I had a thought, why not have the character weapons be blocks? Except for something small and sweet.
My plan (using numbers based on 100 because percents are easy)
Say a player has base 100hp.
Every character always has a laser pistol on them, like, press \'\'f\'\' to quickly switch to laser pistol, press \'\'f\'\' again to switch to other weapon. Laser pistol has base damage of 5-10, firing speed of lv1 AMC, and unlimited ammo. Now, you can buy a weapon block. There would be a few different types of weapon blocks. They go in your ship/spacestation. If you buy a machine gun block, you press (r) to take a machine gun, same goes for sniper-rifles, rocket launchers, grenade launchers, plasma rifles, miniguns, etc. What\'s the best part? as a ship block, they are better the more ship blocks you have (up to a max of, like, 6 for a full weapons locker.) The \'better\' in this case is an ammo count. A single machine gun block gives you 50 shots, 2 give you 100, up to 300 ammo. Once you have no ammo they are removed from inventory and you switch back to basic laser pistol.
theoretical item list:
laser pistol: dmg: 5-10, firing spd: base AMC firing speed, range: medium, ammo/block: infinity
machine gun: dmg: 5-10, firing spd: 10/s, range: short (high bullet spread), ammo/block: 50
gattling gun: dmg: 2-4, firing spd: 20/s, range: medium (medium bullet spread), ammo/block: 100
sniper rifle: dmg: 120, firing spd: 0.5/s, range: far (scope), ammo/block: 10
shotgun: dmg: 7 per bullet (12buckshot), firing spd: 2/s, range: short (spread), ammo/block: 15
laser rifle: dmg: 30, firing spd: 5/s, range: long, ammo/block: 30
plasma rifle: dmg: 70 point-blank, 50 close, 20 medium, firing spd: 4/s, range: medium, ammo/block: 20
grenade: dmg: 150 (explosive), firing spd: 0.7/s, range: short (affected by gravity), ammo/block: 6
grenade launcher: dmg: 150 (explosive), firing spd: 1/s, range: medium (affected by gravity), ammo/block: 5
rocket launcher: dmg: 200 (explosive), firing spd: 0.7/s, range: far, ammo/block: 5
missile launcher: dmg: 200 (explosive), firing spd: lock-on, range: far, ammo/block: 5
In this chart anything marked as explosive has damage falloff of around 40 per meter from point of detonation. Plasma cools down the farther it gets out of the barrel and, therefore, has damage falloff over range. Grenades and grenade launchers can bounce around corners. Rocket launcher is a dumb-fire rocket while missile launcher requires a lock-on between every shot. I like to think these stats are balanced/can be balanced by price differences in storage blocks, but testing would be needed to make sure.
Things I think should be different between ship-weapons and handheld weapons:
1) Core Damage: Damage to the ship core should be half done directly to the person inside and half to the core itself. This means if you sneak into a ship you can kill the capitain without destroying the vessel. I only think this is reasonable for non-explosive weapons, but if you were to shoot the pilot of a ship in the back of the head it wouldn\'t destroy the entire ship. This would also make for a good hijacking mechanism.
2) Consistent damage: No matter how much ammo a weapon has it should be a standard amount of damage, that means when you see someone with a weapon you can strategize around their weapon instead of hoping it isn\'t an exploding sniper-rifle minigun. While I like the idea of customizing weapons, I feel like standardized damage would be better for strategy.
3) Armor-peircing: With these damage levels, armor-peircing weapons would be no problem. some may argue that with that strategy people would try to take out ships with only sidearms. While it is difficult to break through a big shield (to the point that I believe shields need to be nerfed somehow), do you really think people are going to expose their squishy bodies to fire a 200 damage rocket (which would probably break one block (I assume a cubic meter of spaceship hull is tougher than a cubic meter of flesh and bones)) when they have a rapid-fire AMC that hits 300 damage 30 times a second?
I would also recommend an engineer-tool (plasma cutter, infinite ammo, number of blocks determines cutting speed, low of 15 seconds per-hull, high of 3 seconds per hull) that can cut through a ship block by block in place of a primary weapon (keeping a laser pistol as a sidearm.) Whenever a block is broken by this, the entire ship\'s shields should flash red to alert the captain and their allies of a boarding party.
These rely on a beam that will teleport you onto an enemy ship, give you immediate gravity (falling towards whatever angle you hit the ship on, so you don\'t just fly off). It may dock your ship to the enemy\'s wherever you\'ve fired so your ship becomes harder to hit if fired correctly (and would probably not be able to dock on engine blocks for what should be obvious reasons.) Ideally, this will only be able to fire 1 beam at once so you know where you\'re landing. It will, of course, be easier to aim at bigger ships with this beam. How will big ships avoid this?
The Billy AI. Rather than a complicated docking sysyem like ship turrets, the Billy AI would act as rotatable block. Place down the Billy directly onto your ship and all press (r) to program it. Any blocks placed atop it become able to rotate and activate. Being fast and easy, it can only control about 3-5 blocks on top of it (so it isn\'t a replacement for Bobby). It takes power from the ship and fires it\'s weapon only at human (not ship) targets. How would this be properly balanced so someone could not line up 500 Billys on the way to the cockpit? Billy, like player-held weapons, can also penetrate your ships shields. 500 Billys firing at a boarder kills him instantly, but makes a hole in your ship. 2 Billys is an even match for one boarder. 3 Billys have the upper-hand.
A Billy with a shield generator has more health than a Billy without one. A Billy with 3 AMCs does more damage than one with 2 AMCs. A billy with a rocket launcher fires rockets with a nerfed explosion radius (so missile-AIs can be useful without being self-destructive). There is a potential for new Billy-only blocks that I don\'t want to think up (Poison gas, vent oxygen in a range, set off an alarm, etc).
Anyways, those are my thoughts for now.
