Amazigh

This is basically the exact reasoning I had in my head for why shields do nothing for collisions. And on the subject of collisions: As demonsangels69 said, 100m/s is more or less 223MPH, and 100m/s is SLOW in avorion terms. So yeah, when you stop and think about the speeds ships are travelling at, you get a much better appreciation for why collisions do so much damage.

Maybe rather than a new block type, give integrity field generators an "overcharge" option Takes a few seconds to start up, during which time any shields you have are disabled. Maybe startup time could scale based on proportion of integrity field blocks compared to ship size? So just having some tiny ones scattered around to protect your ships skin would lead to a LONG startup. While active shields are kept offline. Provides a damage reduction on covered blocks, (exact value could scale with material used in the integrity field?) but say 90% or so as the maximum, any higher and it starts being *too* good. Gradually increasing energy drain when active, if you run out of energy it shuts down and can't be reactivated until you regenerate a portion of your battery, like how afterburners are limited when your battery runs out. This would save from adding a new block type, and would in theory give this option to all ships. But to have a quick startup (something necessary as the power drain stops you from keeping it up always) would take a notable amount of blocks assigned. Just an idea.

You do realise that a majority of the power of a nuke is caused by the shockwave? In space they're really anemic. There's no atmosphere to carry the shockwave, so all that hits your ship on a proximity detonation is the flash of light, which loses power over distance very rapidly. Sure they are still deadly on contact explosions, but that requires a direct hit. Fighters are a bad idea, true. you'd not want to sit inside something with so little armour, But Drones? those are definitely viable. As they don't need a pilot, they can be smaller than a fighter would need to be, and as such even harder to hit. So if they have a comparably accurate weapon to a larger ship the drone can score reliable hits from much further away. Not to mention that a drone can manoeuvre at obscene G-forces and have no worries about pulping the pilot.

I'm pretty sure that if you have a commander in a second ship and it's set to escort you, it will try and jump with you assuming it has sufficient jump range. But a way to have small ships carried with you would be neat.

This would be really nice. I completely approve of this suggestion.

From what i've seen in This Thread the plan is to have larger turrets have longer range, but otherwise unchanged stats.

Another reason why torpedoes are balanced in that game? The artificial limitations of visibility, destroyers are "stealthy" and can't be seen from as far away as battleships, so they can sneak up and fire torpedoes without having to run through a barrage of fire continuously. In avorion there's nothing stopping a battleship firing it's main guns at a fighter from 8km+ away and making it extremely hard to get into the close range needed to score hits with their torpedoes. It'd be really nice if each weapon class had it's own niche, like plasmas being hands down the best anti-shield weapon, teslas the best all-around weapon in exhange for really short range, bolters very good against hull, rails better against hull than bolters, but only un-armoured hull, and so on for all the other weapon types. I'm hoping that the dev intends to rebalance weapons at some point, because currently railguns are The best weapon type hands down, they're one of the longer range weapons, have good base damage, and the penetration mechanic makes them insane against hull. Not to mention that they are hitscan and have high accuracy.

This is a really neat suggestion, really like the idea. Could be implemented as blocks or as modules As modules there would have to be some sort of restriction to how many turrets it can effect, maybe it could have reduced effect when you go over the limit, to make it less of a hard cap. Tier could influence power drain, number of turrets, and the potency. As blocks it'd just be a flat boost, maybe you'd have to mount the turrets on the heatsink/capacitor blocks in order to get the bonus, or even just have the boost be scaled with the number of turrets it effects, so with 2* as many turrets you'd get half the effect from the same sized block, etc.

if this is something that can happen, its already a fatal problem for game balance. So, you're saying that having a best weapon is fatal to game balance? Or are you saying that being able to mass-produce this best weapon is fatal to balance? A thing to remember about the game, i'm pretty sure it's built around co-op PvE rather than PvP. To quote Koonschi: To put it into this context: if you don't want to oneshot all the enemies there's nothing forcing you to use the as many of the best guns as you can, you could use less guns, or guns that aren't as good, it's all up to what you want.

So you're telling me that the ENTIRE ship is made from chobham? even the screen that clearly had a round go straight through it? Most of my perceptions of "realistic" space combat are based on Children of a Dead Earth just so you know.

With the ability to manufacture found turrets in bulk, this problem does not go away. Ultimately that's a balance issue, which turns out to be completely independent of how exactly turrets are obtained, contrary to the dev's claim (I am also a programmer/designer). You may be able to mass produce the best turret you have, but remember, you could find a better turret as a drop. and suddenly you have to mass produce your turrets again. Sure, eventually you'll have the best possible RNG on a turret and have the best possible stats, but that's really unlikely to happen, so it'll basically always be worth keeping an eye on all the new turrets you get, but can still mass produce any that you want to. They seem dead set on the idea, guess playing Starmade and From The Depths, really influenced them? It's a neat mechanic in those games I won't deny, but I don't think it quite fits in with how Avorion is designed.

There is an alternate flight mode, toggled with F2, where you have can ramp your thrust up/down using X/C/V (iirc) and your pitch/yaw is controlled with WASD, apparently it was the original control scheme for the game. You might want to give it a shot.

One thing that really irks me about that scene: Where's the spalling? Because unless the entire ship is made from some super space material that doesn't spall at all, then those rounds that just punched neat holes in the ship should have also caused a spray of fragments to scatter across the crew compartment, which would at least wound anyone even remotely near the impact point. Not to mention the ridiculously close range that the combat is taking place at. For a show that's trying to be realistic, having ships literally fly past each other is completely insane. Gun range is more like 8KM in a proper realistic setting. (making a guess on the size of the stealth ship, effecive range is based on target size and all) The ship in the expanse is 48m long, so that'd be a 4.8 block unit length ship, manoeuvrability is for sure, the least of your worries at that scale.

Then why bother spending hours designing your battleship if some schmuck in his tiny poverty bomber that took like 2 minutes to make can kill you with ease? Also consider the following: Torpedoes that are powerful enough to pose a threat to a battleship are small enough to fit on a bomber. A battleship is easily two orders of magnitude larger than a bomber, as such it can fit a good dozen torpedoes with room to spare for anti-bomber weaponry/fighter bays. So, how exactly is this bomber a viable ship again?

This is the main point i'd argue for the current style of turret/weapon systems. With the current system you have to work with what's on hand, meaning that every enemy/shop has a chance at giving you a better weapon that what you currently have. Only in the later-game can you (to some extent) pick specific weapons when you have access to turret factories and the requisite components, but even then you can't make exotic or legendary turrets in a factory. With "block based" turrets, as said above, you'll just build the best turret you can, and always use that exact same design because it's the most efficient. (just like how railguns are the go-to weapon at the moment) This is debatable, as the only "building" you have to do in order to beat the game is to place turrets on shipyard bought ships. If it was really a building game then you'd have no choice but to build your own ship(s), and not be able to get by with buying randomly generated ones.