Weapons 2.0 - :(

[Nosajimiki]

lol, maybe if that is what my ship looked like, I'd be okay with it, but I'm literally talking about a weapon system that is only ~1% of my total mass.

 

[GnomeKing]

personal views on current dev build:

sigh ... way off target still, in so many ways - and in some ways actually getting worse
damage patterns are boring and repetitive - missiles are op and boring - cannons still crap - c/m just weird - bomb op (and daft if you think about it) - c/b damage makes no sense at all ...penetration (ha, if you can actually can it that!) models in general are just way off what they should be - really not looking so good.

and recoil lags like f@ck - just stop it already !!! (starmade combat is bad enough as it is, thanks very much

 

[Nosajimiki]

personal views on current dev build:

sigh ... way off target still, in so many ways - and in some ways actually getting worse
damage patterns are boring and repetitive - missiles are op and boring - cannons still crap - c/m just weird - bomb op (and daft if you think about it) - c/b damage makes no sense at all ...penetration (ha, if you can actually can it that!) models in general are just way off what they should be - really not looking so good.

and recoil lags like f@ck - just stop it already !!! (starmade combat is bad enough as it is, thanks very much

• Damage patterns are boring and repetitive
  • Acid is a cool concept, but removal of terciaries and massive reduction of secondaries really is a problem. While there are more "unique" weapons, what we have now seems to do a worse job of filling basic roles and being able to be calibrated to our needs.
• Missiles are op and boring
  
  • They are more of a scaling problem than an OP problem. A bomber can achieve the same missile DPS as a Cruiser because of how reloading and fixed radius works.
• cannons still crap
  
  • The velocity increase looked really promising for those 2 seconds before recoil was added. I would have liked to been able to test them more before the mechanic was added, because now, I cant even verify why they miss so much.
• c/m just weird
  
  • agreed
• bomb op (and daft if you think about it)
  
  • I kinda feel like these are what warheads were always meant to be, but could not achieve. As long as AI never gets proficient with them, I think they are okay as a special tactics weapon.
• c/b damage makes no sense at all
  
  • There is a flaw in how damage propagates that's already been reported.
• recoil lags like f@ck - just stop it already !!!
  
  • Recoil is one of those ideas that sounds good on paper, but very terrible in reality. Games that use recoil expect you to be really close to your opponent when using such weapons. StarMade just does not work on that scale, especially since you can not predict the size and dimensions of you enemy to even have a baseline profile to calibrate such a mechanic against.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

Tested it out finally, and I agree; cannons are garbage, missiles are crazy strong, beams are fine other than against unshielded non-small targets (AKA exactly the targets you'll likely be facing in this since fighters still aren't that great and shields are garbage).
Also, cannon especially seems to lag like crazy. The moment shields go down, it's as if the target is a ghost, and when I finally do see damage appearing, it's not where I shot. I suspect that's the issue with a little bit of lag mixed with recoil making things not sync up between what I shot and what the (local) server thinks I shot.

 

[Tsnonak]

I sure hope there will be some config settings to play with to adjust or turn things like Recoil off :s

 

[Scypio]

Eh, that's a wishful thinking.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

I sure hope there will be some config settings to play with to adjust or turn things like Recoil off :s

I don't. Configs on core mechanics just are shirking responsibility onto servers to balance the game and make it fun. They should only exist in testing to determine correct balance, not in whatever comes to release.

 

[Agame3]

Spoiler: Diagram of recoil mechanism, British 60 pounder gun Mk.I, 1916

1916 technology. How about applying at least that to the StarMade futuristic age?

Just in case inertial dampeners and directional gravity are not able to do the job, of course.

 

[Valiant70]

Weapons 2.0 - :/

Clearly some hard work has gone into the new damage and hit/scan models, and I can imagine that some of this fits well with AI and NPC behaviors and actions.

There are other good things in there also …

BUT overall, the new weapons system/targeting massively degrade First Person action and make the game feel much much less dynamic:

-beams are far too ‘sticky’ and predicable

-missiles are too limited in variety

-ranges across the board make no sense + lack any depth/complexity

-loss of ‘pulse-type’ secondary feels like loss of a finger for no good reasons

-Shotgun (Can-Mis) – sigh, what exactly is the point in that then?

-And Cannons … OMG … these really, really REALLY Suck

Recoil is awful. Just awful. And Dumb. Dumb and Awful. Both of those.

Recoil makes no sense whatsoever. Cannons have gimbals, inertia counter-measures, ect. Broadsides from ships do not flip them sideways in the water. Tanks don’t go sliding backwards down the road. Helicopter gunships don’t start spinning when they fire guns and missiles.

and How will this play with many cannon turrets firing, and in a server? Feels like lag fest to me …:/

Beyond the basic quirky/fun concept, the implementation with ‘random Player shot-variance’ is just Awful. And Dumb. Dumb and Awful. Both of those.

For example; Not being able to target blocks a few hundred meters away CONSISTENTLY with a “sniper/artillery gun” is Laughably Crap. Sorry, but there it is.

The damage models themselves are all kinds of daft and illogical between weapons But worse is how boring and repetitive the damage to blocks is. Now nearly everything makes little ‘splat-holes’. Deep, piercing needle-like damage is rare/non-existent. No more razor-like slashes and cuts. No longer can a ship be turned into a sieve with shrapnel...

Just $~*@:”# Splat-Holes !!!


Summary: looks like useful work for NPC and AI targeting and some damage calculation models. BUT (sadly) Absolutely SUCKS as a PLAYER EXPERIENCE, and therefore (for me) currently a HUGE FAIL

[reviewing grumpy opinions]

No offense pal, but I really wish a moderator would just come by and erase all the formatting from your post. Why did you even do this?

 

[Captain Fortius]

That's probably because most ships, tanks, and helicopters don't have guns that take up 30% of the entire vehicle, and because they have things supporting them like, y'know, dirt, water, or air.

If you want a ship with "realistic" recoil, give yourself one cannon block per every two hundred blocks or some shit.

Well, a month late, but I found this post AND the free time to dump some wikipedia - source of deep knowledges to be sure - on you lads.

We don't have armed spaceships, but a cursory search on main battle tanks will tell you, a german Leopard 2 tank weighs about 62 tons and it's main gun is 3.3 tons. Soo, more like one cannon block per eighteen other blocks.
Then you can add almost another ton for ammunition, bringing the shooty to anything else ratio somewhere around 1:15.

The Bismarck battleship weighed over forty thousand tons, and a quick calculation tells me, of that mass over a thousand tons were just the various guns and cannons (NOT the turrets. JUST the cannons). That's 1:40 if we don't count munitions or the loading mechanisms.
I didn't find out how much ammunition of what type it carried, but a single shell for the main cannon, together with it's propellant charges weighed about one ton, and fully loaded for war, the ship was a quarter heavier than it was when empty. You have to wonder how much of that was fuel, crew, food, misc stuff, and how much boom-boom related stuff.

Aircraft have an even steeper gun-to-not-gun ratio; An 11 ton A-10 Thunderbolt's gatling cannon weighs 1.8 tons with a full ammo drum.
That's a 1:6 ratio without any missiles or bombs. When discharging the gun, pilots say the fuselage rattles, and the plane tilts a bit, but it certainly doesn't start flying backwards....

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

Well, a month late, but I found this post AND the free time to dump some wikipedia - source of deep knowledges to be sure - on you lads.

We don't have armed spaceships, but a cursory search on main battle tanks will tell you, a german Leopard 2 tank weighs about 62 tons and it's main gun is 3.3 tons. Soo, more like one cannon block per eighteen other blocks.
Then you can add almost another ton for ammunition, bringing the shooty to anything else ratio somewhere around 1:15.

The Bismarck battleship weighed over forty thousand tons, and a quick calculation tells me, of that mass over a thousand tons were just the various guns and cannons (NOT the turrets. JUST the cannons). That's 1:40 if we don't count munitions or the loading mechanisms.
I didn't find out how much ammunition of what type it carried, but a single shell for the main cannon, together with it's propellant charges weighed about one ton, and fully loaded for war, the ship was a quarter heavier than it was when empty. You have to wonder how much of that was fuel, crew, food, misc stuff, and how much boom-boom related stuff.

Aircraft have an even steeper gun-to-not-gun ratio; An 11 ton A-10 Thunderbolt's gatling cannon weighs 1.8 tons with a full ammo drum.
That's a 1:6 ratio without any missiles or bombs. When discharging the gun, pilots say the fuselage rattles, and the plane tilts a bit, but it certainly doesn't start flying backwards....

So, a little back-of-the-napkin physics on guns in general: The very concept of bullets is that the most efficient way to kill people and other targets having sensitive internals and nonsensitive externals with a given mass of projectile without explosives is to penetrate.

So, make the projectile really thin and really fast. It may only have the force of a baseball pitch, but the target skin won't be able to distribute the force of impact from the very small area in sufficient time to prevent a penetration.

This ultimately means not much forced involved, you're thrown back as much as if you threw or were hit by a baseball or so by a handgun. That can mess with aim if you don't brace well to distribute the force more, but it won't really ever make firing a gun backwards a valid means of propulsion. Essentially, firing a gun backwards is about what rockets do, and they are incredibly inefficient; you need to fire around 80-90% of your mass at normal rocket exhaust velocity to reach orbit.
Applying this to guns in StarMade makes no sense on many levels, quite obviously.

 

[kurosawa]

We don't have armed spaceships, but a cursory search on main battle tanks will tell you, a german Leopard 2 tank weighs about 62 tons and it's main gun is 3.3 tons. Soo, more like one cannon block per eighteen other blocks.

Would those 3.3 tons be the barrel only ?

Does it include the weight of the tank turret and any computer and ammo loading/storage?[/quote]

 

[Captain Fortius]

Yup, just the barrel and the chamber, and the other parts that make the bare essential "gun" .

 

[Nosajimiki]

I don't. Configs on core mechanics just are shirking responsibility onto servers to balance the game and make it fun. They should only exist in testing to determine correct balance, not in whatever comes to release.

I disagree. Different servers have different cultures. Most server admins DON'T want Schine choosing everything for them. In some cases, a server may need to turn off recoil for performance issues. Some may need to reduce or remove recoil because they use larger sector sizes and increased weapons ranges to meet the demands of their specific player base. In a perfect world, the feedback on the configs will help Schine come up with a really good default setup that does not need a lot of work for most admins, but disabling configs is dumb. A prime example we already see is the mining bonus. Servers that want to promote big ships and lots of PvP tend to favor higher mining bonuses were as survival and mini-made servers favor lower bonuses.

 

[Raisinbat]

pre 2.0 alpha cannons (can/pul) were useful as sidearms because you could have a can/pul/ion weapon and a can/can/punch and use the can/can/punch all the time then briefly switch into can/pul/ion when the cooldown was up and go back to your machinegun wasting less than a second of DPS. With the charge mechanic they lose this ability since you can't use the machinegun while charging so you're wasting DPS for much longer and the sidearm ends up being a complete waste. 2.0 is extremely detrimental to have a varied weapon loadout.

Aside from messing up weapons, the reduction in weapon mass you're allowed is one of the worst changes in the game's history. Long post ahead, but i do have a point.

We don't have armed spaceships, but a cursory search on main battle tanks will tell you, a german Leopard 2 tank weighs about 62 tons and it's main gun is 3.3 tons. Soo, more like one cannon block per eighteen other blocks.

Turret And Hull Weights Of Various Tanks - Modern Vehicles Discussion

Leopard 2a5........ 59,7 t....... (about 20,5 tons for the turret and about 39 tons for the hull)
Leopard 2a4 ........55,15 t........ (16 tons for turret and about 39 tons for the hull)

Yup, just the barrel and the chamber, and the other parts that make the "gun".

"gun" part in starmade isn't just the barrel and chamber, it's also doing the reloading, ammunition storage, ammunition feed etc.

Make that 1:2, not that MUH REALISM is any kind of sensible argument, but you really should be able to tell, simply from the size of a tanks turret compared to its hull that those numbers were bullshit. I'm sure the relative weight of guns would go down for tanks if they could fit shield generators as well.

Having a healthy weight cost between the different systems is good for the game because we have the option had the option to modify how much mass we wanted to invest in different functionality; if 3% of your ship is your dps and 60% is your armor, why would you not drop armor to 57%, a tiny survivability bonus, to DOUBLE your dps? This is the problem with RP thinking; you decide what your ship should be like on some arbitrary conceptual basis, like rebuilding some dumbass star trek ship, while PVP building is tailored to the mechanics; you can NEVER tailor mechanics to someone who is ignoring them, it's ridiculous to suggest that you should.

Wrt the realism, rp gunsizes and MUH SMALL GUNS:

Take a look at the turrets here. On a battleship everything in the turret is what would be considered part of the weapon system in starmade, probably also some of the other stuff like munition storage, but i think starmade equivalent is reactor/capacitor blocks and those dont always go in turrets either, so fairly similar. This is what my turret designs for optimized PVP building looks like:

Internal turret size:

I'd say there's a lot more similarity between modern warships and PVP ships than RP ships, because they're both built around the same core idea of MASS DISTRIBUTION. PVP ships and warships are both optimized around having as much of the systems that make them effective (guns, engines, defense etc) and as little as possible of the stuff that's keeping those things running, or otherwise not contributing for the purpose the ship is built for.

From watching RPers in their showers (yes i can do this) i've reverse engineered their building style as closely as possible, and it goes something like this:

1. Construct a tube
2. Doodle on it
3. ???
4. Beautiful, inefficient trash

RP sees adding turrets to a design as nothing more than doodling; i've never seen an RP ship with turrets recessed into the hull, except as a tiny socket. No attempts at incorporating them into their interiors either; no gunnery stations no internal turret access, not even internal view of the turret so you can see them moving:

No internal access like this:

No visible / mechanical sockets like this:

The key reason you don't see this is the method through which RP ships are built; you make the tube THEN you doodle on it. If the tube/hull is the first thing you make i imagine it's very dificult to get something like this to fit without severely compromising your design, especially if you've already started on your interior. PvP ships are, at least for everyone i know, built turrets first, because they are the most dificult part of the ship to adjust later in the build, so getting them right first and adjusting everything else accordingly is much easier, and PVP builders usually keep mass limits in mind before laying the first block so we know how many turrets we're going to fit and how heavy they'll end up being. Basically in PVP creating and fitting the turrets for a ship is part of conceptualizing it, similar to when RP builders are making wireframes for their ship's skeletons.

My point here, and the following is pure, unadulterated conjecture, is that all the complaints from RP and cosmetic builders about turret/weapon sizes has nothing to do with realism or aesthetics. In terms of realism, turrets on real warships simply are fucking huge, not like the peashooters RPers build. Granted, they dont fit all their mass into their barrels, and theres a good coupple of arguments for allowing turrets to fit slaves and effects in the bases, but that also allows for a lot of potential exploits and much worse complexity in making turrets; for instance what happens if you have multiple weapon computers on the barrel and base? what if there is no base? what if you have multiple barrel entities(would be extremely common for single axis turrets)?
The calls for realism also seem EXTREMELY particular about which "realisms" they want incorporated. Never seen anyone complain about how much a character can carry or sound in space.

As for aesthetics, if it was simply about having turrets that look small, why don't RP builders use ball turrets? I don't have a good picture of one but you basically cram all the weapon systems into a sphere with 10-20% of the sphere sticking up above the hull, like this:

With a double jointed center. Sure they can't depress at all, but little things like turret coverage never bothered them before. Sure turrets wont have the exact same shape or movement as a regular turret, but the point is there are plenty of options that allow visually small turrets that are still high mass and i've never seen an RP ship use them, so i'm calling bullshit on the aesthetic argument for microturrets as well.

I believe, and feel free to correct me on this you larping bastards, that it is neither aesthetics nor realism that cause the call for smaller weapons, but rather that RP process introduces turrets to a ship in the final stage of shipbuilding, often after interior and definitely after exterior are supposed to be finished, where fitting a turret of sufficient mass to the ship would force the builder to completely rebuild huge sections of their ships because there's a huge deathball in the bathroom all of a sudden. It's the only thing that explains why they never have turret oriented interiors, because when adding interiors to a shell that already has huge turrets integrated, it's super obvious to add a few walkways and consoles to the turret and let it have it's own little room.

If changing weapon sizes did nothing but let RPers build ships the way they want as it's natural for them, i'd be all for it, but the reduction in weapon sizes has come at unacceptable cost to PVP builders. The only way you could limit weapon sizes without simply multiplying the damage of existing weapons was through 2.0's reactor system that has taken away mass distribution as a design mechanic so we can no longer exchange mass in one system for mass in another, because everything is gated by the power restriction. This forces all ships into fixed ratios, or extremely limited ones, completely eliminating the possibility of different ship doctrines.

The ability to make functionally unique ships, not merely painting different looking ones, is the core draw in starmade for every competitive builder, and it has been ERASED by 2.0. We are NOT going to convert to roleplayers or cosmetic builders, we are simply going to leave. The elimination of variety in ship doctrines is also horrible for combat in general. Even if the game has multiple weapon options, if all ships have the same speed, defense and staying power then one weapon is going to be the best, because all fights will have the same context, except for ships being smaller/larger, but since that now translates to being a fixed amount stronger/weaker than the other guy i don't see a situation where one weapon would be best against a similar sized ship and less than 50% as good against a ship half your size as the others. Most fps have characters with the same stats, but they have terrain to offset things. If an FPS takes place in open space with no obstacles for 10s of kilometers i call dips on the sniper rifle.

So if the weapon miniaturization and 2.0 which is necessary to enforce it has completely destroyed the fun in competitive shipbuilding and drastically reduced the fun in simple combat which amounts to the vast majority of players losing out on what they enjoy, and all that it gains is that RP builders don't have to adapt the way they build ships, isn't that a super stupid update?

 

[Agame3]

I 99% agree with you. You said it better than I could.

1%: What sounds in space? Wush-wush when you use menus, core making forever a flying missile sound especially when docked and stationary, first 3 times you use a cannon in a game session it goes boom, then shuts up, you call these game sounds???

 

[Nosajimiki]

pre 2.0 alpha cannons (can/pul) were useful as sidearms because you could have a can/pul/ion weapon and a can/can/punch and use the can/can/punch all the time then briefly switch into can/pul/ion when the cooldown was up and go back to your machinegun wasting less than a second of DPS. With the charge mechanic they lose this ability since you can't use the machinegun while charging so you're wasting DPS for much longer and the sidearm ends up being a complete waste. 2.0 is extremely detrimental to have a varied weapon loadout.

Aside from messing up weapons, the reduction in weapon mass you're allowed is one of the worst changes in the game's history. Long post ahead, but i do have a point.



Turret And Hull Weights Of Various Tanks - Modern Vehicles Discussion





"gun" part in starmade isn't just the barrel and chamber, it's also doing the reloading, ammunition storage, ammunition feed etc.

Make that 1:2, not that MUH REALISM is any kind of sensible argument, but you really should be able to tell, simply from the size of a tanks turret compared to its hull that those numbers were bullshit. I'm sure the relative weight of guns would go down for tanks if they could fit shield generators as well.

Having a healthy weight cost between the different systems is good for the game because we have the option had the option to modify how much mass we wanted to invest in different functionality; if 3% of your ship is your dps and 60% is your armor, why would you not drop armor to 57%, a tiny survivability bonus, to DOUBLE your dps? This is the problem with RP thinking; you decide what your ship should be like on some arbitrary conceptual basis, like rebuilding some dumbass star trek ship, while PVP building is tailored to the mechanics; you can NEVER tailor mechanics to someone who is ignoring them, it's ridiculous to suggest that you should.

Wrt the realism, rp gunsizes and MUH SMALL GUNS:

Take a look at the turrets here. On a battleship everything in the turret is what would be considered part of the weapon system in starmade, probably also some of the other stuff like munition storage, but i think starmade equivalent is reactor/capacitor blocks and those dont always go in turrets either, so fairly similar. This is what my turret designs for optimized PVP building looks like:

Internal turret size:

I'd say there's a lot more similarity between modern warships and PVP ships than RP ships, because they're both built around the same core idea of MASS DISTRIBUTION. PVP ships and warships are both optimized around having as much of the systems that make them effective (guns, engines, defense etc) and as little as possible of the stuff that's keeping those things running, or otherwise not contributing for the purpose the ship is built for.

From watching RPers in their showers (yes i can do this) i've reverse engineered their building style as closely as possible, and it goes something like this:

1. Construct a tube
2. Doodle on it
3. ???
4. Beautiful, inefficient trash

RP sees adding turrets to a design as nothing more than doodling; i've never seen an RP ship with turrets recessed into the hull, except as a tiny socket. No attempts at incorporating them into their interiors either; no gunnery stations no internal turret access, not even internal view of the turret so you can see them moving:

No internal access like this:

No visible / mechanical sockets like this:

The key reason you don't see this is the method through which RP ships are built; you make the tube THEN you doodle on it. If the tube/hull is the first thing you make i imagine it's very dificult to get something like this to fit without severely compromising your design, especially if you've already started on your interior. PvP ships are, at least for everyone i know, built turrets first, because they are the most dificult part of the ship to adjust later in the build, so getting them right first and adjusting everything else accordingly is much easier, and PVP builders usually keep mass limits in mind before laying the first block so we know how many turrets we're going to fit and how heavy they'll end up being. Basically in PVP creating and fitting the turrets for a ship is part of conceptualizing it, similar to when RP builders are making wireframes for their ship's skeletons.

My point here, and the following is pure, unadulterated conjecture, is that all the complaints from RP and cosmetic builders about turret/weapon sizes has nothing to do with realism or aesthetics. In terms of realism, turrets on real warships simply are fucking huge, not like the peashooters RPers build. Granted, they dont fit all their mass into their barrels, and theres a good coupple of arguments for allowing turrets to fit slaves and effects in the bases, but that also allows for a lot of potential exploits and much worse complexity in making turrets; for instance what happens if you have multiple weapon computers on the barrel and base? what if there is no base? what if you have multiple barrel entities(would be extremely common for single axis turrets)?
The calls for realism also seem EXTREMELY particular about which "realisms" they want incorporated. Never seen anyone complain about how much a character can carry or sound in space.

As for aesthetics, if it was simply about having turrets that look small, why don't RP builders use ball turrets? I don't have a good picture of one but you basically cram all the weapon systems into a sphere with 10-20% of the sphere sticking up above the hull, like this:

With a double jointed center. Sure they can't depress at all, but little things like turret coverage never bothered them before. Sure turrets wont have the exact same shape or movement as a regular turret, but the point is there are plenty of options that allow visually small turrets that are still high mass and i've never seen an RP ship use them, so i'm calling bullshit on the aesthetic argument for microturrets as well.

I believe, and feel free to correct me on this you larping bastards, that it is neither aesthetics nor realism that cause the call for smaller weapons, but rather that RP process introduces turrets to a ship in the final stage of shipbuilding, often after interior and definitely after exterior are supposed to be finished, where fitting a turret of sufficient mass to the ship would force the builder to completely rebuild huge sections of their ships because there's a huge deathball in the bathroom all of a sudden. It's the only thing that explains why they never have turret oriented interiors, because when adding interiors to a shell that already has huge turrets integrated, it's super obvious to add a few walkways and consoles to the turret and let it have it's own little room.

If changing weapon sizes did nothing but let RPers build ships the way they want as it's natural for them, i'd be all for it, but the reduction in weapon sizes has come at unacceptable cost to PVP builders. The only way you could limit weapon sizes without simply multiplying the damage of existing weapons was through 2.0's reactor system that has taken away mass distribution as a design mechanic so we can no longer exchange mass in one system for mass in another, because everything is gated by the power restriction. This forces all ships into fixed ratios, or extremely limited ones, completely eliminating the possibility of different ship doctrines.

The ability to make functionally unique ships, not merely painting different looking ones, is the core draw in starmade for every competitive builder, and it has been ERASED by 2.0. We are NOT going to convert to roleplayers or cosmetic builders, we are simply going to leave. The elimination of variety in ship doctrines is also horrible for combat in general. Even if the game has multiple weapon options, if all ships have the same speed, defense and staying power then one weapon is going to be the best, because all fights will have the same context, except for ships being smaller/larger, but since that now translates to being a fixed amount stronger/weaker than the other guy i don't see a situation where one weapon would be best against a similar sized ship and less than 50% as good against a ship half your size as the others. Most fps have characters with the same stats, but they have terrain to offset things. If an FPS takes place in open space with no obstacles for 10s of kilometers i call dips on the sniper rifle.

So if the weapon miniaturization and 2.0 which is necessary to enforce it has completely destroyed the fun in competitive shipbuilding and drastically reduced the fun in simple combat which amounts to the vast majority of players losing out on what they enjoy, and all that it gains is that RP builders don't have to adapt the way they build ships, isn't that a super stupid update?

Interesting analysis. I agree with a lot of it including weapon mass, etc, but I actually find most PvPers avoid this particular turret design. Recessed turrets cause tons of extra lag. PvP turrets are typically designed around avoiding main body to reduce lag and increase firing angles; so, PvP tends to favor floating, drum, and orbital turrets.

Drum turrets can rotate 360 degrees in all directs despite being hull mounting which prevents excess collisions. Especially good for VLS turrets.


Orbital turrets wrap around the hull of a ship so that it can rotate in 360 degrees in all directions and never be facing the actual ship. Limited to 1 per-ship, but great for direct fire weapons.



Floating turrets are similar to drum turrets but are not physically connected to the main ship. This means they are less likely to be occluded making them a good option for distributing direct fire weapons across many turrets

 

[Zoolimar]

Interesting analysis. I agree with a lot of it including weapon mass, etc, but I actually find most PvPers avoid this particular turret design. Recessed turrets cause tons of extra lag. PvP turrets are typically designed around avoiding main body to reduce lag and increase firing angles; so, PvP tends to favor floating, drum, and orbital turrets.

The other reason is the fact that armour is shit. If it was good the idea of hiding most of your turrets behind your armour could have had some merit - using same armour plate to cover both main ship body and most of the turret body. But as armour is mostly irrelevant it is much better to distribute parts of your ship so that no shot would be able to hit two of them at once. Or at least most shots.

 

[Captain Fortius]

"gun" part in starmade isn't just the barrel and chamber, it's also doing the reloading, ammunition storage, ammunition feed etc.

Make that 1:2, not that MUH REALISM is any kind of sensible argument, but you really should be able to tell, simply from the size of a tanks turret compared to its hull that those numbers were bullshit. I'm sure the relative weight of guns would go down for tanks if they could fit shield generators as well.

Not quite.

I wouldn't count the weight of the entire turret; there's just too much armor plating and structure that strictly speaking, isn't a weapon.
(Meaning, you'd use hull or armor blocks to represent them in-game)
By your logic, if a ship has guns in it's main hull, then the entire ship would be "the gun".

I'm fully aware of ammunition storage and feed, and I mentioned them accordingly. I too believe, in Starmade those systems would be represented with the same cannon blocks as the actual gun barrel. As long as nobody says they are all energy weapons, that require no ammunition, just magical reactor power, so I gave the absolute lowest number that's difficult to refute. By all means, go higher.

Btw, did you see the guy I quoted, who wrote a 1:200 ratio of weapons to total volume would be realistic? Now THAT's not right.

There's a problem though. On the real thing, only the gun barrel elevates. Expressed in-game, it'd mean a single weapon group is spread out over two or three entities, yet somehow remains joined through a single control computer.
We can't do that in Starmade.
We can build a big recessed pendulum that doesn't just traverse around as a real turret basket would, but swings back and forth as the guns elevate and depress (I assume that's what I see on your green&brown turret as well, if it's not a zero elevation design.)
This is where the complaints of weapon sizes must have stemmed from. Not every hull design has room for a big internal pendulum. Especially replicas.

.... Aaaand, didn't you get RP and PVP in reverse?
An RP ship would spend mass and volume on decorative turret mechanisms and internal control stations, while a pvp builder would rather fill that room with system blocks. Combinations of the two exist, though.

 

[Raisinbat]

There's a problem though. On the real thing, only the gun barrel elevates. Expressed in-game, it'd mean a single weapon group is spread out over two or three entities, yet somehow remains joined through a single control computer.
We can't do that in Starmade.

Right, so you compromise and either build the turret in a way that works given the game's mechanics, or you get an aesthetically correct weapon that's trash.

My point is not to fucking throw away the core of competitive building, and with it 80%+ of the people playing the game just so a handful of morons can have their ships look the way they think they should look.

This is where the complaints of weapon sizes must have stemmed from. Not every hull design has room for a big internal pendulum. Especially replicas.

And those hull design CAN GO FUCK THEMSELVES. The game is under zero obligation to have every possible design be a viable competitive layout. Hell that isn't even fucking possible if you'd think about for a minute; you're literally asking for shape and layout to not have any impact on a ships performance = remove PVP building from the game. You can make ships that look however you want, but if you are building to have something look a certain way why should the game's mechanics say fuck everything other than this particular design???

.... Aaaand, didn't you get RP and PVP in reverse?
An RP ship would spend mass and volume on decorative turret mechanisms and internal control stations, while a pvp builder would rather fill that room with system blocks. Combinations of the two exist, though.

Not this stupid shit again. Almost all PVP ships come with interior; empty space costs -NOTHING-, it just makes you less vulnerable to missile damage. They are called PVP ships because they are used in PVP. We call ships RP ships because they aren't used for anything game related, but for fucking around. A ship that can fight is a PVP ship, regardless of interior. If it can't it's for RP, otherwise nearly every pvp ship would be an rp ship.

Everything i posted is from my own PVP ships. If it turns out i'm an RP builder it will be the shittiest fucking twist in the history of videogames.

Interesting analysis. I agree with a lot of it including weapon mass, etc, but I actually find most PvPers avoid this particular turret design. Recessed turrets cause tons of extra lag. PvP turrets are typically designed around avoiding main body to reduce lag and increase firing angles; so, PvP tends to favor floating, drum, and orbital turrets.

I'm not saying these are great PVP turrets, i'm saying you have plenty of options for making turrets that take up very little surface area for aesthetic purposes, and that realistic turret layouts are heavily recessed, not just strapped onto the surface of the ship. If you aren't interested in aesthetics or realism then sure there's not much point to them.