On an early visit to a Guardian site I flew my Cobra into the ground and exploded. I claim there's a crater named after me now, but I'm no longer sure which one it is.
Should Lithobreaking be more dangerous?
- Thread starter Fost
- Start date
An easy fix to this (lore wise and mechanic wise) is that shields 'interact' with one another, creating powerful repulsion fields and thus reducing direct ramming damage. If you really wanted to have fun with it:
Ramming in ships could result in shield damage and shield generator damage from undue stress on the emitters due to the aforementioned interaction of fields on a large surface area. This means a ramming ship (with shield) is toasting its own shield generator, too, but could be engineering with module health for this exact tactic...at the expense of better shielding in non-ram situations.
For shieldless ships, ramming a shield would incur significant electrical and magnetic forces and, theoretically, could be very dangerous not just to the hull of the craft but internal modules. Ramming with a shield against a shieldless enemy could do universal module damage (i.e., like getting stuck in a Neutron Cone where all modules take damage slowly).
Point being, there's a way to balance that all out for the OP and make it interesting and add more depth to choosing shields and how they are engineered.
And it's good that relative mass is not used when landing... would relative mass come into play when landing on even a small moon, it would be impossible to touch down soft enough to not blow up.
That being said, i also agree that you can stack up your defense quite high by now, making even landing in high gravitation environments very manageable. (Although i also think that i never landed on anything higher than 6g, so i can't speak of personal experience for the really extreme cases. )
Oh man, I would love this. Clipper gang rise up.
High G landings are a huge issue with digital thrusters, and with a small amount of practice not much of an issue at all with analogue thruster control. Big shields currently help with rough landings and inattentive flying in other situations of course but for those wanting more of a challenge they can disable or just not equip shields already.
It's not something I'd want to force on anyone though, not everyone has a controller with enough analogue axis to allow them to map all six degrees of freedom to one.
Basically "problem" exist with people who have humongously strong 5g boosted shields. Flying say exploration ship with "fender bender" shields, and you can make your ship go boom with rough enough landings.
I'm not really seeing where the problem is with big shields? I spent 2017 doing a grand tour of the galaxy in a 19ly fully armed & armoured Corvette. As you can imagine this got a bit boring sometimes & something I'd occasionally do was just disable thrusters at altitude while I made a coffee, and see where it ended up when I came back. I mean, you can't tell me that's not solid exploration entertainment right there. Big shields make me complacent, but they keep me safe too.
But I fly shieldless sometimes too, and enjoy the satisfaction of landing with zero hull damage on some random 2G+ world I happen to find. It takes a bit of care & precision but it's hardly 'learning FA-off' challenging, anyone could do it with a bit of patience & fine control with analogue thrusters.
Big shields and heavily engineered ships are not problem for me, in itself. But it seems that to some players they are. Say ok you kit out your ship to be invincible doom machine, and then get bored as it IS actually invincible doom machine. Be it against NPCs, or even against planetary bodies. Simple solution to this: Don't make your ships invincible doom machines.
Yeah - I had the classic spelling pedant's curse of "can't edit the title" 5 seconds after postingBTW I like "lithobreaking" which may or may not be a misspelling of "lithobraking".
At first i thought this was going to be a thread about core mining...BTW I like "lithobreaking" which may or may not be a misspelling of "lithobraking".
Realistically, at the speeds we travel, Lithobraking should be instantly fatal 100% of the time, regardless of shield strength. Even at a slow speed like 200 m/s stopping instantly would exert an unsurvivable level of G force for any human... so its a bit immersion breaking.
However, the acceleration we can achieve when boosting should also be fatal on many of the faster ships so, given we must therefore have space magic inertial dampeners (whatever Fdev say), if your shields can take the impact damage as currently calculated, you should survive.
However, the acceleration we can achieve when boosting should also be fatal on many of the faster ships so, given we must therefore have space magic inertial dampeners (whatever Fdev say), if your shields can take the impact damage as currently calculated, you should survive.
This is not good game design in my opinion. Difficulty shouldn't be gained by intentionally nerfing your build / ship choice because its too easy to be too strong. There should be encounters that stretch the toughest ships you can possibly build - and not just Thargoids.
If we're talking about exploration there is a pretty direct trade-off between jump range and defensive hitpoints (ie the mass of the ship). Flying a high jump range paper aeroplane is pretty popular, flying fully armed & armoured (as I commonly do) is much less common.
I sort of agree that there should be significant risks, but a) they are out there, that 'death planet' that passes through a Neutron Star's stream comes to mind, and b) I think it should always be possible to escape and speed/jump range/low heat signature are pretty handy for that too
If we're talking about exploration there is a pretty direct trade-off between jump range and defensive hitpoints (ie the mass of the ship). Flying a high jump range paper aeroplane is pretty popular, flying fully armed & armoured (as I commonly do) is much less common.
I sort of agree that there should be significant risks, but a) they are out there, that 'death planet' that passes through a Neutron Star's stream comes to mind, and b) I think it should always be possible to escape and speed/jump range/low heat signature are pretty handy for that too
Im not really talking exploration, to be honest. I dont see that as challenging (beyond boredom avoidance) as there is never anything acting against you. Its possible to make mistakes, but if you are careful nothing bad will ever happen. Edit: I guess high G landings in FA-Off might be an exception, though certainly not with FA-On.
Im more referring to the general principle of 'if you find it too easy, stop designing / choosing your ships well'. I think that is a stupid take, the game should have challenge (kinda mean combat, i guess, but it doesnt have to be combat that seeks you out) for the strongest ships it is possible to make. Im coming from this as a 'builder' - i find designing builds that are the most efficient for a given situation to be fun (its why i play games like this, MWO, etc), and i want something to throw those builds against.
Typical exploration ship does not like lithobraking at all. So for explorer there is risk in every planetary landing involved. Where as for g5 gankboat risks are minimum. But that works like designed.
Okay well the game does provide combat challenge too. Once the Cmdr is proficient enough to kill whatever they have chosen to attempt, then it becomes a matter of how quickly it can be done, how many can be done and how low an equipment level it can be done with. For example I have a 192t mission runner frag Python. I can take out an Elite pirate lord corvette pretty quickly and I can I can stack several missions of various types, cargo fetches & deliveries, base scans, data deliveries all in one run to help me apply lots of influence to factions all in one run. I've optimised that ship for the role I use it for. I have lots of ships, most of them have been built with a similar approach, to be good at as many tasks as possible.
Making the basic existential threat of the NPCs higher is quite a popular suggestion, I think the level it's at is okay and other players provide that extra challenge for me.
Ozric
Volunteer Moderator
Combat doesn't really have anything to do with Lithobraking, so let's no go down that route please.
There are far more bizarre things to contend with, like the fact that landing pads at surface ports are made out of a special absorbing material that does only a fraction of the damage hitting the ground at the same speed would.
It really isn't. Trust me as someone who does a lot of racing
There are far more bizarre things to contend with, like the fact that landing pads at surface ports are made out of a special absorbing material that does only a fraction of the damage hitting the ground at the same speed would.
My dolphin (58 Ly range) can faceplant into a 1G planet at almost 600 m/s without losing shields. Yeah it does have a single guardian shield reinforcement, because i had a spare slot and it only cost me like 0.3Ly of range, but still.
I dont really care about it, im not here saying exploration should be harder or anything, its exploration - the challenge is doing the same thing 3x 10^24 times without making too many mistakes, but its not really true to say explorer fitted ships cant lithobrake.