- Joined
- Dec 29, 2014
- Messages
- 459
- Reaction score
- 269
Mass doesn't work and is overused in the mechanics. This gives decorative/armor blocks nightmarish penalties if you're trying to make an efficient setup and forces uniformity in viable ship shapes, as limiting surface area is necessary.
You add 100 decorative blocks to a ship with, you will then need 15 module blocks to keep your effects the same, 10 thrusters to keep your speed the same, and these use power so we need another 25 power reactors to keep everything running, but hey! now we added another 50 blocks to the ship so we have to pump in another 7 module blocks, thrusters, more reactors etc, etc, etc. And lets not forget that thrusters require increasing amounts of power the more you have, so this gets exponentially worse the larger your ship is, and then there's radar jammers.
Let's not even talk about cloaking where you can't even have an exterior, i cannot find a way of simply covering the reactor blocks while keeping it stable.
I'm so sick of this, i don't want to nickle and dime my ships weighing the consequences of putting a pottet plant in the foyer because i have to expand the systems or the ship will implode. I didn't really notice how insane the penalty is until i saw this ship: http://starmadedock.net/content/the-mirage-le-mirage.2898/
Because the ship has a split hull, a sizable interior and high speed it is practically unable to power itself and its systems, and it doesn't even have overdrive effect! We can't have decent open ship designs unless they're covered in reactors.
The other side of this issue is that competitions tend to use mass as the measuring stick for what ships go in the same category, but a low-interior ship with simple indentless exterior is many times stronger than the pretty ones because a 20000 mass ship with 4000 mass in decorations/armor has roughly 12000 mass worth of combat strength, while a 20.000 mass ship with 1000 mass in dec/armor has 18000; 50% more. And of those 18000 vs 12000 they'll have to dedicate the same amount to speed; 2.0 thrust to mass means another 4000 gone from each; 14000 now vs 8000. If we assume they have the same DPS, but the non-cosmetic ship just dumped all it's resources into shields instead of cosmetics, you'll easily have a scenario where two ships, all else equals, one has twice the shield strength.
What we need is a measurement that ignores decorative blocks, and arguably armor, and using THAT for comparing ship strength and module penalties. I'd even sugest not adding mass from decorative blocks and simply having them die immediately when they take damage; just let projectiles/beams/missiles travel through them like they don't exist. Even if armor only reduces ship speed, isn't that enough? Sure you can make huge armored cubes, but how will they even move?
Just count the number of reactors, capacitors, shield rechargers, shield capacitors, weapon blocks, effects, as well as computers and we're all golden, surely it's not that much work?
You add 100 decorative blocks to a ship with, you will then need 15 module blocks to keep your effects the same, 10 thrusters to keep your speed the same, and these use power so we need another 25 power reactors to keep everything running, but hey! now we added another 50 blocks to the ship so we have to pump in another 7 module blocks, thrusters, more reactors etc, etc, etc. And lets not forget that thrusters require increasing amounts of power the more you have, so this gets exponentially worse the larger your ship is, and then there's radar jammers.
Let's not even talk about cloaking where you can't even have an exterior, i cannot find a way of simply covering the reactor blocks while keeping it stable.
I'm so sick of this, i don't want to nickle and dime my ships weighing the consequences of putting a pottet plant in the foyer because i have to expand the systems or the ship will implode. I didn't really notice how insane the penalty is until i saw this ship: http://starmadedock.net/content/the-mirage-le-mirage.2898/
Because the ship has a split hull, a sizable interior and high speed it is practically unable to power itself and its systems, and it doesn't even have overdrive effect! We can't have decent open ship designs unless they're covered in reactors.
The other side of this issue is that competitions tend to use mass as the measuring stick for what ships go in the same category, but a low-interior ship with simple indentless exterior is many times stronger than the pretty ones because a 20000 mass ship with 4000 mass in decorations/armor has roughly 12000 mass worth of combat strength, while a 20.000 mass ship with 1000 mass in dec/armor has 18000; 50% more. And of those 18000 vs 12000 they'll have to dedicate the same amount to speed; 2.0 thrust to mass means another 4000 gone from each; 14000 now vs 8000. If we assume they have the same DPS, but the non-cosmetic ship just dumped all it's resources into shields instead of cosmetics, you'll easily have a scenario where two ships, all else equals, one has twice the shield strength.
What we need is a measurement that ignores decorative blocks, and arguably armor, and using THAT for comparing ship strength and module penalties. I'd even sugest not adding mass from decorative blocks and simply having them die immediately when they take damage; just let projectiles/beams/missiles travel through them like they don't exist. Even if armor only reduces ship speed, isn't that enough? Sure you can make huge armored cubes, but how will they even move?
Just count the number of reactors, capacitors, shield rechargers, shield capacitors, weapon blocks, effects, as well as computers and we're all golden, surely it's not that much work?
