Potentially Impenetrable Shielding

[Silver_Cloud]

So I had an idea a while back on an idea for a ship and wanted to try it myself, but it ended up too daunting a task for me time-wise. I didn't know where else to post this or if this has been done before so I'll post it here.

Basically the idea is to have a ship with "shield plates". To be more specific, a ship with anywhere between 3 and 8 turret docking bays around the middle of the ship like a belt. The only difference between these turrets and others is they have no guns, only a massive shield generator. The idea is to give the ship plates around the outside with their own shielding supply and regen rates. If the ship is attacked and the assault was to succeed they would have to focus fire on one or two plates to take down their shields, then blast through the armor, take down the main ships shielding, and blast through that armor. Because the ship has the different plates it would be a tough job taking it out because of the separate regen rates.

I will make this myself one day, but it will be a while. I'd rather wait until the game comes out of alpha to make sure it stays viable. However I post this here in case any players want to test it and give it a go. If it works and is applied to a mother-ship, imagine how tough it would be to take something like that down. If built right it would go fantastically on a drone mother-ship.

If any players would like to give any criticism, comments, or ideas I'm open to hearing them. And if anyone succeeds in making something like this I would very much like to see it in action myself.

 

[Thalanor]

Currently the main weakness would be that the individual parts (ship and plates) would have lower shield totals, so you would be very vulnerable to any type of missile. Could be tested in combination with lots of point defense though.

 

[Silver_Cloud]

Currently the main weakness would be that the individual parts (ship and plates) would have lower shield totals, so you would be very vulnerable to any type of missile. Could be tested in combination with lots of point defense though.

Yeah, I figured this wouldn't be that effective on small to mid size ships. The bigger the ship is the more effective this would be, which is why I thought this would be something to try on a mother-ship. Even then it would need a lot of support from allies to make it work well I imagine. Any shielding and armor can be blasted through given time and effort.

 

[Thalanor]

If you are talking HUGE mothership (as in, so large that enemies take a long time to fly around it), you could enhance the whole idea by making it possible to let the mothership (which should still have more capacity than the plates) use shield supply beams "on demand" to regenerate the one section under fire especially quickly. Basically four buttons that would trigger a 5-10s shield supply beam routine for the respective plate.

 

[DivineEvil]

Another good point with that system is that you can easily replace damaged or destroyed plates separately, rather than repairing the parent ship all the time. If not for the basic 7-9 base docking volume, you could even do overlapping facets. Not a new idea though, and most still prefer a big chunk of shielding despite the diminishing returns.

 

[AtraUnam]

Can we turn this into a ship armor R&D thread similar to the drone thread?
I had a similar idea which involved giving each plate its own shield drain beam to steal shield strength from the enemy ship.

 

[MrFURB]

Silver_Cloud An interesting idea for a large scale vessel, but you would need to have a lot of mass to make it worthwhile.

Shield capacitors give a base 55/block to the power of 0.9791797578 capacity, meaning that splitting shield capacity between multiple entities gives a slight bonus, but the total shield blocks would have to be very high in order to make the bonus worth the weakness of weaker individual shielding. Shield blocks are expensive, and having a million of them on a platform meant to tank by splitting damage to multiple entities can have a prohibitively high cost in resources and repairs.

Shield regen on the other hand works off of linear scaling at 5.5/sec/block. There's no gain from separating the regen. There's also an energy cost for running the shield supply/drain beams to move shields from one entity to the other. In addition, using shield supply/drain beams causes entities to go into 'combat mode' which drastically lowers shield regen.

There are positives though; Less mass for the individual parts taking damage means that you can run high power Ion or Piercing defensive effects without worrying about the massive cost of enveloping an entire capital ship within the effect's protection. I can definitely see a use in having multiple power/shield reactors funneling resources into shield and armor plates to run these effects.

 

[Malacodor]

I also thought about that. One problem is how to find out which shield plate is actually receiving damage and how much shield power is left. Since there no way to find out about this from the mothership one has to toggle through all docked plates constantly. Zooming out can help a bit, but isn't really practical. If you know which plate needs to regenerate you have to turn the ship accordingly, which is a serious problem for bigger ships.

 

[jaws2002]

I also thought about that. One problem is how to find out which shield plate is actually receiving damage and how much shield power is left. Since there no way to find out about this from the mothership one has to toggle through all docked plates constantly. Zooming out can help a bit, but isn't really practical. If you know which plate needs to regenerate you have to turn the ship accordingly, which is a serious problem for bigger ships.

I am hoping for the logic system to be expanded so that this kind of thing can be automated.

 

[Argyle_Ninja]

Going off of what I've tested around with docking areas, you can have them overlap however much you want, as long as the ships don't overlap when you try to dock them. For instance I think you could even have armor plating interlock to an extent. Mmmm.. something like:
______---- ____________
xxxxxxxx\---\___xxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxx\___---\xxxxxxxx
__________/---/_______
_____D__________________D_______
Docking module---------------Docking module

How say you?

 

[MrFURB]

Going off of what I've tested around with docking areas, you can have them overlap however much you want, as long as the ships don't overlap when you try to dock them. For instance I think you could even have armor plating interlock to an extent. Mmmm.. something like:
______---- ____________
xxxxxxxx\---\___xxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxx\___---\xxxxxxxx
__________/---/_______
_____D__________________D_______
Docking module---------------Docking module

How say you?

0.o That's actually quite interesting... I may toy with that later.

 

[Drakkart]

probably more effective is building a second armor layer around the hull - well once the shields are down pretty much nothing will really prevent destruction.

 

[Mered4]

And......this thread is why we need to fix the missile mechanics for docked entities.

 

[marcus87]

I had actually designet a different ship, shielded plates inside the ship. Basically a core of the ship and around that six big shield plates then the rest of the ship.

 

[EricBlank]

You could use both: internal reinforcement plates and power supply cores and external scales. Internal core plates might give you a last chance to escape the ship in combat.
I know they won't provide a huge overall bonus to shield strength, but losing plates on one section won't threaten the entire ship as much as being vulnerable from all angles: an attacker can then only hit the mother ship through that gap until others are creates, and only hit the core from a specific angle. Fighters and bombers could easily take advantage of this, but would need to maintain that position to give them the chance to cause damage (they can only mount so much weaponry and remain maneuverable enough to be useful), and that immobility makes them vulnerable.
With turrets being mounted to the scale plates, the loss of shields on the mother ship or one plate does not imply fighter-bombers can swoop in and strafe off every single turret: each one needs to be handled separately.

 

[MrFURB]

One of the major weaknesses of exterior armor plating is that you can't use all of the armor blocks you place on your ship, you only use the ones that get hit which are usually the ones directly between your enemy and your core. One of the ways to minimize this weakness is to have the skin of your vessel be there for decorative purposes while your armor lies in smaller but much thicker plates surrounding your core room and other important locations inside your ship. That way you're forcing the enemy's precision drilling or area-of-effect weapons to go through a much thicker layer of armor to hit your most valuable blocks.

 

[AtraUnam]

Do cores still take 55 seconds to overheat no matter how much damage they take?

 

[Silver_Cloud]

You could use both: internal reinforcement plates and power supply cores and external scales. Internal core plates might give you a last chance to escape the ship in combat.
I know they won't provide a huge overall bonus to shield strength, but losing plates on one section won't threaten the entire ship as much as being vulnerable from all angles: an attacker can then only hit the mother ship through that gap until others are creates, and only hit the core from a specific angle. Fighters and bombers could easily take advantage of this, but would need to maintain that position to give them the chance to cause damage (they can only mount so much weaponry and remain maneuverable enough to be useful), and that immobility makes them vulnerable.
With turrets being mounted to the scale plates, the loss of shields on the mother ship or one plate does not imply fighter-bombers can swoop in and strafe off every single turret: each one needs to be handled separately.

To be honest I didn't even consider sticking defensive guns on them because I simply wasn't looking at them as actual turrets. How silly of me.