More brainstorm fodder, here:
Would the sector used to instance planets in this suggestion benefit from actually being a cube of 9 or even 25 sectors, with the planet itself in the middle, rather than merely 1 sector?
Reasons: for servers sticking to smaller sector dimensions (and probably even some with large sectors) this would create a larger region of navigable atmosphere. Particularly around a very massive planet that fills most of its primary sector, having atmospheric sectors around it would prevent it from becoming absurdly claustrophobic and ruining the effect of being on a huge planet.
It would also facilitate things like dogfights being not totally useless.
It would allow planetary defenses a reasonable opportunity to lock onto and eliminate inbound threats. Otherwise re-entry vehices for warheads and dropships and such could appear literally right on top of you with no real warning or time to respond. Not terribly realistic, and pretty likely formula for ragequits when some troll starts waving you with gunship drones that appear all over your home base out of nowhere.
Also... it would prevent warping into the planet's crust or core without needing a special function, because the region of the planet's wormhole in the main galaxy that you entered from could determine which of the atmospheric sectors you enter.
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This change would inevitably introduce a new way to have PTS combat. Specifically, I'm thinking about Star Wars Ep 5 ESB, where "our heroes" (tm) used a command center (command chairs!) to pick-and-choose "nearby" targets in space and shoot at them.
Example Starmade mechanic:
Whatever weapon you link to the targeting computer is firing straight up at the sky after you have selected the target in a tactical space map. The planet-side shot simply disappears when it hits the skybox.
On the space-side, immediately when it disappears against the planet-side skybox, that weapon output simply shoots out from the center of the planet billboard toon, flying straight towards the target at high speed.
Ships would lose the ability to "hide" behind the planet, on the side opposite the weapon, and the planet would automatically become more defensible when you can shoot out in any direction. However, ships can always retreat farther out away from the planet, out of the range of the planet-side guns and tactical maps.
I love it, but in practical terms how do we allow weapons to lock onto a ship that is a million sectors away?
At first glance I fear we would need a special PTS block or AI setting that would literally set the entity's weapon output (and computer location for target acquisition purposes) as being the center of the planet toon and just shooting right from there with essentially a decorative effect happening on the planet.
[doublepost=1515611475][/doublepost]LOL - can you imagine the solid stream of DPS pouring out of a planet equipped with a dozen, scattered heavy PTS weapons (v. large capital turret sized)???