3 additional propulsion types. A reasonable suggestion.

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    • Legacy Citizen 2
    Hello, sorry if these ideas we already suggested. I realy don't have time to browse through those "covanet, mac canon, mechs, make it callofdutyshooter, plz" things. I tried to think these ideas reasonably with respect to the game's engine.

    More propulsion types:



    TL;DR:

    -effective and space saving drive for small ships (fighters)

    -anti-gravity drive for hover crafts or landspeeders. Works on ships gravity field too.

    -sector teleport



    Shared traits - once you place the propulsion block, it will be active just as it is now in game. If you decide to put two or more propulsion types, you will be able to select them through the numbers hotbar just like you select weapons and other devices. You can have only one propulsion active on the same time.



    Plasma Reactor Drive:


    One block of PRD offers far more thrust than one block of the standard thruster and thus better manouverability and acceleration. But the more PRD blocks you put, the more power you're going need, eventualy rising the power demand to insane ammounts after certain number of PRDs installed. This ammount rise would be realy extreme, insanely extreme, making them totaly inefficient for big ships (to avoid exploits).


    Let's say a fighter with average 50 mass needs 4 PRDs to get same results at the same energy demand as far bigger ammount of standard thrusters. This makes PRD ideal for small fighters. You can use the saved space for better weapons or defensive systems.



    Gravitron Drive:


    This is not a propulsion for the space travel (but can be used in many creative ways). They do a simple job. Once activated, you don't need to worry about gravity anymore. Do you want your giant ship hovering in the atmosphere without worrying being pulled down and crash on the unknown world? The Gravitron is for you. You can also use Gravitron in artifical gravity created by ships and stations.


    A little bonus - Gravitrons not powerful enough to get the ship out of the gravity field will be able to make craft hover only above the ground (let's say 1 or 1.5 blocks above). But they still have a enough power to make a small "jump". Gravtanks, landspeeders, "magnetic" boarding ship, I'm sure you can think more ideas.





    FTL+additional Heat Sinks (extending blocks):


    These are working basicaly as they did in Battlestar: Galactica series. Once you activate your FTL, you will be asked to input sector coordinates and after confirming, the spooling timer will show. Once the timer reaches zero, you will be "teleported" to the target sector. The number of Heat Sink blocks will decide how far your ship is able to jump and mass of your ship decides how long the spool sequence is going to be.

    Whatever you do, the FTL jump will drain at least 80% of your energy so us FTL wisely. Also you can place only one FTL block and that can be supported by connected Heat Sinks (FTL core transporting large masses can overheat without additional heat sinks). Also spooling the FTL core requires some base energy, so you will not be able to put FTLs on every little darn thing. If you want to use FTLs on light fighters/scouts, you will have to sacrifice some space for additional generators to spool the FTL.
     
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    I would add vector-thrusters - as in, \'engines\' that don\'t make you go faster, but increase your turning rate



    They would require to be clustered AND have to be on the outside of large ships, but would speed up the turning rate of otherwise very cumbersome ships.

    - it\'d enable large ship builds to be more manouverable
    - it\'d be nice shiny priority targets that opponents could aim to take out, to reduce enemy cap ship manouverability
    - could be \'directional, so you\'d need at least four clusters of these to help speed up turning in each direct

    Ideally you could require even more, if they were coded to take into consideration where the ship\'s center of gravity was, so you neeeded to space them out away from the center of gravity to push better



    just an idea
     
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    Because there\'s not a week without this idea suggested, I have decided to not mention it and add something new instead.
     
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    • Legacy Citizen 3
    • Thinking Positive
    Love the FTL idea. I\'d like nothing more than to make the Vaygr Battle Cruiser I\'m building jump capable.
     
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    • Competition Winner - Small Fleets
    • Legacy Citizen 10
    I believe a really neat system would be solar sails. They would allow for fast speeds while using no energy. The downside of the solar sails would be that turning and deceleration would be really slow so they are only ideal for trying to travel far distances. They would be placed like plexdoors(ability to appear and disappear) and hooked up to a solar sail CPU. I imagine them looking like the solar sail on Count Dooku\'s escape pod in the second star wars movie when he retreats after fighting Yoda. For you who haven\'t seen Star wars it basically looks like a thin transparent orange sail. Another advantage is that you can exit your core while the sail is activated since you only can move in one direction (forwards) so you don\'t need to be manually driving aka almost acts as a really basic cruise/ auto pilot. Instead of some type of warping system, a hyper drive block should be added. You would simple assign it a hot bar # and it would use 100-250 or so energy X your ships mass per second(same idea as how cloaking works). this is smarter than warping because imagine how annoying it would be if you were fighting an enemy and right as you got their shield down they teleporting away from you and you didn\'t know where they went. Hyper drive would give some type of indication as to what direction they went.
     
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    um the teleporter would instantly drain all your shields and weapons until after the teleport. and anyway the spooling period is like 10-30 seconds, plenty of time for you to OBLITERATE them.
     
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    • Thinking Positive
    It\'s not for combat application. Everyone knows that.