power and efficiency of shields and systems, and can be of high tactical importance.

While these weapons don't do direct damage, they can assist a lot in disabling a ship while not destroying it. That might be useful if you want to like steal information from it or something.
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Re: Flares/Electromagnetic weapons

#2
Flares were in Freelancer so I expect they will exist in LT.

There was a form of EM weapon in Freelancer but mostly just as shield damage.
I believe alternative weapon damages have been discussed, but I never participated in that so couldnt tell you how it went.
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Re: Flares/Electromagnetic weapons

#3
Silverware wrote:Flares were in Freelancer so I expect they will exist in LT.

There was a form of EM weapon in Freelancer but mostly just as shield damage.
I believe alternative weapon damages have been discussed, but I never participated in that so couldnt tell you how it went.

Okay, phew. Like I've done some quick searches, and haven't seen anything so like I thought I'd throw that in there.
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Re: Flares/Electromagnetic weapons

#6
nikki_ wrote:Oh wow!

Cornflakes, do we like share minds or something?

Thanks for pointing that out.
Its just statistics, with that amount of nonsense im posting here some of it is bound to include similar thoughts to other peoples thoughts :P :lol:


On that EMP weapon stuff, there has to be some form of defence against it, possibly different from normal shields and armor to make it a tactical choice to mount.

How could those look/work? :think:
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Re: Flares/Electromagnetic weapons

#10
Actually, speaking of frequencies sparks a thought.

One of the most valuable bits of kit in our various ships will be the scanner. In practice it "just" displays a line associated with the frequencies emitted by whatever energy source or object you're looking directly at. But notionally, the scanner is actually the source of every thing in the world that can be seen by a ship's pilot -- primarily meaning you the player. All of the "world" of LT that you see on your computer monitor could be thought of as data collected passively by your ship's scanner and transformed (by some intermediate hardware) into the visual display.

Thought of in that way, it becomes pretty defensible to think of your ship's scanner as about the most important piece of technology you have, other than the hull that keeps that tasty oxygen at a sufficiently high local concentration.

Well. If scanners are such a big deal, wouldn't it be interesting to research and build and equip pieces of technology that affect ship scanners in various ways? Isn't there rather a lot of gameplay there going untapped (as far as I know)?

"Flares" that blind a scanner (you can think of them as jammers) are one obvious application. But there must be many other possible ways to interact with a ship's scanner. Some might be beneficial (boosters); some might alter data you receive (filters, shifters, compressors/expanders); some might do various nasty things to the data received by the sensors in other ships; some might allow the sensors on multiple ships to be linked, perhaps for a significant boost in resolution or range.

Other ideas?
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Re: Flares/Electromagnetic weapons

#12
Flatfingers wrote: "Flares" that blind a scanner (you can think of them as jammers) are one obvious application. But there must be many other possible ways to interact with a ship's scanner. Some might be beneficial (boosters); some might alter data you receive (filters, shifters, compressors/expanders); some might do various nasty things to the data received by the sensors in other ships; some might allow the sensors on multiple ships to be linked, perhaps for a significant boost in resolution or range.

Other ideas?
[nitpick]
flares are different from jammers (in RL) in that they are consumable objects that mimic the signature of the aircraft to be defended and trick targetting systems into following them instead of the original target

jammers are high powered senders which pump out massive amounts of noise to prevent all target aquisition, true positive or false positive aquisition shall both be prevented
[/nitpick]

(i've already laid out my ideas on flares and ECM there, so i wont copy that here)


for boosting the effective sensor strenght "telescope fields" may would be a possibility.
basically, you have a turret like piece of equipment that projects a forcefield that acts as improving factor for the using ships sensors.

those boosts are limited to the direction the field is pointed to.

those boosts could have any form, filters, amplifiers etc

telescope fields are also attractive for fancy shinies, distorting lenses moving towards the scanned direction
sensor stations would have arrays of those pointed in different directions of interest and swivelling around when focusing in different directions or on different targets


targetted disruptors could work a similar way, turret like devices which reduce the effective sensor strenght of ships inside the cone its affecting


data fusion from multiple sources could work without specialised equipment, but be facilitated by having high-throughput data links between the scanner ships and maybe a central processing point.

:think:
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Re: Flares/Electromagnetic weapons

#13
So I must be thinking along the lines of a jamming field.

Here's a thought... I might start a topic on this, I don't know.

Would it be possible to "jam" or fire jamming weapons at say, colonies or something to disturb economies and whatnot? I am unsure if Josh plans on introducing that sort of mechanic, having cities being able to send missiles (interstellar missiles, muahahaha) or be shot at.
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Re: Flares/Electromagnetic weapons

#14
What is the reason for firing at a colony? For game play purposes I think it's reasonable that colonies can't be destroyed and that they support the faction who owns the space above them. I can go into more detail if you want.

Anyways, since we have the Limit Theory Scripting Language (LTSL) a mod can be made that jams other ships or other objects such as missiles.
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Re: Flares/Electromagnetic weapons

#15
BFett wrote:What is the reason for firing at a colony? For game play purposes I think it's reasonable that colonies can't be destroyed and that they support the faction who owns the space above them. I can go into more detail if you want.

Anyways, since we have the Limit Theory Scripting Language (LTSL) a mod can be made that jams other ships or other objects such as missiles.

Jam communications (destroying their economy and research), reduce population, need I say more? While I probably would not participate in atrocities, I think some others would find it interesting to test out, so to speak, in terms of gameplay tactics

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