P2 fighter/bomber scale

[MacThule]

So Power 2.0 was billed as being scaled so that fighters and other small craft (EDIT: Names aside - doesn't matter if you're calling it a fighter, gunship, bomber, or banana boat - just refering to small combat craft) would not require stabilizers to effectively function.

Based on implementation, this means that all basic (not specialty small craft like "heavy," "assault" or "jump-intercept" variants expected to do crap a standard, carrier-based fighter would not likely do in generic forces) fighters & bombers are expected to be functional with no more than NINE reactor blocks total.

I am not challenging the decision, because it may indicate steps towards a deliberate scale reduction, but I find this scale to be a little surprising. I enjoy making small, fast craft a lot but even I find 9-block reactors... restrictive. Especially from a combat perspective. I feel like because small craft obviously can't take shots from capital grade weapons, they have to be very fast and hard to lock onto, but the power demands from achieving this leave little left over for any kind of DPS. Without both speed & some relevant DPS, fighters and bombers seem pointless. That is ny opinion, but I just don't see craft falling below the current stabilizer limit as ever appearing in normal PvE or PvP combat.

Anyone have any luck creating any un-stabilized (<10RB) fighters that pack even a little bit of a punch while retaining the speed and mobility that such craft require to survive in proximity to hostile capital ships?

EDIT: or if that's all to subjective, do you have any 9RB craft you have actually successfully fielded against either player or AI craft?

 

[aceface]

This all is based upon what you personally consider to pack a punch and to be a fighter.

 

[MacThule]

This all is based upon what you personally consider to pack a punch and to be a fighter.

Except the part that is based on Schine's implemented maximum self-stable reactor. That only exists expressly to address the question "what about fighters?" Meaning that technically, a fighter in the current pre-release SM dev build is a ship with 9 or less RB.

But otherwise, yes. It is totally subjective what role a fighter should play, and whether it should at least be able to 1-shot standard armor blocks or not. That is entirely about semantics though and whether the "name" of the thing is "fighter." Feel free to get into that if that is your thing.

I'm just wondering if anyone has made any nice 9-RB combat craft that could actually see action in the real game. It doesn't matter what their names are.

 

[NeonSturm]

Reactor blocks:

1: Scavenger Mine
4: Scavenger Drone
7: Scavenger Ship
9: Scavenger Flagship

Civilians have 2, 5, 9*, 12*
Military have 3, 7, 12*, 15*
Per crew member.

Interceptors have minimal blocks and only for their special task.
Fighters may have a second reactor one balanced and one for their special task.
Frigattes have a specialized reactor for recon, ftl, combat, additional turrets for failsafe, etc.

There can be a reason for that. A drone bigger than 4 would drain more e while docked (weapon modules).
For 1 guy, using stabilizers for a small ship is a big step (that's why flagship is above 10).
It's meant to be that way that military ships can be used as flagships for civilian, that's why 12 is equal.

It could also be 9, 15, 20 if you like it more extreme between military and civilian or flagship/normal​

 

[MacThule]

Reactor blocks:

1: Scavenger Mine
4: Scavenger Drone
7: Scavenger Ship
9: Scavenger Flagship

Civilians have 2, 5, 9*, 12*
Military have 3, 7, 12*, 15*
Per crew member.

Interceptors have minimal blocks and only for their special task.
Fighters may have a second reactor one balanced and one for their special task.
Frigattes have a specialized reactor for recon, ftl, combat, additional turrets for failsafe, etc.

There can be a reason for that. A drone bigger than 4 would drain more e while docked (weapon modules).
For 1 guy, using stabilizers for a small ship is a big step (that's why flagship is above 10).
It's meant to be that way that military ships can be used as flagships for civilian, that's why 12 is equal.

It could also be 9, 15, 20 if you like it more extreme between military and civilian or flagship/normal​

Are these reports from combat testing small craft, or just descriptions of ideas about possible craft? Any chance you could upload a few of these as examples?

 

[NeonSturm]

I haven't tested as turrets don't work for me in the PRE versions.
1 reactor block supports 1 weapon block, so weapons = reactors if turrets are firing.

But I build a fighter with 4 small turrets (4 blocks with Bc each) and it supports crew space for 30 reactor blocks (2-4 crew members)

 

[JinM]

9 reactor blocks...well tbh. I would not design ships around this guiding block count. They might change it, and then you build your fleet around the idea of 9 rb as fighter size for your hangars and suddenly they change it to 18.

But I love the idea, that there could be a common consensus of what is a typical fighter size and what's a carrier, so people orient themself on it when they try to build ships for pvp or pve.

Hell, why not make reactors get different power levels, and say: smaller 20 rb is a typical fighter reactor, smaller 100rb is a frigatte reactor, 500 rb a carrier class reactor. (numbers are random and not oriented on actual mechanics). So people who build allready have some guiding sizes, and are able to manufacture same sized ships for pvp. So if player A is new and wants to make himself some frigatte he allready has a guiding size, and other players use that size too. The reactors could get labeled ingame like "class 1 reactor: typically used for fighters or scouts" by Shine globally, so every one who accesses the reactor gui gets the hint for what size his ship is for.

For example an old standard size for pvp was 10k mass.

 

[MacThule]

FFS; I sincerely hope nobody is designing fleets right now! I'm just testing, experimenting, and asking about what others who might be testing similar mechanics are discovering.

I'm literally just testing prototypes at 9RB & under specifically to understand whether Schine needs to raise that or not, and to be able to provide quality feedback (not "stabilizer limit sucks ass because it's garbage!!1") about what it permits and what 9RB combat craft look and perform like. I know it could be 90 RB before stabilizer and many would still say it needs to be raised, so I'm trying to understand what the scope of small craft is as Schine has implemented them.



I'm not worried about consensus on size or power. It would be convenient, but it's not possible right now. I don't think we understand where power is going well enough yet. We don't know how the new weapon system is going to act with this power. Whenever power becomes final and locked towards beta and the other systems are properly adapted to it, I would love to have a discussion about power standards on different ship classes, but currently, well I'll pass on that effort.

 

[NTIMESc]

How did you arrive at 9 RB or less? The current config for full power has minimum stabilization at 25% You can build up to a level 4 reactor (40 RB) before you hit 25% stabilizer efficiency and start losing power.

edit: what I mean is that the 9RB limit could be to accommodate simple utility craft, not a necessarily a fighter.

 

[MacThule]

How did you arrive at 9 RB or less? The current config for full power has minimum stabilization at 25% You can build up to a level 4 reactor (40 RB) before you hit 25% stabilizer efficiency and start losing power.

edit: what I mean is that the 9RB limit could be to accommodate simple utility craft, not a necessarily a fighter.

That's a good point about small utility craft. I will have to go back and read the documentation & discussions. I may have misread; I thought I read that smaller craft, with a specific example of fighters, would be accomodated by allowing reactors to be self-stable up to a point because requiring fighters to have stabilizers was thought to be an undue burden...

The 9RB limit I am using is just the point at which I stop having 100% stability from reactor blocks alone. No stabilizers.

 

[NTIMESc]

The capital ship would need to have some sensible parameters too, I think. I made a 10RB fighter with Cc, 11k Shields, and 2.5TTM, and had 600 of them battle 1 of these: Seraphim/Moloch Class Cruiser Mk II
They couldn't do anything against it's 30M shields.
What would be a sensible shield baseline to play with using the new power system?

 

[MacThule]

That's interesting... x600 10RB fighters vs a large capital make no headway.

How was engine performance during that test, BTW? Was it decent?

 

[NTIMESc]

About 5fps. The ships only had 2 groups of 12 Cannon with 100% cannon support.

I tried again with 300, 40RB ships, this time with 2 groups of 50 and 100% support. They still couldn't get the shields down past 97%.
I tried to add another 100, but the game ran out of memory and froze up.

 

[Zoolimar]

Try to build a capital ship in new power. New shields have an up to 5 seconds dead cycle after being hit. So in theory you should be able to destroy the ship of any size given time if you don't stop shooting. Of course if it doesn't destroy your ships first.

 

[NTIMESc]

I took a stab (in the dark) at a Power 2.0 big ship Vs. 100 fighters. Here's what I used:
Test Big Ship> Test Fighter>

At first, it seemed like the fighters had no chance, just barely chipping away at the big ships 200M shields. Then, big ship started taking block damage and Reactor HP started dropping. The reactor appears to have started exploding, but the ship was also riddled inside and out with damage from the fighter cannons even though the shields never seemed to go down, or even drop below 95%. Eventually the ship overheated and I warped out the sector to preserve the carnage:


I'm not sure what the exploding reactor was about, or how any shots made it through the shields. Just judging from how slow that many fighters were taking down the shields, I'd say the weapons need a boost, rather than reactors. I'm assuming that battles involving hundreds of ships is not going to be practical or performant enough. The framerate tanked and I ran into memory errors after the big ship had sustained a lot of damage. This was in v0.200.278(DEV).

 

[MacThule]

So... the ship took block damage and overheated while shields apparently remained up the entire time?

I'm going to try to re-create that this weekend.

 

[Zoolimar]

Yeah, as I feared. You could check the Block Behaviour Config - there is a line that says that reactor HP takes damage if stabilization is under 90%. The damage is a certain % of the total incoming damage depending on how high is your stabilization.

So you had 60% stabilization, your reactor HP started taking damage and then probably reactor started blowing up (It happens if it takes damage and stabilization is less than 100%)

 

[NTIMESc]

Yeah, as I feared. You could check the Block Behaviour Config - there is a line that says that reactor HP takes damage if stabilization is under 90%. The damage is a certain % of the total incoming damage depending on how high is your stabilization.

So you had 60% stabilization, your reactor HP started taking damage and then probably reactor started blowing up (It happens if it takes damage and stabilization is less than 100%)

Well, that would explain a lot. I'm not sure how that makes any sense, though. That basically makes shields (and armor) useless on an unstable reactor, which is exactly where you want them to work. Oh well, I'll just retry with stabilization at 90-100% and hope that a better unstable reactor side effect is implemented.

 

[MacThule]

Meaning the only viable defense for an unstable reactor is heavy armor with absolutely no shields... wow...

So basically "if your reactor isn't 100% stable, do not install shields" because they'll turn your entire ship into a conduit for bypassing all shields and armor, ensuring that every shot directly damages your reactor...

 

[Zoolimar]

Meaning the only viable defense for an unstable reactor is heavy armor with absolutely no shields... wow...

You also need to dock it. There is a separate setting that seems to transfer damage to reactor HP if any blocks on the ship are damaged. Though I didn't test it.