alternative concept of "ship" . "swarm"

[Axim]

As much as i love seeing some of the colossal builds people put so much effort into to design and make, i cant help but feel its only one aspect of how an actual ship might work. instead of a core just being one ship, what if a ship could be modular like having several pods each with their own functions flying around a core with a scripted flight pattern allowing it to not look fixed to the main core and operate independant of the core until the function it serves is selected from the hotbar at which point the player would take control of that pod.



the idea is to be like a hive almost, so a large battleship could potentially be a massive swarm of small ships each with one gun. also (i know this may be a bit farfetched :p) if you could somehow set up a ship with the appropriate factory blocks to make and assemble new pods (hive-drone) on the fly.



also asteroid mining could be done with a small fleet of ships rather than a fixed array on a ship, these methods for fighting and mining could be balanced so that there would be no particular power advantage over having one large ship with turrets and guns or a hive like fleet of drone-pods and so it would come down to design and size between the two and the concepts for aiming would be simple (i have no idea how difficult would be to implement), aiming from the core points every gun pod in that direction or targeting an asteroid and holding down lmb would activate the swarm.



p.s oh and a prospector for asteroids to see if they are worth mining!.

 

[KuramaFox]

That is, suggestions to how health is dealt with, such that ships take damage based on destroyed blocks, NOT based on shots hitting their core (which would no longer be highlighted).



If something like that is done, then swarm ships would be viable with otherwise current mechanics. Just make a bunch of fighters as one ship, remove the bridges connecting them, and viola, a swarm of fighters. I\'ve actually done this on a small scale. The issue is just that turning mechanics are currently overtuned, to the point that a medium-sized ship turns just about as slowly as a massive Titan of a ship will. Manueverability drops off too fast, basically. Which relates to the swarm issue in that anything more then a wing of small fighters will end up turning like a capital ship (as will any frigate or gunship-looking thing that is the same total size as that swarm of fighters, even if it is definitely not \"cap ship\" looking). If the tuning is adjusted, a large fighter swarm and an equivalently sized normal ship will at least be able to out-manuever a ship 100 times as massive.



As for independant ships in a swarm... well, that will have to wait for better AI features and better usability of said features. If an ability to use and recover large numbers of AI ships as drones without ever needing to leave the parent ship come about, then you could make a \"swarm ship\" by modifying a fighter so it has a bunch of docking ports scattered in space around it. From which you launch the AI drones when attacking, and from which you can call for their return if you yourself don\'t get destroyed. .



As for prospectors... I call it a missile ^_^

 

[Stakhanov]

It\'s already bad enough when ships are made of just one bunch of blocks. Swarm ships are just asking for trouble.