StarMade Ship Systems 2.0

[Lecic]

I'm just gonna go out on a limb and point out the next gen exploit I'm going to try right away:
main ship will still have docked armor, turrets, etc, all self powered, and the moment it's sheilds drop below 90% will "explode" in a sudden launching of all it's docked entities into a drone-swarm of doom.

Why would you do this instead of just using a traditional drone swarm? Making your turrets eject, especially at such a high shield percentage, is just dumb. Your turrets would likely be more effective if they were still protected by the main ship for a while.

 

[kulbolen]

Do you believe that no one in Starmade deliberately exploits lag to gain advantage for their turrets & drones against other players?

i believe that its a small enough problem that its not worth mentioning. ive played on every major server for years and ive never experienced this. im sure someone out there is maliciously abusing mechanics to lag people using turrets, but its never happened to me and ive never seen it happen in years of experience. theres a big difference between "its a huge problem!" and "well theres got to be someone doing it somewhere!" what i have seen occasionally is people abusing logic connections to lag people or crash servers just to be assholes, or newer players who dont know what theyre doing stacking tons of missile outputs or m/m launchers and firing 5000 missiles instantly and crashing the server.

Also, I'd love to see a link to your proof that "factually" demonstrates how a 50k or 100k powered turret on a MDP has less firepower than a 50k or 100k ship. It seems unlikely in the extreme to be a comprehensive treatment, but it's always possible.

anytime were both free with some time i can show you how this is the case. but your comparing apples to oranges with your stationary target vs ship comparison. a proper one would be a 100k ship with 10k turrets compared to 10k ships. stations arent worth a shit in the first place because theyre, well, stationary.

I haven't "shit on" anything, I've stated several times that if docked power hadn't been abused literally for years to overcome the power curves (which might as well not even exist along with auxiliaries, but DO, proving developer intent to resist infinite power scalabilty)

"nfinite scalability" is a loaded term. "scalability is not a boolean" lol... just cause it doesnt scale well doesnt mean it doesnt scale, so basically everything in this games infinitely scalable. at least till the point your entity is too big to load in. power scales terribly even with aux, so it still serves the purpose of making smaller ships that dont need aux on the base entity far more efficient than larger ships, so aux serves that purpose well... and since fleets dont get along well with aux it sure helps keep effective fleet ships smaller.

additionally, perfect efficiency self powered turrets may scale well, but since the base entity theyre attached to doesnt, the ship still drastically loses efficiency as it gets larger, and each turret adds considerable ship weight. you ideally want to keep the main ship small enough to not need aux power to keep it efficient.

I genuinely believe that most people who embrace the AI meta dont even understand why it's the bomb, but I hope you are aware that some individuals are very aware of it. It only takes 1 or 2 people on a MP server deliberately doing it to ruin everyone else's fun. Hell, it only takes one bored idiot with all day to spend on MP doing it out of pure ignorance and just being stoked about how invincible his ship is to ruin it for everyone else.

i build complicated ships with self powered turrets, and i dont lag people out in fights so that they cant fire their weapons., and none of the similarbuilt ships ive fought have caused my main ship weapons to not work. id agree many players dont really understand why things are good or bad, they just follow what they hear... but theyre certainly not invincible because i regularly target and kill them, and use player aimed guns while i do it. =D

the reason i believe a fix is necessary has nothing to do with turret lag abuse, its because when complicated high entity count ships break apart when they start to lose a fight, they cause massive lag. whether from large self powered turrets or large docked shields and armor. ive experienced server crashes when i fought people in powerful but poorly built for stability ships, when they started to lose docks. this is a huge problem, but its entirely different than saying people abuse lots of turrets to lag you out so you cant fight back. it can be partially mitigated by designing your docks to not clip in and separate well, which is what ive been learning to do recently.

i have also been super lagged out when 2 massive titans decide to duke it out, cause the games just not designed to handle multiple 500k+ mass 300+ entity ships smashing each other to bits, and id love to see some more soft encouragement to build smaller.

Does intent even matter in this case, if the dynamic still results in an OP meta through AI turrets on laggy entities? It would seem to amount to the same effect in gameplay terms - severe imbalance & wasting dev team time by crippling multiple features intended to balance combat (power caps & maneuverability penalties - both checks against gigantism).

if i believed as you do, that turrets inherently cause tons of lag and make the game unplayable manually, id TOTALLY agree with you. i would not think intent matters at all, and your line of reasoning would make complete sense. but in my experience thats just not the case. the lag comes from oversized ships, too many missile outputs, or aforementoned complicated fancy docked ships breaking apart when they lose (which shouldnt be happening against me if theyre invincible to player aimed guns because lag), and i have thousands of fights against various such ships to back this up. im open to an example of a ship that causes the effect you described.

in the end, for ^ different reasons, i still think a raildock fix in general is necessary, so id say in a way we agree.
[doublepost=1495673053,1495672681][/doublepost]just something to think about:

if turrets are causing mass "lag exploits" and rendering main guns useless, why are you just advocating for removing their ability to self power? surely someone could make non self powered turrets that also lag you, and get the same result even with less efficiency, since you cant fight back unless you also use turrets. the turret is the inherent problem here, not its power source.

should we not remove turrets and raildocks entirely?

 

[TrainDodger]

I'm just gonna go out on a limb and point out the next gen exploit I'm going to try right away:
main ship will still have docked armor, turrets, etc, all self powered, and the moment it's sheilds drop below 90% will "explode" in a sudden launching of all it's docked entities into a drone-swarm of doom.

Take that "planned single reactor" phooeyness.

This is kind of a valid concern, as I elucidated earlier. If you are only allowed one active reactor on the lowest entity on the docking chain, what's to keep players from building "porcupine" ships that simply subdivide into a fleet of drones when threatened, thus bypassing the limit? How is this any better for the game, or servers, performance-wise, than self-powered turrets?

 

[Lecic]

This is kind of a valid concern, as I elucidated earlier. If you are only allowed one active reactor on the lowest entity on the docking chain, what's to keep players from building "porcupine" ships that simply subdivide into a fleet of drones when threatened, thus bypassing the limit? How is this any better for the game, or servers, performance-wise, than self-powered turrets?

Maybe crew could be a good way to limit this? If Bobby AI was removed, forcing the use of AI pilots and turret controllers would make people have second thoughts about sending out hundreds of crew in suicide drones that would take time and resources to replace and train.

 

[DrTarDIS]

Why would you do this instead of just using a traditional drone swarm? Making your turrets eject, especially at such a high shield percentage, is just dumb. Your turrets would likely be more effective if they were still protected by the main ship for a while.

Just to exploit/break the game in weird ways. No other reason at all.

Same reason I "invented" blast-door armor clipping just-inside the actual hull of a ship.

Same reason I park area-trigger gravity "pokeball" ships in spawn.

Same reason I build space stations with receiver-warpgates in the heart of stars, and convert asteroids into transmission-gates at other players bases. (yes, you can still build/survive/exploit star damage, no problem)

The box is full of holes, so think outside it.

 

[Lecic]

Same reason I "invented" blast-door armor clipping just-inside the actual hull of a ship.

I really hope those quotes around "invented" are supposed to indicate you know you're far from being the inventor of clipped armor.

 

[DrTarDIS]

I really hope those quotes around "invented" are supposed to indicate you know you're far from being the inventor of clipped armor.

Not the sole inventor, yes. I'm aware of convergent engineering, where more than one person notices and utilizes the same exploitative mechanic independently. I came up with it somewhere around the switch from SD-BB style missiles. I'm sure others came up with the same idea before and after it.

I'm sure many people can piss many feet into the wind, but I've no interest in getting into that contest.

 

[linwe talion]

Eve Online would like to have a word with you.

when it comes to 10000s of players online in the same universe in Starmade, you won't need economics, it will create itself in a natural way. until that...

 

[JMOWw7]

Does this mean that ships will be more like they are in typical sci-fi, with rooms (chambers) determining what powers the ship has, rather than before/right now where having decorated rooms is just a waste and its better to have like a couple rooms for storage, piloting, and maybe a smaller ship and then fill the rest of the ship to the brim with blocks? I think that aesthetically and role-playing-wise it's a lot better to have rooms rather than a million blocks placed without much thought or art outside of a rough priority on what is protected.

 

[Drakkart]

How does this solve the issue of self powered turrets having effectively no drain on the main ship?

That is the entire point of self powering turrets why should they be a bad thing now? you need to make them self powered otherwise you can not move some barrels without rail mass enhancers which take their power directly from their entity.

Only in my personal opinion, the new great power rebalance is: Limit the player's creativity.

I explain myself:

• First started with the chain drives ... this way of continuously "loading" the warp system, that created two strands of thinking in the community: to allow or not to allow it. People began to use the "launching rails" to create fast clocks, instead of using these "launching rails" to "launch ships", Which was its main function.
• The solution of the development team was to create rules for "launching rails" that would cease to function under certain circumstances, because players were using a "tool" that they were free to use, to perform a function that was not Thought out.
• Then the developers created a system to have an "energy injector" for the same entity, but the three major drawbacks of using this system were so large that their use was unfeasible: they take up space to be functional, they need to "subtract "Energy to recharge, they are not as efficient in a long-term battle.
  
• Afterwards, players saw that the power generated in the same "entity" was not enough for their purposes (to feed the weapons, to feed the shields) ... then the "docked generators" were created, which contributed an increase in the regeneration Of energy and shields (using systems that until that time had not taken into account, and had never thought about "retouching" them).
• The solution of the developers was to "increase" the capacity of regeneration of energy in the same entity ... but for certain things, the players did not have enough, and continued using the "docked generators" ... after a time, they decided "Break" this "creative use" of the tools given to players.

I know that everything should change for the sake of starmade ... but take the creativity to "adapt" certain systems and their functions to do others things, should not be taken as an "exploit" or "abusing a bug".

A great example for example: "Astrotech Computer + Modules" ... this system "currently" has no function, because it is 99.9999 ...% not efficient, can only "restore" the durability of a block At the same time ... if a player finds an ingenious way to restore the durability of all blocks of an entire ship ... the whole system will be taken as something "negative" or "abuse of a bug / exploit" ... because this System was meant to restore the durability of a single block, not an entire ship ... Tell me, if this happens, it will be taken as something "witty" and taken into account as "something very useful" ... or it will be taken as something negative, against everything established ... and thought to be "totally removed Of the game " so that it is not used again ...

Instead of taking something like "negative", why not work, what users create, and possibly "improve it"?

If feel you buddy same thoughts here. which is why i also argue that only the simplest and most boring solution will grant total dev control and at the same time kill the games amaze factor.

Keeping and maintaining incredibly broken, laggy, and unintended mechanics for the sake of preserving "creativity" is not good for the game, for server owners, or for the developers. It is much better for the devs to either kill outright broken exploit mechanics (ionized SSUs, stacked ion, docked and/or clipped armor, stacked power, etc) and to replace the decent ones with more stable, easier to rebalance mechanics (docked reactors -> auxiliaries, chain drives -> JD reactor chambers, push pulse drone launching -> launch rail drone launching, etc).



Yes, that is the point of them, and that is the issue. An active system should have more drain on the ship it is mounted on than the cost of needing more thrusters to move its mass.



Why would a turrets reactor function perfectly fine on its own until the ship it's docked to goes kaput? If it just matches the RHP effects of the main ship, why not just go the full step and make it only draw power from the main ship?

What again is broken and laggy?
Are we mixing things up again? docked entities create lag -> turrets are docked entities -> turrets are bad ? no the game is not done to handle them properly yet that is whats wrong, not the turrets are wrong.
same for the mass trade off you think it is not fair, well then argue for a rebalance not for self powering turrets being bad. THey are fine and they need to sty or the game will become boring a hell.

Using tools creatively is definitely not an exploit.

Creatively using tools to consciously arrange conditions that are predictably laggy with the intent to dominate human reflexes through liberal use of AI (which is not affected by the predicted lag) is an exploit. As is anything similar.



If it's being used in a way that negatively impacts gameplay for all but a tiny minority, then you can be pretty sure that any development team worth their salt will take action to fix the negative impact by whatever means necessary.

Celebrating player creativity cannot take priority over developing a fun final product. One of the primary goals of Alpha-stage Playtesting is to uncover such unforeseen potentials so they can be addressed - either by removal or formal incorporation in a balanced manner.
[doublepost=1495654563,1495651641][/doublepost]

Just questioning; it's almost impossible to reliably compare the two (your assertions aren't 'fact' but rather arguable personal estimations), but it should be considered. Have you seen a Large Mobile Defense Platform used in game? No thrust, just a small auto-charging jump drive and bristling with turrets the size of cruisers? When it jumps in, everyone within sight is crippled by lag and its AI turrets shred everything unless someone has larger, faster AI turrets active within range to shred it first. It creates a 100% AI meta.

My concern is not an issue of turret effectiveness. It's an issue of lag-predicated building, and that is not unique to Starmade - I've been randomly teamed with SC2 players who openly talk about their build being a lag build explicitly meant to overwhelm an opponent's ability to micro. It's a common meta, but it's also always an exploit and needs to be checked in every way possible unless the intent of the game is to be an AI simulator (a la Robocode). Starmade multiplayer is particularly heavily hit by it.

Lag+AI is always OP and always will be OP inside a digitally simulated environment. IRL humans are immune to lag and AIs experiencing any kind of slowdown in processing or transmission would be easily dominated by humans. In digital environments the reverse is true.

Getting rid of the absurd reactor turrets is an important step in the right direction and is long overdue, in part because turret reactors multiply power base to a degree that cannot be balanced for. There's no apparent precedent for them anywhere and they seem to unbalance the game. I'm glad to hear that you are also concerned about stability... do you feel that Starmade's extremely unique, self-powered turrets are somehow 'necessary' to balanced gameplay?

Because I'm not hating on turrets in general, I love my turrets and using turrets isn't abusive. I just hate docked reactors that allow abusers to override caps and scale entities beyond the game's ability to process relatively lag-free. Honestly, if docked power dynamics hadn't been the means of bypassing softcaps for so long I probably wouldn't be opposed, but given the history I think that priority should be given to stabilizing combat rather than preservation of this bizarre little game feature (guns with reactors inside them) that will almost certainly continue to act as a window for exploitation later if not closed now. Near infinite potential to scale power on a ship means that no performance optimizations can ever check the lag potential and the game's meta will always be about planning for AI simulations under heavy lag. Installing variables for servads to set limits on fleet sizes, members, and child DEs as well as individual ship & station DEs would be another good provisional step, IMO, but I'll be happy for now to see entity scalability fitted with some kind of maximum that can be adjusted to game optimization to limit players' ability to purposefully overbuild performance capability.

You are argueing about turrets power with the old powersystem as reason to remove them. it is not the concept of self powered turrets problem the old system did not handle them as you wished. If shine makes the wrong decisions now the game dies. the wrong decision could be killing creativity. self powered turrets are in them selfes something to master...

 

[Alphajim]

What again is broken and laggy?

Docked power was potentially laggy, stupidly a must-have, and OP. Chaindrive is OP (a well designed thing but still OP) . Launching rails clocks were laggy.

And all docked entities must impact the final mass of the ship. Not doing so is clearly... Idiot ? (I don't remember if it's already implemented, it's just to be clear).

 

[Drakkart]

Docked power was potentially laggy, stupidly a must-have, and OP. Chaindrive is OP (a well designed thing but still OP) . Launching rails clocks were laggy.

And all docked entities must impact the final mass of the ship. Not doing so is clearly... Idiot ? (I don't remember if it's already implemented, it's just to be clear).

So the problem is that the game does handle collision detection poorly, why again does this make the concept of selfpowered turrets a bad thing? So banning turrets from the game makes it a better game? No it only turns it into a boring game. They need to fix stuff right but this does not make something else a bad idea. Got it now?

 

[Alphajim]

I didn't talked about turrets, just about broken, OP and laggy things.
Idc about self powered turrets, so I'm not against, as long as they are not another exploit source.

 

[Klepto]

I really like the idea, I think as a balancing measure and as just a cool idea, you could have gas thrusters. pros: takes no power, much more powerful per thruster, gas is somewhat cheap. Cons: you need to have gas tanks, you have to refuel when you run out, gas thrusters burn gas very quickly, and gas tanks explode when hit. I think it would be really cool as like a short turbo boost or something to get an edge over the bigger ships in dogfights. Or you could set up your ship to be a hybrid or run mostly on gas with power thrusters as a backup. The system could extend past thrusters to have a parallel set of systems that are "analog" I don't know, but I think gas thrusters or some thruster other than power would be cool to have on fighters

 

[Lecic]

That is the entire point of self powering turrets why should they be a bad thing now? you need to make them self powered otherwise you can not move some barrels without rail mass enhancers which take their power directly from their entity.

Yes, the point of self powered turrets is that they have no drain on the main ship. I am saying this is a bad thing because it encourages mounting as many turrets as possible, including doing things like massive numbers of self powered orbital turrets which ignore surface area restrictions on turret count. It also encourages modular ship construction, which is inherently laggier than single entity ships.

Also, rail mass enhancers can take power from the ship they are docked to perfectly fine, just like any other system.

What again is broken and laggy?
Are we mixing things up again? docked entities create lag -> turrets are docked entities -> turrets are bad ? no the game is not done to handle them properly yet that is whats wrong, not the turrets are wrong.
same for the mass trade off you think it is not fair, well then argue for a rebalance not for self powering turrets being bad. THey are fine and they need to sty or the game will become boring a hell.

No, the problem is not specifically due to lack of optimization. Two entities are inherently more costly on the game than 1 entity with the same amount of modules, even if collisions between docked entities were perfectly optimized. Spawn in 10,000 cores vs a ship with 10,000 blocks and tell me which is laggier, even though those cores aren't touching bounding boxes, aren't moving, don't have AI running, etc. I am not saying we kill turrets, I am saying we make it more of an actual decision between big guns on the main ship and faster docked guns rather than an obvious default to self powered guns for nearly everything, because they ARE better at everything, and this is bad for the game.
I really hope you don't seriously think that making docked turrets more of a strain on the ship than "gee I sure hope I have enough thrust to move these" would make the game boring.

 

[Drakkart]

Yes, the point of self powered turrets is that they have no drain on the main ship. I am saying this is a bad thing because it encourages mounting as many turrets as possible, including doing things like massive numbers of self powered orbital turrets which ignore surface area restrictions on turret count. It also encourages modular ship construction, which is inherently laggier than single entity ships.

Also, rail mass enhancers can take power from the ship they are docked to perfectly fine, just like any other system.

No, the problem is not specifically due to lack of optimization. Two entities are inherently more costly on the game than 1 entity with the same amount of modules, even if collisions between docked entities were perfectly optimized. Spawn in 10,000 cores vs a ship with 10,000 blocks and tell me which is laggier, even though those cores aren't touching bounding boxes, aren't moving, don't have AI running, etc. I am not saying we kill turrets, I am saying we make it more of an actual decision between big guns on the main ship and faster docked guns rather than an obvious default to self powered guns for nearly everything, because they ARE better at everything, and this is bad for the game.
I really hope you don't seriously think that making docked turrets more of a strain on the ship than "gee I sure hope I have enough thrust to move these" would make the game boring.

If you can carry as many turrets as possible you maybe should focus on just fewer stronger ones for you are obviously not building a small craft then. So probably you are intending to kill also big guys, be told that works best with big guns.

you are saying orbital turets are an issue now. well they look weird true so eventually we should talk about them breaking off? just to add realism... still i do not se the point as well self powered turrets are bad for they do not put drain on the main ship... That is the point of self powered turrets that they can operate even though the main ships power might be down. that they have to rely on their shields and they also act as second protective shield before the ships shield gets tackled. well you need to carry them ofc trust me those mass enhancers carrying mass enhancers or the turret body and all the other systems make you add a significant amount of thrust to the carrying entity... there is no unlimited turrets except you are nuts.

i do not see how self powering turrets encourage modular ship design - what are you refering to anyway pointing at "modular ship design"
the thing with the cores is that schine really treats them as entities with own bounding boxes which is a general docked entity problem.
As this stuff is docked and schine obviously amazelikes door shutters and other rail gimmicks piointing at turrets which really add mechanic to the game is like - look cancer is bad we in general should stop cell growth... - errrr nope!
It is complicated but working with bounding boxes for docked stuff it a deadend and schine shopuld come up with a different model. Still the concept of turrets wether selfpowerd or not is a good one. also i love the railsystem it just was not thought through when thrown at us and ofc we abuse the shit out of it. Still how is this a power related issue because in here we discuss the new power system.

As long as main ships become slower and slower in turnrate turrets are the only option and the bigger the ship the slower the turn rte the more it will rely on turrets. sure the systems on a single entity would right now create less lag with the current railsystem still how is that an arguemnt for "nah turrets should not be able to be self powering"? it is a different aspect of the game which ok right now might be related but still have to viewed as different aspects of the concept.

No in fact i agree with you on the part that it might be too easy right now. Well the powersystem will hopefull up the game again a bit. But it's mass is kind of a realistic approach i'd like to tke it a bit further regarding other FX but whatever it is a game after all not a real life sim.

 

[Lecic]

still i do not se the point as well self powered turrets are bad for they do not put drain on the main ship... That is the point of self powered turrets that they can operate even though the main ships power might be down. that they have to rely on their shields and they also act as second protective shield before the ships shield gets tackled. well you need to carry them ofc trust me those mass enhancers carrying mass enhancers or the turret body and all the other systems make you add a significant amount of thrust to the carrying entity... there is no unlimited turrets except you are nuts.

Yes, I understand what the point of self powered turrets is. You are repeating my points, except you seem to think this is a good thing rather than a bad thing.
Can you not see how turrets having no drain on the power of the main ship is a problem?
Self powered guns allow the player to export block damage, which takes much less block count than ion damage, to turrets, which also reduces their power consumption greatly as it will now ignore the extra output power debuff because each turret is effectively its own output. This acts as a huge DPS multiplier, because a ship can now have its ion gun AND its DPS gun taking down the shields of an enemy ship simultaneously, while also putting minimal power load on the mother ship.

Also, docked entities absolutely need to fully share shields with their mothership rather than the current 75%.
This would fix one of the massive advantages docked armor has, which is allowing a ship to hover at 25% shields for an incredible amount of time as the docked armor absorbs the damage instead until it fully ablates off.

i do not see how self powering turrets encourage modular ship design

Self powered turrets having next to no strain on the ship they are mounted on encourages them to be used as much as possible, making the ship "overly modular."

what are you refering to anyway pointing at "modular ship design"
the thing with the cores is that schine really treats them as entities with own bounding boxes which is a general docked entity problem.

How else would you treat docked entities? They NEED to be their own entities. It's necessary for the docking system to function.

As long as main ships become slower and slower in turnrate turrets are the only option and the bigger the ship the slower the turn rte the more it will rely on turrets.

Yes, and as I have personally seen, most ships over around 300k mass put nearly all of their weaponry in turrets and use the absolute minimum thrust needed to dock and maneuver (0.1 to 0.2 TMR), because the ship can easily mount dozens of massive turrets with no concern for its own power systems. This is especially prevalent in the "lag war" scenarios MacThule has been describing, where turrets are the only option because the meta forces them to and anyone who does not will be lagging too badly to use their regular weapons from the mass entity usage of the enemy anyway. Before turret spam, it was swarmer spam, but since swarmer nerfs and buffs to fleets, turrets have increasingly been the superior option.

 

[Drakkart]

Yes, I understand what the point of self powered turrets is. You are repeating my points, except you seem to think this is a good thing rather than a bad thing.
Can you not see how turrets having no drain on the power of the main ship is a problem?
Self powered guns allow the player to export block damage, which takes much less block count than ion damage, to turrets, which also reduces their power consumption greatly as it will now ignore the extra output power debuff because each turret is effectively its own output. This acts as a huge DPS multiplier, because a ship can now have its ion gun AND its DPS gun taking down the shields of an enemy ship simultaneously, while also putting minimal power load on the mother ship.

And non self powered turrets do not put "block damage" on another entity?
You are throwing words around i need definitions for let me know if i am correct.
Block damage = damage against blocks killing hull and systems.
ION Damage = Damage on Ships Shields
Extra power debuff - What is that supposed to mean? You think block damage is done without tertiary effects? Actually lots of the bigger turrets deal ion and block damage at the same time to maximise efficiency ofc course utilizing weapon effects. turrets get hit as the ships get hit meaning both suffering from aditional power expense to replenish shields... so what is the "extra power debuff you are talking about and if that should make any difference maybe that is what you rally should complain about then. Ships could always fire ion and dps at the same time spreading those over multiple weapon systems, so what?
The new power suggestion actually will encourage to put more weapons on the ships.
Turrets though provide agility bigger ships do not have to aim for targets, so turrets in general are a necessity. Meaning you need them. Eventually ship powered turrets might make more sense with the new power system for the new power system does scale differently we'll need to wait and see. Point is for a self powered turret to work you do not just have to put guns on rails. Basically you need to build and dock additional ships onto a big ship except you add the thrust to shove everything around on the main ship. You loose the comfort of an awesome system to hull ratio and exchange it for a way less efficient way to put guns on your ship regarding mass efficiency and hull:systems ratio in order to be able to attack on multiple angles. no i do not see an issue with that it is a fair trade off that makes capital ships the fearsome force they are supposed to be. Regarding dps multiplier it would be way more efficient to have a single gun on a big ship and exploit the provided systems to hull ratio a big ship offers. and it just fricking does not matter if this big gun would be a partial ion gun or an explosive array...

Also, docked entities absolutely need to fully share shields with their mothership rather than the current 75%.
This would fix one of the massive advantages docked armor has, which is allowing a ship to hover at 25% shields for an incredible amount of time as the docked armor absorbs the damage instead until it fully ablates off.

again maybe that is an issue we should talk about intead of demonising turrets or self powering turrets. Look i gree there are mechanics that get exploited but a turret is a concept. how schine implemented all these mechanics is a question of implementation balancing and the likes.
A concept is a feature which enriches a game. Poor handling and implementation do not make a concept a bad concept it still stays being a feature that requires care to be put in the game to make such features work. Just because the actuall implementation of weaponsystems and shields and sharing effects and such is not optimal does not make a concept a bad thing it always just points towards there needs to be done more work on all these other aspects. I agree turrets are powerfull, they have to be to make it a good game. Are they to strong because other side effects give them too big of an advantage - well, alpha.

Self powered turrets having next to no strain on the ship they are mounted on encourages them to be used as much as possible, making the ship "overly modular."

How else would you treat docked entities? They NEED to be their own entities. It's necessary for the docking system to function.

Yes, and as I have personally seen, most ships over around 300k mass put nearly all of their weaponry in turrets and use the absolute minimum thrust needed to dock and maneuver (0.1 to 0.2 TMR), because the ship can easily mount dozens of massive turrets with no concern for its own power systems. This is especially prevalent in the "lag war" scenarios MacThule has been describing, where turrets are the only option because the meta forces them to and anyone who does not will be lagging too badly to use their regular weapons from the mass entity usage of the enemy anyway. Before turret spam, it was swarmer spam, but since swarmer nerfs and buffs to fleets, turrets have increasingly been the superior option.

Yes i see that point still it is not the concept of turrets fault they got implemented like this... Look the biggest problem i see is that rail mass enhancers allow the supported mass to be utilized multiple times...
personally i think that schine should implement this differently still keeping PDTs speed but lowering the bigger turrets speed if their sum of mass is not supported anymore, kinda like real physics, small stuff can be moved fast bigger stuff needs way more force... the weapon system or selfpowered stuff, those are not my concerns...
Right now i am worried about a power system being poorly implemented. Favoring only ships which extend on one axis and restricting creativity.

 

[MacThule]

No one has suggested or is suggesting turrets aren't necessary.

 

[Lecic]

And non self powered turrets do not put "block damage" on another entity?

I think you are misunderstanding. All turrets export damage to another entity, but self powered turrets are the problem because they have no drain on the main ship, allowing you to fire your shield guns and your block damage guns at the same time with no problems.

Extra power debuff - What is that supposed to mean? You think block damage is done without tertiary effects? Actually lots of the bigger turrets deal ion and block damage at the same time to maximise efficiency ofc course utilizing weapon effects. turrets get hit as the ships get hit meaning both suffering from aditional power expense to replenish shields... so what is the "extra power debuff you are talking about and if that should make any difference maybe that is what you rally should complain about then. Ships could always fire ion and dps at the same time spreading those over multiple weapon systems, so what?

Tertiary effects do not apply an "extra power debuff" to weapons, so I have no idea what you're talking about here. I am referring to the fact that block destruction weapons require a lot of outputs, and that this increases power consumption heavily at larger scales. By putting your block damage in turrets, you can have each turret function as an individual output, cutting down power consumption heavily.

A turret that is big enough to support both ion and block damage is an inefficiently designed turret.

The power needed to regenerate shields is very minimal and again, not a problem for the turret, as it is just using mothership shields and is fully self sustaining, so the extra drain on mothership power does not effect it.

A player operated ship cannot effectively fire both ion and block damage at the same time unless you are using high alpha weapons. A person simply cannot fire two DPS weapons simultaneously like AI can.

Compare two ships. Ship A and Ship B have identical stats, except Ship B has exchanged a small amount of its thrust in order to have self powered turrets without having a higher block count. Ship A has separate ion and block damage DPS weapons. The pilot can only fire one of these at a time, and could not fire both at the same time if he could physically do it because the main ship does not have enough power to do so.
Compare this to Ship B, which has its block damage DPS weapons on turrets. This means it can fire both ion and block damage simultaneously, but the load on the main ship is the same, because the turrets are self powered. This means that Ship B effectively has, let's say, 1.5x the DPS of Ship A.
It should become immediately obvious who will win this fight, despite all else being equal.