Warheads are just fine as they are???

[alterintel]

Would be nice if warheads could bypass armor HP as well, instead of perhaps increasing their damage yield. This would lead to much more creative uses for them in the future.

 

[nightrune]

After attempting a real boarding ship, Criss I'll have to agree with Lecic and Dr. Whammy . Buff damage, increase radius, add Bobby ai detection.

Another addition would be an alert about an incoming warhead.

 

[Blaza612]

With warheads, you get a reasonable size and realistic payload that can be as big

Spoiler

I remember why I love you. :p

 

[Dr. Whammy]

I remember why I love you. :p

Aww shucks... Thanks. :D

By the way, I've added an idea to your Nomadic revolution thread. I tried to make it as detailed and balanced as possible. It looks like it could work.
Let me know what you think.

 

[Sgtwisky]

Will add my 2 cents in as well.

I did some testing a while back (Started the "Questions about warheads thread"). What I found, was that by increasing damage to roughly 7.5x and reducing that radius of the blast (causes less wasted damage and a more focused damage area) I was able to get torpedo's with 1 warhead to feel reasonable. I felt like they could, if they managed to hit, do some damage to turrets on large ships. That is what I feel their goal on small bomber type ships should be.

Now... When using those settings on larger torpedo systems, the damage to a small area of a ship could be rather impressive. Remember that most people only build with 1 or 2 layers of advanced armor. SO once a warhead gets through that it can manage to give a cut to a battleship. Think death of a thousand cuts. One design I use which I am calling a "Javelin Torpedo" uses staggered warhead's that all target the same location. They effectively become bunker buster style torpedo's that are best used on ether Stations (no movement) or very large slow ships. They destroy enough blocks to feel useful without making such a massive hole as to feel OP.

Now, if PD turrets could be set to prioritize warheads, or missiles then I believe the advantage of being "Untargetable" would disappear. Which I'm fine with. But the weapon would remain useful as a tactical choice. Not the kind of thing you use in every engagement, but one which you have to carefully chose when and where to deploy.

 

[Kilim]

Warheads I feel need to be made more explosive, they seem to only do max 1-2 blocks damage on most ships.

 

[Lord_Greyscale]

having been running a server with warheads at the same 8 radius blast, but 20,000 damage, they seem to do okay.

I've noticed that an astounding amount of that damage is being eaten by Armor HP, so either that's doing it's job of "preventing" one-shots, or it's interfering with the warhead's "ignore shields" job.

Oh, and at that level of damage, they're just as hazardous to the ship carrying/launching them as they are to the intended target.

More-so, actually, since they're usually inside[i/] the launching ship untill they're being fired.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

Yes; Armor HP as well as damage 'dissipating' through armor blocks as they are eliminated will lower overall observable damage to a target. The same thing happens with missiles and pulses.

I use 500,000 damage with 25 radius as it is slightly better than most medium missiles but not an insta-kill weapon. It has a noticeable effect on advanced armor but not over-powered when compared to nukes or long range missiles since a torpedo is a 1-shot weapon. You need to be fast and creative to use these. You also need to have the engineering know how in order to construct a launcher capable of firing these things. The limited supply and inaccuracy keep the weapons from becoming unbalanced in comparison to other weapons.

 

[nightrune]

I just played with the configs a bit last night. Upped to 20k, only 8 block radius. Got some OK damage but did tremendous damage to armor hp.

The problem I have with 500k is then they are very deadly to stations.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

They are no more effective on a station than a regular missile of decent size. You get only one chance to use it and have to get creative (not to mention within enemy weapons range) to actually hit a station. On the other hand; no one said 500,000 is the "magic number", though it seemed to yield the most realistic results of all the different things I tried.

Allowing for point defense to target (and prioritize) warhead blocks would take away most of the threat to stations from these things. An attacker would have to choose between ramming (risky), torpedo spam (expensive) or conventional weapons (time consuming). That's realism, immersive gaming and creativity; all-in-one without being over-powered. Either way, warheads need a realistic buff to be considered useful for anything besides small breaching charges.

 

[Zekester81]

(copy paste from another thread but shows what you can do with them and collision damage on vs off https://starmadedock.net/threads/point-defense-turrets-for-warheads.22814/#post-259975)
Here is what you can actually do with a small physical torpedo at this point:

http://s1153.photobucket.com/user/Zachary_Reed/slideshow/torpedo research

Spoiler: test, pics, and opinion

This torpedo

against blue crystal armor with collision damage on On a side note, the torp was reduced to it's ship core which was overheating and thrown out the bottom of the target at a couple hundred m/s while the target was sent spinning off for about 17km.(Edit: actually the glass block test sent the target spinning http://i1153.photobucket.com/albums/p505/Zachary_Reed/torpedo research/starmade-gif-0006_zpsqeefwgg2.gif)

Glass blocks with two holes are from identical torpedoes. The lower crater impact in the face is with collision damage off from 300m. The upper impact that stretches into the glass is with collision damage on at @ 750m/s from roughly 1000m. The ship core exited the back of the target(100m) and was destroyed.

I may have underestimated them somewhat, but for all the expense and trouble to make one, plus space required to use them and their limited capacity, the bang is probably not worth the buck. Keep in mine that mine were capped with advanced armor, but with a warhead exposed for this test. It would be extremely vulnerable to PD.

I posted a bomber with two in the content section that use a full armor cap for penetration of the target that I haven't tried out on the range. These would be less vulnerable because no warhead is exposed, but the rest of the casing is far more fragile than the non-capped torpedo, and they move slower(@450m/s). I used these as they were not just solid blocks of warheads, which are extremely vulnerable to everything including sneezing, and seemed to be of reasonable size to be considered a viable small torpedo(5-8 warhead block cores). Making bigger torpedoes would make them more liable to be picked up and destroyed by turrets set to any or under the direction of the pilot.

Overall, I'd still like to see an increase in warhead power maybe 2-3x what it is now. PD should definitely be allowed to hit these things and, if the torp is in a casing, might not be enough to stop them. On the other hand, a protected torpedo is useless with collision damage for the server turned off, which it is by default. The only way then is to leave the warhead exposed to make it extremely vulnerable again. This also makes it a much less potent weapon and easier to kill, where I think that perhaps PD would be OP against them.

 

[Endal]

I found a bug regarding docked warheads, here (BUILD CHALLENGE: Torpedoes, launchers, magazines!). This is almost what warheads should do, except that it is slightly overpowered.
I will do more penetration depth testing if the bug is not intended to go on the fix list.

 

[PriZm]

ill keep it short and simple: warheads need some serious buff. they are the hardest weapon to actually hit with and you can only use them once. With this in mind, their damage is just ridiculously low...