Melee weapon for ships: Ram

[General_Revil]

Here is the idea.

So far in game crashing your ship into another ship won't do any damage to it. It's not realistic, but I'm okay with it (because I crash my ship a lot). However, I think it'll be fun if there is a way to damage a ship by crashing my ship into it. Thus introduce a new hull block: Ram. Just like any other hull it has wedge, corner and those up coming new shapes.

Basically, if a ram block on your ship touch another ship while your ship is over a certain speed, it does damage to that ship you crash into. You don't have to turn it on and off so it needs no weapon computer and doesn't have to be put on the hot bar to activate.

Its damage depenends on the amount of ram blocks in the group, and the relative velocity of both ships (if it's too much trouble, it can just be the attacker's speed).

Shields are effective to ram just like any other weapon.

When crashing in to blocks the ram itself will receive no damange. When against ram damage or any other melee weapon damage, a ram block should have stronger armor than harden hull. But if the damage is not enough to destroy a whole ram block, the block will receive no damage, so you won't break your ram when you are owning your enemies with it.

However a ram block should has armor weaker than regular hull when against projectile and explosive damage. So people won't use ram to replace hull.

Also, besides the regular ram block, let me introduce a second type of ram: power ram block. You can give it any fancy name you like, the main idea is it needs power, unlike the regular one. And now that it needs power, maybe having a weapon computer and be able to activate/deactivate on hot bar would be nice. When activated a power ram block will have a glow effect, just to look good.

A power ram does less damage than a regular ram, but it has no minimum speed, so it can slowly cut through a ship, just like an electric hot knife.

Hope you understand my English and my idea. Thanks and good day.

 

[jzimmerman4]

Although this is a good idea, people would just create large ships covered in ram blocks and just run into everyone else. Making rams weaker than normal hull won\'t stop this since large ships have plenty of shields and hull is currently super ineffective even if it is hardened. I would suggest using disintegrator a since they were designed to do exactly this(just make sure they arnt right by your ship)

 

[NeonSturm]

I guess, Desintegrators are mainly to stop cheap drones and jammed ships close to yours.

 

[jzimmerman4]

Unless you configure them properly, but it is true they are ineffective against large ships. I do have to say that it would be legit to create the dark elves\' fighters from the second Thor.

 

[General_Revil]

I think the goal is to make covering ship with ram a absolute lose. If the shield is way less powerful than normal when protecting ram blocks, like 50%, even 75% weaker, that should do it. If that\'s not enough, maybe the shield should not cover any ram on the ship at all. This actually make sense, just like pulling out your sword before you use it to kill somebody.

 

[jzimmerman4]

I could support that though it would essentially replace the disintegrator

 

[NeonSturm]

I like desintegrators to be somewhat a first-strike, not reloadable during combat with which you can distract not only turrets, but also damage the weaker turrets before engaging a combat.

Or a last-resort minefield-layer to evade out of radar if the other ship has to go around. but somewhat expensive/ineffective as a missile replacement.



Another possible use is with bobby-AIs and jam+cloaker (it finally should support it!).

The minefield is jammed and as soon as some ship get into range, they cloak (core battery+regen) and hit the enemy (neither require weapon cpu nor accellerate at full speed /low accuracy)

 

[General_Revil]

I don\'t really know what is desintegrator, but it sounds not very much a weapon to me? I don\'t think ram is very similar to this desintegrator...

 

[GROOV3ST3R]

If there was to be a RAM implemented, it would need serious balancing in order to prevent people from building gigantic missile ships.



A Ram would do the job of a disintegrator, breaking apart enemy ships and blocks while it would keep your intact or relatively intact. Now that would be ridiculosuly OP, if your ship didn\'t suffer damage in an attack.



There should be something like this, but it would need some serious forethought by Schema and he has other priorities right now ^^

 

[NeonSturm]

I think the easiest and fastest way to buff desintegrators without making them op is:

Make them a liquid which sticks on the other ships hull, can not be removed in build mode while your shield has