StarMade Ship Systems 2.0

[UrstMcRedHead]

I for one welcome our new reactor Overlords.

 

[Haalon]

e. Why not just use chamber systems for weapons as well to keep it consistent. It may even be more intuitive and intriguing. Also having the ability to change out the effects on the fly would be kind of cool.

This.
Currently, we actually can change effects on flight by manually C-V them, but it isn't very convenient. Chambers would be neat solution for this

 

[TrainDodger]

This reflects no turret in real life or any science fiction ever. How many combustion cylinders does a 20" main gun on a battleship have? Does the .50 cal on top of a nuclear submarine have its own reactor as well?

Taken outside of Starmade, the notion of putting a reactor on a gun is absurd.

Real 16" guns on battleships don't have reactors, because they're not directed-energy weapons. What they do have is a magazine full of gunpowder and shells that stretches down into the hull:

When an Iowa fires its guns, does that make the radar power go out? Does that leave less power for propulsion? No, it doesn't. The energy comes from powder bags. The power to rotate the turret comes from ship service generators, separate from propulsion. If turrets were a hundred meters long and massed thousands of metric tons, and carried massive DEWs, they would have their own dedicated reactors.

I think it's more ridiculous, actually, that some people want to hamstring turret construction by making them into little parasites that you glue to the outside of the hull instead of a fully-integrated component of the ship.

Taken inside Starmade, it's not absolutely necessary in any way, turrets function just fine drawing from primary power, but over a period of years docked power has been a primary source of exploits & performance problems.

This is deceptive. Docked power with logic clocks and power beams is a performance issue. Turrets having their own power are no more of a performance issue than unpowered turrets of equal size.

I'm starting to feel like the powered turret argument is nothing but a trojan horse for keeping docked power around in order to bypass and work-around primary entity power caps meant to balance entities.

If power scales linearly with block count in the new system, then there is nothing to bypass. It's only OP right now because you can get around the S-curve. Turrets would actually be disadvantaged, having less distance to put between reactors and stabilizers, relative to the much larger ship that they're mounted to.

 

[Chckn Wildstyle]

Real 16" guns on battleships don't have reactors, because they're not directed-energy weapons. What they do have is a magazine full of gunpowder and shells that stretches down into the hull:

When an Iowa fires its guns, does that make the radar power go out? Does that leave less power for propulsion? No, it doesn't. The energy comes from powder bags. The power to rotate the turret comes from ship service generators, separate from propulsion. If turrets were a hundred meters long and massed thousands of metric tons, and carried massive DEWs, they would have their own dedicated reactors.

I think it's more ridiculous, actually, that some people want to hamstring turret construction by making them into little parasites that you glue to the outside of the hull instead of a fully-integrated component of the ship.



This is deceptive. Docked power with logic clocks and power beams is a performance issue. Turrets having their own power are no more of a performance issue than unpowered turrets of equal size.



If power scales linearly with block count in the new system, then there is nothing to bypass. It's only OP right now because you can get around the S-curve. Turrets would actually be disadvantaged, having less distance to put between reactors and stabilizers, relative to the much larger ship that they're mounted to.

You are a beautiful bastard.

 

[MacThule]

Having one reactor only for an entire ship is fairly antithetical to most Sci-Fi and real life ship designs. I have seen countless shows...

I'm not trying to be dismissive, CW, but this is a vague anecdotal support for a very debatable basic assertion. In 40 years I've yet to see or read one single fiction where a ship's turret was independently powered. Dune, Star Wars, Star Trek, Ender, Galactica, Firefly, Farscape, Stargate, even Spaceballs - I recall none of these ever mentioning independently powered turreted weapons.

There's nothing inherently 'antithetical to most' science fiction about not having reactors inside guns. If divergence from canon is 'antithesis' (which it isn't) then it would be more correct to say that allowing it is antithetical to science fiction settings since the vast majority do not feature independently powered shipborne weapons.

A series of reactors inside an enemy ship or station - OK, sure. Granted. The new system has that, BTW, and none of that has anything to do with putting reactors inside of guns.

And as far as it being "antithetical to most... real life ship designs" that is just patently false. Turrets IRL are powered by ship's power - they don't have their own private diesel engines. A few could have on-board batteries (capacitors, not reactors), but I don't know of any specific examples IRL that even have that. Ships often have backup generators, but those are inside the ship not inside of weapons or turrets. weapon systems still have to draw from ship's power.

You've cited not a single example and you're claiming that "most" fictional and real life ships sport independently powered guns? I'm not sure where you got that idea, but it's just wrong. I'm not attacking your Starmade turret building expertise, Chkn, but nothing factual seems to support a need for allowing docked reactors to operate in the first place.

Us people who like the idea of self powered turrets are saying what are saying BECAUSE there is the One-Reactor limit for the parent ship. If not, I would just put specific power reactors immediately under each of my turrets. This arbitrary One-Reactor limit, -Which I Think Is A Good Balance Decision-, is why Turrets should be able to power themselves.

And before this proposal there was a different reason why.

That is what is throwing up red flags for me. That regardless of how drastically systems are changed, some people are always insisting that this ridiculous backdoor to power exploits absolutely must always stay open. So we've always had power exploits. And hilariously absurd guns with reactors in their barrels.

It's not required for anything, and if a vertical thruster block can be used in RP decor as a 'stove' it or another block can just as easily be pretended to be a 'turret reactor.'

Self-powered turrets don't match reality, they don't match any fiction or game I know of, and they aren't necessary for anything in Starmade except bypassing soft caps. That's the only thing that simply "cannot be done" without docked power, and I'm not really a big fan of that.

It seems to be the core feature undermining every attempt to re-balance the old power system. If permitted under the new reactor system then it will surely undermine any balance the new system brings as well.

 

[TheWurm]

I am not arguing different rates of regeneration between Alpha and DPS focused weapons. I am arguing that they will have inherently different power draws from the mothership even if they fit inside the same shell. This inherent difference leads to difficulties in making cross fleet turrets. Most turrets would have to be tailor made for each individual ship.

In that case you and I have understood the proposed changes differently, and ... well, I can't say it's specific enough to say for certain which of us is right. The assumption I'm making based on what's presented is that right after firing an alpha weapon will have the same draw (or slightly more) while charging as a rapid fire weapon of the same size while it is firing, then a smaller draw to stay charged once full, but that doesn't (on a very quick reread) appear to be explicitly stated. This is one of those places where concrete numbers on different weapon systems and set ups would be nice (assuming, as always, that this is the proposal we go with.) For what it's worth, I'm for either having the original proposal stand (including bounding boxes for reactor/stabilizer groups) or giving weapon systems near uniform power consumption for total size (primary +secondary + Tertiary). If it means giving up the overdrive effect, I will be the first to shed a tear, but it'd be worth it.

 

[MacThule]

This is deceptive.

Indeed it is, because none of it supports putting reactors inside of guns.

Real 16" guns on battleships don't have reactors

Exactly. There is no RL example to base turret reactors on, neither are shells and powder analogous to power generation for an energy weapon.

The power to rotate the turret comes from ship service generators, separate from propulsion.

Yes. From ship service generators inside the ship, not generators inside the turrets themselves.

Turrets would actually be disadvantaged, having less distance to put between reactors and stabilizers, relative to the much larger ship that they're mounted to.

I'm not concerned about theoretical turrets that would be using additional active reactors for appropriate purposes. The problem is that even if your evaluation is correct it does not address deliberate exploitation of docked power, only the projected balance-imbalance of legitimate turreted weapon systems, and turrets do not require independent power to achieve that balance. It only opens the exploit door.

 

[Brokengauge]

Hey, just let me know if I'm am idiot, or if this has been brought up: what's to stop me from making several pieces of one ship, each with their own reactor and chambers and whatnot, and then docked to the main entity? Will the reactors on docked entities then shut off? what happens then if 2 ships dock together in that case? Or docking to a station?

 

[Mariux]

nais.

 

[Chckn Wildstyle]

Hey, just let me know if I'm am idiot, or if this has been brought up: what's to stop me from making several pieces of one ship, each with their own reactor and chambers and whatnot, and then docked to the main entity? Will the reactors on docked entities then shut off? what happens then if 2 ships dock together in that case? Or docking to a station?

For the ships docked to another ship, all the ones that are child ships will have their reactors turned off.

 

[TrainDodger]

Self-powered turrets don't match reality, they don't match any fiction or game I know of, and they aren't necessary for anything in Starmade except bypassing soft caps. That's the only thing that simply "cannot be done" without docked power, and I'm not really a big fan of that.

It seems to be the core feature undermining every attempt to re-balance the old power system. If permitted under the new reactor system then it will surely undermine any balance the new system brings as well.

Well, that's just the thing. The way I understand it, the new system doesn't have an S-curve built into the block count, nor does it seem to have a softcap. The power associated with each reactor block is a linear relationship. 100 blocks of reactor are 100 times more powerful than 1 block of reactor. 1,000,000 blocks of reactor are 100 times more powerful than 10,000 blocks of reactor, and so on. What's on a curve is the distance between reactors and stabilizers, and this heavily favors objects with large box dimensions.

Turrets are a lot smaller than the ships they're docked to, generally speaking. You can only put the stabilizers so far away from the reactors, so the reactors for turrets can only be so big before they start to lose efficiency. Of course, someone could go nuts and try to make a tiny, tiny ship with gigantic turrets hanging off the sides, but if the rest of the systems are balanced correctly, this would be ineffective. That is, it wouldn't have enough thrust to move at all. You can't even bypass that limitation with docked thrusters, because they always draw power from the lowest entity in the chain. A ship must be a given size to even be capable of effectively moving larger turrets around.

The thing is, Starmade is just 'sploity by its very nature. There is nothing keeping you from building a mobile minefield consisting of massive grid of unconnected warhead blocks being "driven around" by a small (and very distant) core/thruster unit, or mounting a ton of turrets to floating frameworks spaced kilometers apart with the power/thruster unit hidden behind a web of deadly fire. It's the same way with this power proposal. There is literally nothing keeping you from putting the stabilizers on the outside of the ship, a couple kilometers away, floating out in space, connected by nothing save for a thin tractor beam tether and surrounded by hardened armor and heavy shielding. Things are only even remotely balanced in Starmade because a large number of players work on a sort of honor system and agree to not make doomcubes or bizarre, spindly abominations with their guts in full view, and try to build things that make sense from an engineering standpoint. As soon as you undo that self-restraint, all bets are off.

I'm not concerned about theoretical turrets that would be using additional active reactors for appropriate purposes. The problem is that even if your evaluation is correct it does not address deliberate exploitation of docked power, only the projected balance-imbalance of legitimate turreted weapon systems, and turrets do not require independent power to achieve that balance. It only opens the exploit door.

The entirety of the new power system opens an exploit door. See above ^^^

 

[Brokengauge]

For the ships docked to another ship, all the ones that are child ships will have their reactors turned off.

I'm not crazy about that. In general I build turrets without their own power supply anyway, but I don't think child entities should have their reactors shut off. If other ppl want to have self powered turrets, they should be able to. If I want to dock to another ship without losing my own power regen, I should be able to do that.

I'm going to speculate about a planned feature here: boarding. If I'm going to dock to another ship to board it, does this mean that my ship is now going to be dependent on the ship I'm boarding in order to fire it's turrets in case backup arrives? What if my target is woefully smaller than me? What about faction permissions? Will docking to a hostile faction's ship allow your own to keep its reactor on? Or will the enemy ship be forced to try to feed the demand of my ship? What if I felt like being a dick and built a large pulse/can/overdrive weapon on my boarding craft to purposefully try to drag the enemy ship's power down?

 

[Ithirahad]

* I hope one of the mods reads this*

Well, if that is so, then goodbye StarMade. I enjoyed ever second of this game the last 2 years, but this, no, sorry, I can't do it. If you with your 300+ bleuprints can do this then I show all my respect, but me with only 50 + blueprints can't see them all become useless.

This is your fault, not the game's. It's still in alpha*... and in alpha, big things can and do change. If you thought they'd be keeping stuff the way it is just because they happened to release their alpha development builds, I'm not really sure what to tell you. :P

*and despite popular belief, alpha testing and development phases can and do carry on for several years in some cases.

 

[Atheu]

Indeed it is, because none of it supports putting reactors inside of guns.



Exactly. There is no RL example to base turret reactors on, neither are shells and powder analogous to power generation for an energy weapon.



Yes. From ship service generators inside the ship, not generators inside the turrets themselves.



I'm not concerned about theoretical turrets that would be using additional active reactors for appropriate purposes. The problem is that even if your evaluation is correct it does not address deliberate exploitation of docked power, only the projected balance-imbalance of legitimate turreted weapon systems, and turrets do not require independent power to achieve that balance. It only opens the exploit door.

I honestly think your entire argument is flawed here, in the real world we use ammunition, in starmade we use energy to fire our weapons, now this being said, the barrel can be the weapon output, and the base of the turret it's powerplant (since there's no other purpose for the base than it being the source of power)

if we remove the powerplant from the turret, what else is there to put into the base of the turret? we'd be back to how we started with the old docking system

 

[Thunder Cock]

not really, what if you want to spread out multiple reactors across a large ship and run them at the same time to minimize powerless if one is hit,
or being able to build individual reactors for individual systems.

edit: i still cant see any reason to not allow multiple reactors at once, any real ship would have multiple reactors with redundant backups. and it just seems like intelligent design to have multiple running at once, ie, you have a main reactor for most of your systems, but you have secondary reactors for, say, engines, and another for shields, i mean this is only really an issue on ships larger than 400 meters but still, i am many others often build this large

The reason why I see not allowing multiple reactors at once is that if you could have many reactors the most effective way would be to have as many small reactors as possible (assuming there is no efficiency loss for smaller reactors) in order to increase the dependability and survivability of your power system (with more reactors the percentage of power output loss when a reactor goes down decreases). This would essentially force builders to go back to something similar to the current power setup by fitting in as many of the smallest reactors possible into your ship.

 

[Lecic]

i thought the same until i remembered losses due to topped internal capacity of weapons

in the case of a large group of X*Blocks of DPS weapon, the losses are ridiculous and almost all of the energy provided by the ship is changed in damage.
Whereas in the case of X*blocks of alpha weapon, the losses may exceed the amount of power regen available to load the weapons.

With the current self powered turret with power capacity blocks, a same size alpha turret would use far less weapon blocks than a DPS one - due to the need of capacitor - and would obviously deal less damage over time - but one could change a turret for an other and it would not change the design of the main ship.

whereas with the power system described in this topic, changing from a DPS turret to a an Alpha one would cause :

1 - a huge reduction in scale of the turret, and so a probable rebuilt of the ship, at least arround the dock of the turret.
2 - a complete rebuild of the main ship to add reactor blocks, which means also increasing the number of chamber blocks, which means almost completly rebuilt the ship.
3 - a turret filled with hull - or any block which doesn't consume power - to keep its size.

As I mentioned above, you lack the knowledge of the intricacies of turrets to fully understand this discussion. Different systems require different power and you can optimize turrets for either DPS or Alpha Damage or Shields or Armor which will yield different results. 1 Weapon =/= 1 Shield and so on. To make this very clear, we will assume everything is inside the same turret shell. Optimizing for Alpha or DPS will leave different amounts of internal space for other systems or hull/armor. A turret that can fit on a spot on a ship is not guaranteed at all to have the same energy requirements as a same mass same size turret of different interior design.

2nd Paragraph) You are making sweeping implications from what seems to be a point of ignorance. On very small ships this is a very large concern, and it only decreases in importance to a moderate concern with larger ships. I can assume that you have dealt less with turrets than I have from your writings, which is okay, but it is obvious that you don't understand their intricacies.

I am not arguing different rates of regeneration between Alpha and DPS focused weapons. I am arguing that they will have inherently different power draws from the mothership even if they fit inside the same shell. This inherent difference leads to difficulties in making cross fleet turrets. Most turrets would have to be tailor made for each individual ship.

Did neither of you read the section on weapons? Weapons of the same block count and energy per damage will have the same energy per second requirements.

*Further Edit Clarification* Remember how Overdrive increases power need along with several other modifications to weapons, lest we forget Secondary/Tertiary usage.

Overdrive modifies the ratio of DPS per block and power per damage. It is really not applicable for this comparison.

Us people who like the idea of self powered turrets are saying what are saying BECAUSE there is the One-Reactor limit for the parent ship. If not, I would just put specific power reactors immediately under each of my turrets. This arbitrary One-Reactor limit, -Which I Think Is A Good Balance Decision-, is why Turrets should be able to power themselves.

How can you support self powered turrets but not multiple reactors on the same ship? They're EXACTLY THE SAME, except one is docked.

Man, all this talk about docked reactors being imbalanced, about self-powered turrets being somehow wrong. I like building huge, self-powered turrets. A real, manly turret is at least a million blocks.
Why not just make docked entities inherit the division of Tech Points? So, for instance, if you have a reactor of 100 blocks on the main ship, and then two turrets with 50-block reactors on each, then the ship gets 50% of the TP allotment and the turrets each get 25%. This would work perfectly and would keep people from cheesing offensive chambers on turrets, because, for instance, if you had a 50,000-block reactor on a ship and only 1000 blocks of reactor for each turret, then each turret would only have a tiny fraction of the total TP (that is, it would only have power, not much in the way of chambers).

TP is only used for effects and modifiers, though. The main issue with self powered turrets is that they are SELF POWERED, which would not require any TP.

I think, even from an RP standpoint, it's cool to have self-powered turrets.

We don't balance the game around what is "cool from an RP standpoint," we balance the game around what is balanced. And self powered turrets are broken.

This is deceptive. Docked power with logic clocks and power beams is a performance issue. Turrets having their own power are no more of a performance issue than unpowered turrets of equal size.

You're not accounting for the fact that many self powered turrets sit on multiple layers of docked power generators. These specifically would go away with a linear power system, but turrets having their own power IS a performance issue. The game has to worry about calculating all the regen and reactor damage for 2 extra entities for self powered turrets. Multiply that by the dozens of turrets and docked guns a larger meta ship might have, and you're cutting down on a decent load by disabling their reactors and making docked guns useless.

I still believe that the docked entities should still be allowed to use internal reactors, having a turret that can self power itself, can relieve some of the stress from the mothership, and at this current time, i still do not have any idea how many reactor blocks you are going to require to get what we currently have for the system now (i.e. how many blocks will it take for 2million generation)

But the problem with self powered docked entities is that they have no stress on the mothership. They are self powering, self aiming, and immune to frame rate lag. They need to be more like a system and less like drones glued to tripods.

I'm going to speculate about a planned feature here: boarding. If I'm going to dock to another ship to board it, does this mean that my ship is now going to be dependent on the ship I'm boarding in order to fire it's turrets in case backup arrives? What if my target is woefully smaller than me? What about faction permissions? Will docking to a hostile faction's ship allow your own to keep its reactor on? Or will the enemy ship be forced to try to feed the demand of my ship? What if I felt like being a dick and built a large pulse/can/overdrive weapon on my boarding craft to purposefully try to drag the enemy ship's power down?

Boarding was planned to be done with the teleporter system, and I see no reason for it to be any different. Even if it was through docking (this certainly wouldn't result in any terrible collision lag!), it would have its own checks and not work like normal docking.

 

[Atheu]

But the problem with self powered docked entities is that they have no stress on the mothership. They are self powering, self aiming, and immune to frame rate lag. They need to be more like a system and less like drones glued to tripods.

Did you also read my next post?

 

[Lecic]

Did you also read my next post?

I honestly think your entire argument is flawed here, in the real world we use ammunition, in starmade we use energy to fire our weapons, now this being said, the barrel can be the weapon output, and the base of the turret it's powerplant (since there's no other purpose for the base than it being the source of power)

if we remove the powerplant from the turret, what else is there to put into the base of the turret? we'd be back to how we started with the old docking system

There are lots of things that could be done for the base of the turret. The main one that comes to mind is something people have wanted for ages, which is allowing us to put our secondaries and effects into the base of the turret.

 

[Firrion]

I notice how your goals mention allowing creativity but balance is not on the list. I assume all of you at Schine know that balance should be your priority. Creative range is nice as wide as possible, but some limits should be present. Else we end up with same old problems and the game's non-creative element remains pointless.

There are a lot of complaints here saying this is completely unintuitive to new players while also being needlessly complicated. Others are saying how there's no depth to the system to dig around in. Bit of a paradox there. Anyway. I don't see how this can be unintuitive, as all the new players go through the same moves; place the reactor, if you make it too big a popup in the build mode (for example) with a mouseover tooltip tells you to place additional stabilizers as far as possible to increase efficiency - chambers are after all completely optional and the most complicated part of all this. They may be a part of the power system, but they are an upgrade, not the basics. Put reactor; put stabilizers is far easier if you can just blob them than trying to explain just how you need to place current power modules in order to not make them dead weight on the ship. As for the depth, it comes in form of putting stabilizers in the best place to maximize efficiency for the main and auxiliary reactors, and maximizing the effects of the chambers. And if there's going to be a lot of buffs, there are a ton of loadouts for the ship. Going to take a while to find the best one to suit your needs. This is the kind of depth that doesn't need a spreadsheet to min-max (read: intuitive and simple) while it still requires skill and experience to handle. It comes down to the UI, if it's made visible and without the need to go through lots of menus, it really can be that simple. All those menus (priority power for example) can have default values so you don't have to fiddle with it at all unless you want to. Plenty of options, but the basics are all you need. And those are as simple as it gets.

As for there being a limit on one reactor, it feels a bit arbitrary, but i don't see a problem there really. Provided those new hit points work more or less the same when taking damage as the old system. If you'd adjust the Tech Point (after how many hours of brainstorming did you just give up on the name, Schine? i know the feeling) generation to balance out so you can have multiple reactors without more chambers working at once, that would be neat. We can do without, but whatever. Don't see the point of having an active reactor for every system on the ship if they all fail in the same order anyway.

Don't know what to make of turrets, it would make more sense to have them be equal to the main gun in terms of chamber buffs. It sure feels like that would become a breeding ground of exploits, but i can't think of any. If you could make it work somehow, i'm sure we'd all appreciate it.

Probably missed something, i've been thinking about all this ever since it was posted and there's a lot to cover. Too much for one brain. All things considered i think this will be a good thing when it gets sorted out. Though that'll probably take some time. Big fan of the chamber thingies. And yeah, TPs could do with a better name. I'd give you some ideas but i too am suffering from a fatal lack of creativity currently. Sorry Schine :/

 

[TrainDodger]

There are lots of things that could be done for the base of the turret. The main one that comes to mind is something people have wanted for ages, which is allowing us to put our secondaries and effects into the base of the turret.

I second this. It would be nice to be able to build turrets where the topmost part in the chain (the elevation axis/gun system) doesn't have to be so large relative to the base, like it does right now. Like actual battleship guns, for instance; the whole gun house doesn't have to elevate with the guns, just the barrels.