EMP Burst: knocks out ship systems in a given radius. The EMP effect could last a varying amount of time depending on the distance the target is from the center of the pulse.

Shield Bumper Cube: acts as a hard surface in space. Six of these shield projectors would have to be necessary to trap a ship within them. Think of it as shooting a net over your prey, but instead of a net you are trapping your prey in a box which can vary in size.

Shield Bumper Sphere: Same type of effect as the cube but it expands out from a central point and forms a sphere which traps the ship within it. These would usually be delivered via a drone, in this case though, the shield is one way. It allows ships to enter it's shield but prevents them from leaving until the shield projector's battery has expired.

Why not something that simply reduces engine energy efficiency? They can still use cruise mode, but it won't give as much of a speed bonus when under the effect. That way, they'll be forced to stay and fight until the effect wears off.

To balance this, you could speed up the engine recovery by "restarting" the engines via moving all power away from engines for a short while. To prevent stunlocks, this reboot would reduce or ignore the effects of subsequent engine disruptors.

Introduce a chance of failure.

Another thought on running.

I'm not sure how this plays with the existence of a "cruise mode," but what if the captain of a ship could order the engines into an emergency overdrive mode?

This particular mode would give ships a chance to escape by allowing them a temporary extreme burst of speed, but once that burst is complete it incapacitates their engines for a little while, as well as randomly disrupting several other key systems (shields, weapons, scanner).

The point to this design is that it gives ship operators an interesting choice to make between two risks: stay and fight, or run but then be immobilized for a little while?

Again, I'm not sure how to make this worthwhile if there's a perfectly free cruise mode available. It's just a thought.

Jazehiah wrote:Why not something that simply reduces engine energy efficiency? They can still use cruise mode, but it won't give as much of a speed bonus when under the effect. That way, they'll be forced to stay and fight until the effect wears off.

To balance this, you could speed up the engine recovery by "restarting" the engines via moving all power away from engines for a short while. To prevent stunlocks, this reboot would reduce or ignore the effects of subsequent engine disruptors.

Maybe use a nonlinear effect instead of flat reduction?

Something that scales with the allocated engine power?

So when you are below cruise mode energy it has not much of an effect but above it starts to kick you down

So to avoid the effect you have to go sub-cruise