Weapon drills on smaller ships?

[Tamren Shade]

I had a crazy idea at work tonight, and I was wondering if I'm just tired and a little cracked or if this might actually work.

I want to build a fast attack gun corvette/frigate as my next project (something that will hopefully only take a week or two and NOT six months ), and I was contemplating experimenting with in-line weapon configurations. I want to mount the equivalent of a GAU 8 on a corvette to frigate sized very fast moving starship.

Spoiler: GAU 8

I was wondering about setting up a Cannon-Cannon-50% Ion of around 6000 blocks into 4-6 groups with the discharge blocks in line and staggered 1-3 blocks apart. First, would Starmade be ok trying to handle that many projectiles in one line, and two if so, is this even a good idea? Or would I just be wasting damage potential by punching projectiles through hole all the way through the target? Am I better off going for more a WWII multiple barrel Thunderbolt approach, then trying to mimic a modern day 30mm rotary cannon?

I also want to add a pair of missile pods to this ship with the same multiple inline groups. The idea being rip the hell out of the shields on the way in, and switch over to rockets at close range to hopefully gut a bunch of now exposed and shieldless systems blocks.

Maybe toss on a pair of missile-beam turrets and 6-12 small AMS turrets.

What can I say? I like big guns and I cannot lie

 

[AtraUnam]

Multiple projectiles in a line works just fine, theres a whole branch of weapons 'tech' based around the concept. Overpen can be an issue but not against most ships which are generally over 100m long.

 

[splatthecat]

I've built my own weapon system similar to the A10 (the ship became the Aighten) with a mix of Ion and punch through cannons I believe. Logic fired which wasn't always the best but when it worked it could take out an Isanth in about 4-5 shots and it was half the size!

Something you're proposing would be devastating!

 

[Dr. Whammy]

Sometimes, I miss the *old* weapon system. Back then you could easily make a weapon that fires that fast. This was due to the power failure resulting from depleting your ship's power lasted only a split second and did not impede you from fire the next shot. So the instant there was enough for even one more shot the weapon would fire again. Having multiple outputs on a cannon system would result in what I call "bullet vomit"; decent damage and VERY awe inspiring to watch/hear. I almost want to petition the dev team to get rid of the current power failure mechanic and revert to the old one just so I can hear the sound of those guns again.

Nowadays, the best you can achieve is 600 rounds per minute on a single cannon/cannon setup. While you can make an avenger cannon using the method you described, you may run into a few issues trying to place it on a corvette.

1) Size vs firepower: If you engineer the weapon to fire fast, using multiple weapon systems linked to logic and rotators, you can simulate a GAU8. However, syncing the weapons to fire at that rate will either leave you with weapon hiccups (logic signals exceed the fire rate of the weapons; resulting in small misfires) or wasted potential DPS (the logic does not use all of the weapon's possible fire rate; resulting in less damage than the weapon should otherwise, do)

2) The weapon's size (on a corvette) will not be sufficient enough to spew the kind of damage a GAU8 is known for. You may end up with an intimidating decoration on your ship and not an effective combat system. Also, aiming may be a pain.

3) If you take the true A-10 warthog approach and build your corvette around the gun, then the idea becomes more feasible. However, you should push toward the 2 million power regen soft cap and keep an eye on your power consumption.

I understand if this is a "just because you can" type project (the best kind!) so my input is not meant to dissuade you but to make you aware of what to look out for. Personally, I hope you can pull it off.

Dammit, now I want to try it.

 

[Dire Venom]

Just like to add something.
You can have in-built weapon systems that are controlled by the AI but don't require a turret/base.
They have limited firing arcs, but have much greater accuracy than players and fire on their own without needing to be logic driven.
Here's one that @Guthris made:
The red arrow is pointing at the AI controlled entity (which is essentially a giant immobile cannon built into the ship)

It cannot rotate or move, and has about a 30 degree firing arc.
Where it can aim/fire is shown by the box onscreen bellow:

So as you can see they are far superior to logic driven ones (the AI is perfectly fine with firing multiple cannons at once), and you could do the same thing with missile pods on the wings.
Just line up your plane and let the AI shoot for you without needing any moving parts or turrets
Big props to @Guthris for sharing this with us and creating these images!

 

[Tamren Shade]

Hmm, Dire Venom, how big is that targeting box on the display module and how far out from the gun camera is it? And I'm assuming the camera is directly in line with the projectile path or is actually offset a block or two?

Now I'm thinking of kicking it up a notch and building the ship around a massive stationary turret, I could have the AI firing mixed groups of C-C-Ion C-C-Punch and C-C-Explosive. Kind of like putting a mix of different ammo types through a high ROF autocannon.

Dr Whammy, as cool as it would be, I wasn't planning on having the assembly actually spin on a rotator block, I just wanted to get multiple weapon groups in line each tossing out the aforementioned 600 round per minute. I could be pushing 2400 to 3600 projectiles per minute by simultaneously firing all 4-6 groups at once. And of course I was absolutely planning on building the entire ship around this thing!

I'm glad this crazy idea is getting some positive feedback here, nice to know the community at large is almost as crazy as I am

 

[Madman198237]

That box is only a couple of blocks from the viewpoint. It's display-block-driven, I THINK. I could be wrong. However, the box's size doesn't matter, what matters is the area it covers. That area, which grows the further from the cannon you are, is the area in which the cannon system can acquire a target and shoot it. The further the distance, the larger the area covered by an angle. Therefore, it does not need to be any particular distance away, so long as it is roughly accurate. That camera, if it actually works, is directly lined up with the weapon system. Possibly on the system itself.

 

[kurosawa]

sweet fixed turrets..

Adding fighters with interchangeable weapons to my to-do list, it should come in on page 56

 

[Dire Venom]

Hmm, Dire Venom, how big is that targeting box on the display module and how far out from the gun camera is it? And I'm assuming the camera is directly in line with the projectile path or is actually offset a block or two?

Now I'm thinking of kicking it up a notch and building the ship around a massive stationary turret, I could have the AI firing mixed groups of C-C-Ion C-C-Punch and C-C-Explosive. Kind of like putting a mix of different ammo types through a high ROF autocannon.

Dr Whammy, as cool as it would be, I wasn't planning on having the assembly actually spin on a rotator block, I just wanted to get multiple weapon groups in line each tossing out the aforementioned 600 round per minute. I could be pushing 2400 to 3600 projectiles per minute by simultaneously firing all 4-6 groups at once. And of course I was absolutely planning on building the entire ship around this thing!

I'm glad this crazy idea is getting some positive feedback here, nice to know the community at large is almost as crazy as I am

I didn't build it, @Guthris did so he would know.
The firing arc does seem restricted, but manageable and Im often moving some of my main ship weapons to stationary docked entities as I can't aim at all -_-.
Another cool idea he came up with was having stationary 'gun pods' attached to turrets. They can't rotate by themselves, but are docked onto the turret, so if the turrets pointed at something they'll also shoot as well.
I figure you could easily reach the number of projectiles using docked entities, but I don't know about the lag :/

Another suggestion would be to docked a rotating gun barrel to the docked entity that'll be firing the guns (so that the bullets go through the spinning barrel harmlessly), and if you build up a docked spinning chain you could easily end up with this:

You could also have each barrel full of cannon fired AI as well :3 It would be beautiful :D

TLDR: Build a giant spinning machine gun controlled by the AI!

 

[jayman38]

The barrels on a gatling gun in Starmade don't necessarily have to be weapons. You could have the weapons firing behind the barrels, and use a rotating barrel dummy structure with hollow barrel cylinders to simply make it look like a gatling gun, while the real weapon fires through it. (Kinda like a real-life gatling gun!)

 

[Tamren Shade]

I did a little testing on this concept last night, 8x roughly 300 Cannon 300 Cannon 300 Punch firing in line had an interesting quickly repeating bars of fire look, went clear through my 200 block penetration target with on clock, and made a mess of the frigate and destroyer I used as target ships, although the server wasn't thrilled about the damage calculations.... I'm going to try again with 6 groups and 4 groups inline and see if I can get a similar damage pattern without stressing the server.

 

[Lonnehart]

I'm so horribly tempted to make something like a gatling gun except it fires warhead tipped torpedoes...

 

[StarWars1981]

DrWhammy's already pulled that one way before you. He's got a 100-round warhead torpedo launcher. Dunno how effective it is on standard settings or on the server he plays on, but it sure does look scary, and it lags servers something awful, I hear.

 

[EricBlank]

Anything that pisses off the admins is truly a weapon of The People.

I've got quite a hankering for making one of these, now, too. My shredder corvette has plenty of space in it...

 

[kurosawa]

Anything that pisses off the admins is truly a weapon of The People.

Building something awesome for sure is fun, but why piss on the admins? They are just normal players running "there" own servers on limited resources.

 

[KiloZulu]

I made a Gatling gun over a year ago, but ran into a couple problems that kept me from putting it into normal use. One problem was a bug that caused wireless logic to forget its connection anytime the server was restarted. The other problem was a limitation of the logic system that ended up causing multiple guns to trigger at once. I believe there might've been a work-around or change to logic since then that could alleviate the problem, but I haven't delved back into it.

Aside from that, I found the Gatling I created to be pretty awesome. It essentially allowed me to add rapid-fire to my weapon system without using cannons as the secondary. That freed me up to boost the damage and it could really wreck things. Of course, by the time you include all the logic, and the diameter of the barrel housing, you could just as easily place eight cannon hard points or turrets on your ship that provide the same damage output.

 

[Drumboy168]

Meta-projectiles?

You rang?

 

[godmars]

snip

Do these work with the 'aim at selected' option? Last time I tried they didn't and weapons like that become useless the moment you are fighting more than one thing due to their limited firing arc

 

[EricBlank]

The aim at selected option does work. You can reliably use fixed turrets with it.

 

[AtraUnam]

WAIT! missile metaprojectiles got fixed! Why did no one tell me!?