Personal Weapons vs Ship&Station Shields

[Spartan-228]

It would be nice if our hand held weapons would not spark the shields of a station or ship we are currently inside of, and even better would be if they ignored them completely. However I am quite aware that would be very difficult to impossible to do with the current shield system.

Another option would be to make it so that hand held weapons ignored shields completely. I can already sense a number of you are getting your pitchforks and torches, just hear me out.

If hand held weapons can ignore shields, the relation that they have with hull blocks, standard armor and Advanced Armor should change as well. For example, it should be very hard to impossible for your hand held weapon of choice go through advanced armor. On the other side of the coin hull blocks wile not being completely useless at stopping hand weapons, should be in comparison to advanced armor able to be cut through within a relatively short amount of time. Then of course standard armor would fall some where in between.

 

[Mortiferum]

It would be nice if our hand held weapons would not spark the shields of a station or ship we are currently inside of, and even better would be if they ignored them completely. However I am quite aware that would be very difficult to impossible to do with the current shield system.

Another option would be to make it so that hand held weapons ignored shields completely. I can already sense a number of you are getting your pitchforks and torches, just hear me out.

If hand held weapons can ignore shields, the relation that they have with hull blocks, standard armor and Advanced Armor should change as well. For example, it should be very hard to impossible for your hand held weapon of choice go through advanced armor. On the other side of the coin hull blocks wile not being completely useless at stopping hand weapons, should be in comparison to advanced armor able to be cut through within a relatively short amount of time. Then of course standard armor would fall some where in between.

So you essentially want all hand held weapon to be turned into torches.

No.

 

[Spartan-228]

So you essentially want all hand held weapon to be turned into torches.

No.

No! the torch of course would be able to cut through advanced armor, the pistol for example would barley be able to scratch it.

 

[JumpSuit]

Your thinking the wrong way about this, maybe have a specific block that HAS the property to allow astronaut weapons to be allowed to target it directly. Say for instance there is some type of important block... i dunno (switching to planetside 2 for example): in PS2, you can disable shield generators by disabling them with holding a key for a period of time, maybe something similar can be applied to starmade. Make Boarding a craft or station practical.

 

[jayman38]

Soooo..... Give blocks an additional 10%-50% effective armor rating against astronaut weapons on top of their existing armor rating, so that any armor is impervious to astronaut weapons? Then they can still... gradually cut through system and plain hull blocks. Maybe.

 

[Spartan-228]

Soooo..... Give blocks an additional 10%-50% effective armor rating against astronaut weapons on top of their existing armor rating, so that any armor is impervious to astronaut weapons? Then they can still... gradually cut through system and plain hull blocks. Maybe.

Essentially yes, and that way you get a better boarding auction scenarios. You no longer get that shield effect that you have now when fighting inside a ship or station, and computer consoles and other delicate things laying in the open will get shot up like they should in a boarding action.

 

[kiddan]

Sounds a lot closer to popular sci-fi universes of today, interior-wise, anyways. It's not like random players couldn't jack your ship with a torch beam already.

 

[JumpSuit]

Sounds a lot closer to popular sci-fi universes of today, interior-wise, anyways. It's not like random players couldn't jack your ship with a torch beam already.

The torch is a solution that is flawed.

 

[Tamren Shade]

In the interest of making boarding actions more interesting, has anyone proposed some kind of breaching charge?

Or a hacking type device you could equip as a weapon and use to flip logic switches or open/close doors if you have uninterrupted access for a bit.

 

[Spartan-228]

In the interest of making boarding actions more interesting, has anyone proposed some kind of breaching charge?

Or a hacking type device you could equip as a weapon and use to flip logic switches or open/close doors if you have uninterrupted access for a bit.

you can sort of use the warhead as a breaching charge, you just can't stick it to things.

 

[rocketman221]

Disabling the shield hit effect is fine, but ignoring the shields is a bad idea. We already have torches and warheads that can do that.

 

[Snowtiger256]

Yeah, disabling shield hit effects for personal weapons is fine, but no handheld blaster should be able to burn through a solid meter of metal at any efficient pace. In any common sci-fi franchise, you can see weapons punching holes through interior paneling and such, but these panels are never as thick in scale as the common hull blocks in SM.

As such, the effects of a personal blaster in SM should be limited to damage texture overlays on the hit blocks (scorch marks, broken displays, etc.). Actually burning through a block (destroying the block) should be limited to high power weapons (rocket launchers) or breaching tools (such as the Torch).

 

[jayman38]

If the wiki is still accurate, the standard-issue pistol fires approximately 7 times a second with 10 points of damage.

Assuming the ship still has armor HP, that should automatically reduce the damage by half, yielding an impact of 5 damage.

If we add a full 50% armor effect to any ship block when hit by an astronaut weapon, that yields a rounded-up damage of 3.

3 times 7 is 21 dps. So it would take about 3.5 seconds to burn through a block of hull with 75 hp. When you consider how powerful scifi handheld weapons are in popular media, going through a full cubic meter of non-armored hull in about 3 seconds with 25 rapid-fire pistol hits is not so crazy. Furthermore, if you were to give hull 10%-20% armor rating (very reasonable), the pistol damage rating rounds to 2 per shot, and it will take more than 5 seconds (38 pistol shots) to burn through a cubic meter of hull.

With these figures, it would take a hair less than 2.5 seconds to burn through unchanged system blocks with 50 hp. That sounds reasonable to me. So a control computer won't go down on the first hit, like popular sci-fi media. Instead, you gotta hit it with the pistol about 17 times to blow it up. I wouldn't want saboteurs to take down my computers with a single pistol shot, like in movies, so I'd be pretty satisfied with my computers requiring 17 hits each to kill by astronaut.

 

[boomchacle]

So you essentially want all hand held weapon to be turned into torches.

No.

how about add a torch which ignores shields and can somewhat quickly remove blocks but also has a range of like 1 meter