Making hulls useful, and adding a new dimension to ship design

[Lordprinceps]

As it stands, Hulls are pretty much useless except for warding off small ships and such, as only weapons under 40 or so blocks will be stopped by regular or harded hull. Everything else rips through hulls easily, which is completely OK, as that is what shields are for.



However, there are a few changes that could make hulls more usefull, and not just as a defensive block or as a paintbrush.



1. Regular hulls mass is reduced from .1 to .01, and hardened hulls is reduced to .1



3. Buff hardened hulls so that they provide a huge damage reduction to AMC's (shields are incredibaly effective against missles, so hardened hulls could be the counterpart to AMC's) like 90% for instance.



4. Make hulls (regular and hardened) fullfill a secondary, structural function. Make it so that hulls provide a buff, or rather, negate a debuff to nearbye blocks. For instance.



"If a block is not within X adjacent (no diagonals) blocks of a hull (X+n for hardened hulls), it has a chance of being destroyed when an adjacent block is destroyed by any means, except for building"

"This means that a large AMC array, or a large high-yield generator, would be ESPECIALLY vulnerable to damage, unless they hadd hull supports close by or actually inside the array"

"Take a 21*21 AMC array, if it had no hull support, a single stray shot that takes out a cannon block could lead to a chain reaction destroying the entire weapon."



In addition, groupings of hull support would extend the range of effect, growing rapidly for every layer, and then giving increasing diminshing returns.



This would mean that a small fighter, if it had a layer of hull blocks on its outside, would be safe from a possible critical damage reaction, but a large ship with massive weapon and generator arrays would either have to sacrifice stats for structural support, or run the risk of a single shot managing to initiate a chain reaction in their internal systems.



Another possible variant to this system would be that the thicker a line of hulls, or the more hulls with overlaping structural support areas, the more damage from a single shot is required to initiate a chain reaction.



Thoughts? Questions? Suggestions?

 

[War Dog]

It\'s not so much that hull is underpowered (Even though it is), it\'s the AMCs that scale ridiculously.

I had an idea for improving hull in my own idea thread.:http://star-made.org/content/changing-everything-or-omg-suggestion-rush

/shamelessselfpromotion

Not so sure about the structure thing, it kinda voids a lot of the current ships currently used.

I do like the decrease in mass. The biggest thing I dislike about hull blocks is that they degrade turn radius immensely and offer very little in return. Especially on ships with cloak/jammer.

Hull blocks also need to cost less. They can add tougher hull blocks that cost more to compensate.

Instead of straight up increases, I suggest that hull blocks get X% damage resistance from other nearby hull blocks. The bonus depends on what the block is, not the nearby blocks. Let\'s say 3%

So one hardened hull surrounded by 7 other hull (Hardened or Regular doesn\'t matter) gets 3% damage resistance for each one for a total of 71 (50+(7X3)) whereas a regular hull gets 46 (25+(7X3)). This allows for strategic placement of hardened hull.

 

[Jonny Monroe]

All of the solutions I\'ve read on hulls require dynamic calculations to acheive, which would put severe strain on a server during any remotely large fight.

When suggesting a change for hulls, try and come up with something that is a static change rather than something that has to calculate and recalculate a large number of blocks each time one gets destroyed.



Personally, I think hulls should just straight up get 10times more health. If a fighter is attacking a capital ship and breaches the hull it should be more effective for that fighter to aim for the breached area, rather than ignore it and keep hitting wherever it wants. Why is it like this currently? Because hull is meaningless. If I\'ve got good enough aim to repeatedly hit a ship in the exact same spot continuously, 95% of my time is going to be on shields, 1% on hull and the other 4% on the shield blocks/AMCs/whatever else is behind that. A group of players attacking a cap ship should have to co-ordinate damage against a single area of hull to \'dig\' through it, if they want to take it down in an optimal way. Right now anyone can shoot anywhere, the hull is nothing, it\'s paper. Getting the shields down is 95% of the job, after that the hull is just cosmetic.