Booster thrusters

[REALDrummer]

My suggestion is to add specialized booster thrusters to the game. These thrusters would normally be inactive, but can be used with the press of a button to give the ship a sudden burst of speed in the forward direction. This would allow for some crazy manuevers in game and good manuevering abilities would go from a helpful ability in a pilot to an essential skill.



Some of the fancy manuevering that could become possible with such thrusters can be seen in an example taken from the show Battlestar Galactica in the YouTube video given in the link below. In this SciFi series, the Raptor fighter ships have the ability to stop their thrusters, flip the ship completely around on its nose, then with a sudden burst of power charge straight back at the enemy in a matter of seconds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G9t0OFHSWg#t=225



These boosters would normally be inactive or substantially less powerful than normal thrusters and would consume a large chunk of power when activated. Like with regular thrusters, the more that are present on the ship, the more effective the boost would be and the more power would be consumed.



What do you think?

 

[Feace Shlorfk]

Do you mean something like Afterburners? There needs to be something to balance it so it isn\'t Push-G-go-WARPFACTOR3MR.SULU... Afterburners would rely on the engine heat to work. It\'s also ~1:05 AM, so that is my excuse foar putting foar instead of for, and the rest of the typoes/idiocy/ramble.

 

[jzimmerman4]

I would really like to see this in game if it was balanced to only be usable by fighters and other smaller craft. So maybe it would consume power based on mass like a cloaker, just not as extreame.

 

[caelum19]

I think they should be extremely in-efficient, so they don\'t replace thrusters

for example, hypercoil thrusters would have much more thrust-per-power, but they\'d be slower.

the only problem is, they won\'t be very helpful if there is a cap on the speed.

 

[NeonSturm]

How would it be affected by your core as basic power tank and power tanks getting more efficiency per block(weight) at large scale? Can you provide an example?

If balance is based on power consumtion, I guess crafts with little and much weight will beat medium-sized craft.

But it won\'t help 800m ships to evade a shot in less than ( (size/2) /speedLimit )seconds either



As interesting it will be, I think the current power storage mechanic will hurt the possibility to balance this.



As for the blocks - I guess your idea work out similar as:

Thruster-boosters add a thrust-storage.

1. Thrusters will refill it with their thrust and work at thrustStored/thrustPerSecond efficiency
2. OR: They include a smaller thruster, but normal thrusters can\'t access this storage/power as fast = equal to 1.

Option 1 would make it easier to balance. Option 2 is what I guess you suggested.

 

[AmeriChris]

we could use them as a RCS for turning those massive behemoths that go from 1 - 50 in half a second but turn like a rockect in ksp with little torque.

 

[zorozeenee]

the probem is that no manuevers will be done because ships can go as fast forward as they can up down and sideways, this is a huge issue that needs to be fixed

 

[Dr_Freeman99]

Prepare to attack! On the count of three. One... two...
*Other ship activates boosters*
WAIT! What happened? Where are they?
I don\'t know sir! They must have hyperjets on that thing.
AND WHAT HAVE WE GOT ON THIS THING, A *CUISINART*?



Lol, but seriously, this is what should happen. These \'boosters\' should be operated on a cooldown set-up relative to the amount of time activated and the amount of power available for them, and they shiould only be able to be placed on ships of a certain mass and below. Therefore they cannot be used in place fo hypercoils, and they cannot be used to make a huge ship leap like a fucking rocket-powered cheetah from sector to sector.

 

[jzimmerman4]

+1 for the SpaceBalls reference

 

[REALDrummer]

I agree with Dr_Freeman99\'s statement that \"These \'boosters\' should be operated on a cooldown set-up relative to the amount of time activated and the amount of power available for them\".

The boosters could work similar to the way standard hyperflux coils work in that the amount of power that they consume should be related to the number of boosters you have multiplied by the time that they\'re activated. In addition, they could be limited by power as the hyperflux thruster coils are now; if you run out of power OR perhaps get below a certain percentage of your total possible power storage, they simply will not work. In addition, they should have a separate, relatively flat-rate cooldown like missiles.

In addition, the acceleration provided should definitely depend on the mass of the ship. Bigger ships should get much less acceleration off a boost with the same number of boosters as a much smaller ship.

Finally, we could also add a time limit on the boosters\' use. This time limit could decrease with more clustered boosters, but nevertheless, there should be a limit on how much time the boosters can be used before they shut down from \"overheating\" and begin the cooldown timer. This would prevent the possibility of completely replacing standard thrusted ships with infinitely boosting ships.

However, I disagree with the statement that \"they shiould only be able to be placed on ships of a certain mass and below\" (Dr_Freeman99). Limiting options in that way in a sandbox game is no fun for anyone, really. What we could do instead is make the amount of thrust gained from a boost more than just simply inversely proportional to the mass of the ship. In other words, if the mass of the ship is \"m\", \"b\" is the abstract amount of boost that the ship would get form a given amount of time using the boosters, and \"k\" is some constant, instead of having b = k/m, we could have something more along the lines of b = k/(m^(3/2)). This would make the acceleration from a boost decrease exponentially as the mass of the ship increases instead of linearly, making it virtually impossible to get any sort of boost out of a truly massive ship while allowing little ships much more leeway for quick jumps.

So, considering the cooldown time and much larger power consumption and all, I doubt that they could be used to replace standard thrusters.

 

[NeonSturm]

Overheating, yes

Cooldown like missiles - how about let them fill up a slowly degenerating heat bar and disable a new activation (but don\'t stop current) after 80%?

Not work if below certain percentage - how about below certain number? 1/5 second of drain?



Currently thrusters can have 50+ thrust per 1 mass - too much! - Who needs afterburners?

 

[Lycanite]

Rater than just having regular thrusters and then booster thrusters, it would be cool to see a few more, a bit like how there is a wide range of weapons.

• Regular thrusters (with added moddability such as high max speed but slower accerlation in order to balance out the power usage).
• Afterburners (eats a lot of power but much faster).
• Warp thrusters (jumps a sector maybe but eats all the ships power and has some kind of cooldown, could lower the shields too as it interferes with warp drive or something).
• Pulse thrusters (big boosts that eat a big chunk of power but are a one shot, good for jumping out of trouble but not for consistent high speed boosts, could possibly be modified for larger boosts and more power usage or smaller boosts yet less power usage, depending on player preference).
• Possibly some kind of flame or plasma thrusters that offer a little speed boost,not as much as the afterburners but leaves a trail of fire or something that damages enemy ships that are in pursuit) This could be possibly be replaced with just Afterburners and a reir weapon of some kind though, in fact that would be a nicer alternative, so maybe not this type.

 

[Legolas170]

Did a video on YouTube if a talk with calibiri on YouTube. He answers lots of dev questions. Watch the whole thing.

 

[Calbiri]

They recorded that?
Hehehe, ya, so can someone throw a link up??
I think it addresses most everything in this thread

 

[blurb357]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGoD11jT9RY

 

[NeonSturm]

What is the problem with big ships? They behave like fighters.



We should just add a delay to their movement. That would give fighters the possibility to outmaneuver them.

We could toggle between hyperspeed/normal modus which is more effective but with delay.



Now I play on a server where 1:1 thrust and less is common because of power regeneration limitation rules.

They balance combat really good. but annoy you if you just want to travel a long distance. I hope that ANY method of second movement will lead to an improvement.

 

[Izikiel]

Wait, could these things act like emergency boosters, knocking a large ship out the path of a projectile? Cause I would love that.

 

[REALDrummer]

Yes, that would be one possible use for such a thing. However, you would have to have a large number of boosters on the ship to move it if it was large and the power would probably drain rather quickly, but for a short, quick movement, it could work.

I only really see this working if your ship is fighting enemies equipped with d1000 missiles or disintegrator-laden bomb structures, but still, it would be cool.

I imagine that the primary use of these thrusters would be for maneuverability and rapid velocity changes in small fighers.