Read by Council Suggestion: Starship Graveyards/New Overheat Mechanics

[Reviire]

Ships dissapear when the overheat timer expires. That's no fun. So I thought about this, and I think it would be a nice addition to the game.

Starship Graveyard:
Pretty self explanatory. It's a location on the map where the wrecks of ships can be found and salvaged, possibly even commandered. All locations with more than 4 ships will show up on the map was a waypoint, any graveyard with less than that will not. For performance reasons, all the ship wrecks will be anchored in place, unless interacted with. (i.e, a large ship rams them, or starts towing them. If rammed, they would re-anchor after a short time. )

Changes to ship salvaging:
Since these ships will be sticking around, you shouldn't be able to just pull the parts off them. But that said, it also wouldn't be any fun if they acted like stations did, and just gave you mesh. Instead, when you salvage, you would have a chance to get the part completely intact, some of the materials to make it, or as usual, just some mesh. Chances would vary depending on part, and all be configurable.

Overheat changes:
Ships overheat, and just dissapear. With the addition of starship graveyards, there could be some more persistancy of large ships, especially after battles. When the overheat timer expires, the ship would instead be anchored in place as a wreck.

Why this would be the shit:
It would add a lot more atmosphere to the game, and give new players to the game, or the server, more things to go "wow" at. The graveyards of battles fought between two powerful factions long ago, floating there. Gives a bit of life to the game. New players too, seeing giant, charred wrecks, maybe converting them into an outpost or something. Make a life out of stealing wrecked ships and fixing them up. Fun stuff.

 

[jstenholt]

Are you talking about a procedurally generated feature, or something that happens over time because of player action? Because let me tell you, after a space battle, you better believe the winning side salvages the losers down to the core if their ship is made of anything halfway useful.

EDIT: Ship Explosions: How we should handle dead ships

This thread is a far more concise (and in my opinion all around better) suggestion on how to deal with overheating ships.

 

[ToasterBorst]

Really love the idea, though really not sure about plausibility. Would love to see some more discussion on the topic.

 

[Zerefette]

I think dead ships should lose stability in space and get carried by solar winds, let's get solar wind in the game too.

 

[Amadeus]

I think that a mix of both graveyards and overheating cores would be best. It wouldn't be very fun if a bunch of drone cores were left on the map as a graveyard. I do like the idea of some ships sticking around after a battle though, it would be quite immersive. In response to people salvaging after a battle having graveyards be procedurally generated may help. Having both marked and unmarked graveyards on the map may also give us a reason to cruise in space, not just jump around.

 

[Reviire]

Are you talking about a procedurally generated feature, or something that happens over time because of player action? Because let me tell you, after a space battle, you better believe the winning side salvages the losers down to the core if their ship is made of anything halfway useful.

I was talking about both. They would be generated using default ships (Could add some new ones specifically for the purpose of graveyards, ancient ships.), and ships the server admin let the generation use. But they would also be created after space battles when all the cores overheat and expire.

EDIT: I read the thread, I like the explosion idea. Under a certain, very low percentage of hp, they could explode, only leaving small bits of salvage anchored there. After an intense battle, all you can see is charred pieces of behemoths.

I think that a mix of both graveyards and overheating cores would be best. It wouldn't be very fun if a bunch of drone cores were left on the map as a graveyard. I do like the idea of some ships sticking around after a battle though, it would be quite immersive. In response to people salvaging after a battle having graveyards be procedurally generated may help. Having both marked and unmarked graveyards on the map may also give us a reason to cruise in space, not just jump around.

Yea a few drones just sitting there would be kinda silly. Maybe just completely remove ships under a certain mass, so you don't get any tiny ships floating around.

 

[Madman198237]

Great idea, very hard to implement. Because there are no ship graveyards in a game where everything can be salvaged and reused.

Perhaps make armor almost always return scrap (It's been shot/burned/blasted to pieces) but let systems have a better rate of return. This would encourage salvaging of internals less than outsides (As it should be).
But make all of these really likely to give scrap instead of the block you salvage, unless salvaged with the hand tool. This would give the ability to some newbies/dedicated salvagers to go to wrecks and find the valuable parts, but make it likely that graveyards will, in fact, exist after all-out war.

Another problem....this would result in clusters of vessels scattered around in random sectors after a battle, as light vessels are destroyed in one sector, the battle moves, and then the titans fight each other to death in the next sector over, before some cruisers escorting salvage vessels get destroyed on their way in, a sector up from the titans. Or something similar.
Perhaps remove all the junk ships as soon as the sector they're in is unloaded, and save the ones that make it over a mass threshold until the star system itself reaches a certain number of wrecks, at which point, somewhere in an empty sector, far away from the star, a ship graveyard is spawned with all the wrecks (Anchored), just like an asteroid belt....but with the actual remains of the shot-up ships. As in, an invisible, temporary blueprint of the ship is made and then loaded into this graveyard.


This offloading would happen after the sector is unloaded, so that the next time the sector is loaded, the vessel is gone (Things drift in space, that's my excuse) and, if there is already a ship graveyard in the system, can be found in the graveyard next time it is reloaded. If possible, the graveyard should be refreshed every time it is loaded and unloaded, so that vessels that have been salvaged and are now below a mass threshold are "ejected" from the system and truly deleted.