Option to switch off weapon on ships to reduce power consumption

[rocketman221]

I would like the option to switch off individual weapons on ships to prevent them from constantly drawing power.
Disabling a weapon would discharge any stored power and have a cooldown time, but it wouldn't draw any standby power.
This would allow a ship to have a larger selection of weapons on board without needing a huge reactor.

 

[Dire Venom]

+1 It could be an option alongside the screen showing the power draw, allowing you to activate/deactivate individual systems .

 

[YamiHikari]

In order to balance this out, it would definitely need to have a very long cool down. otherwise it would become too overpowered.
[doublepost=1513700698,1513700485][/doublepost]Additionally, my experience with the new system kind of negates the necessity of this. The reason being that with a reactor of only 40 blocks or so you can have some pretty bada** weapon systems. I tried it out and managed to get a ship with a top speed of 360 (I used a few reactor chambers) and a cannon that can drain 20k shields in a single blow (or something like that). Basically, schine has put a ton of effort into balancing this out and making the new power system less of a burden. The only problem is the controversy surrounding stabilizers. They are a smart addition, but need a little bit of reconfiguring to support more varied build types.

EDIT: I took another look at my cannon's power, it can do 356o damage in one hit (no secondary). there is also a damage beam and some shields hooked up to it. I ended up having to bypass using armor and such because it was such a clunky build. All in all it was a decent test of how well balanced the new power system is. the big plus is that it doesn't cost anything to use weapons, only to maintain them.

 

[jayman38]

An easy balance would be to have the weapon system drain its stored power over time, and then have to build it back up when brought back online. That way, if you have it turned off for only a bit (maybe you accidentally turned it off instead of the weapon next to it or something), then bringing it back won't take very long, but if you've left it off until it drains completely, it might take a while to power back up.

With reactors providing as much power as needed, weapons would need to have a limited draw-rate for this balancing to be effective. For example, maybe it takes a weapon system 900k to fire, and your reactor produced 1 M e/s. Well, there wouldn't really be a cooldown there. However, if you reduced the weapon's ability to charge to 200 e/s, then you'd have a 4 second charge-up period.

With a static charge-up period, bigger weapons would require a longer charge-up time. On the other hand, a fancy math equation could give you an interesting curve that adjusts the charging rate to the size of the weapon. Example: Maybe a 2M E weapon might have a 300 e/s charge rate.

 

[MacThule]

An interesting idea. It might be too early in pre-release to know if this will be necessary, but it's worth considering!