Shield Emitter Blocks: The solution for "Gigantism" and fighters.

[apelsinsaft]

Outline of the issue:

This is a collection of three separate changes that would help alleviate the issue some like to call "Gigantism", the phenomenon where people make bigger and bigger ships because this is the only way to remain effective in an arms race. You can argue that it's realistic or makes for nice competition and all but, the problem is gigantism in starmade has no limit. If servers don't set up limits for ship size, soon everyone puts all their faction resources into making sanity shattering titans that are completely unassailable by anything but other sanity shattering titans.

Why is this bad? It's simple. The only way to gain advantages is make bigger ships. Fighters? Forget about it. Corvettes and frigates? Better move up quickly or get left behind. Got new players in your faction but no resources to make big ships for them yet? To the gulags. All in all gigantism hampers the creative freedom the players have for not only building their ships, but also how they're supposed to play the game. Scouting only gives you intel on the size of the enemy ships, and maybe what weapons they're using.

The idea:

The changes are simple:

1. Add a "Shield Emitter" block, vulnerable from attack even through shields.
2. Buff shield capacity and regeneration.
3. Add the ability to assign secondary and primary undeathinators.

The Shield Emitter:

A cube with one side representing the output, and five empty sides. The cube itself would have the effective HP of several advanced armor blocks. The key features of the block would be that it:

• Is required for a shield to function.
• Can be damaged at any time, even through shields.
• Removes a portion of your shield when destroyed, proportional to the total amount of emitters the ship has.

The block would have rules to its use on ships. First and foremost, a ship would only be able to have a certain amount of emitters total, proportional to total ship mass. Obviously destroying all 500 emitters on a titan is something nobody would ever want to do, so this is a must. Something like 5 emitters maximum for titan size ships would probably be a good limit, but it could probably be higher. Depending on how it plays out stations may or may not need emitters, and if so it should probably be a larger maximum amount, like 10.

Second, the emitter would check the open space on its output side for a sphere with the diameter of X blocks, where X is ship size divided by 2 (or something to this effect). If any part of the ship intersects this sphere, docked or not, the shield emitter "fails", and the portion of the shield it was responsible for also fails. This is to prevent builders burying the emitter in an impossible to hit location. See the following crude mspaint diagram:

Naturally, if somebody would decide to make a spherical death star they could easily fit the shield emitters inside it. To prevent this, the emitter may check whether the space it's in is closed or not, perhaps if there's anything in the path of the output side.

The other stuff:

Since just adding the shield emitters on their own would be a massive nerf to shields, a buff to shield capacity and regen rate would be in order. Optimally, in any given condition protecting your ship with shields should be stronger than armor, provided you can make sure your emitters aren't shot out by flanking enemies. This is to promote people using small ships to counter shielded large ships. Since armor-tanked ships with no shields are already vulnerable to light weapons, this means at any given time your ship should be vulnerable to bombers and other small ships.

Another problem with coaxing your fleet mates to use fighters is the way Undeathinators work. You could technically set your respawn location inside the mothership of the fleet so you can get back in the fight easily when your fighter inevitably gets shot up, but what if the mothership dies? You get sent back to the center of the galaxy. The easy solution would be to allow people to set a primary and secondary Undeathinator. One at the mothership, and the other at your home base/planet. Easy peasy.

Why the Shield Emitter?

Let's go over the pros and cons.
Pros:

• Fighters/Bombers now have a function and reason to exist. Bombers, and small corvettes and frigates and what have you, are able to maneuver around the enemy capital ship and hit the shield emitters. Additionally, fighters and small gunboat type ships can effectively defend their capital ship from bombers lodged into blind spots.
• Scouting has more importance and depth. Scouts and spies can relay information about the number and location of shield emitters on enemy capital ships. Before a fight, briefing the bomber pilots on this intel will have a big impact.
• Emitters are not a complex system. There's no need for shipmakers to painstakingly erase half their interiors; just sprinkle some emitters on your hull and you're good to go!
• A buff to shields gives more reason to use warheads for torpedoes/suicide attacks/ramming. It's also another incentive to board your enemy.

Cons:

• Fighters/Bombers are still vulnerable to turret spam. Speeding to the blind spots of the enemy capital ships is probably their only chance of surviving. Then again, fighters and bombers are supposed to be disposable. Perhaps being suicidal isn't all that bad if you manage to pick off an emitter per bomber?
• Schema&co would have to change how shields work, which may be more work than it seems. I'm not sure, i'm no programmer, i made sure to include details on how it would work in as simple a way as possible, but there might be some unforeseen detail that makes this impossible? You never know!
• Emitters may break the aesthetics of some ships. Some people like to make really clean shapes with certain colors and that might not work well with a single emitter block being an eyesore. Additionally, some ship shapes make it impossible to place an emitter anywhere but on the "clean armor surface" that many people like to make.
• There might be issues where for example people dock their ship to a mothership with 3/3 emitters, increasing the mass of the mothership to the point where it can now has 3/4 emitters. If you place a fourth emitter on the mothership and undock the other ship, would the shields fail? If so builders would have to make sure carrier type ships have the appropriate amount of emitters before they add the subships, and so on. Another solution would be to not include docked entities in the mass calculation for emitters.

What do you guys think? And yes, i'm sorry if somebody made a suggestion like this before. Searching for shield and emitter gives 50 gorillion results

 

[nightrune]

I think it's unique and its possibly something to consider. The only thing I think needs to happen for fighters though is better ai, and a buff to warheads.

Fighter bombers should just be a vehicle for launching torpedos, and mostly be AI controlled.

 

[NeonSturm]

I would go for 6 (ships) and 12 (stations) and require a pyramid with the boundary box on bottom and the emitter on top to be free.

But what prevents you from having 2 motherships or stations near the sector boundary which guard the emitters of each other?

Personally, I would prefer force-field groups bound to a emitter for shield-vectors.

 

[Master_Artificer]

I don't agree with the limitations set by this idea. Maybe in the future after more releases and I can get a better sense of how the gameplay feels, but currently I don't like it.

 

[apelsinsaft]

I would go for 6 (ships) and 12 (stations) and require a pyramid with the boundary box on bottom and the emitter on top to be free.

But what prevents you from having 2 motherships or stations near the sector boundary which guard the emitters of each other?

Personally, I would prefer force-field groups bound to a emitter for shield-vectors.

Having an infinite pyramid instead of a sphere is a really good idea to be honest, i should have thought of something like that. Then again, that stops some placements that could be considered legit, like having an open ring shape and an emitter inside the ring, or something.

I think nothing prevents you from hugging a sister ship to protect your emitters - but that would require some coordination since docking together would disable the emitters! Also, that's an incentive to use push/pull effects, isn't it? Knowing(scouting) that the enemy uses special tactics like that, you could counter it by pushing the enemies apart.. i guess i'm going off on a tangent.

I don't agree with the limitations set by this idea. Maybe in the future after more releases and I can get a better sense of how the gameplay feels, but currently I don't like it.

I agree that it'd be a pretty big change, but could you elaborate which limitations don't sound good?

 

[Malacodor]

This would require constant collisions checks to make sure no door is moved in front of the emitters right before battle, exactly what the game needs.

How do you want to prevent protection of the emitters by armor plates that aren't docked but can't move relative to the ship?

Emitters may break the aesthetics of some ships. Some people like to make really clean shapes with certain colors and that might not work well with a single emitter block being an eyesore. Additionally, some ship shapes make it impossible to place an emitter anywhere but on the "clean armor surface" that many people like to make.

No, it wouldn't just break aesthetics. It would utterly destroy creativity since the entire ship had to be built around the transmitters. They had to be as protected as possible without disabling them. Also, the ship had to be built in a color similar to the emitter blocks to make spotting them harder.

P.S.: Just checked my WIP titan, 99% of its surface would be invalid locations for both, the sphere and the pyramid version. It would be less with wedge shaped emitter blocks, but those are easier to hit thanks to 40% more exposed surface.

 

[apelsinsaft]

This would require constant collisions checks to make sure no door is moved in front of the emitters right before battle, exactly what the game needs.

How do you want to prevent protection of the emitters by armor plates that aren't docked but can't move relative to the ship?

Actually, doing a collision/intersection check every couple of seconds isn't all that complicated for the computer. It's checking five spheres every couple of seconds tops. I'm no programmer but that's a tiny smidgeon fraction of the computational power compared to what's needed for physics collision checking.

Wedging armor into the ship to protect your ships emitters is silly. They'd either need to be giant machinations perfectly interwoven with your ship(and ready to kill your framerate at a moment's notice) or a tiny thing that can be shot down by a fighter anyways because it lacks shields. Both won't follow you when you warp jump. What's the problem?

No, it wouldn't just break aesthetics. It would utterly destroy creativity since the entire ship had to be built around the transmitters. They had to be as protected as possible without disabling them. Also, the ship had to be built in a color similar to the emitter blocks to make spotting them harder.

P.S.: Just checked my WIP titan, 99% of its surface would be invalid locations for both, the sphere and the pyramid version. It would be less with wedge shaped emitter blocks, but those are easier to hit thanks to 40% more exposed surface.

Actually, that's a pretty valid issue now that i think about it. A ship that is mostly a triangular sort of shape or has no orthogonal surfaces will struggle with the emitters. Perhaps a setting that lets you offset or rotate the output side would help, but that would be a complicated solution. NeonSturms idea to check a pyramid instead of a sphere might be better in this sort of case. What ungodly geometrical shape is your titan that makes it 99% invalid? Is your ship a perfect octahedron?

The part about forcing us to use a certain color for a ship is easily fixed. Make emitters come in many colors.

edit - not to upset you but if you're that fixated on making the perfect minmaxed ship with 40% less surface area for the emitters, why didn't you just make a borg cube

 

[dwwojcik]

This idea makes sense from a 'realistic' point of view, shield emitters are a pretty common theme in Science Fiction. It doesn't fit in at all with the rest of the shipbuilding mechanics though. StarMade lets you build your hull in whatever shape you can imagine, then fill it in with generic systems that can be any shape necessary. These emitters go against that, you'd have to plan your hull design and shape around them.

Anyway large vs small ships will be addressed in a different manner. The economy is far from complete, if I recall there will be things like NPC miners and passive resource acquisition. And anyway, there's no point in trying to fight it, big ships are always better than small ships, it's just common sense. Small ships are only effective vs large ships in large numbers, which NPC crewmembers/pilots will make possible.

 

[SkaireKrough]

There have been several proposed 'fixes' to the big/little ship problem where smaller ships are no threat to larger ships, yours, in my opinion falls into the overly complex and confusing category. The following proposals are workable and not that confusing or complex (again my opinion)

I had an idea that related to the weapon mechanics fix (Cannon/beam rebalance vs Missiles (+realism, coooool!)), that would make armor more effective, and as I was iterating on that idea I came up with an idea that would make give smaller ships an advantage at least defensively. That is, nerfing shield capacity and regeneration based on surface area.

The idea is that right now shields act as a barrier that completely encompasses the surface area of the ship, and as the ship gets bigger that surface area increases at an exponential rate. Because of this I think shields should in general have exponentially-increasing power costs on larger ships because they would have to protect a larger area. In other words, the larger the ship, the more shield generators and capacitors you would need to power a shield compared to a smaller ship with less R/C blocks for roughly the same effectiveness.

There are two aspects to this concept - shield capacity and shield power. Right now shield caps create a pool of shield hitpoints that absorbs incoming damage. However, I think that the actual capacity of the shield should be the pool of shield capacity divided by the external surface area of the ship.

To make this simple to visualize, were going to assume our ships are Borg cubes, simple deathblocks of a given dimension. Now assume we have a Borg cube that is 10x10x10 in its XYZ dimensions. Since it is a cube, the surface area is equal to the sum of the area of its 6 square sides, each of which are its length to the power of 2. In other words:

SA(cube) = 6x^2

Based on this, our size 10 Borg cube has a surface area of 600 [6(10)^2 = 6*100]. Now enter a larger Borg cube with a size of 50. It's surface area would be 15000 [6(50)^2 = 6*2500]. Out of the 1000 blocks on the size 10 cube (V=10^3 = 1000), exactly 250 (25%) are shield capacitor blocks. We'll ignore adjacent block bonuses and say shield cap is 100hp/block, so the size-10 cube has a total shield cap of 25000 (250*100). ,Likewise, the size 50 cube has a volume of 125,000 with the same percentage of shield cap blocks per total mass, in this case 25% of 125,000 or 31,250, with a total shield HP of 3,125,000.

As you can see, if the same ratio of blocks are kept, by increasing the size of the second cube by a factor of 5 we've increased the shield capacity by a factor of 5^3 or 125. Both shield amounts are roughly average for that size of ship.

However, now lets say our total shield capacity is spread out among the surface area to be shielded. The size 10 cube has a total shield capacity of 25k; divide this by the SA of 600 and you end up with a shield cap of 41. The size 50 cube with 3.1m shields would end up with 208 (3,125,000/15,000). Obviously these are both crappy amounts, so a system like this would also need a buff to how much shield cap each individual block provides, but I digress. The point is that, the ship that is 5x bigger now only has 4x the shields of its smaller cousin.

Basically, dividing shield cap by surface area would make it so that as a ship's size increases, the effectiveness of shield blocks would decrease, and the ship would have to compensate through the use of an escalating amount of shield cap blocks. Of course, most ships are built more aerodynamic than Borg cubes and therefore would not suffer as much of a difference, but this makes smaller ships inherently tougher by making them easier to shield, and it also makes sense in realism terms.

Likewise, shield regeneration should also escalate relative to surface area. However, rather than nerfing the amount of shield that each individual block regenerates, instead we should increase the power required to generate that additional energy by the surface area of the ship, because the larger the shield the more power it will take to restore shield energy. In keeping with the idea that the shield's capacity is being spread out amongst the ship's surface area, we'll say each point of shield regeneration costs 1 unit of ship power for every 10 block surfaces being shielded - therefore, a cube shaped ship with a shield regen of 250hp/s and a dimension of 10 would cost 15k power per second (250*600/10 = 250*60), while a cube ship of size 20 with a shield regen of 500 (twice as big and regenerates twice as quickly) would have a power cost of 120k power/second - almost 8 times the power usage for double the size and double the regen rate.

So in the end, we are dividing a ships total shield capacity by its surface area, and multiplying the power cost per point of shield regen by the ships surface area.

While this setup may seem unnecessarily harsh on large ships, keep in mind that large ships still have an advantage over smaller ones in terms of how much armor they can have. I mentioned an idea concerning armor in the aforementioned thread where armor would be A) significantly buffed, and B) would deflect damage that would penetrate the armor, passing a percentage of it to the surrounding blocks instead. This thread originally discussed changes to cannons and beams to allow for base damage armor penetration regardless of subsystems. Under this new weapons system, if a block is destroyed half of the remaining damage goes to the block on the side directly opposite of the side impacted, while the rest is divided evenly amongst the other 4 surrounding blocks. With this idea, destroyed armor blocks would still protect the blocks behind them by decreasing the penetrating damage while increasing the radial damage to the blocks sharing that surface - and since these would most likely also be armor blocks, the combined effect would be a shot that would destroy 1 armor block and weaken the others, but would not significantly damage the soft blocks behind the armor block.

Of course, while armor would last longer and be more effective, it would still degrade as it got hit and unlike shields would not regenerate. Since the armor can't be repaired/replaced easily during combat, it would be more effective on larger ships with more of it.

So basically, what I am suggesting with both of these ideas is to increase the protective effect of armor, while at the same time making shields more power-intensive and less effective as ship size increases. Larger ships would need to rely more on their armor for protection when surviving a firefight, whereas smaller ships with less armor would have shields to protect them instead. This would change the dynamic of gameplay significantly, as well as keep people from building these massive bleeding titans with 9-figure shield capacities that can tank indefinitely.

Of course, this only fixes the defensive aspect - offensively larger ships will still have an advantage over smaller ones in terms of raw damage output. But a smaller ship is faster, lighter, and harder to hit, and without shields to protect it a group of small fighters could easily whittle down the armor and blocks of a larger ship, while the larger ship struggled to swat the flies taking bites out of it until it finally keeled over and died, metaphorically speaking. It would also make it to where even missile-pulse combos with massive alpha damage would not be able to 1-shot an unshielded ship... through it may be able to using a 1-2 punch, one to blow a hole in the armor and one to blow up what is inside. But of course, smart shipwrights could mitigate that risk by using armor internally as well and compartmentalizing the different areas of their ship.

Your suggestion is almost exactly like my response to the survey, but you didn't forget to square the side dimensions when figuring area.



If mass or number of blocks were used to 'approximate' volume which then can be used to 'approximate' surface area, ships with non-cubic exteriors and having actual interior rooms would not be penalized.


Here is the suggestion I put on the survey.

1.Shields should protect all parts of a ship, including all docked units both those internally docked and external.

2.Two ships each having the same number of shield caps but with one ship being larger than the other, the larger ship should have weaker shields due to the shield having to cover a larger area.

3.Shields really only need to cover the exterior of ships but 'Bubble' shields are not workable due to technical reasons.

4. Currently ships significantly smaller than their opponent has realistically no chance of even causing superficial damage to the larger vessel, provided that both ships were built with the same design philosophy, I.E. brick, role-play etc.

5. I've read many threads proposing differing shield mechanics, some were unworkable due to current hardware/software limitations, many are overly complex, more are completely useless and some are just bizarre. The somewhat recent doubling of shield cap effectiveness to try to make combat last longer just allowed shipbuilders to increase their weapons and decrease shield cap count without reducing shield strength.

6. A good number of shield change suggestions have some way to allow some damage to bypass shields, most seem to be complex and/or confusing.

Solution: A ship with shields will have 3 stats for shielding.

1.Total shield strength - based off number of shield capacitors, similar to current formula, maybe able to remove the part about diminishing returns.

2. Shield recharge - based off number of shield rechargers, again can use formula similar to current, may even be able to remove 'combat' recharge rate difference.

3. Shield density - total shield strength divided by 6 times the cube root of the total number of blocks in the ship, including all docked units (this will approximate closely enough the external surface area of the ship irregardless of design philosophy) When incoming fire hits the ship each hit/damage tick is treated separately just like it is now. But each damage calculation will now subtract the 'shield density' stat from the damage before apply the remainder to the actual block. This is done for every block in cases of blast, piercing and punch through. (may allow the elimination of the '7' block cap on damage for some effects) Also the 'shield density' stat is subtracted from the 'total shield strength' for each block affected. If the damage doesn't exceed the 'shield density' then the damage is subtracted from the 'total shield strength'. As 'total shield strength' goes down so does 'shield density'.

Edit: Messed up the mass to area equation it should be 'total shield strength divided by 6 times the square of the cube root of the total number of blocks in the ship, including docked units.

This should, with 2 ships of differing sizes with the same percentage of shield caps result in the larger ship having a larger total shield strength and a somewhat larger shield density due to surface area to volume ratio favoring the larger ship but still not have the larger ship be invulnerable to the smaller ship.

It should also increase the desirability of weapons with longer recharge rates that deal higher damage per hit. It will not affect the cannon/cannon combo much at all, but it will make things like cannon/pulse or cannon/beam more of a threat due to their ability to inflict some damage before shields are totally down.

Shield caps on docked units should either be included in overall shield calculations or be considered as off-line while docked to prevent turrets from having effectively stronger shields than the main ship. There are a few other concerns regarding docked ships and shielding when you take the new docking system into consideration. For instance when the 'magicnetally' docking takes place it will be possible for ships to be docked together, not just one to the other, but mutually docked one to the other. In cases like this it would be best if each was considered as separate ships as far as shielding is concerned.

 

[apelsinsaft]

This idea makes sense from a 'realistic' point of view, shield emitters are a pretty common theme in Science Fiction. It doesn't fit in at all with the rest of the shipbuilding mechanics though. StarMade lets you build your hull in whatever shape you can imagine, then fill it in with generic systems that can be any shape necessary. These emitters go against that, you'd have to plan your hull design and shape around them.

This is really my biggest worry with the system, the fact that it forces you to have a block on the outside that can't be covered up or moved and then hidden when not needed. However, i want to get a misconception out of the way. The reason why i suggested the emitter check a huge area for emptiness is so that everyone will have to place the block in an easy to hit location, rather than try their best to hide it behind armor plates. You might as well put the emitter on an antenna far from the main body and it will be just as protected as if you were putting it somewhere on the external armor - IE not at all. That's the point.

It's definitely however a problem that ships with loads of big turrets would have very little surface area to put emitters on. Again, the idea to check for a pyramid like NeonSturm said is probably better than a sphere.

Anyway large vs small ships will be addressed in a different manner. The economy is far from complete, if I recall there will be things like NPC miners and passive resource acquisition. And anyway, there's no point in trying to fight it, big ships are always better than small ships, it's just common sense. Small ships are only effective vs large ships in large numbers, which NPC crewmembers/pilots will make possible.

This is entirely my fault for not explaining better, but the idea was to create incentives for players to fly bombers and other small craft. We all know NPCs are coming and will make fighters not 100% useless, but having a carrier won't be as useful per cost as a lone battleship unless there's something for the fighters to do other than add DPS. It's really simple why: A carrier requires crew for the ship itself and X amount of fighters. A battleship requires crew for the ship itself. Making the carrier might also take more effort, depending on how elaborate your docking system is.

There have been several proposed 'fixes' to the big/little ship problem where smaller ships are no threat to larger ships, yours, in my opinion falls into the overly complex and confusing category. The following proposals are workable and not that confusing or complex (again my opinion)

Confusing? Here's a TL;DR of my suggestion:

• Shield emitter block goes on the outside of your ship.
• Depending on how big your ship is, you can have up to 5 or 6.
• The block can be destroyed even when your shields are up.
• When 1 out of 5 for example are destroyed, you lose 20% of your maximum shield.
• When all emitters are destroyed, the shield is deactivated until you repair the ship.

The stuff you linked is way more confusing imho.

 

[dwwojcik]

I really don't see how this helps. I've thought more about it, and I've realized there's a bigger problem with your concept. All it does is essentially nullify shields. Big ships will easily be able to take out each others emitters, and small ships that shouldn't logically be able to affect a huge battleship will be able to as well. So once the shields are down, all that's left is armor, which battleships still have more of. We're back at square one.

In science fiction such as Star Wars (the universe I'm most familiar with) there is usually something to set fighters apart. They carry a unique weapon, they can flank the enemy to get behind their shields, or they can fly inside a larger ship and attack the inside. The first two would be very interesting to see in StarMade, and the last one is a non issue since I'm sure none of us are silly enough to build hollow ships that the enemy can fly into. When/if things like that are added to StarMade, I can see why a lone fighter would be an attractive option. But until something like that exists, nerfing battleships to hell is just going to make one of the best parts of the game, the ability to build massive starships on a scale bigger than in any other game I know of, pretty much irrelevant.

So, for now at least, all fighters do is add DPS. Right now fighters-sized ships are only useful for personal non-combat transports, or for beginners with few resources to defend themselves from pirates. Once NPC pilots are added, fighters will be much more useful in larger battles, with NPC wingmen to add additional DPS, or completely automated fighter wings launched from carriers.

So I think we need to let large ship vs small ship rest. The game isn't done yet, and Schema knows some people are concerned about this issue. I plan to have fun building big ships and see where development takes us with concern to small ones.

 

[SkaireKrough]

Confusing? Here's a TL;DR of my suggestion:

• Shield emitter block goes on the outside of your ship.
• Depending on how big your ship is, you can have up to 5 or 6.
• The block can be destroyed even when your shields are up.
• When 1 out of 5 for example are destroyed, you lose 20% of your maximum shield.
• When all emitters are destroyed, the shield is deactivated until you repair the ship.

The stuff you linked is way more confusing imho.

So a small ship with just one looses its shield with the first hit, yeah that will work. If that's the way it would work why bother putting shields on small ships at all,would be better to invest the mass and resources into armor. I'm sure I would rather have a solution that doesn't include adding another block to make shields work, especially one that doesn't make shields on small ships pointless

 

[terra mining corp.]

maybe a controlling computer for shields would work better,the shield computer would be vunerable to emp pulse or beam attacks only when below a threshold number lets say 10%before it starts to recharge,it would require a high amount of damage to destroy,or lower amounts would disable based on damage amount.

 

[Pacific_Jim]

Another issue with this idea is that Starmade doesn't really keep track of a ships in/outside.

 

[sayerulz]

Nuke from capital ship = instant shield down. That's all this idea would do. Fighters are ALREADY perfectly viable, you just need to use more than one of them. Why should a ship that takes 1/50000000th of the time and effort be able to take out a titan? All that does is encourage people to run around in 1ox10 cubes of missiles, thrusters, and power and put a bunch of holes in peoples ships. And it would make the 100x100 swarm missile spammers even worse.

 

[apelsinsaft]

Several of you are saying that a capital ship would easily be able to snipe off all the emitters of another capital ship. That's wrong simply because( assuming whoever made the ship your enemy uses isn't retarded enough to place all 6 emitters next to each other) you can't hit all emitters at once. So long as every emitter was placed facing a different direction, the maximum emitters you can see at any given moment, no matter how close or far away you are, is 3. Unless there's a major difference in agility, the enemy ship can simply keep one side pointed at you and move away and never lose more than 3 emitters. The notion that a small ship would ever lose its single emitter is ridiculous. You have all the turning power in the world to keep your vulnerable side out of harms way.

So far the only real downside i've been able to gather is the "you're forced to have an exterior block that messes with aesthetics" issue, and it's major enough that on second thought maybe this idea wasn't all that good. I'd love to see somebody pick up the shield emitter idea for a mod or something though, or for some other incentive for players to fly fighters to be added.

 

[Lone_Puppy]

Hi apelsinsaft. Your idea inspired me to think of an alternative.
Shield Emitter Block Alternative Idea

It's not as well fleshed out as yours, but the guts of the idea is use a similar method to the area activation trigger/controller.

 

[dwwojcik]

So by shooting out 3 blocks, a ship of any size can take out 50% of your shields? I still don't feel that this is fair. And what if a ship has to expose its emitter in order to bring its guns to bear on the enemy? You can design your ship so the emitter is on the opposite side of your guns, but that only solves anything if there's only one enemy, which I'm sure is not the case in most engagements, at least those involving capital ships.

And what if there is a major difference in agility? Smaller Battleships/cruisers can still have overdrive modules and decent turning speed. Not to mention stop beams to hold you in place while I scramble a fighter to snipe your emitter.

 

[Pacific_Jim]

You wouldn't even need a battleship. Min/maxing a fighter with a big enough gun to take out any block in the game isn't hard to do, and with the health system in place turrets aren't going to kill it quick enough. Really, this entire idea is solving a problem that doesn't really exist. Smaller ships and fighters are already useful, you just need them in numbers (and for now they're not cost effective as there's no good way to retrieve them), and there's already a way to bypass shields on larger ships, they're just unreliable.

I feel like this idea would create some serious balance issues, and the games performance would also suffer from having to calculate what counts as an exterior.

 

[Thalanor]

You wouldn't even need a battleship. Min/maxing a fighter with a big enough gun to take out any block in the game isn't hard to do, and with the health system in place turrets aren't going to kill it quick enough. Really, this entire idea is solving a problem that doesn't really exist. Smaller ships and fighters are already useful, you just need them in numbers (and for now they're not cost effective as there's no good way to retrieve them), and there's already a way to bypass shields on larger ships, they're just unreliable.

I feel like this idea would create some serious balance issues, and the games performance would also suffer from having to calculate what counts as an exterior.

Pretty much this - drone technology as demonstrated by keptick 2 years ago can still be implemented today to great effect, the only limiting factor is that any launched drone is booked as lost resources. The long-awaited fleet AI (whenever it comes by) will hopefully solve this, making carriers more viable.