Read by Council Star made...

[DeltaEpsilon7787]

Spoiler: ...into a weapon.

A new weapon system called "Heli-ray". Three new blocks: collector, mirror, emitter.
Collectors should be exposed to starlight. The more collectors are exposed and the nearer they are to a star, the more damage the weapon will inflict.
Mirrors act as a conductor for light. They must be adjacent to collectors to work otherwise they act as a decoration.
Emitter is the output. It acts both like the emitter and like a computer for the system. Mirrors adjacent to the emitter will connect collectors to the emitter.

Each mirror group should only be connected to a single emitter at a time.

Damage should grow linearly to collectors amount and inversely exponentially to the distance to a star.

The weapon consumes very little power. That's the idea here.

It should look like this:

Pink - a star
Blue - collectors
Red - mirrors
Cyan - an emitter.

This weapon works like extremely powerful continunous damage beam.

Extra:
Some way of transporting light between entities. Yes, you got it right: turrets that track stars. Probably mirrors adjacent to rail docker make rail docker behave like a mirror too. All other rail systems get this property as well.

Spoiler: ...into a power source

Solar panels.
A limitless way of powering ships of any size. They work similar to "Heli-ray" except that in this case they produce power. Area = linear growth, distance = inverse exponential growth. Solar panels should be very fragile for apparent reasons.
Awesome way of producing power for star stations. Will allow stations to get really powerful defence systems since it's easy to generate power using solar panels yet remaining fairly compact (in comparison to using power blocks or generators).

Make combat a little bit more area dependent.

Extra:
I also propose making weapon computer be able to use solar power to decrease or nullify their own power usage. Currently you can connect a weapon computer to a light source and color the projectiles and what I suggest is making solar panels also connectible to aforementioned computers in order to reroute generated power into power consumption of selected weapon and therefore make it take less power per shot. Usage? Most usage goes for stations again. It will bring a possibility of stations having less power capacitors to supply their weapon systems as those consume a lot of power.

Spoiler: ...into an ultimate defence/offence system

A passive weapon to be used on huge ships. Requires three blocks: collector, mirror and dissipator. It's possible to reuse "Heli-ray" collectors and mirrors. Uses the same layout.
Basically it makes a ship using it a small star itself.
The center of the star is the dissipator block.
Any ship in some radius will be affected by that weapon if a clear line of sight from the ship to the dissipator exists. Each ship will get damage depending on how powerful the weapon is and how close the ship to the dissipator is. Unlike real stars, shields will protect the ship from the damage. If shields are down, the exposed blocks will be affected and most probably the ship will be burned quite quickly.
Ultimately this weapon is supposed to fight drones and fighters during capital ship battles. Also anti-torpedo defence.
It is also pretty inefficient and hard to use for anything else.
It also affects everything indiscriminately, including the ship using it.

More might be added later.

 

[HolyCookie]

don't know about this, it all seems a bit too OP and besides that, it looks like a lot of information processing as the server/computer would have to calculate where a ship is every second, look if there is something in between them and the sun and then check which panels get power then check how much power they should get. I don't even know if that is possible. solar panels for stations though, is something I could maybe agree on because stations aren't moving they don't need to run all kinds of checks.

 

[DeltaEpsilon7787]

don't know about this, it all seems a bit too OP and besides that, it looks like a lot of information processing as the server/computer would have to calculate where a ship is every second, look if there is something in between them and the sun and then check which panels get power then check how much power they should get. I don't even know if that is possible. solar panels for stations though, is something I could maybe agree on because stations aren't moving they don't need to run all kinds of checks.

Sun damage already calculates exposed blocks, doesn't it? Reuse that code.

Raytracing doesn't take lots of processing time and in this case you don't need perfect resolution either.

 

[SuperWookie]

So the Holy Beam of Ra as a new weapon?

 

[DeltaEpsilon7787]

So the Holy Beam of Ra as a new weapon?

Sort of. Burning wooden ships using soldiers with mirrors is not as efficient as this though.

 

[HolyCookie]

Sort of. Burning wooden ships using soldiers with mirrors is not as efficient as this though.

actually, it probably was as spaceships are manned by 1 player and ships are manned by manny people :P

Sun damage already calculates exposed blocks, doesn't it? Reuse that code.

Raytracing doesn't take lots of processing time and in this case you don't need perfect resolution either.

dunno, the sun damage only starts playing when you get like really near it and I'm guessing that they are danger zones, the zones start damaging a ship once it loads that sector. just guessing though, for the programming stuff I really have little knowledge.

for raytracing, it's not about processing time, it's the processing itself that can harm the server/computer. say you have 10 panels every panel would have a raytracer, the raytracer checks if something is blocking the view to the nearest sun this means the block needs to know where he is, where the sun is related to him and then check if there is something away, every 1 second (or even faster) he repeats this. that means when you have an actual decent amount of panels, like 1000 or something, the processor gets to calculate all that information times a thousand.
let me just tag Megacrafter127 he is a programming, I bet he can explain you with professional knowledge.

 

[DeltaEpsilon7787]

like 1000 or something, the processor gets to calculate all that information times a thousand.

and in this case you don't need perfect resolution either.

You don't need to perform raytracing for every single solar panel. Actually the resolution should probably be determined dynamically.
Say you have 1000 solar panels exposed. You won't really mind not accounting 10 or even 50 solar panels. That's the idea here - to make the calculations more "chunky" or discrete. Basically instead of making 1000 raytraces you can only perform, say, 37. Yes, if one of the blocks gets darkened, you will lose 25 as those belong to a chunk of size 5x5. However 25 is vastly insignificant relative to 1000 so you can do such optimizations. I'll have you know many collision models for huge objects work like that. They don't use perfect convex meshes for that if differences are insignificant.

That's one of the optimizations you can make here.

Another optimization is not accounting for blocks which are guaranteed to not get active. Basically if a solar panel blocks lies covered from all sides, it doesn't need any calculations and the only time you need to bring it up again is when that entity got changed somehow.

And the hardest and the most insane one is adding lots of geometry and math to decide whether an object is really in between emitter and a light source. That's easy in Starmade as your average area doesn't have lots of objects. The objects can be imagined as parallelepipeds (what a word) so the calculations are not that complex. It is also far faster than using raytracing but it is more complex than just raytracing.
The hardest part here would be calculating what shadow that object would produce onto the panels. You can introduce math here too but honestly it would be so much easier to just use raytracing instead. It's not the fastest but it's simplier by a factor of 2.

 

[NeonSturm]

Or just check if a ship is between the light source and collectors.

If yes, check how much an area around the solar panels / obstacle overlaps.

Then subtract the (obstacles size) * (overlap fraction) from the number of light-receiving panels.

If there are multiple obstacles, the biggest one should be calculated first, then the others subtract size * overlap(=0…1) * remaining-fraction(=0…1) to account for the chance that one is in line with the big one.

 

[Master_Artificer]

Currently the sun emits explosive beams, and by the nature of a larger surface area you catch more of them on your hull.
I guess the blocks for the collector just redirect them to whatever your aiming at but this sounds like a idea for more of a mod than for an addition to one of the 4 core weapon systems.
And while it is "free damage", it probably won't be able to deal as much damage as the antimatter bolts from the AMC's we have.

The weapon is a good idea for a mod once that system is implemented though.
[DOUBLEPOST=1454613150,1454612798][/DOUBLEPOST]Oh wanted to add that light is inversely proportional to distance with power being multiplied by 1/(d^2) to simplify it. So a great melee weapon but...

 

[DeltaEpsilon7787]

And while it is "free damage", it probably won't be able to deal as much damage as the antimatter bolts from the AMC's we have.

I don't agree here. It contradicts what's happening in game. Any ship is vurnerable to Sun Damage if you get really close. This weapon basically focuses the Sun Damage and makes it locally extremely powerful.
Ultimately this weapons follows a simple philosophy of risk for reward. You can get closer to a star and risk your own ship. In this particular area this weapon becomes incredibly powerful and supersedes every other weapon thanks to virtually zero power usage. However it becomes incresingly useless as you go farther from the star. That's why it uses inverse exponential growth of damage. It gets absolutely OP when you are near a star but you also are contained within this relatively small area with certain risk of getting too close.
It is a situational weapon. It will never replace other weapon systems.

Logically you have an incredibly powerful source of energy, why not use it? That's the point of the whole thread.

If yes, check how much an area around the solar panels / obstacle overlaps.

Then subtract the (obstacles size) * (overlap fraction) from the number of light-receiving panels.

If there are multiple obstacles, the biggest one should be calculated first, then the others subtract size * overlap(=0…1) * remaining-fraction(=0…1) to account for the chance that one is in line with the big one.

I am not sure exactly how can you make this all simple.
Here is a question.

check how much an area

How can you easily find that area?

 

[Lecic]

There are two important things to ask when suggesting an entirely new weapon type- How is it different from the existing weapons, and could it be implemented as an effect?

Let's look at the first part. Well, it's a beam weapon. We already have beam weapons.
Let's look at the second part. Could it be implemented as an effect? Yes. And, actually, if the way players defend from solar damage in the future is through an effect, this would be a great offensive use for that effect (gaining damage the closer to the sun you are.)

 

[NeonSturm]

How can you easily find that area?

Count blocks in the XY, XZ and YZ cross-sections.
Or just use a semi-accurate approach with a function based on block count and boundary box of the object.

 

[DeltaEpsilon7787]

Let's look at the first part. Well, it's a beam weapon. We already have beam weapons.

Yes, it is a beam weapon, but that's not the main point.
That doesn't matter how this weapon inflicts damage.
This weapon is like a Damage Beam+100% Cannon which uses almost no power if you want to think of it like that. The main unique point is that it's a conditional weapon. All other systems efficiency depends on internal factors: power storage, amount of blocks, effects. They all work the same anywhere and everywhere under any conditions. That being said we can easily think of them as non-conditional weapons. They are less powerful than Heli-Ray but work everywhere. On the other hand, Heli-Ray efficiency depends on one internal factor: amount of blocks (or to be more exact area covered by blocks) and one external factor: distance to a star. You can't locally control that factor (unless you are an admin who loves to move stars) and that's why it is a unique weapon. It exchanges Power Storage for Distance to a Star. Since you can't control it, its balance requires making it more powerful than other weapon systems.

Together with Solar Panels and Micro-Star they all forms a whole bunch of conditional systems.

 

[Lecic]

Yes, it is a beam weapon, but that's not the main point.
That doesn't matter how this weapon inflicts damage.
This weapon is like a Damage Beam+100% Cannon which uses almost no power if you want to think of it like that. The main unique point is that it's a conditional weapon. All other systems efficiency depends on internal factors: power storage, amount of blocks, effects. They all work the same anywhere and everywhere under any conditions. That being said we can easily think of them as non-conditional weapons. They are less powerful than Heli-Ray but work everywhere. On the other hand, Heli-Ray efficiency depends on one internal factor: amount of blocks (or to be more exact area covered by blocks) and one external factor: distance to a star. You can't locally control that factor (unless you are an admin who loves to move stars) and that's why it is a unique weapon. It exchanges Power Storage for Distance to a Star. Since you can't control it, its balance requires making it more powerful than other weapon systems.

Together with Solar Panels and Micro-Star they all forms a whole bunch of conditional systems.

Again- can you accomplish this with an effect? Yes.

 

[DeltaEpsilon7787]

Again- can you accomplish this with an effect? Yes.

What about this then?

Extra:
I also propose making weapon computer be able to use solar power to decrease or nullify their own power usage. Currently you can connect a weapon computer to a light source and color the projectiles and what I suggest is making solar panels also connectible to aforementioned computers in order to reroute generated power into power consumption of selected weapon and therefore make it take less power per shot. Usage? Most usage goes for stations again. It will bring a possibility of stations having less power capacitors to supply their weapon systems as those consume a lot of power.