Modulated Cruisers

[Master_Artificer]

Basically takes advantage of the power generation softcap, by making "hullplates" that have their own energy and shield buffer. This system seems to work really well when engaging at range, and when you can rotate on your axis back and forth exposing different sides of your ship to fire and allowing others to recharge.

I haven't seen any modular titans, except the one that used this to overcome the Armor and Systems hardcap by docking basically what looked like modified planet plates to his ship. Then again, not everyone should make a 6-8 million mass ship, cause no one will fight you.

Anyways, we have found that this ship design works best for medium class ships. It also works because shields on docked sections lose their own shields first before sending the damage down to the mothership's shields, which is totally awesome and badass by the way.

Setup goes Turrets barrels, which have shields and power storage but usually not enough for their gun, so it draws from the base, which is large and should take advantage of the easy to reach 1 million energy recharge. Then the base is connected to the Modular Segments, and will draw power and deposit excess damage to them. Those Modular Segments are big hunks of capacitors, shields, and hull, with a few strands of power to get 1-1.2 mill generation. Those in turn will draw power and deposit excess damage to the Core, which should also have huge power capacity and shields, but less than normal power regen. When you start taking shield damage and are drawing lots of power from your Core, you rotate sides and start tanking on your other sides shields, while letting your damaged side and core regenerate. Bigger ships simply have more of these.

 

[StormWing0]

Modulation get even crazier when you go the exo armor route. Since each part has its own shields, power, and weapons it gets hard to kill when done right. Still got to work on a good setup for it though but using another ship as armor would only work if the ship it is armor for is made to use it. At least I know I'm not the only one experimenting with modular designs.

 

[Master_Artificer]

Heh, the weakness I found is actually the armor! XD

Splitting up the hull into sections seems to make the ships armor weaker, but maybe that's just my designs.

Unless you have just massive armor plates docked to the front. But then again, as Mr Furb once said, "Unused armor is wasted armor"

 

[Trekkerjoe]

What if you put shielded armor segments on rails, and have them traverse the surface of the ship? Then you would have much difficulty draining the shields of one segment because another one would replace it while the other one recharges. You could have multiple modules swap out on the press of a button or on timer, of course, this means that all turrets on those modules should be sunk in.

 

[Master_Artificer]

you can do that, sure. This is about a whole new build class, where you make ships out of multiple segments and staple them all together!
(2375 things Mr. Welch can no longer do during an RPG: 130. I am not authorized to form the head.)

My ships wont have that functionality, they will be more like bulk cruisers, where each segment might be around 5-6k weight each! I don't think that will move too easily on rails.

 

[Trekkerjoe]

Are mas enhancers still bugged? They could alleviate this problem somewhat, considering you have no weapons on the core, just thrust and a lot of extra power you could be feeding into the enhancers. If they are still bugged, that design would only work well on mid/small-sized build. Now time for an incredibly important consideration: How in the world can this be made to look good?

EDIT Edited for clarity.

 

[Lord Daro]

With fixed plates it's no problem at all to get good looks. The plates can simply be build to wrap around the main ship.

Moving plates on the other hand are the part where it get's serious. I would probably try to have them rotate around the ship. Like satellites or mabye something like this:

 

[Master_Artificer]

How in the world can this be made to look good?

Well, a certain Rebel Assault Frigate Mrk II comes to mind.

Have the bulbous sections surround the body, which would be rested inside and might include the dangly bit as well.


Another cool thing is a hybrid of this already exists, for those that have large turrets with self sustaining power supply in them.
If I could only get my hands on a rough outline of a hull for the Talos...

I would hollow out those bulbous tube turret mounts and stick a big ball turret in each of those! Oh but a man can dream...

 

[Tunk]

With armour you want to isolate it on top of the shield, so main ship -> shield -> armour.
this causes armour to ablate at 50% while maintaining shield regen.
Also means less effect modules needed, but also means relatively weak armour unless you use large chunks.
ion on the armour reduces shield damage as well, so helps keep modules down.
most secondaries (drain, emp, etc) effect the entity they hit, so also effectively makes you immune to certain stuff.

 

[Master_Artificer]

Huh, my testing showed that defensive modules like Ion didn't boost the shielding produced by another docked entity, like a turret with it's own shields. Maybe my method was flawed? (I did go into the experiment with the mindset that it wouldn't work, and didn't spend that much time on it. Yay Bias.)

 

[Tunk]

It depends on the entity hit, if the armour is hit it will use the armours ion bonus when passing it down the chain.
If the shield (shield entity not shield stat) is hit it will use the shields ion bonus
If the main ship is hit it will use the main ships ion bonus.

 

[Master_Artificer]

It depends on the entity hit, if the armour is hit it will use the armours ion bonus when passing it down the chain.
If the shield (shield entity not shield stat) is hit it will use the shields ion bonus
If the main ship is hit it will use the main ships ion bonus.

Sorry, I didn't quite understand that.
Do you mean, if an entity (lets say a turret) is hit, and that entity has shields, will it use the ion bonus that the main hull has?
Or will it only get the bonus when it transfers damage to the main hulls shields?

 

[Tunk]

The hit entities bonus will be used when damage is transferred down the chain (turret barrel being the top of the chain, your ship being the lowest).

So if the armour has 0% ion bonus, it will do 100% damage to its own shield, and any shield the damage is transferred to.
If the armour has 60% ion bonus it will do 40% damage its own shield, and to any shield it is transferred to.

 

[Master_Artificer]

you mean the shield? Also, you cant give docked things passive effects through logic, only the activated defensive effects right?

 

[EricBlank]

If you want the ship to really perform well, you'll want to take the time to individually activate each components' defenses before battle. Remember that they do stay active after leaving the ship.

I've thought about using these sorts of vessels before, but I've never actually built one. I suppose that I should get around to it.

 

[Hexed]

I'm building something like this now because I got curious. (I'm calling it a War tortoise)

I was wondering however, Say a shot hit a docked component, does the shot subtract from the main ships shields or the docked ships shields? I know that the main ship will provide cover as long as it's own shielding is above %50, but does it do so before or after the docked components shields are completely drained?

I haven't actually done much testing since the rails update, I've been pretty absorbed just coming up with new hull designs.

 

[Tunk]

Damage to own shield first then it keeps checking down the docking chain until it finds a shield >50%
If it cannot find a shield >50% apply the damage to hit entity.

 

[Hexed]

Damage to own shield first then it keeps checking down the docking chain until it finds a shield >50%
If it cannot find a shield >50% apply the damage to hit entity.

Thank you, I had a feeling that was how it worked. If this is the case, then a large Borg cube made up of several layers is in theory possible isn't it? I'd imagine a ship like that would be remarkably resilient. It would certainly make for a more interesting doom cube.

 

[Adonis0]

Well, you could design it so that all the docked components have 1M e/s regeneration, and pass most if not all back to the main ship, and then use the main ship to provide shielding which can regenerate in the order of 10M shield/s (easily) and it'd produce a ship that's pretty difficult to knock off. Not sure how much space that'd take though (still not particularly far in my singleplayer)

 

[Lecic]

Cool concept, but the amount of lag this many entities causes is probably a heart attack for any server owner reading this thread.