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Handling ship builder limitations

#1
Limiting weapons and etc that can be placed on the ship is a logical choice. However, how will that limit be chosen? How will it scale with ship size/design/etc? Obviously these answers need to be worked out, and I have some ideas that may help.
Rather than using an arbitrary limit based on ship size, you could give each component an energy cost based on it's firepower/thrust. This, combined with ship energy production (which could either be based on ship size, or be another component contained within the ship), would enforce limitations that force players to trade off between propulsion/firepower/defense in a manner closer to what is required in real life designs.
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Re: Handling ship builder limitations

#2
twitchYarby wrote:Limiting weapons and etc that can be placed on the ship is a logical choice. However, how will that limit be chosen? How will it scale with ship size/design/etc? Obviously these answers need to be worked out, and I have some ideas that may help.
Rather than using an arbitrary limit based on ship size, you could give each component an energy cost based on it's firepower/thrust. This, combined with ship energy production (which could either be based on ship size, or be another component contained within the ship), would enforce limitations that force players to trade off between propulsion/firepower/defense in a manner closer to what is required in real life designs.
This has been more or less confirmed, Josh hasn't gone into any details of exactly how it will work though, also, there are already threads on the topic, please look around a bit before creating a new thread.
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Re: Handling ship builder limitations

#4
I think the Eve Online version of this, as far as the fitting of modules is concerned, is a good basis for something to explore or expand/improve on. For those unfamiliar with it, this is the basic idea:

Each ship type(based on faction/meta/tech level etc) has a specific amount of CPU power as well as Electrical Grid or Power Grid. Each module (be it propulsion/defense/offense) has an associate power grid and cpu cost. Thus allowing complete freedom of where to spend your fitting power to make a juggernaught destoyer with impressive firepower, but because of the balancing, this gunboat would have the armor class of a wet paper bag. Or at the same time, a really fast ship used a lot of its power grid for capacitor batteries and micro warp drive making it very fast but firepower and actual defense modules are minimal.

I don't want to see the same system implemented in LT, but something in that same sort of balancing reasoning would be a good fit. Here is kind of the way I imagine:

-Hull size (some calculation based on mass as well as volume relating to the size of power source you can cram into your ship and its maximum acheivable output)
--this would set about some parameters as to how much power you could produce and thus putting a 200 GJ laser on a ship that could only house
a 200 GJ reactor wouldn't make sense. I mean you could stick it on there but shooting it would drop offline all life support /shields/ propulsion/ lights/ AC/ Radio/ Power Steering etc.

--I really like the idea of making actual volume a parameter. How can you fit a nuclear reactor that is 10 meters tall into a ship where no section is taller than 8 meters? I don't mean that an actual down the the inch measurement system but some sort of reasonable parameters so as not to allow a ship the shape of a piece of paper to have 42 laser cannons on it because it has so much surface area. I guess really what I am saying here is that mass/volume/surface area being a means of limiting the type of "stuff" a ship can actually, "physically" wield.

I want to be able to put anything "physically possible" onto my ship that I wish. Whether or not it works is up to my ability to be reasonable and employ some sort of common sense to the things I slap onto it. I think, procedurally speaking, this is possible. Even being able to craft our own weapons based on mathematics. Amount of energy expended as a ratio of size of projectile/energy load of beam weapons etc and calculate heat/kinetic damage to scale. A projectile slamming into another ship or body would follow the same physical engine calculations as slamming your own ship into said body, only scaled down by velocity/mass.

After all, we are calling this a space sim, right? So lets simulate some semblance of reality- but in a non-simulated fun way.

--Nutty
"The end is always coming, and the beginning will never come back..." --Nutty

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