Could Fighters Get a Buff?

[Panpiper]

Large ship got a massive inertia while small ones don't.

Large ships have inertia in proportion to their mass, just as do fighters. Large ships have more mass and therefor more inertial than fighters, this is true, but it is in direct linear proportion to their mass, just like fighters. The end result is that the only reason fighters might be more agile relative to large ships is because they (maybe) devote a larger fraction of their mass to engines with which to fight their inertia. There is absolutely nothing that says that a large ship cannot devote the same ratio of mass to engines as does a small ship, or vice versa.

The main reason why large ships are superior to small ships in space is twofold. Larger ships have a larger volume to surface ratio, meaning they need devote less mass to the skin of the vessel than does a smaller ship. This is not trivial. The skin of a space vehicle meant for long duration in space is neither thin nor light, especially if you are trying to proof it against solar storm radiation. The second reason is that there is a limit to how small some components can be miniaturized. Large ships will derive mass savings from all sorts of things (as a ratio of total mass) from life support to navigation.

 

[terra mining corp.]

so my question is how long does it take builders to make their 1m block stomp the fug out of everything machine..........vs making numerous 300-1000 block fighters/10-100 block drones,make them and injoy them and rebuild them quickly when destroyed.

 

[Malacodor]

so my question is how long does it take builders to make their 1m block stomp the fug out of everything machine..........vs making numerous 300-1000 block fighters/10-100 block drones,make them and injoy them and rebuild them quickly when destroyed.

It takes pretty long, which is good. I'd be bored quickly if I only built fighters.

 

[Scypio]

Large ships have inertia in proportion to their mass, just as do fighters. Large ships have more mass and therefor more inertial than fighters, this is true, but it is in direct linear proportion to their mass, just like fighters. The end result is that the only reason fighters might be more agile relative to large ships is because they (maybe) devote a larger fraction of their mass to engines with which to fight their inertia. There is absolutely nothing that says that a large ship cannot devote the same ratio of mass to engines as does a small ship, or vice versa.

That's true if you got in a straight line with your ships, bigger ones can beat smaller ones with thrusts. But small fighters won't use their speed for that, they'll fly around, hitting blind spots like mosquitoes. A huge ship will take ages to stop and fly backward, even more if you want to turn. A fighter won't. That's why there will always be fighters, because they can fly around. I like to refer at them as mosquitoes, because they are absolutely that. Won't beat the big ship but are annoying to deal with unless you got your bug spay.
Right now they aren't even that except if it's a human who pilot it. But hey, take alone a 40k mass ship with a fighter...

That would encourage collisions.

Like turrets, rail doors and so on does. It's not like a docked reactor inside your ship that detach. Btw that was just an idea that popped in my mind.

 

[kingreol]

Untill you make the carrier titan to carry the 100s of fighters. That might actually take more work in planning and design... It's about the same work overall... fighters will have the day once we get all of our fleet toys. Fleet jump and allowing multiple carriers in a fleet will sure make epic battles

 

[Madman198237]

The thing is, in space, fightercraft are absolutely useful. They do the same things that did in WWII until today----Be more maneuverable than the other guy. You outmaneuver your enemy and his guns, and you get to shoot for free, no damage received. Smaller vessels are astronomically more maneuverable than larger ones, because, for starters, you can't generate an infinite amount of energy. This is poorly reflected in-game in a lot of ways, but the basis is: You reach a point with every system of power generation where the disadvantages overtake the advantages. For instance: Fission, where you reach the point where you generate too much heat for too little gain, or too much size. Fusion: Well, same problems. Heat and size. Of course, added bonus if you make such a powerful compact fusion machine that it collapses into a miniature neutron star or even a black hole. The larger ship loses to inefficiency more than the smaller one.

Next, thrust. Here, you have the issues of a vessel operating in an area no atmosphere and no gravity. The larger ship, with less surface area to volume ratio, cannot turn itself as well as a smaller vessel. It cannot have powerful enough attitude jets, AND it's got to compensate for the increased strain of generating those centripetal forces. Basically, a larger vessel attempting to turn as fast as a smaller one is far more likely to strain and fracture its own structure....while also killing its own crew with G-forces.

 

[kingreol]

there's also the TIE fighter issue. If your craft is killed by a single burst of fire, most pilots won't get the chance to learn from their mistakes.

This gave me a BSG hardon.

 

[Malacodor]

AND it's got to compensate for the increased strain of generating those centripetal forces. Basically, a larger vessel attempting to turn as fast as a smaller one is far more likely to strain and fracture its own structure....while also killing its own crew with G-forces.

This can be countered with structural integrity fields and inertia dampening fields. Without these jump drives would either fly away on their own, while leaving the rest of the ship behind with a big hole in it, or the crew would end up like flys on a windshield.

 

[kingreol]

With the conversation on inertia and turn speed. Turrets come to mind, why use fighters outside swarm tactics if a turret of about any size could turn and aim on a dime. 1 shoting each one.

 

[Malacodor]

With the conversation on inertia and turn speed. Turrets come to mind, why use fighters outside swarm tactics if a turret of about any size could turn and aim on a dime. 1 shoting each one.

Because turrets can't evade or fly into a blind spot.

 

[Pacific_Jim]

And it depends on whether you can finish the fighter in one shot or not.

 

[Groovrider]

If I google Jem Hadar fighter I get this.

My smallest and most effective ships seem to come about that size too.

 

[snwh]

hmmm, I pretty much only read the first page, so excuse me if I missed something important.

Now, I don't necessarily condone changing fighters, because I don't have any pvp expierience yet, and the largest ship I've built was either a corvette or a small frigate, or even a FAC, by most standards. However, if I were going to do something with torpedoes, this is the way I would do it.

First, Torpedoes wouldn't have any heat seeking or lock on. And they would be relatively slow. This is so that Smaller ships, like a destroyer or cruiser, has ample opportunity to outmaneuver the torps. If you can hit one with a torp, good on you, but overall it should be rather hard. Whereas a massive battleship is going to have a very tough time getting out of the path of an oncoming torpedo spread.

Second, I would make Torpedoes take ammunition, which I don't think anything else in the game takes yet. Torpedoes would be big, bulky, and hard to carry a lot of them. This means a fighter with a torpedo strapped on it, is probably going to be sacrificing a lot of its dogfighting capacity, at the very least while the torpedo is still unfired. It also means that a small fighter is only going to get one or two shots with a torpedo, before it has to fly back to a carrier and restock. This also opens the avenue to things like destroyers and such using them, and being able to fire them a few times.

Third, I would make Torpedoes scale poorly. This encourages their use on small ships, because it's a lot of power for a small ship to have in a handful of blocks, but the larger your ship gets, the better conventional weapons start looking, because you have the power grid, and the space to start installing those massive titan-esque weapon systems, and a hard to hit with, not -that- damaging torpedo starts to look less satisfying.

Of course there's prolly a lot of kinks in this, because I just thought it up off the top of my head (mostly based off of world of warships), and because I don't know the game very well at all.

To reiterate, I don't know if fighters need changed or not, it just sounded like fun, postulating how I would go about doing torpedoes.

 

[Nickizzy]

hmmm, I pretty much only read the first page, so excuse me if I missed something important.

Now, I don't necessarily condone changing fighters, because I don't have any pvp expierience yet, and the largest ship I've built was either a corvette or a small frigate, or even a FAC, by most standards. However, if I were going to do something with torpedoes, this is the way I would do it.

First, Torpedoes wouldn't have any heat seeking or lock on. And they would be relatively slow. This is so that Smaller ships, like a destroyer or cruiser, has ample opportunity to outmaneuver the torps. If you can hit one with a torp, good on you, but overall it should be rather hard. Whereas a massive battleship is going to have a very tough time getting out of the path of an oncoming torpedo spread.

Second, I would make Torpedoes take ammunition, which I don't think anything else in the game takes yet. Torpedoes would be big, bulky, and hard to carry a lot of them. This means a fighter with a torpedo strapped on it, is probably going to be sacrificing a lot of its dogfighting capacity, at the very least while the torpedo is still unfired. It also means that a small fighter is only going to get one or two shots with a torpedo, before it has to fly back to a carrier and restock. This also opens the avenue to things like destroyers and such using them, and being able to fire them a few times.

Third, I would make Torpedoes scale poorly. This encourages their use on small ships, because it's a lot of power for a small ship to have in a handful of blocks, but the larger your ship gets, the better conventional weapons start looking, because you have the power grid, and the space to start installing those massive titan-esque weapon systems, and a hard to hit with, not -that- damaging torpedo starts to look less satisfying.

Of course there's prolly a lot of kinks in this, because I just thought it up off the top of my head (mostly based off of world of warships), and because I don't know the game very well at all.

To reiterate, I don't know if fighters need changed or not, it just sounded like fun, postulating how I would go about doing torpedoes.

Would Dr. Whammy now educate the common people about the great uses of warheads.

 

[snwh]

Would Dr. Whammy now educate the common people about the great uses of warheads.

heh, well. Like I said. I'm a new player. I didn't realize there was a warhead block. But yeah, that's pretty much what I was thinking.

 

[Madman198237]

Actually not, Malacodor. If JDs use the Alcubierre effect, then the whole ship accelerates even, even if it does then pass lightspeed relative to outside observers.

Yes, warhead torpedoes are already a thing, though a good engineer can have tracking torpedoes.

 

[sayerulz]

Only weaksauce star trek ships that explode if someone sneezes at them while the shields are down need "structural integrity fields". Any proper ship has a hull and superstructure for that. Much more reliable and effective, as we've seen when star trek ships threaten to totally fall apart from a tiny hole in a non-critical area.

 

[RabidBat]

My only real issues with using fighters vs a large ship is you need them in quantity. Saw someone mentioned 50 fighters.

From experience that is gonna be a frame rate killing lagfest once the weapons start lighting up, heck even with just so many entities in single area seems you're asking for trouble. Just go attack a pirate station, due to the way they constantly spawn you get issues right across a server in a minute, fleet of 5 decent sized ships and 30 spawned pirate fighters and good bye game play. (and possibly the server)
Even the tiniest of fighters can be an issue fir performance in great enough numbers.

The server I play on most tend to go for smaller fleets with larger ships for this reason. And once their turrets start undocking and clipping good bye fps and ping.

On the topic of fighter power though, I build gunships or corvettes in favour of small fighters, in about 99% of popular sci-fi, fighters are only good against other fighters.
X-Wings and TIE fighters for example crumple like paper, they rely on pilot skill and flexibility, you won't see one going up against a Star Destroyer for example, and the only reason one defeated the Death Star is because it used a power missile via a weak point.
I mean the X-wing could of sat there for 50 years pining it with pew pew lasers and never put a scratch in the shields let alone the hull.
You want something that is bigger than a fighter if you're going to take on larger ships.

I guess this could become The Last Starfighter where a single fighter is so OP it can destroy an entire fleet of hundreds of ships lol.
But yeah a bug hits a StarWars fighters windshield and they explode, especially them TIE's.

Fighters are fodder. Nothing more. Purely to distract/destroy turrets, other fighters and provide cover until the heavy hitters get into place. E.g Destroyers.

But yeah for me it is all moot until the game gets optimised so 5 missiles and a couple of entities in the same sector doesn't cause the game to go completely to shit as it currently does and has done for years.

Thinking back to The Last Starfighter reference. New SM weapon idea: Death Blossom As this seems to be what a great deal of people seem to think fighters should be able to do.

tl;dr version:
StarMades shit optimisation kills any ideas of having large fighter fleets, or fleets period until it does get fixed.

 

[Ithirahad]

But yeah for me it is all moot until the game gets optimised so 5 missiles and a couple of entities in the same sector doesn't cause the game to go completely to shit as it currently does and has done for years.

What? I'm not saying that StarMade doesn't need optimization (in some areas it is sorely lacking) but I was on NFD Build - a server famous for instability partially due to all the creative mode shenanigans that occur there - with three other people in huge ships (~battlecruiser-sized or larger; my own ship was 100-something-k mass) shooting missiles (and by missiles I mean a LOT of missiles) at stuff... The game ran fine; my client got a bit laggy because my CPU is not really designed to handle all the physics but otherwise nothing bad happened.

 

[RabidBat]

What? I'm not saying that StarMade doesn't need optimization (in some areas it is sorely lacking) but I was on NFD Build - a server famous for instability partially due to all the creative mode shenanigans that occur there - with three other people in huge ships (~battlecruiser-sized or larger; my own ship was 100-something-k mass) shooting missiles (and by missiles I mean a LOT of missiles) at stuff... The game ran fine; my client got a bit laggy because my CPU is not really designed to handle all the physics but otherwise nothing bad happened.

Have you got the servers hardware specs?
Everyone I play with is having the same issues I reported, regardless of PC specs.

I have:
i5 3570k OC'd to 4.2ghz
Galax GTX 970
32GB G-skill ddr3 16gb dedicated to StarMade
ASRock Z77 Extreme 6 motherboard
Windows 10 64bit

Have to go look up the server specs, can only remember it has 10GB of ram dedicated to it.

Also 3 ships almost tolerable, but as I said we got people here mentioning 50+ ships at once and that is for a single player.

Be interested in the server settings also, like is it stock or custom?