Reactor Chamber effects

[Lancake]

We have spent quite some time, thinking about possible chamber effects, or effects that would be useful to apply on a sector/system level. Some of these are already in our current dev build tree but most only exist on paper so far.

Past suggestions on StarmadeDock have shown that there are plenty of unique and fun ideas posted regularly and we believe you can help us by cooking up some more chamber related effects.

If you have any ideas, or know previously made suggestions that would work well as a reactor chamber, leave that here in this thread. The only thing we ask is that you also provide a short description of what the said effect would do.

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Example:

• Multi charge jump drive chamber
  • Makes a jump discharge less than 100%, allowing multiple jumps from a single charge.
  • Variable to modify: jump charge consumption
  • May need extra modifiers to balance it,
    
• NOTES: Similar method could potentially be used for other in-built systems such as scanners/stealth drive

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In case you are unfamiliar with the upcoming power update and the reactor chambers, read this thread

 

[jayman38]

1. Weapon Accelerator

• Double the effective speed of every weapon shot
• Projectile bounding boxes are doubled in length to ensure proper intersection calculations
• Increase beam maximum range with a non-beam secondary weapon.

2. Shotgun Targeting Chamber

• Instead of a random spread, target random blocks in a cone of fire instead
• See the original suggestion linked in the number 2 title for more details and ideas.

3. Pulse Trap Extension Chamber

• Extend localized pulse weapons into a shipwide shield-like "astronaut-zapper".
• Instead of individual pulses, all pulse modules contribute to zap-shield strength, and "pops" any hostile astronaut(s) that contact the ship at any location.
• Uses only enough weapon energy to kill the astronaut, so that the field can quickly recharge and zap more hostiles in a boarding party or other astronaut group.

4. Antigravity Chamber

• Allow the entity to hover above a gravity source, similar to the Stop effect.
• Allow changes in altitude.
• Auto-shutoff when leaving a gravity field.
• Auto-activation when entering a gravity field?

5. Security Computation Chamber

• Increases the time needed to hack systems (hacking not yet implemented)
• Increases the accuracy of AI.
• Increases the effect of Jamming.
• Slightly reduces the power requirement of cloaking.

6. Factory Ship Controller

• Allows a ship to use factory blocks.
• Slower construction rate. (No factory enhancers allowed?)
• Incompatible with cloaking systems.

7. Electrobimagnetic Generator

• Enable the ship to "stick/align/land" on/against any surface.

8. Mass Gyroscope

• Increase turning rates on all axes

9. Thrust Accelerator

• Increase linear thrust on all axes

10. Pulse Charger

• Automatically charges scanners, jump drives, and other "charging" elements.
• Very slow recharge compared to manual.
• Should allow faster manual charging (crew!)
• Replaces logic-clocked chain drives.

11. Ram Booster

• Suddenly charges the entity forward. (Speed +100?)
  
• If impacting another entity, damage based on mass against whole-entity values.
• Shield, Armor, and Structure Impact
• Initiate a massive neutral "Damage Pulse" charge at the point of impact, damaging all entities within pulse damage range.
• Stop all relative motion at the time of impact, so that the damage pulse simulates the damage of ramming, without the excessive calculations that might cause lag.

 

[Edymnion]

Spitballing ideas here:

Phase Shifter
Shift out of phase with normal matter. You are immune to weapons fire from non-phased ships, and non-phased ships are immune to your fire while shifted. Can pass through non-phased solid structures such as asteroids.

AI Booster
Increases the difficulty settings of your AI systems above the server default setting. Makes your turrets, your drones, your fleet ships, etc more accurate with their fire.

Shield Bubble
Gives allied/faction ships withing a certain distance a scaling portion of your shields. So say a drone carrier with massive shields could automatically extend some part of those shields to it's drones within the same sector or within a scaling range.

Threat Modifier
Increase/decrease the threat level of your ship compared to others, making AI more or less likely to attack your ship given a range of options. So you could make a tank that intentionally increases it's own threat to pull fire away from other ships in the fleet, or fighters that reduce their threat to slip through defenses.

Mass Reducer
Decreases the mass of the entity, meaning it can use less thrusters or be moved by rails with less enhancers.

Effect Booster
Increase the percentage per block for secondary and tertiary effects. So say you had a 10 block weapon that had Overdrive on it. Normally you'd need 10 OD blocks to get maximum effect. Could make it so you only needed 5 OD blocks to reach maximum effect. Or need less modules to get 100% effect on secondary things like Cannon/Cannon or Missile/Beam. Let you pack more whollup in a smaller package.

Ignore Damage Reducers
Let you still deal base damage with an effect that would otherwise decrease a weapon's damage. So you could have a Beam with 100% ION that still did it's normal base damage on top of the energy drain. Or a weapon with 100% stop that still does damage.

Cargo Booster
Increase the storage capacity of cargo blocks, more storage with less physical space.

 

[AssIn9]

Capitol ship systems please.

 

[JinM]

Cargo Enhancement Chamber: Decreases the thrust debuff ships receive for carrying large amounts of cargo by a given percentage.
> Level 2 chamber: Docked entities mass debuff on thrusters get get decreased.

Thruster Nitro boost chamber: Enhances your ships acceleration for a limited amount of time upon activation.
> Level 2 chamber: multiple nitro boost charges.
> Level 3 chamber: jump one sector ahead into the direction you are facing, rechargable

Gravity Chamber: Emits a gravity field for astronauts only upon the whole entity. The difference to gravity blocks is, that this gravity field activates allways and doesnt need any interaction to impact the astronaut.
> Level 2 chamber: set the direction of the gravity (bonus if you can set areas on the ship where what type of gravity impacts).
> Level 2 chamber: The gravity field is circular (not spherical) outbound (you get pushed away from the cneter). This simulates rotational gravity.
> Level 3 chamber: Entities get affected too (but only entities that have no gravity chamber themself).

Security Chamber: Keep track of astronauts on your ship by knowing the count that are in a certain ship radius.
> Level 2 chamber: Reinforce doors against torch beams, 50% longer damage time.
> Level 2 chamber: send logic signals from areas where astronauts are walking. Minimum area size: 5x5x5. Have a setting that allows to only use the trigger, if enemy factions or friendly factions or own factions or any of the aviable options is present.
> Level 2 chamber: allow the interaction with logic blocks for non faction members, select what type: only activation modules, buttons, and/or/not etc. also storage, displays, factory selectable aso.
> Level 3 chamber: allow to salvage selected block types from the ships when a non faction member uses astronaut mode (example: allow to mine wood blocks for a minigame, or allow to mine a crystal block for a breadcrumb hunt)
> Level 3 chamber: allow block placement, select which types

Nanite-Repair chamber: Lets your ship self repair, if your shields are not under attack! Uses a blueprint to reconstruct missing blocks and repairs your ship upon activation, has a long recharge of 5 minutes after no shield damage was present. Needs storage and blocks.
> Level 2: Include docked entities (attention: this might deconstruct entities that were not docked upon blueprint saving!).
> Level 2: Use capsules for repair after blocks got used.

 

[EricBlank]

As posted in this thread: New Chamber Ideas

Inertial web:

• Increases weapons with beam seondary range and projectile speed by 50%, but reduces ship speed and acceleration by 90%
• Overrides thrust and speed enhancing chambers

Fake reactor/beacon

• Show up on scans as if it were a set of reactors and chambers.
• Requires more accurate scans to see through the illusion, higher dedication to this chamber increases the scan strength necessary to bypass it.
• Larger chamber point dedication also causes it to look significantly larger than it actually is.

I suggested:
Ramming defense chamber

• When we get an update to collision damage, protects your vessel/station from a degree of damage.

Hitpoint pool conversion:

• Subtracts a fraction of the total of one of your hitpoint pools (armor or shield) and adds x% of the subtracted value to another.
• If adding to armor hp pool, add in the additional hitpoints over a lengthy time period, since otherwise youd have to buy them from a shop.

Storage capacity:

• Increases the volume of items your storage containers can hold by a largish amount
• Does not affect the mass of stored cargo, so it still affects ship mass if youre overloading your containers.
• excess cargo leaks into space when chamber disabled

Cargo mass reduction:

• Reduces mass of hauled cargo to a degree, letting that cargo freighter be just a hit more manueverable.

Back to not mine
Overcharge reactor output:

• Increase reactor output
• Make reactor + chambers unstable if hit. It goes boom

System overdrives:

• Gives boost to a specific ship system (thrust, shield cap or charge, etc)
• Does so over limited time, needs to be recharged before each use (or fixed duration and cooldown)

Fleet/faction telemetry/communications chamber (s)

• Sends ship data to other craft (with or without a matching/receiver chamber of their own?), including targetting data, location heading and speed, sharing hitpoint status (maybe highlighting ships that are under fire or damaged so logistics ships can respond)

Specific weapons improvements

• Better reload, range, damage or projectile speed for a specific weapons system
• Increase number of stored weapons charges?

Some other ideas ive had:

station based decloaking/scanning chamber

• forces all craft within range to decloak/unjam if its powerful enough to overcome their effects.

Ship systems assistance chamber

• Craft in range of the source of this share a portion of the sources ability to do something.
• Shares jump drive and scanning bonuses, possibly others
• Set to not affect hostile craft, but works for faction, allies and neutral
• May reduce the source objects capacities in proportion to what it offers other craft

Heat sink/vent chamber

• Reduces or stops damage from proximity to stars
• Temporary at first, can be made permanent

Stand down/cease fire

• Makes a ship appear and be treated as non hostile until it performs a hostile action, regardless of current faction standing
• Good for diplomatic negotiations shuttles during wartime
• Disables onboard weaponry and turrets

Faction FoF ID cloak/hijacking

• Allows a ship to appear as a member of another faction or as neutral when highlighted or in the navigation panel
• Can display a false ship or pilot name.
• Displays faction identity as one of the npc factions or as a player faction other than the viewers that has more than one member.
• Use of weapons or aggressive action breaks the effect

 

[Jake_Lancia]

Random ideas off the top of my head.

Sector/system wide effects:

Sensor Disruption field

• Makes entity using this chamber and any other entities in the same sector have reduced navigational sensor range.
• Can be used to hide the exact location of a ship or a group of ships, but like swarmer missiles, it affects friendly ships too.
• Works on stations.

Jump Interdictor

• (may require additional server calculations) If an enemy entity is jumping in the direction of the players' entity while this chamber is active, it pulls said enemy ship out of jump space into the sector of the players' entity.
• Consumes large amounts of power.
• Cannot stop an enemy jumping *out* of a sector.
• Incompatible with standard jump inhibition.
• Can be used on stations.

Other effects:

Reactor Overcharge

• This Chamber slowly drains power while inactive.
• When activated, gives player entity dramatic boost in power for a set amount of time proportional to the time it spent inactive.
• Cannot be reactivated for at least 2 mins after activation. (or some other time period idk)
• Cannot be used on stations.

Gemini Effect

• Projects a duplicate nav signature, including relevant system info, of players' entity 1-2km away from player entity.
• Consumes moderate amount of power.
• Player entity cannot use other Stealth chambers while this effect is active.
• Cannot be used on stations.

 

[Coyote27]

Main suggestion:

NO offensive/weapon chambers. Save those effects for the weapons update. Chambers that make certain weapons more power-efficient are especially a bad idea IMO, because they don't do anything interesting and would be a near requirement for combat ships, making any other chamber choices less viable.

Miscellaneous ideas:

Station power supply/shield supply chambers: Split a portion of the station's shield recharge or power generation between all friendly ships in the same sector; can be set to affect faction-only ships, allied ships, or even neutral ones too.

Station shipyard chambers: Variants to auto-repair ships docked in the shipyard (armor/systems/block HP) and possibly auto-replace missing blocks from any storage linked to the shipyard computer that the ship's blueprint/design says should be there but aren't - another way of saying this is that it would automatically update the ship to match the last saved design/blueprint for the ship, using blocks that you have available. This could potentially extend to repairing the station itself.

Station manufacturing chambers: Increase the efficiency of factory enhancers on the station, either power-wise or by production rate.

 

[JinM]

Transmission/Communication chamber: Basic idea is to manage your fleet.
Level 1: Set targets to attack via the chambers "weapon" slot. Order fleets to patrol relative to your ship: In front, to the left an right equally, circular around it.
Level 2: Order fleet into a certain part of a sector the ship is currently in. Divide the sector into a 9x9x9 grid.
Level 3: Hijack enemy fleet controlled ships to malfunction randomly. Makes some of the enemy ships to forget their orders of patrolling for 5 minutes, or makes them to not fire if targeted indivually with the chambers "weapon slot", but only if the enemy fleet ships are having no scanner modules or some other stuff the developer should best pick.

 

[Non]

maybe its been said somewhere, maybe its already a feature, i havent checked, but higher strength scanners should identify any ship with an active jump inhibitor or equivalent system

also, i think offense chambers should be gone

 

[DrTarDIS]

Gate beacon/caretaker array
-allows the reverse effect of normal warpgates: summons all entities in target sector into the current one(on stations)
-allows "summoning" of faction fleets into current sector(on ships)


Jump wave expander
-allows additional Fleet Ships to piggyback/follow the leader's jump without docking
-higher levels leave a temporary(disappears on sector unload) "wormhole" other players may use


Trade complex
-connects to the trade network(for ships)


Energy concentration chamber
-Reduces/steals the effectiveness of other reactors in range by a flat % of reactor's output
-chamberlevel*5%output
-only highest level entity in system applies it's effect to all other entities


Energy dispersion chamber
-supplys reactor energy wirelessly to other [friendly/fleet]entities in range
-chamberlevel*5%output
-only highest level entity in system applies it's effect to all other entities


Crew complimentor
-allows aligned astro(s) to gain all benefits of entity
-eg shields, jamming, cloaking
-really shouldn't need a chamber, but it's an excuse to get yall to make alignment work better
-unlocks the "head expander" and "crew shrinker" and "walking beacon" sub-chambers


Bio-generator
-spawns "spiders" like old neutral stations, Because pets are vanity
-#spawned = reactorLv /5 round-up
-lv2 assigns {faction} to otherwise insane/hostile spiders
-lv3 spawns an additional " " for every 5 spiders as leader.

 

[Crimson-Artist]

Lancake just a question on chambers. Will effect computers still exist after this update? alot of the effects defensive abilities seems to now be done with chambers. im going on the assumption that the defensive effects will be replaced with chambers while the computers will still be used for weapon linking.

 

[Lancake]

Lancake just a question on chambers. Will effect computers still exist after this update? alot of the effects defensive abilities seems to now be done with chambers. im going on the assumption that the defensive effects will be replaced with chambers while the computers will still be used for weapon linking.

They will still be there to be used in weapon combination. It's possible that some of them will be removed entirely though when we update the weapons too.

NO offensive/weapon chambers. Save those effects for the weapons update.

also, i think offense chambers should be gone

We're not planning to keep them unless there are offense related mechanics that do make sense to apply on the whole entity, since otherwise they overlap with what the weapon combinations already do as you point out.
I'm already struggling to come up with a single useful example for that tree so I imagine the final offense tree would be so small we shouldn't bother with it.

That doesn't mean you can't mention any effects altering weapons or behaviors in some way, while not useful as a chamber, they could still be used on a sector/system effect where everything in there is buffed/nerfed by it.

 

[apelsinsaft]

I linked this spreadsheet in another thread about suggestions for reactor chambers. The idea from the beginning was a suggestion i was thinking of where the old effect systems could be linked to eachother to create funky defensive effects, and i think some of these could translate nicely into the new chamber system.

The main thing to take away from all of these is they have very wild and playstyle-defining effects, intended to shake up the way designing a ship works and encouraging people to find neat combos and scout their opponents to develop counters for these combos. Obviously some of these effects are not very smart (the black hole effect would just be a lag fest)

EDIT: For anyone paranoid about opening spreadsheets, i'll list the effects below

• Negative Wave Generator - Causes nearby ships to lose power according to your power regeneration
• Shield Phase Drive - 50% of damage you deal to nearby ships bypasses shields.
• Destabilized Injectors - Doubles your power generation but damages your structure by 1% every 5 seconds.
• Flux Diverters - Redirects 50% of armor damage taken to your power bank.
• Positron Resonator - Nearby ships suffer damage proportional to 100% of the energy they spend.
  
• Charge Pumps - 25% of all energy spent by other ships nearby is redirected to your power bank at max effect.
• Charge Radiators - 25% of all energy spent by your ship is also transferred to other ships nearby.
  
• Electromagnetic Feedback Loop - Lowers energy generation of nearby ships the closer they are.
  
• Phase Field Generator - Spawns a large bubble shield around your ship. Damage dealt to the bubble shield goes directly to your shield HP. Any effect that would disable your shield will also deactivate this effect.
  
• Pulsar Field - Causes your ship to pulse every second. Deals damage equal to 0.5% of your structure HP to both your own ship and nearby ships.
  
• Null Space Expander - Causes nearby projectiles and missiles to move slower the closer they are, down to 90% slower.
  
• Probability Drive - Reduces all nearby damage reduction effects, including regular armor reduction, by up to 50% the closer the source is.
  
• Void Field - Ships within 500m of your ship are drawn to yours as if you were a planet.
  
• Negative Void Field - Ships within 500m of your ship are pushed away from yours, as if you were a... white hole?
  
• Drag Field - Nearby ships are slowed down by up to 75% the closer they are.
  
• Nanite Phase Cells - Damages your ship's structure by 1% every second. Reduces all damage dealt to your shields to 0. Has a long cooldown after deactivating before you can toggle it back on.
  
• Emitter Plates - Reduces damage dealt to your shields by 100%. Deals 33% of that damage to your armor or structure HP instead.
  
• Energized Membrane - Disables your shields. Your shield banks are recharged with 200% of damage taken to armor/structure.
  
• Ionized Plasma Field - Nearby ships transfer their shields to your shield bank at a rate of up to 1% of your shield HP per second the closer they are.
  
• Neutral Plasma Field - You transfer 1% of your shield HP to nearby ships every second at max effect.
  
• Ionic Feedback Loop - Nearby ships have their shield regeneration lowered the closer they are, ending up reversed at max effect.
  
• Cascade Absorbers - Your armor takes up to 100% less damage the longer it is under fire. The power draw of this effect scales with the damage reduction, eventually blacking out the ship. Deactivating resets the "under fire" timer.
  
• Scavenger Nanites - Your ship takes 1% structure damage every second, and its shields and armor HP are restored by 2.5% every second.
  
• Auxilliary Warp Core - Quickly warps your ship forwards a distance equal to 10 times your longest dimension. Once used, is deactivated and has to cool down for 15 seconds.
• Warp Field Generator - Warps all ships within 1000m forwards a distance equal to 20 times your longest dimension. Once used, it starts a 15 second cycle, and at the end of the cycle, the nearby ships are warped.
  
• Temporal Resonator - Everything other than the ship in the same sector is slowed by up to 50%, depending on the relative size of the chamber, including power generation, fire rate, projectile speed etc. Other ships with this effect are immune according to their own ratio.
  
• Nanite Liquid Tanks - 75% of all damage dealt to the ship's armor and structure is automatically regenerated within 60 seconds. Deactivating this effect will cancel all liquid nanite repairs, the effect isn't retroactive.
  
• Predictive Absorbers - Armor damage taken from nearby ships is decreased scaling with distance, dealing down to 33% of the original damage. The maximum reduction is achieved only at very close range.
  
• Absorption Field - Reduces damage dealt to nearby ships by 75%. This cumulative reduced damage is instead dealt to your ship. This effect cannot trigger on another ship with this effect activated.
  
• Gravitic Deflector - Causes your hitbox to effectively be 75% smaller against beams by curving beams away from its center of mass.
  
• Quantum Reconfigurator - Whenever your ship deals damage to a nearby ship, your armor and shield HP is replenished with up to 20% of the damage dealt the closer you are.
  
• Quantum Field - Deals up to 25% of armor damage taken to nearby ships depending on distance.
  
• Plasma Deflector - Causes 100% of all projectiles that hit your ship to deal no damage and bounce in the direction they came from. Draws a large amount of power and continues to draw power for several seconds after deactivation, effectively blacking out your ship.
  
• Infinite Mass Field - Your ship and nearby ships lose up to 100% of their thrust power depending on distance.
  
• Subspace Core - Phases your ship into a temporary dimension where it can't be affected or seen by the outside. Likewise, the ship can't see anything around it or affect its surroundings. This depletes your shield banks and quickly blackouts your ship. Deactivating causes your ship to appear randomly in the sector to avoid collisions.
  
• Subspace Field Generator - Creates a spherical rift around the ship. The rift stays in place and has a diameter much larger than the ship. Any ship that enters the rift is taken to a random nearby sector(including the ship that created the rift). Only a ship small enough to fit inside the rift will be teleported.

 

[TheKingOfSpace]

Perhaps my suggestion here could work as it's own chamber:
Jump Drive suggestion: Continuous drives

Optional 'warpspace' jumping style for one-click long-range jumps

offense related mechanics that do make sense to apply on the whole entity

Turret things perhaps?

Turret Accuracy

Self explanatory.
​

Turret Rotation Speed

Boosts rotation speed of all of a ship's turrets by a small amount.
​

Turret Targeting Speed

Turrets could have a short delay before a it turns to fire at something. This'd reduce that.
​

 

[Crimson-Artist]

Lancake I also noticed that the the FTL chambers doesnt hav an option for auto charging. Are you guys still working on that or is that no longer happening?

 

[Coyote27]

On a contrapoint to this thread, what things listed so far sound like good ideas but would be better NOT handled by chambers?
One that comes to mind is the turret settings -

Turret things perhaps?

...which are good ideas, yes, but maybe Bobby AI improvements should handle that instead of putting it on chambers.

As a general thought on the matter: If it directly involves weapons (or support beams), it should be part of the weapon system update that's supposed to come next after power. If it's an AI issue, it should come with other improvements to the AI systems directly. If it involves rails, then it should be fit in with other rails-related ideas as a package there.

 

[Ithirahad]

Turret things perhaps?

Turret Accuracy

Self explanatory.
​

Turret Rotation Speed

Boosts rotation speed of all of a ship's turrets by a small amount.
​

Turret Targeting Speed

Turrets could have a short delay before a it turns to fire at something. This'd reduce that.​

I assume this implies that larger turrets would be given a slower rotation rate to start with, in addition to that targeting delay, and... SO MUCH YES on both counts.

 

[EricBlank]

For offensive effects across sectors, maybe chambers that reduce/increase local projectile and ship speeds, weapons ranges, and damage outputs, affecting all ships within range of the output regardless of affiliation.

 

[Brokengauge]

I would like an easy visual shorthand of some sort telling me where my unlinked chambers are. There is already a grid point labeled, but I'm a visual person, and so some sort of highlight, or glowing incorporeal box on that particular grid point would be immensely helpful