Ship Grappling Beam: Boarding Pods, Fighters and More!

[Ithirahad]

Currently, if I wished to board an enemy ship, I would have to somehow be flown close enough to grapple on. This probably means hitching a ride on a boarding pod piloted by another player (Or AI with a bit of hacking, but that's risky; AI is really easy to shoot down.) So I thought, what if, instead, we had a Grappling Beam Module? A single block, which lets a ship align to another.

Your first thought is probably, "That's OP, right? A ship could just grab onto another ship and the other ship could never hit them..." But there are two things to mitigate this. First of all, like the handheld grappler, the grappling beam would only hold on for a certain amount of time (Maybe a minute or two), and it would have a fairly long cooldown, certainly more than enough time for a smallish ship to reorient and start shooting at the annoying fish trying to stick to it, assuming said smallish ship doesn't have turrets which would wipe out said fish anyway. Second, the amount of power the module uses would be based (exponentially) on the mass of the ship that's trying to use it. If a big, lumbering cruiser tried to align to something, about all that would happen is that the ship would run out of power and any systems engineers onboard at the time would simultaneously facepalm. However, a tiny shuttle could happily slip in and hang on while a boarding team hopped out and began an assault on the enemy vessel - Granted it didn't get shredded by turrets, of course.

This would be useful for friendly fighters and shuttles as well. It would make launching and docking a lot easier, since all motion becomes relative to the mothership for a certain amount of time, so even at full speed a fighter would be able to fly out of the hangar bay at full speed relative to the mothership. It might even have useful implications for AI - if AI drones could reuse code from this for their own version of an alignment system, it would make pathfinding to and from a dock (relatively) a lot easier.

 

[UndeadPotato]

The pod might have problems fitting onto the ship though. A player only takes up 2 blocks of space, but a (small) ship still has to make sure it fits onto the side. This might have collision issues if something is in the way. Have you thought of a way around that?

 

[Lecic]

Yes please. This would even allow for specialized craft like a ship designed to keep control of a hangar for boarders.

 

[Pacific_Jim]

I haven't had chance to download the update yet, but first thing I'm doing is spawning in a pirate capital and boarding it. I imagine stealth ships will be awesome for this, which brings me to your suggestion. Being able to align in a stealth ship sounds pretty overpowered, since you could make it straight past the enemy turrets and right into their door with comparatively minimal effort.

 

[Ithirahad]

The pod might have problems fitting onto the ship though. A player only takes up 2 blocks of space, but a (small) ship still has to make sure it fits onto the side. This might have collision issues if something is in the way. Have you thought of a way around that?

No need. A boarding pod just has to grapple on (Align, not physically stick to the ship), then sit near enough to the ship that the boarders can exit, cut their way into the ship, and slip in, without getting flattened by all the big pew pewy stuff going on under/around/overhead. Bonus points if they can shelter themselves inside a missile crater.

 

[Lecic]

I haven't had chance to download the update yet, but first thing I'm doing is spawning in a pirate capital and boarding it. I imagine stealth ships will be awesome for this, which brings me to your suggestion. Being able to align in a stealth ship sounds pretty overpowered, since you could make it straight past the enemy turrets and right into their door with comparatively minimal effort.

Solution- using the ship grapple beam drops cloak, and there's a cooldown before you can cloak again.

 

[UndeadPotato]

No need. A boarding pod just has to grapple on (Align, not physically stick to the ship), then sit near enough to the ship that the boarders can exit, cut their way into the ship, and slip in, without getting flattened by all the big pew pewy stuff going on under/around/overhead. Bonus points if they can shelter themselves inside a missile crater.

Fair enough. I guess I just imagined a breaching pod instead of a shuttle.

 

[Ithirahad]

Solution- using the ship grapple beam drops cloak, and there's a cooldown before you can cloak again.

Yeah, that works. I'd think, anyway, that if you just used some kind of fancy gravity manipulation tech to grab onto an enemy ship and magically change your inertial frame while keeping relative trajectory (or lack thereof) it would probably emit some kind of signature that funky futuristic starship sensors can detect, therefore rendering your cloaking tech null and void.

 

[EricBlank]

I like this idea, for boarding enemy craft from a smaller ship. And yeah, cloaking should drop; if anything, the parent ships AI handling maneuvering thrusters would immediately know they'd gained mass on one side, because that new mass needs to be adjusted for in performing course corrections.

However, I think for ships trying to launch from/dock to a friendly craft, a tractor beam on the parent that helps guide them would be nice, and also permit combat bear hugs such as in the opening scene of Star Wars Episode IV; star destroyer tackles a corvette to forcibly board it.

I'd probably make it a short range, high energy usage system though, just so its not the end-all-be-all strategy to grab your opponent.

 

[hunterRAE]

I do like this, but you can align easy with the rotation keybinds and a pull beam system, which is doable and is rather fast. I see your suggestion though as a simpler and nicer compliment to the boarding mechanics, which I would greatly appreciate for my own ship breaching board ships.

 

[kiddan]

A ship grapple beam could also make warping not the Life-Saver-Every-Time-You-Use-It-2000 :P Provided you could actually fly with the warping ship, you could have some insane battles, maybe even mid-warp ones!

 

[Zaphord]

A ship grapple beam could also make warping not the Life-Saver-Every-Time-You-Use-It-2000 :p Provided you could actually fly with the warping ship, you could have some insane battles, maybe even mid-warp ones!

"Sir, the boarding party has nearly breached the hull."
(Ship warps away)
"Soo... yeah, there they go. Should we follow or wait for them to take the ship and warp back here?"
(Captain face palms)

I had asked about interdiction a while back, and now we have a situation that it could prevent. I wouldn't send fellow faction brothers to board a ship if it could just warp away on me, I'd want to make sure that sucker isn't going anywhere. Best option I've come up with is EMP weapons to keep their energy reserves low, but it doesn't always work depending on the ship.

Warp-Skiing, could be the next new sport after skid racing.

 

[hunterRAE]

I do think that there has to be a way to end warping away as a last ditch effort, but nothing comes to mind. The only thing that would help with boarding at this moment is have a warping boarding ship that has overdrive, so ships of larger mass cannot run away as easily.

 

[Lecic]

I do think that there has to be a way to end warping away as a last ditch effort, but nothing comes to mind. The only thing that would help with boarding at this moment is have a warping boarding ship that has overdrive, so ships of larger mass cannot run away as easily.

We'd need to make it so jump drives charged up automatically once you activated them, and then jumped as soon as they were done charging.

 

[Jh]

I like this idea because since the updates I too have been struggling to actually use the grapple to board a player driven enemy ship.