Making Astrotech and Scrap Useful

[Lecic]

...At which point you need a huge repair ship, and if power requirements were, say, exponential, that would not work.

Exponential requirements are hilariously easy to get past. Just build a logic fired board.

Am I the only one who thinks destroyed blocks should stay destroyed in a battle? You don't perform surgery in the middle of a firefight. You slap some gauze and bandages over the wounds and hope they keep you from dying until the battle is over.

 

[nightrune]

Exponential requirements are hilariously easy to get past. Just build a logic fired board.

Very true, just looked at the docked reactors.

So what I want to try to enable is this:
http://starmadedock.net/threads/the-nomadic-revolution-motherships-capital-ships-as-homes.21511/

Its conceivable in a particular playstyle (and even others), that you may have an intergalactic ship that needs to be fixed on a long journey, and will not be able to just build a shipyard the size of the ship on your journey everytime you need a repair. I think it will be useful to have a way to replace blocks based on a design without the ship yard. I would not have the progress be based off the size of the blocks. I definitely think a shipyard is the best/easiest way to fix missing blocks, but there would be some benefit to having some other way to do it based on a blueprint that was mobile.

There a couple ways to balance it as well. Here is a couple ideas I think would work well together.
1) An entity is only allowed to receive an astrotech effect from one source. In essence no stacking.
2) Logrithmic power requirements, scrap, and blocks are needed to fix ship.
3) Build Rate is capped below the ship yard in standard configs, this can be adapted in the configs.

Additional Ideas
1) Astrotech fills the HP, and Armor before it replaces blocks unlike a shipyard.
2) Do none of this, I like my game the way it is :D
3) Remove astrotech completely as its job is duplicated by the shipyard in essence
4) Allow astrotech computers to be slaved to a shipyard for increase block building speed!
5) Require ship to be shutdown or in reboot to replace blocks (I like this one! Gotta be helpless to repair.)

I'm sure there are many more, but the TLDR is:
We should have some other way to replace blocks when you have a design associated with ship. You could be far from home and should at least have some way to repair, but it should cost, and it should take time so its not always an option.

 

[Nickizzy]

Am I the only one who thinks destroyed blocks should stay destroyed in a battle? You don't perform surgery in the middle of a firefight. You slap some gauze and bandages over the wounds and hope they keep you from dying until the battle is over.

Of course you don't! But why can't your intergalactic-supershielded-iondrive-titan with 20 large turrets with 100k dps and 40 pd turrets and a support fleet in a multi-server faction and have fighter bays and drones and miners all on one ship, you should be able to repair without making a station and shipyard, and heal fighters without having to dock each one individually? They should be weak, but they should still be able to be used as specialized support ships and fighter bay healing.

 

[Lecic]

So what I want to try to enable is this:
http://starmadedock.net/threads/the-nomadic-revolution-motherships-capital-ships-as-homes.21511/

Its conceivable in a particular playstyle (and even others), that you may have an intergalactic ship that needs to be fixed on a long journey, and will not be able to just build a shipyard the size of the ship on your journey everytime you need a repair. I think it will be useful to have a way to replace blocks based on a design without the ship yard. I would not have the progress be based off the size of the blocks. I definitely think a shipyard is the best/easiest way to fix missing blocks, but there would be some benefit to having some other way to do it based on a blueprint that was mobile.

Ah, see, here's where my issue comes in. I really, really hate that idea, since it reinforces the "each faction has one single important HB" problem, and introduces a new, overpowered ship variant.

I feel like any replacing of actual blocks outside the shipyard should be done by hand. I could support a feature that displays ghost versions of destroyed blocks, like in a paste template (perhaps a bit fainter though), for easier replacing.

Of course you don't! But why can't your intergalactic-supershielded-iondrive-titan with 20 large turrets with 100k dps and 40 pd turrets and a support fleet in a multi-server faction and have fighter bays and drones and miners all on one ship, you should be able to repair without making a station and shipyard, and heal fighters without having to dock each one individually? They should be weak, but they should still be able to be used as specialized support ships and fighter bay healing.

I do think shipyards should be allowed on ships as a capital ship system, actually, for drone production and the repairing of smaller ships, or for mobile shipyards. I don't think you should be able to repair anything besides armor HP with astrotech, though, because astrotech has two massive number of advantages over shipyards- overall dimensions and mobility.

 

[Nickizzy]

I don't think you should be able to repair anything besides armor HP with astrotech, though, because astrotech has two massive number of advantages over shipyards- overall dimensions and mobility.

If you put shipyards on ships both have mobility, and astrotech would have really low rates, like 1 or 0.1 per second per block.

 

[Lecic]

If you put shipyards on ships both have mobility, and astrotech would have really low rates, like 1 or 0.1 per second per block.

A shipyard on a ship has mobility, yes, but it still has to be the proper size to heal something. With astrotech, even a tiny ship with a repair beam can heal a much larger ship at any time. All it needs to do is occasionally drop back into the main ship and pick up more supplies.

 

[GRHayes]

Since we've got the cargo system now, I feel like this is a good time for this suggestion. You should be able to link Astrotech beams to a storage container. When you shoot a ship with that astrotech beam, it takes scrap out of the storage and replenishes the armor HP of that ship.

I'm not sure what the scrap:healing ratio would be. 1 scrap = 1 HP? Each cargo space can hold 100 volume, so that leaves... 1000 potential HP to be healed per cargo space.

I'm not sure if docked astrotechs should work on the main ship or not. On one hand, it provides for an interesting new kind of tech, but on the otherhand, it sounds kind of overpowered. It would probably be best to make it not work on the ship it's docked to.

scrap is already useful just combine it.

 

[Lecic]

scrap is already useful just combine it.

Scrap isn't useful. There's no reason to collect it to combine it in the first place. You have to mine 5 station blocks to get a single block of metal mesh, and mining bonuses don't increase that. Meanwhile, ore gives you TEN mesh per single block refined, and you get 12 ore from a single ore block just on default settings, let alone with the increased multipliers most servers have.

 

[Nickizzy]

Astrotech would be really weak, like I said

and astrotech would have really low rates, like 1 or 0.1 per second per block.

So your really small ship would have to
A. Replenish your ship like every 20 blocks because your cargo would have to be so small to have mobility
B. Take like 10,000,000 years because it's mini, 5 block astrotech system would take 1-10 seconds to Heal one hitpoint,

These limits would allow support ships with only astrotech, and have hangars or landing pads that have astrotech turrets healing your ship when it lands.

 

[Magrim]

Imo I don't think we should allow astrotech to replace blocks. Also imo I don't think it would be op to have docked astrotech repair the ship they are docked to. I posted a suggestion awhile back about turning astrotech modules into an effect system, with their defensive use being a passive armor regen. One response was that even though the armor update helped, armor still gets destroyed pretty quickly, so you might not see much use out of it anyway.

I don't particularly agree that you wouldn't see many people using it, but they do have a point about the resilience of armor, which is a good thing when it comes to making sure this doesn't become op. If armor was harder to destroy you might end up with an invincible ship.