Griefing with a torch?

[Panpiper]

aceface in another thread mentioned the idea that one could board another person's ship and use the 'torch' to "break the core and get in it". This strikes me as an appalling thing, that this should be a mechanic. Is this not a rather simple mechanism to obviate faction modules and make ship stealing or frankly any other sort of griefing, easy?

Is this actually a fact, that this possibility exists? Is it intentional? If so, how are we expected to defend against this? Anti-astronaut turrets, etc., can only go so far, as there is nothing to prevent a griefer from torching their way through to your turret, or am I wrong?

 

[StormWing0]

haven't tested the core part yet but I know for a fact you can kill all blocks other than the core with the torch but not sure what effect the torch has on the core other than maybe kicking someone out of it. So faction blocks are up for grabs with the torch. That said as long as you are docked to home base they can't do a thing to your stuff as for floating around anywhere but home base you'll need to get smart in defending your stuff.

In my faction's case we like to use logic a lot so often times our ships and stations are littered with traps and turrets on the inside. The torch does only 1 damage per tick though so even if they try to torch the turrets and traps they are likely dead before they can kill it. Any internal defenses will likely kill astronauts long before the torch can do any damage worth noting that can't be undone with a repair beam.

 

[aceface]

There are a few limiting factors to boarding which I've noticed
1. It's not so easy to get onto a ship, cloaking ship however can get you on quite easily
2. It's not always easy to find the entrance to a ship
3. It's not always easy to get through the doors of a ship. The torch does 1 damage per second and neglects armour resistance. Advanced armour has 250 hp, so 250 seconds to get through one piece. Imagine a 10 block thick blast door. 2500 seconds!! almost 1 whole hour.
4. Then there's the anti astronaut turrets many people put in their ships. In the bobby ai module you can set it to target astronaut.

 

[Mariux]

Best to just keep ships docked to the homebase when you log off. Speaking of in-flight protection, use damage pulses

 

[0Samuel0]

Boarding in general is an intended and long anticipated feature, and the ability to do so is mostly because of the torch. Yes, it does indeed work on factioned ships. In general, if you wish to avoid this, or pvp of any kind, than you need to dock to your homebase, which is completely invincible.

I mean, you can shoot and capture factioned ships anyway. And if you have designed your ship so that finding the core and getting to it is that easy, you are doing something wrong.

Some ideas:

1. The easiest, most overpowered, and need-to-be-fixed one, just set up a gravity module that goes down a 1x1 tube of advanced armor sideways from the entrance to the core.

2. If you expect to be boarded while in your ship, damage pulses lining the inside of your ship linked to the hotbar. See the torch popup? (you get one if one gets used on your ship) Fire the damage pulse, problem solved.

3. For the more logic savvy, do the same thing as idea 2 but linked to area triggers, so that anyone entering your ship while you have the trap enabled dies.

I'd stay away from turrets, because either they only shoot people at war with you are they shoot everyone, and this is a blanket option affecting all turrets in the faction.

 

[Panpiper]

Well, how about someone who enters the ship through for instance a turret hole, and cuts not through a blast door, but a piece of hull close to where the turret dock is. There would almost certainly be corridor access to the turret on the inside of the ship. The player has now free rein to explore your ship. They attempt to find your faction block, perhaps expecting to encounter an anti-astronaut turret. They locate the turret, perhaps dying and having to come back in the process, but now knowing where it is, they cut their way through to the turret, bypassing it's fire zone, to disable it. Conceivably they could avoid even this and access the faction module by cutting their way to it from the rear of wherever it is.

I suppose a ship builder could build their faction module nestled deep inside the guts of other systems and completely inaccessible without being in build mode. This would make it virtually undiscoverable by an invading player. I am presuming that it is the faction module that is the vulnerable point? Could someone cut their way into a ship core without first doing so to a faction module?

I appear to be impervious to my own damage pulses. Are other players with whom I am not 'at war' vulnerable to them? If I create damage pulse 'traps' inside my ship, will they be reliably set off by anyone who ventures into them?

 

[BDLS]

Crew, anti personnel turrets, traps....

There are a ton of ways to protect yourself. Torches and boarding are awesome features.

 

[Panpiper]

Crew? I tried hiring a couple of crew a few months back and immediately regretted the bug filled decision. Are crew serviceable to the point now where they will actually align with a ship and at the very least stay where you put them? Having them wander about would be fine too, as long as they don't wander off into space and stay inside rooms and corridors. Will crew actually fight a player who uses a torch on your ship?

 

[Keptick]

To be honest it's probably safer (and faster) to just blow up a ship and make it overheat. Simply factioning a ship has NEVER been a safe measure against theft.

 

[Trekkerjoe]

If you have an AI on your battleship, and set your faction to declare war on hostile action, then your battleship(and potentially your entire fleet) would try defend itself from attackers, so long as you have a faction member on board when they log out, they will spawn with the ship and take it home if the ship had run away.

Besides, even if the ship lacks an AI, the point of cutting into a ship is so you don't risk decimating it and have to repair all of it's systems. As for countermeasures, I've had yet to hear anyone suggest a hidden door(courtesy of rails) or a haywire gravity room.

 

[Jaaskinal]

You can break the core to force the astronaut out. You have to find and destroy the faction module to get into it though. The torches appauling DPS and the astronauts low health means that there are many many many counters to boarding. If you'd in the ship, you can even scroll out a bit, line your crosshairs up onto the astronaut, and fire. If you're not in the ship, and it's not on a homebase, and it's not hard to find, having it stolen will be a good lesson.

 

[Aynslei]

If your ship is in a position to be taken by a torch, chances are you would have lost that ship anyway.

There are many counters, and taking a ship that has a pilot is even harder.

 

[Reilly Reese]

Well they have to get through your shields in someway first...

 

[Aynslei]

Well they have to get through your shields in someway first...

Torches ignore shields, that is their entire point. If you can break a ships shields and keep them down the laser pistol will work much faster and at range.

 

[StormWing0]

The thing is though if someone has the time to take your ship with a torch alone it deserves to be stolen. Pop out gun doors on all places they can fit for me. Basically just a fix direction turret in the place of one of those rail doors in addition to a normal blast door makes it so people have to go around. Griefers that have the time to take your ship with a torch have earned that steal to say the least. One last way to ruin a griefer's day is to rig bait ships with lots of warheads in them and scatter them around. :P

A ship designed to be stolen with warheads ready to go off when they start moving and go dock it somewhere is a nice way of seeing who has won the Darwin Award since if they take it back to their home base you can detonate the warheads long before they get there and leave nothing left to steal. :P

 

[Winterhome]

Alright, I'll go ahead and say why this is all bunk


Boarding takes 10ish minutes on a "normal" ship with relatively little interior, and takes much longer on ships with full interiors.
Nobody I've ever seen has put "access corridors" in under their turrets.
Most people who I know of dock their ships to their homebases or put their ships in empty space in the middle of nowhere, both of which are suitable protection.
If you're flying your ship when you get boarded, you can kick the boarder's ass with internal defenses, like hidden damage pulses that you manually trigger (remember: area triggers can be broken)

If anything, boarding ships with a torch is underpowered.

 

[Edymnion]

Someone on my server found where somebody else had put a station in their claimed system.

The asked what they should do about it. My suggestion was to buy a torch, get in there and find the faction block, and cut it out. Then drop your own faction block and take the station for yourself.
[DOUBLEPOST=1440772581,1440771150][/DOUBLEPOST]Also, this is why on large ships/stations, put your faction block in a room with an automated turret set to aim for players. Preferably at the end of a long hallway where there's no way in hell they can reach it before being mowed down.

 

[StormWing0]

If they do get into the room having a laser fence of beams comes to kind.

 

[DuckyQuacks]

I suggest we screw the whole boarding thing? maybe we can have some other weapons instead of a "laser" it doesn't do a lot of damage and it's hard to aim since the fps / mps /bps, Feet , Meters , Blocks.

the only thing which is defending yourself is your ship, and if you need to reboot you are hopeless against other people without other kinds of weapons.

if your at spawn and "noobs" are trying to board your ship to get a ride somewhere then kill you, it's extremely difficult to get them out.

I personally think there should be new kinds of hand held weapons guns which fire at a rapid rate.

~xXDISCOVERERXx

 

[Winterhome]

I personally think there should be new kinds of hand held weapons guns which fire at a rapid rate.

We have handheld weapons.

If it's such a problem, get a few sniper rifles and defend your ship with them.