Criss' Thread

[Lecic]

As it is a small freighter it will not have a PD turret on it.

I think the idea that "small ship = no PD" is an incredibly foolish idea.

Spoiler

Here's one of my smallest ships. It has 8 PD turrets. And this ship isn't designed to carry important cargo from one place to another, it's a cheap, disposable scout.

 

[Ithirahad]

Agreed. Also, I'd say that the greatest service you can do for an escort vessel (besides paying them a whole lot of money) is to bring your own PD...

 

[Colt556]

It makes perfect sense for the freighter to be little more than a big box with engines. It's not at all unrealistic, there's countless examples through all periods of human history where merchant vehicles were not able to protect themselves. That's what the military/police are for. I'd expect the TG to have their own brand of powerful warships that can respond to threats to their trade, but it's simply not cost-effective to make every single freighter into a warship.

Losing a freighter to pirates an sending in some security forces to deal with it is a lot cheaper than outfitting hundreds, thousands, or millions of ships with enough defenses to fend off pirates themselves.

 

[Lecic]

Outfitting each freighter like a warship is dumb, yes, but mounting a few PD turrets so you don't just soak up every missile like a dumbass is not.

 

[Criss]

Agreed. Also, I'd say that the greatest service you can do for an escort vessel (besides paying them a whole lot of money) is to bring your own PD...

Well the escort would be other ships of the Trading Guild. The freighter pays them nothing, they are all working together.

 

[Master_Artificer]

Hmm, shift the head to the right a tad, and place a PD turret in the new space.

Bam! asymmetrical, still can stack in a box, and looks cool.

 

[Ithirahad]

Well the escort would be other ships of the Trading Guild. The freighter pays them nothing, they are all working together.

This is besides the point; that was just a general statement.

 

[Colt556]

Point defenses cost money and the odds of freighters getting hit by pirates is relatively low all things considered. I mean again look at real life. Our freighters, our cargo haulers are unarmed. Even when they travel through dangerous areas (like the freighters near somalia or even military transports) they still aren't armed. Even minor things like PDs add up when you're adding several of them to potentially millions of ships. It's far cheaper and smarter to just have your freighters run away and if they do get taken you send in the actual warships to deal with it.

The way I see the TG being, based on Criss' posts, is that yeah sure their freighters are easy targets but if you hit them it wont be long until the TG sends in warships to beat you down.

As Sun Tzu said, he who tries to protect everything protects nothing. It's better to simply have a smallish but powerful military fleet that can respond to problems than to equip every single freighter with costly weapon systems.

 

[Lecic]

Point defenses cost money

It's far cheaper and smarter to just have your freighters run away and if they do get taken you send in the actual warships to deal with it.

Point defense is far cheaper than having the replace your ships every time they meet up with a pirate using missiles. PD will save your ass against the first volley of missiles before your JD charges.

 

[Crimson-Artist]

very cool design! will isanths get an upgrade or are they gonna be phased out?

 

[Colt556]

Point defense is far cheaper than having the replace your ships every time they meet up with a pirate using missiles. PD will save your ass against the first volley of missiles before your JD charges.

You're not looking at the big picture.

Yes, sure, for ONE ship you're right. We're not talking about one ship, lore-wise we're probably talking about MILLIONS of ships. Again using real life as a relatable example, is a single CIWS gun cheaper than a destroyer? Of course it is. Is two million CIWS guns cheaper than a destroyer? Nope, not even remotely. You keep looking at it exclusively on a single-ship basis. The thing is the TG is a giant organization that has to manages far more than just one ship. And adding PDs to all their ships because 1% of them might get pirated simply is not worth it. Corporations make these kind of financial assessments all the time in real life. It's exceptionally realistic. If you want your faction's freighters to worry more about safety than profits, then you add PDs to your freighters. But the mindset of the TG is "max profits" as stated by Criss, so if losing a ship now and then is ultimately cheaper in the long run, that's what they'll do.

 

[Lecic]

You're not looking at the big picture.

Yes, sure, for ONE ship you're right. We're not talking about one ship, lore-wise we're probably talking about MILLIONS of ships. Again using real life as a relatable example, is a single CIWS gun cheaper than a destroyer? Of course it is. Is two million CIWS guns cheaper than a destroyer? Nope, not even remotely. You keep looking at it exclusively on a single-ship basis. The thing is the TG is a giant organization that has to manages far more than just one ship. And adding PDs to all their ships because 1% of them might get pirated simply is not worth it. Corporations make these kind of financial assessments all the time in real life. It's exceptionally realistic. If you want your faction's freighters to worry more about safety than profits, then you add PDs to your freighters. But the mindset of the TG is "max profits" as stated by Criss, so if losing a ship now and then is ultimately cheaper in the long run, that's what they'll do.

Two million CIWS guns is cheaper than replacing thousands of freighters AND their cargo because they got a big hole punched in them by a missile that could have easily been shot down.

Real life does not have as many pirates. Real life typically does not have pirates that are using heavily armed attack craft.

 

[Colt556]

Two million CIWS guns is cheaper than replacing thousands of freighters AND their cargo because they got a big hole punched in them by a missile that could have easily been shot down.

Real life does not have as many pirates. Real life typically does not have pirates that are using heavily armed attack craft.

That's implying pirates are absurdly numerous and would pretty much instantly pounce on an undefended ship. The fact that the team seems to think undefended freighters are fine strongly implies pirates are not going to be taking out thousands of freighters.

 

[Drakkart]

Hello!

Aside from managing social media I work on a lot of the in-game assets that will be present in the StarMade universe. A few others and I will use this thread to show off the work being done on the latest builds and maybe tease future releases. We will also talk about the design philosophies that go into each build and help define who these factions are and why they build the way they do!

To start we have the Trading Guild or TG for short. We have seen the TG. But who are they? What do they stand for? The answer is simple. Money! The TG exist in this universe to make a profit. Much of what they do is meant to expand their reach and make new acquaintances to sell stuff to.

Now we want to give some personality and purpose to the way we build. The various factions will prefer to build into certain technologies over others. Pictured below we have the small freighter. (To keep things simple we will refer to ships by size; small, medium, large or extra large).

The TG naturally want to cut the costs down on their vast fleets of freighters. As such they often utilize inefficient heat sinks and limit the amount of shielding they have on their vessels. The most advanced part of a TG ship is the jump drive, which enables them to make quick deliveries of cargo.

With their large quantities of cargo, it only makes sense they have large engines as well right? That said, they are not powerful. This is mostly an aesthetic thing so the freighters won't be as agile as other vessels.

The internal amenities are limited. It's mostly the necessities ; bridge, crew quarters and a kitchen.

The rest is cargo space. Additionally all the doors on the side open up and can be activated in sequence!


That's all for now. I hope to start a weekly thing where I reveal a bit more as to what we are working on. There are already plenty of assets ready to be shown off. Next up we will take a look at the new and improved stick shop. Feel free to leave feedback and questions below!

What i like the most about this Criss is the fact that these are not Eve replicas. You are a great builder, these show that much better than trying to copy what another design studio did. Just saying man, that is really good starmade stuff.

 

[Lecic]

The fact that the team

No offense to Criss, but he doesn't know all that much about systems for a dev. His knowledge on on-par with a serverside noob. Hell, in his latest video, he can't figure out why a ship with a 100% pierce gun isn't doing any shield damage.

 

[Darkkon]

That's implying pirates are absurdly numerous and would pretty much instantly pounce on an undefended ship. The fact that the team seems to think undefended freighters are fine strongly implies pirates are not going to be taking out thousands of freighters.

Well that depends on your definition of pirate. If you're only counting NPC pirates, then you are probably right. Now players...well a lot of the time they tend to resort to piracy either to test out their fancy new destroyer, or when they are really hurting for *insert resource here*.

 

[Colt556]

No offense to Criss, but he doesn't know all that much about systems for a dev. His knowledge on on-par with a serverside noob. Hell, in his latest video, he can't figure out why a ship with a 100% pierce gun isn't doing any shield damage.

That's pretty irrelevant though. Not knowing systems doesn't change the fact that he seems to think freighters wont come under attack that often. I don't know anything about systems but if I was told "hey, yeah, I was thinking pirates would be a fringe faction, y'know, hit n run like they are in real life" and I went "alright cool" and designed with that in mind, my lack of system knowledge wouldn't effect anything.

The fact that we have to understand is that there's a reason the ship has no guns and the devs have total and complete control over the game. If they want the freighter to be unarmed then they obviously wont make it so lore-wise or gameplay-wise that the freighter will be under non-stop pirate attack. They'll make pirates properly rare.

Rather than give every single freighter weapons the TG would probably just plonk a warship to patrol dangerous regions, like how we stick warships near somalia.

 

[Criss]

very cool design! will isanths get an upgrade or are they gonna be phased out?

They will be updated. I am not sure what the plan is for them. They are pretty far from the other races in terms of the aesthetics we decided on. They might be used as a default for random factions. It's a bit iconic at this point. No reason to remove it.

Also, to the few of you debating here. This isn't really the place for that. I would like to avoid pages of debates on the merits of installing PD on all ships. You stated your opinions and there is no need to do so multiple times. As I mentioned earlier there are turret mounts and there may be variants that actually have PD installed. The TG is massive. They have shops spread throughout the entire region of space that you will explore and more. And frankly, they don't care if one ships gets blown to smithereens. Somewhere else they are setting themselves up to build 10 replacements. They are ever expanding, at least slowly.

Additionally I would like to make note of something said before. Ships will very much play into specific roles. Freighters will not be heavily armed. They are for cargo, and as such they can transport more than other ships of similar size. A player is still free to get their hands on them and alter them if they desire. The TG shouldn't spend money making their ships jacks of all trades. They have a purpose and the serve that purpose well.

No offense to Criss, but he doesn't know all that much about systems for a dev.

I did mention this was a group effort no? I am not the only one building these.

 

[Colt556]

Well that depends on your definition of pirate. If you're only counting NPC pirates, then you are probably right. Now players...well a lot of the time they tend to resort to piracy either to test out their fancy new destroyer, or when they are really hurting for *insert resource here*.

I'm exclusively looking at NPCs. Basically the way I took it is these ships are designed to fit their universe, and players aren't suppose to be 90% of the population lore-wise. Lore-wise the TG's freighters probably don't get taken out by pirates that often so it's better to leave them unarmed and rely on dedicated warships.

From a gameplay perspective this is the small freighter, I wouldn't be surprised if the devs intend it to be a weak target for starting players.

 

[Lecic]

weapons

PD turrets are not weapons. That'd be like saying that a dozen shield caps on a ship are weapons.

Honestly, if the TG is trying to keep costs down, why don't freighters have no shields and only basic hull? I can't tell from the distance the picture is at to see whether that stuff is basic or advanced, but that freighter is definitely covered in standard, and that stuff isn't cheap en-masse.