New pushing mechanism / pulsar replacement

[ltmauve]

So, anyone who has used the pulsars knows that they are slightly unwieldy and hard to use. Since most of the desire for pushing other ships comes in the form of launching stuff from carriers, and having all of those bubbles and crosses everywhere is a pain.

Its a new computer/functional block pair, calling it "Linear Accelerator" and "Accelerator Controller"

The linear accelerator will only form groups with adjacent accelerators with the same orientation, because the orientation of the accelerator is the direction of the push. The push is applied evenly to the entire volume of the bounding box. The force of the push scales with the mass of the group, and inversely with the area (perpendicular to push direction).

The difference between this and the pulsar is that the accelerator can stay active for continuous periods of time. The power usage increases over time, just having it active. When another ship is in the field, the energy needed to get the same force from thrusters is added, per ship in the field.

 

[Visitor]

I'd personally recommend ignoring current weapon system (or pushing for some local balance measures at the server one is playing if the problem is mostly pulsar effect in multiplayer) till we get the new one where pulsars may actually be quite less unwieldy. I wouldn't mind some accelerators for, if only for aforemenetioned fighter/drone launching. Whether we should retrofit some weapon system for this or get new launchpad I am unsure.

 

[psteiner]

Well, I think this is a great idea, and while the pulsar is fine right now, this is actually really different and should be implemented with the pulsar. Honestly, to me, the pulsar is simply a weapon to disorient small fighters as they buzz around you in a much bigger ship. However, this is not controlled, and the "disorient effect" also ruins the fun for people trying to make missiles and torpedoes as I have tried making missiles in tubes, and when the thing goes spinning, it collides with the ship much too often requiring large unsightly tubes/ launch zones. This would be much better for that kind of thing, and I honestly think that it should have a transparent blue beam. If the direction of the beam is whatever direction the cannon are facing, this would also double as a tractor too.