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Original post by Aemilianus Lopicallo
original post:http://oldsite.star-made.org/content/personal-defense-armor-weapons-boarding-robots-and-medicine
original post:http://oldsite.star-made.org/content/personal-defense-armor-weapons-boarding-robots-and-medicine
Personal Defense - Armor, Weapons, Boarding, Robots, and Medicine
++ Incoming huge wall of text ++
On personal defense
~~~
Personal defense is where we brandish laser guns and run around shooting people like Imperial Guardsmen fighting Orks. We wear armor, and use weapons to defeat enemies trying to hurt us and/or our property, who also wear armor and use weapons to defeat enemies trying to hurt them while hurting their property.
There are multiple weapon types in my suggestion - Ranging from knives, pistols, rifles, swords, and special heavy weapons like rocket launchers and miniguns. Due to popular demand, perhaps there could be some sort of editor - much like the ship build editor - that allows you to design your own weapons? This is explained later on in the suggestion.
Ranged Weapons
I propose 4 tiers of ranged weapons, that fire 2 types of projectiles. The 3 tiers are pistols, rifles and heavy weapons. The 2 types of projectiles are energy and kinetic.
Pistols are tier 1; the weakest. They are cheap, ubiquitous, light, and do varying amounts of damage, but they are great as a sidearm because they are reliable.
Rifles are tier 2; which is right in the middle. They are good all around weapons, but they are rarer than pistols, slower firing (unless it is automatic, which drastically increases its price), and less commonly found.
Heavy weapons are tier 3; they are the most powerful. Heavy weapons are big, heavy, and expensive. They are capable of doing tremendous damage to infantry, and some of them are even capable of damaging ships. An example of a heavy weapon would be a missile launcher. They are big, heavy, expensive, and powerful.
Tier 4 weapons are not like the other 3 tiers of weapons. Tier 4 weapons are grenades, which have completely different effects from guns, but they are still ranged weapons, even if the range is very short in comparison. Grenades have a much larger variety of effects than the other 3 tiers of weapons do. They can short out machines, create large anti-personnel explosions in the form of fragmentation, and disable enemies for a short time by blinding them and making them temporarily deaf. Grenades are one use, of course, but each grenade is much more expensive than one magazine/clip/cartridge/whatever of ammunition for any kind of gun, barring the most exclusive and powerful of weapons. Grenades would bounce around corners and arc over obstacles - Perfect for boarding parties, which will be explained later on.
The two types of projectiles I mentioned are fired from the 3 tiers of guns. These two types of projectiles are energy and kinetic. Kinetic projectiles are the variety of solid projectiles that we see today. Energy projectiles, however, are different.
Energy projectiles are things like lasers, plasma, and lightning. An energy weapon is more expensive than a kinetic weapon, but they usually lack recoil, are more accurate, make no noise, are incredibly powerful in comparison to kinetic weapons, or a combination of all of those. An energy weapon is almost always better than a kinetic weapon. Their only downside is how expensive they are, which is usually 2 - 6 times more expensive than kinetic weapons.
Ammunition could be a problem. While kinetic weapons are MUCH cheaper than energy weapons (and also less powerful), it is important that you always have enough ammunition, because a gun without bullets shoots nothing. Bullets should be manufacturable from things like plextanium, and also purchaseable at shops. Buying bullets would still be pretty cheap, though. But we all knew that, didn't we? What I wanted to focus on was ammunition for ENERGY WEAPONS. Energy weapons would, depending on how powerful they are, have varying amounts of ammunition in their energy cartridges. Buying an energy cartridge is not easy - They are made out of expensive materials and must be capable of storing a vast amount of energy to power their weapons. Luckily, they are completely reusable, and you can recharge one completely for free at a power block. Manufacturing them should be possible too; energy cartridges are worth a pretty penny.
Now we can harness the power of LOVE, which is rumored to be the most powerful force in existence, to create WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION!
Armor
We have all these devastating weapons capable of slaughtering thousands of men before having to reload, but how will we protect ourselves from them? Why, with armor of course! Different kinds of armor can protect us from these horrifying weapons. I propose 4 tiers of armor.
Vests are tier 1; They are not very protective, but they provide the minimum of protection needed to survive combat. Forgetting your armored vest when you repel the boarders/kill everyone on board is like forgetting to put on a spacesuit when you're going out into space. This is a basic essential - Much as a pistol is a basic essential - to personal defense.
Moving on, tier 2. Tier 2 are suits. Suits are like your basic space-suit, but they provide full body protection, and military spacesuits are covered in metal plates to provide protection against antipersonnel weaponry. Even a civilian's suit easily provides the protection of a vest, and much, much more.
Tier 3 are powersuits. Powersuits are like regular suits, but they are only military weapons, and they are always completely armored from head to toe. Powersuits are powered using electricity, and servomotors, increasing the user's strength and speed by a notable amount. A user wearing a powersuit is often faster, stronger, and tougher than any normal person. Because powersuits are so tough, they are also usually much more durable, making them the only armor truly effective against melee weapons. Unfortunately, powersuits require constant energy to keep the suit functioning. No power, no mobility. Nevertheless, the wearer of a powersuit is a very formiddable opponent. They are also usually soldiers, extremely rich or privelaged, or criminals - likely wanted dead or alive.
Personal forcefields/shields are tier 4; much like forcefields, they sheath the target in a protective field without adding additional bulk. Personal shields are mostly invisible until the wearer is shot. They are the most effective against ranged weapons, but they require energy to absorb/deflect projectiles. Every time a shield absorbs/deflects projectiles, it loses energy, which is stored in a battery. Batteries can be very small, but provide very little power for the shield, or backpack mounted, which is heavy and reduces the size of your inventory, but provides a lot of power for the shield. Shields are VERY expensive, because they negate all damage done to them by 65%, and blasts from weak weapons like pistols literally bounce off shields. Fortunately, they provide no protection against melee weapons, and only reduce damage from kinetic weapons by 40%, but they are still incredible in how much it reduces damage to the wearer. Shields can also be worn over other armor - Even powersuits (although then it uses twice as much energy). The end of days is the day someone equips an entire army with power armor and shields.
Melee
Say you run out of ammunition, even for your pistol. Well, since you have no way of fighting anymore, it's time to surrender, right? Wrong. Good thing you brought a vibrosword, you're not going down yet! Melee weapons are your last resort, your smash-them-in-the-everything-with-a-handheld/handworn-object card. They are capable of doing extreme damage, because in the future they still have swords because that's cool. Melee weapons can manifest in all sorts of ways!
Some examples of melee weapons would be arming swords, short swords, broad swords, rapiers, hand-and-a-half swords, greatswords, knives, daggers, clubs, flanged maces, winged maces, knobbed maces, spiked maces/morningstars, short spears, regular spears, pikes, tridents, scythes, voulges, berdiches, poleaxes, warhammers, whips, halberds, battleaxes, billhooks, fauchards, lances, staves, mauls, ranseur, spetum, corseques, partisans, glaives, bec de corbins (may or may not be a hammer), mallets, barmaces, cudgels, falchions, katanas, nodachi (technically a greatsword), fighting picks, sabres, scimitars, shivs, and the chinese dao, which is like a broadsword-sabre hybrid. And note, all of these can be vibro weapons/monomolecularly edged/chainsaw bladed/energy weapons.
Boarding
So we have a ton of weapons and armor, now what? Well, we use them! We can use all of these toys in boarding parties. All we have to do is get on board an enemy ship, kill all the crew and steal their treasure! It's not that hard. Unfortunately, getting on the ship is the problem, so here are a few ideas on how to board a ship.
Teleportation. We can teleport onto enemy ships. All we have to do is get on the ship in the first place (which i will elaborate in the next paragraph), and set up a beacon. That way, friendly troops can teleport onto an enemy ship, and the enemy crew has to disable the beacon or else people will keep teleporting aboard until there are no more people that can board. The boarders would be a huge problem, because they could run around damaging ship components and weakening the ship in general, not to mention killing all the crew. A teleport beacon would have to recharge everyone time someone uses it, so 100 people can't just teleport onto a ship at once. This makes it important to either have multiple teleport beacons, or one huge one that must be defended. One thing we can do with teleporters that has nothing to do with violence, is creating a teleport beacon and allowing two ships to transfer crew. This could have many uses, such as trading cargo, hiring extra crew members at a station, etc. A teleporter beacon would require energy to stay up, and the more teleporter beacons that are connected, the longer ranged the teleport beacon becomes, and the faster it recharges.
Tractor beams. Tractor beams can slow down, or even stop a ship completely, and allow crew to board it. A tractor beam would require energy for as long as it is maintained, but the more tractor beams there are connected, the longer ranged it is, and the more powerful the pull of the beam. Tractor beams would have their own computers, too. Maybe, if you're really poor, you can use harpoons instead of tractor beams! You'll have to find a really, really tough rope though.
Electromagnetic Pulses. Also known as EMPs, an electromagnetic pulse would temporarily disrupt the power in a ship, shutting off power to all components, or at least reducing power. The EMP requires energy to use. The EMP may or may not be instantaneous, but it uses energy every time it is fired. This does not mean a tiny ship can use an EMP to turn off a huge ship and blow it up, because the EMP does not automatically turn off all power to the ship, it only reduces it based on how many EMP blocks are connected. The more EMP blocks that are connected, the longer ranged it is, and the more power it disrupts. A huge ship can have an EMP superweapon that disables entire fleets! No power, no shields, no weapons, and no life support.
Jetpacks. Jetpacks can, if the enemy ship is very slow/immobilized (tractor beam comes in mind), using a jetpack will not only get you to the ship you want to board faster, but it will also save energy for your ship because you won't have to hold up the tractor beam for as long. Jetpacks can use conventional fuel, or use energy to power them. Conventional fuel jetpacks are cheap, but you must pay to refuel it. Energy jetpacks are much more expensive. Not only is it rechargeable at any power block, but refuelling it is free.
Magboots/gravboots. Magboots/gravboots are turned on once you enter another ship. Magboots/gravboots make you enter the gravity of the ship you are on once they are turned on, eliminating the need to hunt for a gravity block lest you get thrown around on the inside of a moving ship. They would be uncommon, but not rare, and slightly on the expensive side, but manufacturing them is simple.
Hacking. Hacking a locked plexdoor, or a weapons computer, or a shield block, for example. Hacking a door would open it, hacking a weapons computer would disable it, and hacking a shield block would turn it off, weakening the shields. To hack things, maybe we could have a special key bound to "hack". You'd need a hacker object in your inventory, which would be rare and expensive. Maybe different hackers would have different levels, and the higher level they are, the faster they do their job. Different objects would have different hacking speeds. Hacking a shield block, for example, would not take very long, because most of the time a single ship will have tens to hundreds of shield blocks. Hacking a weapons computer would take a very long time, because by hacking a weapons computer, you completely disable a portion of the weapons that a ship is in control of. After something is hacked, someone has to re-enable it by using it. This process takes the same amount of time to hack the object, but you do not need any special tools. The only problem is finding the hacked object, but a hacked object would be easily distinguishable from the others because it would have a different texture to simulate it being disabled.
Demolition Charges. These are blocks that, like disintegrators, are used to create explosions to devastating effect to the ship. However, unlike distintegrators that are described as "uncontrolled, wild, and difficult to manage", these demolotion charges will be simple blocks with the ability to detonate with the press of a button. As in, place demolition charge, activate demolition charge, wait 10 seconds kaboom big hole in ship. These charges could or could not work on shields, depending on how unbalanced that would be (probably not as you could easily fly away, unless you cannot move in which case you might as well be dead anyways). Demolition charges always have a set explosion size - perhaps big enough to punch a 5x5 hole into a regular hull, and a 3x3 hole into a hardened hull. I imagine they'd be pretty expensive, since they can also harm players on the other side and possibly destroy cores. In fact, this'd be very useful for the destruction of crucial ship elements like shields, weapons, and power generators.
Now the problem with boarding is the fact that the shield completely protects everything inside too, so it is impossible to damage the interior of the ship with bombs and heavy weapons. There's also the problem where you can just throw a ton of antimatter cannons on the inside of a ship and keep firing, preventing anyone from being able to entier your ship lest they get shot. I'm not sure how to fix it, but we have to fix it to make boarding a viable tactic. Maybe antimatter cannon projectiles cannot go through the ship they are attached to anymore, and shields only work on blocks exposed to space? Or maybe shields can just create a bubble around the ship.
Security
You have all these weapons and armor, but you have no one to use it! And there's more guys boarding your ship than you have crew! What do you do?! Use robots! A new AI, which everyone wants to call a BILLY AI, could be used in the creation of drones/androids/robots, but not cyborgs because cyborgs are human. A BILLY AI could be placed in a voxel editor much like the weapon builder and ship builder, and used to fight enemy boarders. They won't be stupid and run straight towards you without noticing the wall literally in front of them, they should at least be able to round corners without getting trapped.
A BILLY AI can be equipped with any of the weapons that regular humans can use, even grenades! They should only use grenades when friendlies are not in range of the explosion, if possible. If not, then no grenades for robots. A BILLY AI can have variable stats. Some BILLY AIs are tougher than others, and some BILLY AIs are faster than others. BILLY AIs can have program functions, too! They can be support, melee specialists, and shocktroopers.
A support BILLY AI is not very tough, and very slow. However, they more than make up for it with their heavy weaponry, and their plethora of tools such as astrotechnician beams which they can use to fix other robots, and salvage lasers, which can be used to salvage things if they are programmed to salvage a specific block.
A melee specialist is not very tough, but incredibly fast. These are the ones that rush up to you like a hormogaunt/zergling and go Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Man on you with their 6 monomolecularly edged vibro chainsaws.
A shocktrooper BILLY AI is very tough, and has medium speed. It lacks heavy weapons, and uses medium weaponry like rifles instead. A shocktrooper BILLY AI is the medium ground of security bots, it is not too slow, not too fragile, and it uses decent weaponry if armed by the right people.
A way to control the security bots would be with AI controller blocks. These can be placed waaay in the back, and allow someone to control up to 10 bots. The controller can either direct individual robots (robot 2 engage target 5 open fire), or he can take control of one of them. The controller blocks have a certain maximum range, and if a robot leaves that range then the controller loses control of the robot, which then follows its default programming. Each robot would need to have a controller beacon that is attuned to the AI controller block. The more AI controller blocks that are grouped together, the longer ranged it is. The AI controller block only works on robots that are attuned to that specific block however, it can't take control of other robots unless those robots are hacked and attuned to the AI controller.
Furthermore, we could introduce several different types of doors. Many of these can even be used for civilian ships. Some examples would be hardened plexdoors, automatic plexdoors, forcefield doors, and glass doors. A hardened plexdoor would have the stats of a regular plexdoor, but doubled. Automatic plexdoors detect any player directly adjacent to the door and opens. Forcefield doors are like hardened plexdoors, but 3 times tougher than a regular plexdoor as well as translucent. Glass doors are just regular plexdoors but see-through. Perhaps doors could be locked using keycards, authentification codes, and DNA scanners. A door with an authentification code would require a password. A door with a keycard lock would require a special card. A door with a DNA scanner on it would only accept the DNA of certain people to open it, but would be incredibly expensive and military. Perhaps we will be able to acquire a DNA sample from say, a corpse?
Mechsuits
Giant robots? SOUNDS LIKE AN AMAZING IDEA! A mechsuit would basically be what would happen if you combined a powersuit with a robot. It's powered, and can use heavy weapons like they're pistols. These have nothing to do with boarding - They are FAR too large to fit in a space ship of any size. A mechsuit would only fit in specialized mechsuit rooms on specialized mechsuit transport ships (battletech dropships i'm looking at you).
Mechsuits are ridiculously expensive in comparison to other personal defense weapons, but they more than make up for the price by fielding weapons used by spaceships, and using armor that can deflect all small arms fire except for heavy weapons like a laser minigun. The only weakness of a mechsuit is the cockpit.
Just because they're giant robots, does not necessarily mean they are weapons, however. A mechsuit can also have salvage lasers for mining, and astrotechnician beams for repair, much like support bots. I would also suggest adding teleport beacons to mechsuits, so allies can teleport to them (expensive expensive expensive), and jump packs. Of course, they won't be able to FLY with jump packs, only slowly fly across a small distance at a low height to jump across impassable terrain.
Medicine
At the moment, healing is not an option. If you lose health, that health is gone for good unless you suicide. So, I suggest the ability to heal people. There are two options, using a medkit, and using a medical computer. Medkits can be bought a a shop or manufactured. A medical computer is more complex.
Medical computers are like weapons computers in that you put a bunch of blocks together and connect the computer to the blocks to make it more effective, but instead of killing people, a medical computer saves lives. Medical computers have Medicine dispenser blocks. The more medicine dispensers that are connected to the computer, the faster it heals. A single medicine dispenser would heal incredibly slowly, probably at 1 hitpoint every 2second, out of 100. This means that even if you are at 50% health, it takes almost an entire minute and 40 seconds to get all your health back. You'd need 200 medicine dispensers to heal 100 health in 2 seconds, which is a lot. Medicine dispensers use energy. The more dispensers, the more energy it uses every second.
tl;dr pew pew
