How to make other stations secure - Discussion Thread ***PLAYER SOLUTIONS ONLY!***

[DrTarDIS]

I just realised that area triggers are so cheap I could build the entire noise cloud with them, and no tangible blocks at all, and probably still achieve the desired result...

and that they clip with projectiles.

 

[Jojomo]

and that they clip with projectiles.

Hmm, well that's not exactly what I was hoping they'd do, but it's a problem I was already dealing with when using alloyed mesh etc.

 

[Shaker]

Surrounding your station in rock or purple rock stuff, if it gets blown up, who cares

The sensor cloud and my idea above is a waste of blocks vs ships that are going to straight out shoot at your ship, the blocks would be better suited to shields/armor

Logic moving plates, bad idea...

Turrets need to be welled in and have a armor plate protecting the docker.

The pulse/pulse idea would be slower than the pilot, they will be able to hit the station before they get wreaked

 

[Calhoun]

I had an idea the other day that is fairly on topic. It solely deals with cloakers however.

Link a sensor to armour HP, you lose any Armour hp and it raises a giant forcefield around your base.

+Traps Cloakers in the FF
+Coupled with a jump inhibitor, they ain't going nowhere

-No weapons will work when the shield is up
-you still have to take a hit
-potential for lag

Still, you could literally capture people cloaking with warheads for when you get back online.

 

[Jojomo]

The pulse/pulse idea would be slower than the pilot, they will be able to hit the station before they get wreaked

Yes, I've been experimenting to see if I can do without the "noise cloud" of solid blocks, but I can't. Although ships don't appear to be able to avoid clipping the trigger net, even at very high speed (plus my high ping on top of that), the logic-fired response to the trigger (activating pulse in this case) is too slow to hit the enemy before he hits the station.

So the noise cloud part of the solution is essential, to slow down incoming ships (unless someone can think of a work-around).

Slowing down the ships is Stage 1, and I've now pretty much got that working well (I'll put an example image below).

Stage 2 is detecting the ship and firing pulse to unlcloak it.

Stage 3 is destroying the uncloaked ship.

Stage 2 works quite well, but as well as uncloaking I'd like to destroy all warhead blocks that are on any (almost) unshielded cloaker pokers or any torpedos that have a single shield capacitor block. Although warheads have 25 HP and no armour, and pulse/pulse does 600 damage, I need around 15-20 (can't remember) modules to break a warhead. Is damage per block capped to 600/number of blocks in AOE?
How much damage do I need to do to guarantee an astronaut with a torch cutter will be killed by pulse?

Stage 3 is a bit difficult for two reasons
A: anti-poker turrets have to be able to shoot down anything in the noise cloud, which will reduce their effectiveness (blocked shots), and also damage the station.
B: Other turrets meant for shooting conventional attackers will either have to be inside the noise cloud (reducing their effectiveness and potentially dropping *huge* amounts of damage into the station) or have their own noise cloud that rotates with them and has an opening for outgoing fire.

A is perhaps not too hard to overcome: multiple barrels and/or explosive effect to ensure that a block in the noise cloud doesn't completely shield a ship from a turret's fire. These anti-poker turrets won't need to do large amounts of damage to destroy ships that can cloak, so shouldn't be a threat to the presumably massive shields of the station.

B is more problematic: the station will have other turrets, to take out anything from fighter drones to titans that attack the station with plain old firepower.
Some of these will potentially do vast amounts of damage, so can't be allowed to shoot the noise cloud (which is part of the station).
So they need to be prevented from shooting at cloaker-pokers exposed in the noise cloud, and they need to be able to shoot their intended targets without hitting the noise cloud.
If they're placed outside the noise cloud they'll need their own noise cloud that rotates with the barrel, which would need a hole for them to shoot through - I guess this would be an open cone out to 30 degrees off the barrel vector? Or is it 15 degrees?
This open firing cone would be a vulnerability that would need to be handled.
A turret barrel can't damage itself with its fire can it?

Does anyone have any answers to my questions, or any relevant thoughts? (Helpful or critical)

10k crystal composite noise cloud in 100^3 volume. Pink borders just for ease of visualisation

 

[Shaker]

that is alot of effort just to protect yourself from the chance of a griefer

 

[kiddan]

A turret barrel can't damage itself with its fire can it?

Fire goes right through its own entity, just not docks or motherships. So you don't even need a cone for the shots to leave by. =)

 

[StarWars1981]

Pretty overkill on the noise cloud. Probably better to do a two-part cloud: Phase 1 cloud is area triggers and some solid blocks spaced to prevent large-ish ships from coming up to the station to avoid fire from some badly sited turrets. Phase 2 is a denser cloud to stop all vessels or at least slow them down ... and it contains dozens of points for pulse weapons fire. Phase 1 detects all incoming vessels; Phase 2 destroys them. In case they attempt to hold back near the Phase 1 ring, that's equipped with pulse too. The rings will allow cloaksticks through unless they're nailed by perhaps repeated pulse firing from Phase 2 sites. Most of the pulse weapon system will be some form of secondary and tertiary setup in the main station. They're all attached to the main station, and set by logic to fire.

 

[Jojomo]

that is alot of effort just to protect yourself from the chance of a griefer

If you mean time spent, it isn't: I wrote a little piece of code to do this for me, and when I've got it right I'll publish the resulting template for anyone to use.

In resources required it's actually pretty cheap - 10k blocks is just the same as a single 100x100 solid layer, and the blocks are alloy mesh or crystal composites (that's just a single 100^3 section of course, and the whole station will need to be covered with these). So cost is pretty insignificant, especially relative to the huge cost of the rest of the station which is enough shields to take anything that can be thrown at it.

If the future result could end up being a non-homebase station that people feel comfortable leaving while they log off, I personally definitely think it's worth it.
[doublepost=1485464398,1485463244][/doublepost]

Pretty overkill on the noise cloud. Probably better to do a two-part cloud: Phase 1 cloud is area triggers and some solid blocks spaced to prevent large-ish ships from coming up to the station to avoid fire from some badly sited turrets. Phase 2 is a denser cloud to stop all vessels or at least slow them down ... and it contains dozens of points for pulse weapons fire. Phase 1 detects all incoming vessels; Phase 2 destroys them. In case they attempt to hold back near the Phase 1 ring, that's equipped with pulse too. The rings will allow cloaksticks through unless they're nailed by perhaps repeated pulse firing from Phase 2 sites. Most of the pulse weapon system will be some form of secondary and tertiary setup in the main station. They're all attached to the main station, and set by logic to fire.

I've tested different depth/density point clouds, and this is what's required to reliably stop/slow down (very) small, (very) high speed ships.
I could have a Phase 1 also as you've suggested, but it would be extra, on the outside of this, not replacing some of it.

I'm putting pulse in the station hull instead of the cloud because it's impossible to hide out there. And if they're pulse/pulse they're extremely slow firing (pokers could recloak), and if they're plain pulse I need a huge number of them to cover it all. So putting them in the hull seems preferable, and the pulse/pulse can cover 80% of the volume for decloaking.

I would love to have the pulses do the killing, but because they have either poor range or poor reload time, I'd need to do that in a single shot, and that requires pulses that break my goal of cheapness.

 

[StarWars1981]

-snip-

Well, pulse weapons can be dangerous enough. And I was thinking single-block pulse weapons outside, with secondary and tertiary blocks in the station; also, could have up to 27 blocks outside in a 3x3x3 block for harder-hitting or longer-ranged weaponry. Option 2 is large numbers of "Scout" turrets sitting in this artificial asteroid belt, small weapons designed to quickly shred cloakers via missiles or C/C weaponry. These can be only a little larger than multibarrel PDTs, fitting weapons capable of smashing the non-armor blocks every cloaker I've ever seen equips.

The pulse would mostly decloak. You COULD do that with a warhead mine, but that results in large amounts of friendly-fire damage should an incautious pilot arrive. The point is you have lots of explosions in the area to decloak, while station turrets handle most of the shredding. The scout turrets would work as another layer of defense, as well as being up close and personal to these countered griefers.

 

[Jojomo]

Well, pulse weapons can be dangerous enough. And I was thinking single-block pulse weapons outside, with secondary and tertiary blocks in the station; also, could have up to 27 blocks outside in a 3x3x3 block for harder-hitting or longer-ranged weaponry. Option 2 is large numbers of "Scout" turrets sitting in this artificial asteroid belt, small weapons designed to quickly shred cloakers via missiles or C/C weaponry. These can be only a little larger than multibarrel PDTs, fitting weapons capable of smashing the non-armor blocks every cloaker I've ever seen equips.

The pulse would mostly decloak. You COULD do that with a warhead mine, but that results in large amounts of friendly-fire damage should an incautious pilot arrive. The point is you have lots of explosions in the area to decloak, while station turrets handle most of the shredding. The scout turrets would work as another layer of defense, as well as being up close and personal to these countered griefers.

I was planning to have the pulses in the cloud originally, but they were too easy to see an take out with a warhead, and placement of area triggers became quite a bit more difficult than just having a simple net on the hull and one 75 blocks out, which is what I have now. Plus I can make them a lot larger inside the hull if I need to than I can in the cloud.

I have a layer of pulse/pulse behind the first hull layer which cover 75-80% of the 100^3 volume, and another layer of them 33 blocks behind that.
I also have a layer of pulse/cannon 10 blocks behind the outer layer of hull for astronauts in case I leave the pulse/pulse with damage too light to take them out.

I was going to have small cannon/cannon turret or two on the hull (better for anything getting close to the hull, and they're less vulnerable there than than out in the cloud). What size barrels would you recommend?

 

[Madman198237]

Just have a detector monitoring structure and armor HP. If you use a 100% detector linked through a not gate, then you can tell as soon (Hopefully) as you lose a single block. You lose anything, you start firing off pulses throughout the cloud of waste blocks. This way, you have short-range high-damage pulses of just 2 blocks...and one of those can be hidden in the station itself. Assuming you build your cloud properly, so that a cloaked warhead can't fly through without touching a block, you can then prevent any real damage from anything other than the high-speed glitch-reliant warhead torpedoes....and those might get caught somewhere in the cloud anyway. Hopefully.

 

[Gasboy]

Is there a way to use logic to trigger a scanner? For it seems to me that you could keep a ship with a scanner docked to a station, and have it scan at random intervals. Any cloaker nearby gets decloaked, and your station can open up on it.

Assuming logic can be used to trigger a scanner.

 

[Madman198237]

No. Logic and scanners can't be mixed, sadly.

 

[Gasboy]

No. Logic and scanners can't be mixed, sadly.

That is rather unfortunate.

 

[DrTarDIS]

That is rather unfortunate.

literally the greatest failure of the game's programming. I hope it's not because of a "must be bound to a player variable" object-fail.

 

[Madman198237]

It could just be that it's a mechanic meant to make cloaked vessels a reality. Otherwise, AI or large vessels would be able to simply run a staggered set of scanners constantly, invalidating cloaker tactics....somewhat. That said, while I appreciate the idea of preserving balance, there needs to be a revamp of this stuff. But that's a whole other section of the FSM.

 

[Gasboy]

literally the greatest failure of the game's programming. I hope it's not because of a "must be bound to a player variable" object-fail.

Not to mention, scanners ought to be usable on a station.

 

[kiddan]

Not to mention, scanners ought to be usable on a station.

They are if you dock them and have someone jump in the core to scan. Not a method I'd like anyone to be stuck with, though. =S

 

[Gasboy]

They are if you dock them and have someone jump in the core to scan. Not a method I'd like anyone to be stuck with, though. =S

I know that. It shouldn't be necessary to do that, though. :P