Variable Missile Geometry

[Panpiper]

I enjoy having other aspects to ship optimization that create for more design strategy than simply adding more blocks. One thing I would like that would be fairly simply for people to grasp, relatively easy to implement and quite logical and thematic would be to offer extra customization to missiles dependent upon the missile block geometry. Instead of having a fixed damage and speed for various missiles, have the two divorced from one another and dependent upon the length and girth of the block placement (relative to the output block facing). The wider the block placement, the higher the damage of the missile but the slower the speed (making it more vulnerable to point defense). The longer the block placement, the higher the speed but the lower the damage.

Note this would be the 'ratio' of damage to speed that would be changed, not the total damage and speed. A one block wide, four block long missile would do X damage at Y speed. A missile with eight times as many blocks with a width of two and a length of eight would do 8X at Y speed. This is not a means to create extra power with scale, merely a method to add extra customizability to ship design.

 

[Criss]

We used to have a system where we could slide a percentage of the weapon into specific qualities such as damage, radius, speed, and reload. The devs opted out. It was very easy to create OP missiles. Considering there is a speed limit to the server that all ships can match, a small ship with a massive payload could fly right up to an enemy and unload the slow missile.

I do think there are some will be better ways to make use of weapons. I would like to see more weapons used for a wider variety than we do currently. Not against what you want, just the way about achieving it.

 

[CyberTao]

Converting reload speed into alpha damage is more or less what you can do already by altering the block ratio of Master/Slave systems, and, well Nukes used to be high damage with long reloads and that got nerfed because it was just too powerful. Similar issue applies here.

Would love to have more depth to building, but in the end I'd have to back off of anything "box" based because... implications of cubes based systems was the cause of death cubes. Also becomes an issue organizing outputs if you want high damage.

 

[Mariux]

We have slave system for that. Why not just make the missile geometry depend on it's slave system, for example, pulse slave missiles would be bigger and easier to shoot down and so on.