Ability to desginate sections of ships for specfic purposes for bonouses.

[philthy mcnasty]

One of the things that has been bugging me lately, is that there is no coherent reason to ship design.

I can stick thrusters, powerblocks, and other blocks anywhere i want. While this adds a lot of customization, it also does not make too much sense.

Worse still, the most efficient designs tend to be cubes and rectangles, so while a ship may have a pretty hull, the inside systems are all rectangle in design, with checkerboard patterns of powerblocks and thrusters/shield modules being the most prevalent.

One soultion, is to allow players to designate sections of their ships for different purposes, like engineering for power and thrust, weapons control for computers, and weapon zones for weapons. What these zones would do, is provide specific bonuses for blocks in them. The other benefit of this, is that the orentation of these zones can be set to a default position, so if i have a "bottom facing salvage zone", then all salvage beams in that zone will face the default direction that i have set.

This way, players can be rewarded for their creativity, furthermore, when the hp system is implemented, this would allow other players to target specific systems when they are discovered either via scanning, or knowledge of the ship type. After all, there may be instances in which you only want to disable weapons or engines, like if you want to salvage a ship, or just want to scare someone away from a claim.

certain sections would however, have weakened bonuses if there are multiple sections, so multiple engineering sections would not be as efficient as one engineering.

Also, certain sections would be limited in size based on mass of the ship, this would prevent abuse.

 

[jayman38]

This is an interesting alternative to using system computers to create subsystem targets. I like it. Possible marker location for the subsection target: geometric center of the subsystem area. Because some people will want to create multiple subsections for a system type, I'd recommend only deactivating all blocks within that subsystem when it is "destroyed" (drops below some level of HP?)

This begs the question, how do we determine the damage or destruction of one of these subsystems without a control computer? (Example ideas: 50% block loss, 50% HP loss, 50% mass loss within the subsystem, server configurable, whichever is reached first)

Also, regardless of how we determine a section is "destroyed", we should have some massive effect for when it is. Such as the explosive destruction of the subsection via a simulated nuke explosion at the center of the subsection, with a diameter of the smallest dimension of the subsystem bounding box (or maybe a diameter of the middle-size dimension for a chance to do damage outside the bounding box, to other systems), with an epicenter at the geometric center of the subsystem. Furthermore, any surviving blocks in that subsystem's bounding box should be rendered inactive, and shouldn't provide anything but physical properties such as mass and HP to the host structure.

 

[MineCatFTW]

This seems like a neat idea. It definitely needs some fleshing out however.

 

[Blakpik]

+1 Support! This sounds like a very good way to encourage ship building, I don't see how it fixes the 'doom cube issue'.

 

[jayman38]

+1 Support! This sounds like a very good way to encourage ship building, I don't see how it fixes the 'doom cube issue'.

It won't fix the doom cube issue at all. If anything, it would encourage more "cuboid" construction. However, I think the benefit of targeted subsystems would outweigh the concern over cube ship construction.

 

[Blakpik]

It won't fix the doom cube issue at all. If anything, it would encourage more "cuboid" construction. However, I think the benefit of targeted subsystems would outweigh the concern over cube ship construction.

True, we still gotta fix that doom cube issue, anyone can make solid boxes of parts, I think there should be a reward for building an actual ship instead of a glorified gun.

 

[philthy mcnasty]

yeah the doom cube annoys me, because i see some nice ship designs out there that are pretty, and should work in theory, but they become too inefficient to work right in the current game.

One way to make the shapes for the compartments differ, is to use a system similar to the build helper. That way, inside*(edit, should be "instead") of just a square, you can set it up as an ellipse or sphere. I also feel that the build helper needs to have pyramids and other shapes in it too, but this is an alpha game, so i assumed that the devs would add that later.

But i do feel strongly that compartments need to be a feature. I used to be a sailor, and ships are separated in compartments so that we can have water tight integrity. It would only make sense that space ships be broken up into sections, to maintain air tight integrity.

I also feel that having certain sections explode if hit makes sense. this would add some strategy and tactics to the space battles of the game. It would also make boarding actions more important if a faction wants to capture a ship.

 

[NeonSturm]

I worry about cube-sized sections.
> Why not just use docked ships instead of sections then?

 

[jayman38]

I worry about cube-sized sections.
> Why not just use docked ships instead of sections then?

That would be another good way to designate subsystems. The game just needs a mechanic to share the docked section's systems completely, without transfer beam losses. Otherwise, there will be very little motivation to create these subsystems. They would simply be a RP novelty.