pre 2.0 alpha cannons (can/pul) were useful as sidearms because you could have a can/pul/ion weapon and a can/can/punch and use the can/can/punch all the time then briefly switch into can/pul/ion when the cooldown was up and go back to your machinegun wasting less than a second of DPS. With the charge mechanic they lose this ability since you can't use the machinegun while charging so you're wasting DPS for much longer and the sidearm ends up being a complete waste. 2.0 is extremely detrimental to have a varied weapon loadout.
Aside from messing up weapons, the reduction in weapon mass you're allowed is one of the worst changes in the game's history. Long post ahead, but i do have a point.
Turret And Hull Weights Of Various Tanks - Modern Vehicles Discussion
"gun" part in starmade isn't just the barrel and chamber, it's also doing the reloading, ammunition storage, ammunition feed etc.
Make that 1:2, not that MUH REALISM is any kind of sensible argument, but you really should be able to tell, simply from the size of a tanks turret compared to its hull that those numbers were bullshit. I'm sure the relative weight of guns would go down for tanks if they could fit shield generators as well.
Having a healthy weight cost between the different systems is good for the game because we
have the option had the option to modify how much mass we wanted to invest in different functionality; if 3% of your ship is your dps and 60% is your armor, why would you not drop armor to 57%, a tiny survivability bonus, to DOUBLE your dps? This is the problem with RP thinking; you decide what your ship should be like on some arbitrary conceptual basis, like rebuilding some dumbass star trek ship, while PVP building is tailored to the mechanics; you can NEVER tailor mechanics to someone who is ignoring them, it's ridiculous to suggest that you should.
Wrt the realism, rp gunsizes and MUH SMALL GUNS:
Take a look at the turrets here. On a battleship everything in the turret is what would be considered part of the weapon system in starmade, probably also some of the other stuff like munition storage, but i think starmade equivalent is reactor/capacitor blocks and those dont always go in turrets either, so fairly similar. This is what my turret designs for optimized PVP building looks like:
Internal turret size:
I'd say there's a lot more similarity between modern warships and PVP ships than RP ships, because they're both built around the same core idea of MASS DISTRIBUTION. PVP ships and warships are both optimized around having as much of the systems that make them effective (guns, engines, defense etc) and as little as possible of the stuff that's keeping those things running, or otherwise not contributing for the purpose the ship is built for.
From watching RPers in their showers (yes i can do this) i've reverse engineered their building style as closely as possible, and it goes something like this:
- Construct a tube
- Doodle on it
- ???
- Beautiful, inefficient trash
RP sees adding turrets to a design as nothing more than doodling; i've never seen an RP ship with turrets recessed into the hull, except as a tiny socket. No attempts at incorporating them into their interiors either; no gunnery stations no internal turret access, not even internal view of the turret so you can see them moving:
No internal access like this:
No visible / mechanical sockets like this:
The key reason you don't see this is the method through which RP ships are built; you make the tube THEN you doodle on it. If the tube/hull is the first thing you make i imagine it's very dificult to get something like this to fit without severely compromising your design, especially if you've already started on your interior. PvP ships are, at least for everyone i know, built turrets first, because they are the most dificult part of the ship to adjust later in the build, so getting them right first and adjusting everything else accordingly is much easier, and PVP builders usually keep mass limits in mind before laying the first block so we know how many turrets we're going to fit and how heavy they'll end up being. Basically in PVP creating and fitting the turrets for a ship is part of conceptualizing it, similar to when RP builders are making wireframes for their ship's skeletons.
My point here, and the following is pure, unadulterated conjecture, is that all the complaints from RP and cosmetic builders about turret/weapon sizes has nothing to do with realism or aesthetics. In terms of realism, turrets on real warships simply are fucking huge, not like the peashooters RPers build. Granted, they dont fit all their mass into their barrels, and theres a good coupple of arguments for allowing turrets to fit slaves and effects in the bases, but that also allows for a lot of potential exploits and much worse complexity in making turrets; for instance what happens if you have multiple weapon computers on the barrel and base? what if there is no base? what if you have multiple barrel entities(would be extremely common for single axis turrets)?
The calls for realism also seem EXTREMELY particular about which "realisms" they want incorporated. Never seen anyone complain about how much a character can carry or sound in space.
As for aesthetics, if it was simply about having turrets that look small, why don't RP builders use ball turrets? I don't have a good picture of one but you basically cram all the weapon systems into a sphere with 10-20% of the sphere sticking up above the hull, like this:
With a double jointed center. Sure they can't depress at all, but little things like turret coverage never bothered them before. Sure turrets wont have the exact same shape or movement as a regular turret, but the point is there are plenty of options that allow visually small turrets that are still high mass and i've never seen an RP ship use them, so i'm calling bullshit on the aesthetic argument for microturrets as well.
I believe, and feel free to correct me on this you larping bastards, that it is neither aesthetics nor realism that cause the call for smaller weapons, but rather that RP process introduces turrets to a ship in the final stage of shipbuilding, often after interior and definitely after exterior are supposed to be finished, where fitting a turret of sufficient mass to the ship would force the builder to completely rebuild huge sections of their ships because there's a huge deathball in the bathroom all of a sudden. It's the only thing that explains why they never have turret oriented interiors, because when adding interiors to a shell that already has huge turrets integrated, it's super obvious to add a few walkways and consoles to the turret and let it have it's own little room.
If changing weapon sizes did nothing but let RPers build ships the way they want as it's natural for them, i'd be all for it, but the reduction in weapon sizes has come at unacceptable cost to PVP builders. The only way you could limit weapon sizes without simply multiplying the damage of existing weapons was through 2.0's reactor system that has taken away mass distribution as a design mechanic so we can no longer exchange mass in one system for mass in another, because everything is gated by the power restriction. This forces all ships into fixed ratios, or extremely limited ones, completely eliminating the possibility of different ship doctrines.
The ability to make functionally unique ships, not merely painting different looking ones, is the core draw in starmade for every competitive builder, and it has been ERASED by 2.0. We are NOT going to convert to roleplayers or cosmetic builders, we are simply going to leave. The elimination of variety in ship doctrines is also horrible for combat in general. Even if the game has multiple weapon options, if all ships have the same speed, defense and staying power then one weapon is going to be the best, because all fights will have the same context, except for ships being smaller/larger, but since that now translates to being a fixed amount stronger/weaker than the other guy i don't see a situation where one weapon would be best against a similar sized ship and less than 50% as good against a ship half your size as the others. Most fps have characters with the same stats, but they have terrain to offset things. If an FPS takes place in open space with no obstacles for 10s of kilometers i call dips on the sniper rifle.
So if the weapon miniaturization and 2.0 which is necessary to enforce it has completely destroyed the fun in competitive shipbuilding and drastically reduced the fun in simple combat which amounts to the vast majority of players losing out on what they enjoy, and all that it gains is that RP builders don't have to adapt the way they build ships, isn't that a super stupid update?
