Hi. First post!
Since, in my experience at least, battles between capital ships tend to degrade into strafe fests with either side struggling to bring their main guns to bear, I feel like we should take a cue from real historical naval warships. Once we could make practical turrets and guns good enough to put on them, warship armaments changed from fixed broadsides to heavy turreted cannons. This allowed the ship to bring her guns to bear without maneuvering.
I propose that we be able to link to turrets weapon modules located on the turret base, or possibly on the main ship itself. This would allow for much more powerful turrets that can be feasibly used in capital-class engagements. A ship's survivability is thus improved by its ability to engage targets that either outmaneuver or outflank it.
So let's balance it.
The upside is that this allows for more depth and creativity in ship design, and also for more diverse roles such as heavy fixed-gun dreadnoughts, turreted heavy battleships, multi-gun destroyers, and the like. Even if it doesn't have to be, it's also more realistic: real-life ship guns go far beyond the barrels and turrets, housing systems like ammunition storage, loaders, and even heat sinks or coolers.
While there are downsides, I think those two things should even out the advantages while still providing enough incentive to apply the concept.
This would also provide avenues for crewability and gives interiors a practical purpose: since human crews can be much better at choosing targets, interiors can allow them to reach the turrets in the safety of the ship's hull.
Oh, and I did do my homework (it was all I could find), but I feel like it needed more elaboration. I also didn't want to hijack or necro a month-old thread.
What do you guys think?
Since, in my experience at least, battles between capital ships tend to degrade into strafe fests with either side struggling to bring their main guns to bear, I feel like we should take a cue from real historical naval warships. Once we could make practical turrets and guns good enough to put on them, warship armaments changed from fixed broadsides to heavy turreted cannons. This allowed the ship to bring her guns to bear without maneuvering.
I propose that we be able to link to turrets weapon modules located on the turret base, or possibly on the main ship itself. This would allow for much more powerful turrets that can be feasibly used in capital-class engagements. A ship's survivability is thus improved by its ability to engage targets that either outmaneuver or outflank it.
So let's balance it.
- A special type of turret axis is used that allows this cross-entity linking. Every turret using this type of axis has increasingly lower damage for each axis placed on the main ship: thus, a six-gun destroyer with 30 modules per turret has less overall damage than a three-gun battleship with 60 modules per turret, losing still to a conventional ship with a non-turreted 180-module fixed gun. This somewhat preserves the feasibility of current ship designs and forces a decision between defense, coverage, and multi-target engagement capability or sheer focused firepower.
- The number of modules, or the damage from each module, linked to the turret from other entities up the docking chain must be limited by the number of modules already on the turret. This prevents something the size of an anti-missile turret from slicing your ship clean with the power of a dreadnought's main gun.
The upside is that this allows for more depth and creativity in ship design, and also for more diverse roles such as heavy fixed-gun dreadnoughts, turreted heavy battleships, multi-gun destroyers, and the like. Even if it doesn't have to be, it's also more realistic: real-life ship guns go far beyond the barrels and turrets, housing systems like ammunition storage, loaders, and even heat sinks or coolers.
While there are downsides, I think those two things should even out the advantages while still providing enough incentive to apply the concept.
This would also provide avenues for crewability and gives interiors a practical purpose: since human crews can be much better at choosing targets, interiors can allow them to reach the turrets in the safety of the ship's hull.
Oh, and I did do my homework (it was all I could find), but I feel like it needed more elaboration. I also didn't want to hijack or necro a month-old thread.
What do you guys think?
