Spherical Shields

[Grimson]

Looking at the shield system and the hand held weapon that you are given, the weapon is useless for boarding party's. If the shields go up and you can't use the plex doors you world be trapped. The game is already calculating the hight, width, and length of your ship, if the shields rap around these points then the boarding party would have to break the shield then board. After you board you can knock out the doors with your sidearm so you can still move around. With this though the core should be emune to the hand held laser so that you can't break in an just destroy the core and user at the same time. To destroy the core you would have to use the ship class laser array. comments on this below please.

 

[Miow22]

I don't understand your suggestion.

 

[Grimson]

Currently the shields cover every surface of the ship. If you destroy the shields then board the ship(If it is a capital ship) the shields will regenerate because you don't keep up your attack. The ship is registered to a faction so you can't you plexdoors. After the shields go up you can't get though the door because you can't bring down the shields with your hand held laser and destroy the door. The idea of spherical shields is that the shields would be like the shields in Star Trek. The shield encompass the ship but doesn't cover the inside, the shield is like a bubble around the ship. This way you can still move inside the ship after shields go backup. I hope this clarifies the suggestion.

 

[Megacrafter127]

There is just one problem with that:
It would cost way more calculation time, than the current system.
Also? why leave your own ship to board an enemy ship if you're alone? one could easily leave one in an own ship and have him bring the shields down if required.

 

[Aecetym]

And what if the ship has inner turrets? You enter, get shot and then the enemy has 2 ships cause you aren't flying yours anymore. That rises the question what about your ship? What will keep the enemy ship that is still working fully from destroying your ship and then just go deal with you by going in buildmode and blocking you off and use cheap trick (lava everywere, for the moment AMC shotgun in corridor, ...). Will this not kill creativity in some way (endless plex door corridors)?

And maybe the biggest questions
Why would you even want to board a still active ship?
and
How will you get in the enemy ship to start with?

Atm I don't support or even like this suggestion, so many potential problems.

 

[Jack Caos]

bubbly shields would also give little fighters an advance to Supergigantic big hulks of blocks and turrets named titan sized ships.. if you fly your little fighter inside the shields you can make damage to the blocks directly because your behind the shield... maybe flying throug a shield will bring your own shields down for balance reasons.
another fact: bubble shields will shield your turrets because they are inside the bubble

 

[Aecetym]

bubbly shields would also give little fighters an advance to Supergigantic big hulks of blocks and turrets named titan sized ships.. if you fly your little fighter inside the shields you can make damage to the blocks directly because your behind the shield... maybe flying throug a shield will bring your own shields down for balance reasons.
another fact: bubble shields will shield your turrets because they are inside the bubble

Please explain how this would be, in any way, fair for the larger ships/titans. So a little ship, about <5 min buildtime, can fly inside the shield bubble and do damage to a still fully functional battleship/carrier/titan/... that can take weeks to build. Causing hours apon hours of potential repair work to detail, hull and/or systems. And how big doesn't the bubble have to be to allow a fighter, taking everybody has different opinions on fighter size, to support you idea?

Not to mention cloaked fighters bullying your pride ship. Pretty sure most ppl here can already imagen what that will mean to your ship.

 

[Jack Caos]

the ship which can fly into the bubble has to be pretty small I think but that depends on the shape of the titan, and how much space there is left between the ship and the shield...(see fig. 1 and fig. 2)

but to prevent the shield from leaving to much free space between bubbla and ship, shields bubbles could be generated by clustered shieldblocks, kind of like docking enhancers enlarge the docking area, and the total count of blocks in a cluster still define the strength of a shield. that way you can make a big bubble for your main ship part, and and small ones for the wings etc. (fig. 3) with clever bubbling ther wont much rom for enemys inside the shield. This would, by the way, allow us to make cool things like hangar shields to.

something like this. ships which are so small they can fit inside the standart docking area wouldn be so much thread for a titan, which after all has some turrets which would take down this tiny thing in seconds.

 

[Miow22]

I think the current system would work fine - shields just need to have a really long down time.

 

[Zeno9141]

bubbly shields would also give little fighters an advance to Supergigantic big hulks of blocks and turrets named titan sized ships.. if you fly your little fighter inside the shields you can make damage to the blocks directly because your behind the shield... maybe flying throug a shield will bring your own shields down for balance reasons.
another fact: bubble shields will shield your turrets because they are inside the bubble

The point of a fighter is not to one-man siege a capital. Think straight for a moment. In what series or movie has one fighter taken out a ship that forms the head of the fleet? It would make sense if the core of that capital was so very extremely exposed (ahem, Death Star), but besides that, it makes no sense at all. Fighters are designed to be small, and fight in groups. No way just one could berserk in, negating all shields, and ruining a piece of art that took months to make. It's just not logical.

Also, if the turrets were within the bubble, it would make said ships extremely overpowered, because the turrets would have no need of their own shields anymore, because they already have millions of shield points to keep them intact. Forever.

I think the current system would work fine - shields just need to have a really long down time.

That, and more efficiency to hull.

 

[karkinosz]

For spherical shields to make this work.... ugh

This seems like it might be too much of a performance hog and not to mention rather unbalanced.

Performance wise-
While I do not know the exact details of how shields work I can make an educated guess that.
1. Shields intercept damage by checking if weapon fire (which is probably its own type of short lived entity) has hit the entity the shield protects and instead deducts shield HP instead of individual block HP.
2. Collision with other entities is already being accounted for (why else do you get stopped when you ram a shop?) thus makes minimal performance load.

But to approximate a spherical shield you probably aren't going to use a sphere, simply because complex shapes are a pain in the ass. (Why else do we use polygon models for games and etc.?)
You are going to probably have to make another entity which will have nearly as many polygons as the ship itself, even if shields are made invisible they exist and will add more calculations. Now to ships these will be no-clip objects you can fly though but would intercept weapons fire and probably missiles but will add more CPU load to an already CPU intensive game.

Now maybe the devs will like it and the coding genius schema will come up with some amazing way to do the shield bubbles without making some of our larger builds impossible but as the shield gets bigger there is a proportionally larger shield bubble entity to calculate for and you will probably be looking at a dozen shielded ships at once... im not to optimistic about this idea.

As I've said before I'm not 100% sure if any of my guesses are correct so this first part can be taken with a pinch of salt but now for part 2.

Balance wise-
1. In the games current state we can not damage ANY part of a ship without taking down the shields.
2. This means that boarding is ineffective as well as shooting any area within the ship.

The thing is that hull in the games current incarnation is useless at blocking out weapons fire. You NEED shields to work else its game breaking. And while i hate to repeat others have said that fighters shouldn't be able to solo capital ships and they DO have a point being able to enter spherical shields doesn't make sense either since a bullet or a ship both are projectiles and the shield would disintegrate either.

 

[Aecetym]

... It would make sense if the core of that capital was so very extremely exposed (ahem, Death Star), ...

*cough* Death Star twice *cough*

 

[fire219]

The original shield system in the game actually was like this, making a bubble around the ship. It was changed to the current system because the bubble system was awkward, and like has been said before, would likely have a performance hit.

 

[Lecic]

The point of a fighter is not to one-man siege a capital. Think straight for a moment. In what series or movie has one fighter taken out a ship that forms the head of the fleet? It would make sense if the core of that capital was so very extremely exposed (ahem, Death Star), but besides that, it makes no sense at all. Fighters are designed to be small, and fight in groups. No way just one could berserk in, negating all shields, and ruining a piece of art that took months to make. It's just not logical.

Also, if the turrets were within the bubble, it would make said ships extremely overpowered, because the turrets would have no need of their own shields anymore, because they already have millions of shield points to keep them intact. Forever.



That, and more efficiency to hull.

*cough* Bismark *cough*

A massive ship, the Bismark, was crippled by a small group of outdated biplane torpedo bombers, allowing it to be easily destroyed by ships it would have normally smashed.

However, in Starmade, it is impossible to land a crippling shot, because once shields go down an enemy is wrecked, anyway, and all important systems can just be packed deeply inside, underneath the massive shield banks.

Another problem with Starmade is that, technically, there is absolutely no difference between a large and small ship beyond stats. Which is why battles between big ships look like oversized dog fights.

 

[mattxer]

In just about every scifi show such as stargate, shields are wrapped around a ship like so:

It makes more sense to have a shield like this because it can protect launching fighters and turrets.
If you think of it from a kinetic view if you take a hit from a missile the explosion would be dispersed away from the ship and the hull would be unaffected but if how it is currently the kinetic impact from the missile should affect the hull because the shield is right on top of the hull as it is now.

I'm just saying, just about every show/movie i have watched has had shields like above.

 

[Lecic]

In just about every scifi show such as stargate, shields are wrapped around a ship like so:

It makes more sense to have a shield like this because it can protect launching fighters and turrets.
If you think of it from a kinetic view if you take a hit from a missile the explosion would be dispersed away from the ship and the hull would be unaffected but if how it is currently the kinetic impact from the missile should affect the hull because the shield is right on top of the hull as it is now.

I'm just saying, just about every show/movie i have watched has had shields like above.

From a gameplay perspective, spherical shields make turrets unable to be K/O'd before the main ship's shields. You can just keep fighters inside of plexdoor protected hangers- even if they're open they'll stop shots.

Also, they were originally spherical, but they were much more resource intensive.

 

[mattxer]

From a gameplay perspective, spherical shields make turrets unable to be K/O'd before the main ship's shields. You can just keep fighters inside of plexdoor protected hangers- even if they're open they'll stop shots.

Also, they were originally spherical, but they were much more resource intensive.

As it stands now unless you have a giant ship with turrets that have huge shields on them its not even worth having them, AI are very good at shooting cores. smaller turrets are practically useless.

 

[Lecic]

As it stands now unless you have a giant ship with turrets that have huge shields on them its not even worth having them, AI are very good at shooting cores. smaller turrets are practically useless.

Actually, I've found that a large array of smaller turrets with lots of points put into range and rof are great for keeping enemy shields at low regen rates that they get during combat when you can't keep your main guns on them.

 

[mattxer]

Actually, I've found that a large array of smaller turrets with lots of points put into range and rof are great for keeping enemy shields at low regen rates that they get during combat when you can't keep your main guns on them.

The main point i'm trying to get at is a turret is part of the ship it should be shielded from the ship just as it draws power from the ship.

 

[Zeno9141]

There is a fine line between sci-fi realism and gameplay. You need to find the balance between them. Spherical shields are indeed realistic, but would completely break gameplay.

I have also noticed, the initial discussion was about boarding parties, not shields itself. The poll corresponds in no way to the discussion at the moment.
So, if the reason these spherical shields were suggested was "Boarding Parties", then I would prefer a discussion about what the thread actually is about...

Boarding parties. From RP perspective? I love them. But in casual gameplay they are but a bother. ESPECIALLY when people bring up the most radical and gamebreaking ideas supporting it.
There are simpler solutions to the problem you proposed. Try to fix the problem at the astronaut/boarding party instead of changing ship mechanics. Some options are: Hacking, or laser cutters that do very little damage to blocks and negate shields.

The main point i'm trying to get at is a turret is part of the ship it should be shielded from the ship just as it draws power from the ship.

As I said in a previous post, that would make ships extremely overpowered, and make the game even more unbalanced than it already is.