It's impossible to make good figther weapons

[hakkarin]

By the time the gun is big enough to break even 1 block it's already too big to be a practical fighter weapon. Making fighters in this game is a joke.

 

[Raisinbat]

Don't make them can/can...

And what mass level is a fighter? If you're trying 5 mass then yes that's not possible, but 50mass+ you can do just fine

Try unslaved beams or logic controlled can/beam. Getting those to 3k damage per tick with 2 shots per second takes about 20 mass; that'll knock about 15 blocks deep, or 3 blocks of heavy armor and is still fast enough firing to hit with.

You can also try a burst cannon as long as you use a rapid fire tracer with it, but they're tricky to use against other fighters.

 

[Edymnion]

A Cannon/Pierce can break a standard armor block in one shot if it does 240 damage per shot. Thats all of 24 blocks in your cannon plus two computers.

Thats a 2x2x6 block of modules. Even the smallest of fighters can afford 2x2x6 blocks.

1340 damage per shot of Cannon/Pierce will destroy the strongest, most protected armor blocks in the game in one shot. Thats only 134 blocks.

 

[hakkarin]

Still being able to only break 1 armor block every 2 seconds is a laughable amount of damage. It makes fighters borderline useless.

 

[Batavium]

Still being able to only break 1 armor block every 2 seconds is a laughable amount of damage. It makes fighters borderline useless.

You want the fighter to take down a bigger ship? Against an opponent of the same size that damage is fine. Many use small fighters in fleets to destroy much larger targets. Some are notorious in doing so and feared by many.

If you give the fighter a lot of these weapons and enough power to fire all of them at ones. Than you can use a fleet to really let it fire all weapons at the same time. The ai can fire a whole weapons bar full of weapons provided there is enough power. You can even tag along in a docked scanner to break your enemies radar jam.

 

[MrFURB]

Starmade combat is rated by the number of blocks one brings to a battle. There are lots of other variables, of course, but number of blocks is the usual starting place. Fighters have excellent damage avoidance, potentially very good armor efficiency without sacrificing thrust, and perhaps the second best power generation per block after ships in the 1.2 mil e/s range.

The issue described here is that all those bonuses act like % bonuses stacked on top of the number of blocks a fighter brings to a fight, which is low. The solution has always been to bring more fighters, but with the AI update not out yet and human pilots a valuable commodity trying to maintain a fighter fleet becomes a massive hassle. Still, drone/fighter spam is strong as heck. Hard to beat when the solution (being a turret boat/gunship) tends to have the same AI targeting issues as drones do.

 

[hakkarin]

Starmade combat is rated by the number of blocks one brings to a battle. There are lots of other variables, of course, but number of blocks is the usual starting place. Fighters have excellent damage avoidance, potentially very good armor efficiency without sacrificing thrust, and perhaps the second best power generation per block after ships in the 1.2 mil e/s range.

The issue described here is that all those bonuses act like % bonuses stacked on top of the number of blocks a fighter brings to a fight, which is low. The solution has always been to bring more fighters, but with the AI update not out yet and human pilots a valuable commodity trying to maintain a fighter fleet becomes a massive hassle. Still, drone/fighter spam is strong as heck. Hard to beat when the solution (being a turret boat/gunship) tends to have the same AI targeting issues as drones do.

What AI update are you talking about? Will it allow you to command AI fleets of fighters? How does AI handle fighters currently? Does it actually control them like fighters (making strifing runs) or does it just treat them like any other ship?

 

[Panpiper]

I offer you this challenge. Load up your choice of ship. Pick the baddest ship you've got or even know about. Download the Marauder fighter. Divide the mass of your chosen ship by 500 (the mass of the Marauder). Field that many AI Marauders versus your chosen ship. When you loose, try it again with half as many Marauders. When you loose, try it again with ten percent.

The Marauder ship is actually less powerful than it could be and is due for a rebuild. Fighters are NOT under powered. Most people simply don't build powerful fighters, for reasons I don't particularly understand.

And by the way Raisinbat, the weapon on the Marauder is a cannon/cannon.

 

[kingreol]

People care about block textures with fighters a bit much.

 

[kulbolen]

various people have made 15~ mass ships that hit in the 100k+ range, so thats definitely not true. but i do agree its hard to make nice fighters by realistic measures, just cause no realistically scaled fighter shi pwill be using meter wide hull. even 1/3 slab is 10x what it would be. imo thats the main reason you scale up a bit and just ignore "realistic" scales for small ships. 100 mass fighter can be quite capable

 

[Malacodor]

I offer you this challenge. Load up your choice of ship. Pick the baddest ship you've got or even know about. Download the Marauder fighter. Divide the mass of your chosen ship by 500 (the mass of the Marauder). Field that many AI Marauders versus your chosen ship. When you loose, try it again with half as many Marauders. When you loose, try it again with ten percent.

The Marauder ship is actually less powerful than it could be and is due for a rebuild. Fighters are NOT under powered. Most people simply don't build powerful fighters, for reasons I don't particularly understand.

And by the way Raisinbat, the weapon on the Marauder is a cannon/cannon.

According to my tests your Marauder heavily exploits the AI's intentional mis-aiming. I pitted it against my Skreeg, which missed it almost all the time. Even firing blindly in the general direction would have resulted in more hits. And the best part was, when I spawned a version with a beam weapon instead of C/C - it kept missing, too!

 

[Panpiper]

According to my tests your Marauder heavily exploits the AI's intentional mis-aiming. I pitted it against my Skreeg, which missed it almost all the time. Even firing blindly in the general direction would have resulted in more hits. And the best part was, when I spawned a version with a beam weapon instead of C/C - it kept missing, too!

Any such 'exploit' is entirely coincidental. I wanted a pirate that wasn't easily dealt with by the simple expedient of spamming swarmers. To that end, it needed a very good set of point defense turrets. If the AI is so stupid that such turrets make aiming at the fighter problematic, it is not my fault for building a fighter with good point defense, but the fault of the developers for making insanely stupid AI targeting.

The next incarnation however of the Marauder will reduce those turrets to only four. The motive for that is almost entirely to reduce server strain when large numbers of Marauders wind up in a battle due to pirate stations summoning reinforcements.

Try removing all the point defense, saving that blueprint, and then retesting with the turretless version.

 

[kulbolen]

marauder DOES abuse ai aiming mechanics, but that doesnt make it unfair. its just built intelligently, and can be easily beaten at even mass by many other types of ai driven ships.

 

[Calhoun]

marauder DOES abuse ai aiming mechanics, but that doesnt make it unfair. its just built intelligently, and can be easily beaten at even mass by many other types of ai driven ships.

Now wait a sec Veil.

It doesn't ABUSE the mechanic, its an accidental result.

 

[Croquelune]

According to my tests your Marauder heavily exploits the AI's intentional mis-aiming. I pitted it against my Skreeg, which missed it almost all the time. Even firing blindly in the general direction would have resulted in more hits. And the best part was, when I spawned a version with a beam weapon instead of C/C - it kept missing, too!

What ? Where the exploit there ? All my PvP ships have marauders's design ; does that makes me an exploiter ? I don't guess so. It just smart design. People can just blame themselves to follow 95% the normativ path of the uncreativity by doing linear ship. Only experimentators and pionners does know about this design and exploit its power and try deal with its weakness (yeah cause this design has also a real true weakness).

 

[kulbolen]

maybe true calhoun. i not claiming panpiper is trying to cheat the game. im claiming that his ship, during combat, takes advantage of the games crap targeting system, intentional or not... it still happens. as far as it being some kinda exploit, i dont mean to give that impression at all.

 

[Az14el]

you can "break 1 block" with like a 4 block weapon system (counting computers too),
obviously you want to do more than this sure, but go look at how big a fighter of any RL or Sci fi descript ever is, i bet you can fit more than a 4 block gun in that.

 

[AtraUnam]

IRL fighter planes are a lot bigger than people tend to think they are, those thigns are larger than busses and can weigh up to 30 tons.

 

[mosimon2]

IRL fighter planes are a lot bigger than people tend to think they are, those thigns are larger than busses and can weigh up to 30 tons.

An f-22 Raptor only has a wingspan of about 13m and is about 18m long, trying to fit decent systems that are already made up by 1m^3, it would get sorta hard. (not trying to be a jerk, just throwing some numbers out there.)

 

[AtraUnam]

An f-22 Raptor only has a wingspan of about 13m and is about 18m long, trying to fit decent systems that are already made up by 1m^3, it would get sorta hard. (not trying to be a jerk, just throwing some numbers out there.)

Make use of the cores natural 50k power capacity and use some alpha weapons cannon/cannon is not your friend here.