StarMade Ship Systems 2.0

[Sgtwisky]

2) And I know you're gonna be like "Awww shiiiiet I didn't think of that": Auxiliary Power.
I know I know we had that before, but it makes sense, we no longer have Aux reactors, and these new chambers are in fact "Auxiliary" as you don't need them, so why not? Auxiliary Power can be used in sentences easily and has a nice ring to it. Auxiliary Power for Auxiliary Systems.

I would support this idea. Nice and creative. Good artists copy, great artists steel.

I like this new proposal. I don't wanna repeat what's already said (no one will read this anyway

Just so you know we care.... I read it.

 

[Valorum]

The first proposal hurt my head. This one actually makes sense. Nice job.

And how about just "Reactor Points"?

 

[materia]

Tech Points, madlibs name edition

Prefixes ____ Suffixes
Energy _____ Points
Power ______ Cubits
Reactor _____ Nodes
Plasma _____ Reserves
Tech _______ Auxilliary
Research ____ Petaflops
Speciliazation _ Motes

Throw more ideas in

 

[TheWurm]

I think this will work better than the previous proposal, but I have a few questions.

1)what is to stop us from putting redundant stabilizers outside the ship hull to gain maximum power i.e. the chandelier?

What dictates the size and number of stabilizer groups. It sounds like I could put one stabilizer ridiculously far away such that my opponent cant see it, and it will perform just as well as a box of them surrounding my reactor. Why would I build bigger groups/more groups if they don't matter?

Had to re read the OP, but it looks like there won't be any benefit for stabilizer distance past the minimum radius. So a stabilizer block right off that border will be just as effective as one 5 k blocks away.

For the love of god, schema and Criss DO NOT compare the chamber system to a tech tree. A tech tree you need to unlock through grinding and experience point and it's a completely different thing. You had me panicking when I first heard it on the video thinking "omg now there's experience points too?"

This is an upgrade system. A boost system. A specialization system. A great idea allowing for vast customization opportunities. BUT. It is not a freaking tech tree. Please don't confuse your players.


Edit: On second thought, this seems more complicated than it should be.
1. Why the tech points? Why can't chambers just consume power? Why create a completely redundant different resource coming from the very same reactor?

They meant to describe the shape, methinks. But yes, confusing as all get out. Also, it looks like they want to limit tech points by entity, so having it use power would mean larger ships have an advantage they don't seem to want them to have.

Requiring ships of a certain shape (wedges) to put their turrets on pylons/ridges sounds like a bad system.



This actually makes me think, why not disable ALL docked reactors? By making turrets need to draw power from the main ship, you remove the advantage they have of splitting up all the reactor HP, which would make turret boats a huge pain to properly kill. You would also make EMP actually able to work on turret boats, as turret boats are currently pretty much immune to EMP if their guns are self powered (and trust me, they usually are.).

It looks like if you're mindful of where you put your reactors and stabilizers, you can keep their bounding box away from your large turrets. But it will definitely be something to be mindful of, and could make some ship/turret mixes much harder to pull off effectively. This should only affect turrets that you want to give their own power and special abilities.

This is all just my reading on it, but I did try to go over the post again to make sure.

I do also have a few concerns, namely:

Will there be a size of reactor that doesn't require stabilizers, or at least has optimal distance smaller than it's own size, so that we can still build small ships (say 50 m or less) without having to deal with it? This was one thing called out in the first proposal that I really liked.

It's not really clear how you assign special abilities to different chambers. it seems like it's either a built in thing, in which case how do you set the blocks to a certain upgrade, or it's assigned in some menu, which brings up the question of what happens when you reassign one branch on a tree on the fly. It's a sort of nitpicky detail kind of thing, I'm just a little fuzzy on it.

Speaking of nitpicky details, would dependent chambers need to be right behind the chamber they depend on, or could there be other chambers in between? So, could you go Jumpdrive 1 -> Shields -> Jumpdrive 2, or does it have to be Jumpdrive 1-> Jumpdrive 2?

Enquiring minds need to know!

 

[Space Shaman]

Information warfare
Knowing where the reactors are of your opponent’s ship is quite important now and we don’t want people to just randomly shoot ships either. Going back to the old core drilling where you always knew where to shoot is not an option either. The ability to find reactor related blocks is something that will be tied to the scanner blocks and also the Scanner + ECM tree with the reactors.

In best case scenario, you can see exactly where they are, lighting up green through the hull’s ship. This would of course scale properly with transparency and intensity so that the most important reactors are easily seen

In worst case scenario, those reactor groups would not show up or appear bigger than they are and they may even move around randomly (scrambled).

In which scenario you end up depends on how strong and upgraded your scanners are, and how many points the enemy invested into countering it.

This actually somewhat NEGATES information warfare. We HAVE information warfare already! You must capture the tech in question or spy to get info and then train your members with that intel. Then you have the scrambling of the positions, but at that point, you might as well just not have that system at all and keep info warfare as is.

All in all, this will add "realism" to individual ships. Starmade doesn't need that. It needs realism in the way large scale encounters can be facilitated. Above all else, it needs to be fun and believable without changing its purpose.

 

[Mr.Steam]

1) Since the whole system presumably relies on computers to keep everything running smoothly and bigger power systems have better control computers how about tech points just be CPU CYCLES, or CLOCK CYCLES.

2) Some have worried about complexity. I would think you could achieve basic plain vanilla functionality with One reactor block and maybe one stabilizer next to it. Only when you want more specialization or more power for large ships would the complexity go up.

3) A long skinny ship may generate more power by keeping the reactor and stabilization blocks apart, but it is a trade-off because the power system is closer to the surface and more susceptible to being shot.

4) Some have worried about creating One shot Alpha ships. Isn't this basically what a torpedo bomber or dive bomber was? You got one shot and if you missed you were out of luck but if you hit just right, it could be devastating. This will bring new meaning to anti- fighter defense.

 

[Shaker]

the big question is how many blocks will it take to get to the equivalent of the current 2million e/sec ?
and what the minimum distance between reactor and stabilizer if it was 1 reactor doing it.

ive got a 1.4million block ship sitting at 450m long, wondering if im forced to throw the reactor in the back and the stabilizers in the nose

 

[Lecic]

Also, with turrets, if I have a reactor in the barrel, don't shut it off just because I added some gun depression, please only use the starting orientation for determining what is on or off, otherwise I will be very angry.

Or just fully disable docked power and finally solve the issue of docked guns and shields. The new power will be linear, so there's no reason not to.

 

[Gandrac]

V E R Y N I C E

please don't name them tech points

Maybe just 'excess power' ?

 

[taisong]

Sounds good.
Do we have to have the chambers though? Our current passive effect modules are fine, as long as they are tuned similarly to the proposed "chambers". I do not think it is necessary to make it a tech tree.

 

[Scypio]

A way to power turrets without using the main ship's power (thereby circumventing the 2m e/s cap), a way to prevent aux explosions from doing significant damage, some strange shenanigans that allow turrets (and fixed autoguns) to get tons of power in a compact manner with no aux at all, etc.

Please stop. Docked power cells are just straw mens that we agitate to scare people. Docked power cells are not efficient, and reliable. Except with clipping but hey, that's something else.

For the proposal i'm like atra. I see future problems depending on the way it is done. I also see checkerboard reactors/stabilizer. So let's see what you do Schine.

 

[Zyrr]

First off, this is a pretty solid proposal all around. I can really tell that Schine thought over their last proposal and the suggestions we made and made some significant improvements. Really very very solid, this will be a good change. But I'm me so I have some points to nitpick.

1) "Ability to turn reactors on or off. Toggling between states will have some form of penalty/spooling up time tied to it." Spool time for this should be based on the size of the reactor you're switching from compared to what you're switching to is. Make sure the maximum isn't too high.

2) Per the rest of the posters, just eliminate self powered docked entities until they undock. It's too exploitable.

3) A global tech point (change this name) amount for ships is silly. Base it on how many total reactor blocks there are. This will scale better with how much players want to invest in their power systems.

4) Increase TP transfer rate for reactors with lower reactor to stabiliser ratios. "Apocalypse engineering" reactors but with less regen efficiency - if we consider the above suggestion, could make for some interesting but dangerous setups.

5) If such a thing is feasible, consider making reactors with lower reactor to stabilizer ratios explosive a la auxiliary reactors. My suggestion would be to scale the threshold based on total # of blocks - for example, at 100 total blocks (reactor blocks and stabiliser blocks) you would need an efficiency rate of 60% for your reactor blocks to not explode when damaged. At 200, 65%, etc. The exact numbers don't matter - the more blocks you have, the higher efficiency you need. This, of course, would be affected in real time, so losing a chunk of stabilisers could suddenly be really unfortunate. To digress, make stabilisers stabilise.

Please stop. Docked power cells are just straw mens that we agitate to scare people. Docked power cells are not efficient, and reliable. Except with clipping but hey, that's something else.

For the proposal i'm like atra. I see future problems depending on the way it is done. I also see checkerboard reactors/stabilizer. So let's see what you do Schine.

Docked power cells are very powerful, even still.

 

[taisong]

Also, I do want to fill up my ship systems. What should i fill it with?

 

[Matt_Bradock]

2) And I know you're gonna be like "Awww shiiiiet I didn't think of that": Auxiliary Power.
I know I know we had that before, but it makes sense, we no longer have Aux reactors, and these new chambers are in fact "Auxiliary" as you don't need them, so why not? Auxiliary Power can be used in sentences easily and has a nice ring to it. Auxiliary Power for Auxiliary Systems.

This. So much this.

 

[Gandrac]

5) If such a thing is feasible, consider making reactors with lower reactor to stabilizer ratios explosive a la auxiliary reactors. My suggestion would be to scale the threshold based on total # of blocks - for example, at 100 total blocks (reactor blocks and stabiliser blocks) you would need an efficiency rate of 60% for your reactor blocks to not explode when damaged. At 200, 65%, etc. The exact numbers don't matter - the more blocks you have, the higher efficiency you need. This, of course, would be affected in real time, so losing a chunk of stabilisers could suddenly be really unfortunate. To digress, make stabilisers stabilise.

That sounds interesting!

You are right, maybe Stabilizers should just be used to ... yea ... stabilize the Reactor instead of providing efficiency, so that it does not blow up big time.
If you lose enough of those Stabilizers the Reactor gets more likely to blow up from a direct hit. This would leave you the freedom to build a ship with a completely unstable Reactor that could blow up from just a single hit, but on the other hand could be used in a more compact/efficient design. I am thinking about highly efficient small Fighters or Glasscannons in general.

 

[Crusade]

//MAX_ACTIVE_REACTORS = 1
i.e, server setting.
Make it happen.

Then I'm pretty sure you guys are golden.

 

[taisong]

Another thing. Why aren't we connecting the reactor with shield/thrusters etc? Wiring is necessary for ships, I guess...

 

[therimmer96]

Another thing. Why aren't we connecting the reactor with shield/thrusters etc? Wiring is necessary for ships, I guess...

Because for some reason this community is against having to wire everything together


BECAUSE THEY HATE FUN

 

[Andir]

I'd rather have wires than arbitrary heat zones and minimum distances.

 

[taisong]

Because for some reason this community is against having to wire everything together


BECAUSE THEY HATE FUN

I guess it gets a little confusing, but come on, it is not as confusing as our old power system, right?
The reason I said this is that, depending on how this will turn out, we will have a lot of empty interior space. I think a little work on piping/wiring would help to use up that space. It also provides some more weakness for your ship too.

Big ships can now use the open space to get some fighters on board. However, small ships would probably have some tiny little empty pockets that nobody can use. I think we need to address this, either by adding light armor or some kind of a inner ship layer.