FD, please remove power plant and thrusters headshots !!!

[Yokoshima]

I wonder if I am the only player here who is not a perfect shot when it comes to fixed weapons. I have been playing space and flight sims for most of my life. Still I do not manage to make every shot with my fixed weapons count, neither do I manage to keep my crosshair on my target ALL the time. Far from it.

When I use gimballed I can keep shooting my target in turning fights, and while I am busy dodging and maneuvering. Yes in theory fixed weapons would make me kill my target about 25% faster. But in practice I find that I can not maneuver well enough to make that difference count. Not even in a Vulture. At my skill level the tracking ability of gimbals makes them far superior. Maybe I just suck.

Depends. If you are talking about a ship smaller then an asp I would think it would be hard to hit them. I can't even stay behind a conda in a vulture. But in my Python I can hit them (ships as large as an asp and larger) 90+% of the time with a fixed thermal weapon. Same with kinetic but I have to get a lot closer. And things like plasma guns and cannons have such a huge splash it's hard not hit the sub systems. Another NPC python was turning and I missed my cannon shot and hit halfway between the thrusters s and the PP on it's top side. Still did almost 20% damage to it's power plant with just that one shot.

That all being said I like "tanky" ships, just as I like the tank role in most things. So I do use turrets and gimballed weapons to make up for my poor maneuverability. I know I do far less damage then a mobile ship, but that's not the role I like so I am OK with that. And again I would never want to use fixed on something smaller than a cobra. If my ships angle is just a hair off my shots land nowhere assuming the are facing me/away from me. I don't think gimballed or turrets need a nerf, nor do I think fixed need a damage buff since they already have one and less energy costs. They DO imho need a buff to their "soft lock". My roll shouldn't have to be matched to be almost perfectly in sync in CQC. Ironically enough fixed weapons are awesome for sniping. After ~ >2km they hit a target going in a relativity straight line about 80% of the time. My gimbals are lucky to hit even 20% of their shots on a small ship.

 

[Schattenbogen]

We were basically facing, or "face tanking" each other.

"Face tanking" an elite Anaconda ?
Wanted to try a new suicide method ?

I'm scared to death when I see an elite Anaconda turning his face in my direction and I love this.
Not so many games give you this sensation with an enemy knowing escaping is a possibility.

 

[soma]

No, gimballs are great and virtually everybody will do more damage per time with gimballed weapons... until the opponent starts deploying chaff. It's not the higher damage of fixed weapons, it's their immunity to chaff why poeple prefer them for PvP.

But back to the topic... it's indeed too easy to kill ships long before their hulls reach 0% by targeting the power plant. It has become a standard tactics that everyone uses and unfortunately it devalues armor and even the newly introduced hull reinforcment modules to the point of complete obsolescence, which can't really be intended.

I know it is only marginally relevant to the topic, but I am really not bothered by chaff that much. If a large target is deploying chaff: just get closer. If a small target is deploying chaff: untarget him for a few seconds. Chaff effect does not last long and many people forget to deploy chaff regularly enough, especially while in a stressful PvP situation.

Back on topic.. i agree that armor is currently quite useless. It should protect subsystems, or at least have some positive effect on time to kill. Xodz has made a good suggestion earlier

An easy way to make this happen, is to make it so you can't even hit subsystems until armor is below X%. Where X could be different for the various different subsystems.

That would IMHO improve the situation a lot:

• Armor upgrades would count. Say the PP can only be damaged when hull is below 50%. Military Hull reduces damage by 50%. --> it would take twice as long before the Powerplant becomes vulnerable
• Different subsystems become vulnerable at different armor percentages. eg. drives could become vulnerable at 75% hull (but they can be repaired), powerplant at 50% hull. Suddenly you have meaningful tactical options.
• Different ships could have different percentages. eg. Powerplant on Anaconda is well protected and becomes vulnerable only when hull is below 25% or so. It would mean we have to develop different strategies for different types of ships / opponents.
• If they would implement that and subsystems were made harder to hit (eg. nerf gimbal subsystem tracking, reduce subsystem hitboxes) they could even reduce the health of subsystems. So fighting an anaconda could become a multi-stage fight: Take down shields. Get hull to 70%. Take out shield generator (eg. with some well placed cannon shots). Get hull to 50%. Take out drives. Get hull to 25%. Take out Powerplant.

Edit / Disclaimer: Numbers are completely made up and just examples. This would of course need to be reasonably tweaked / balanced.

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Depends. If you are talking about a ship smaller then an asp I would think it would be hard to hit them. I can't even stay behind a conda in a vulture. But in my Python I can hit them (ships as large as an asp and larger 90+% of the time with a fixed thermal weapon. Same with kinetic but I have to get a lot closer. And things like plasma guns and cannons have such a huge splash it's hard not hit the sub systems. Another NPC python was turning and I missed my cannon shot and hit halfway between the thrusters s and the PP on it's top side. Still did almost 20% damage to it's power plant with just that one shot.

True, I was ignoring big ships. They are barn doors and relatively easy to hit. I was more thinking about dogfights (think Viper vs. Viper)

 

[Yank31]

"Face tanking" an elite Anaconda ?
Wanted to try a new suicide method ?

I'm scared to death when I see an elite Anaconda turning his face in my direction and I love this.
Not so many games give you this sensation with an enemy knowing escaping is a possibility.

Ah man... I explained a bit later on how the fight went. I didn't want to develop it too much in the OP as the fight in itself was only the introduction of the subject!

We do need tough opponents, and yes I'm a bad pilot (but it wasn't as dumb as it may seem, reading only the OP), but those are not the point of this topic

 

[Xodz]

I know it is only marginally relevant to the topic, but I am really not bothered by chaff that much. If a large target is deploying chaff: just get closer. If a small target is deploying chaff: untarget him for a few seconds. Chaff effect does not last long and many people forget to deploy chaff regularly enough, especially while in a stressful PvP situation.

Back on topic.. i agree that armor is currently quite useless. It should protect subsystems, or at least have some positive effect on time to kill against skilled opponents. Xodz has made a good suggestion earlier



That would IMHO improve the situation a lot:

• Armor upgrades would count. Say the PP can only be damaged when hull is below 50%. Military Hull reduces damage by 50%. --> it would take twice as long before the Powerplant becomes vulnerable
• Different subsystems become vulnerable at different armor percentages. eg. drives could become vulnerable at 75% hull, powerplant at 50% hull. Suddenly you have meaningful tactical options.
• Different ships could have different percentages. eg. Powerplant on Anaconda is well protected and becomes vulnerable only when hull is below 25% or so. It would mean we have to develop different strategies for different types of ships / opponents.
• If they would implement that and subsystems were made harder to hit (eg. nerf gimbal subsystem tracking, reduce subsystem hitboxes) they could even reduce the health of subsystems. So fighting an anaconda could become a multi-stage fight: Take down shields. Get hull to 70%. Take out shield generator (that would only take a few well placed shots). Get hull to 50%. Take out drives. Get hull to 25%. Take out Powerplant.

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True, I was ignoring big ships. They are barn doors and relatively easy to hit. I was more thinking about dogfights (think Viper vs. Viper)

I don't know that I would use those numbers, but that was my general idea. As you get bigger and bigger and tougher and tougher the more strategy should play a part, rather than just: Pop shields > powerplant > profit. I mean it's kinda silly for a ship to have 2038492348 armor and die 5 seconds after losing shields because someone put the power plant on the outside of the ships hull.

 

[soma]

I don't know that I would use those numbers, but that was my general idea. As you get bigger and bigger and tougher and tougher the more strategy should play a part, rather than just: Pop shields > powerplant > profit. I mean it's kinda silly for a ship to have 2038492348 armor and die 5 seconds after losing shields because someone put the power plant on the outside of the ships hull.

Yes the numbers are completely made up to illustrate the example. This would of course need to be reasonably tweaked and balanced. I am not a game designer

 

[Mephane]

I disagree, a shieldless ship being hit with say a railgun I would expect to be pierced end to end by a relativistic projectile. Limiting subsystem targeting to very limited arcs is simply not realistic given the power of the weapons involved.

However I do agree the armour type/reinforcement packages should reduced the amount of piercing damage components take. Power plant targeting though should still stay.

FD could make specific weapon types consider a wider arc to hit a subsystem, so that for example railguns punch through more ship than multi-cannons. But since you seem to apply realism: the railgun projectiles are a) not relativistic and b) if they were, any ship would immediately explode in a single hit from even the small railguns.

 

[Yank31]

That would IMHO improve the situation a lot:

• Armor upgrades would count. Say the PP can only be damaged when hull is below 50%. Military Hull reduces damage by 50%. --> it would take twice as long before the Powerplant becomes vulnerable
• Different subsystems become vulnerable at different armor percentages. eg. drives could become vulnerable at 75% hull (but they can be repaired), powerplant at 50% hull. Suddenly you have meaningful tactical options.
• Different ships could have different percentages. eg. Powerplant on Anaconda is well protected and becomes vulnerable only when hull is below 25% or so. It would mean we have to develop different strategies for different types of ships / opponents.
• If they would implement that and subsystems were made harder to hit (eg. nerf gimbal subsystem tracking, reduce subsystem hitboxes) they could even reduce the health of subsystems. So fighting an anaconda could become a multi-stage fight: Take down shields. Get hull to 70%. Take out shield generator (eg. with some well placed cannon shots). Get hull to 50%. Take out drives. Get hull to 25%. Take out Powerplant.

This would be great, also non essential modules should probably be way up top on that "hull-meter", like weapons, life support, cargo hatch, sensors... to allow for even more options. Seems to me that it would feel much more tactical when facing "big" ships, and much better when being flying one (lost all left side weapons - Fuuuu, omg, now I have 7:30 of oxygen left, 3%#!!, now my sensors are gone, I can't even target this little... quick, my AFMU... /shaking). Much better than being stranded in 2 seconds flat, anyway...

I'm glad people seem to be more receptive to the idea now

I really do think this would make a massive change for big ship pilots, while still making a nice and fun improvement for the big ship killers (granted, at the cost of some speed).

 

[Muetdhiver]

SOMA's proposal is quite good I think.

It feels so silly that multicannon rounds can penetrate an anaconda military grade hull to do
damage to the powerplant. It makes equiping hull bulkhead modules a bad choice, as you gain
nothing but higher mass and higher insurance for a module that is everything but cheap.

> Upgraded bulkheads should be harder to penetrate that stock hull.
> Health added by bulkheads and hull packages should have to be removed (ablated/puched) before
having reduced overall penetration resistance.
> High penetration weapons should be able to go through even good armor, but lose damage dealt to
subsystems in the way.


Also, the fact that everybody targets the powerplant over any other subsytem is revealing of a
lack of meaningfull tactical choices in this matter. Maybe replacing kill shot by some amount of ship damage,
plus plant reboot time where the ship is on emergency power would be more interesting.

 

[Kondensat]

dont go face 2 face with an elite conda that likes to use a class4 PA. easy as that.
and dont strafe into these nice, purple-glowing balls of destruction....

improve your flying skills, instead blaming an AI to be better than you

and this:

Quick suggestion on top of my head : when you hit the power plant, instead of blowing the whole thing up and the WHOLE ship with it, you could make it so that it only damages the power plant, and DEPRIVE the ship from SOME power. That would :
- make things more interesting for the victim : "Phew, I'm not instantly dead, but I need to re-affect power priority, quick !"
- create another coding nightmare for our favourite AI dev coder.

is already in the game! a damaged PP produces less power!

 

[Yarsunas]

It's been suggested by a few people that internal subsystems be immune to damage until the hull has taken some damage. I think that this system would actually be quite hard to implement with how armour penetration currently works in game.

I really think that increasing the rate at which an attack's subsystem damage is mitigated as it travels through the target's hull when the hull is tougher than baseline (due to armour or hull reinforcement) decreasing the % damage taken by sub-systems relative to hull so as to bring the ratio more in line with lightweight alloy no reinforcement ships.

Actually would anyone like to help me test Hull % at PP50 for different hull load outs?

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...is already in the game! a damaged PP produces less power!

I've never noticed this maybe my PP's never been that damaged. I have seen PP malfunctions losing ALL power for a few seconds but never lost just some of it.

 

[Kondensat]

I've never noticed this maybe my PP's never been that damaged. I have seen PP malfunctions losing ALL power for a few seconds but never lost just some of it.

i´m always running more modules my PP can power, so i have a very tight prio setting for my 5 groups. my group 4 is a power hungry weapon and as soon as my PP is hurt, it shuts down, leaving me with my group 3-weapons.

if you have enough power for all, you dont notice it, but its there....

 

[NeilF]

I gave to agree to some degree.

Anytime I now go up against a large ship, the first thing I now do is target the Power Plant.

IMHO:-
- The Power Plant shouldn't be a valid target. It's buried right in the middle of the ship most likely, so don't allow it to be hit directly.
- Thrusters should be split into individual thruster groups that can be targeted, so you lose certain groups at a time. eg: Pitch.

If people complain that removing the Power Plant as a target isn't realistic, then can I point out there's an obvious target that isn't available at the moment that should be, "Pilot".

 

[soma]

It's been suggested by a few people that internal subsystems be immune to damage until the hull has taken some damage. I think that this system would actually be quite hard to implement with how armour penetration currently works in game.

Could you elaborate why that is hard to implement? My naive guess would be that it could be implemented like this

if subsystem_hit:

if self.hull > subsystem_armor_threshold:
​

apply_damage_to_hull()
​

else:
​

apply_damage_to_subsystem()
​

 

[Sgt Doom]

Would be interesting if destroying the power plant wasn't immediate death, but caused a still significant explosion (consider it the hydrogen fuel reacting to the weapons fire along with interior oxygen) and forced the ship to run on emergency power, much like emergency oxygen. Said explosion would still finish off a truly crippled ship, but knocking out an Anaconda before you've even gotten halfway through it's health would be less likely.
This would necessitate prioritising all modules beforehand, as said emergency power would probably just be sufficient for powering enough systems to make a getaway, and perhaps would last for a much shorter time depending on how much power was being drained.

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Could you elaborate why that is hard to implement? My naive guess would be that it could be implemented like this

if subsystem_hit {
if self.hull > subsystem_armor_threshold {
apply_damage_to_hull()
} else {
apply_damage_to_subsystem()
}
}

Edit: changed code to use braces, editor does not like Python it seems

It's already implemented to an extent in larger ships e.g. if you smash up a part of an Anaconda's hull, you do far less hull damage to that area, but more component damage.

 

[NeilF]

Could you elaborate why that is hard to implement? My naive guess would be that it could be implemented like this

if subsystem_hit {
if self.hull > subsystem_armor_threshold {
apply_damage_to_hull()
} else {
apply_damage_to_subsystem()
}
}

Edit: changed code to use braces, editor does not like Python it seems

Wouldn't that mean a subsystem could never reach 0, until the hull did? So the ship would be destroyed before any subsystem could be?

 

[soma]

Wouldn't that mean a subsystem could never reach 0, until the hull did? So the ship would be destroyed before any subsystem could be?

Edit: You are right. i forgot the other branch. correction:


if subsystem_hit:

if self.hull > subsystem_armor_threshold:
​

apply_damage_to_hull()
​

else:
​

apply_damage_to_subsystem()
apply_some_hull_damage()
​

else:

apply_damage_to_hull()
​

Anyway I realize it is a very naive piece of code, I was just trying to illustrate that it should be pretty easy to decide if the hull is low enough for subsystems to take damage.

 

[NeilF]

Edit: You are right. i forgot the other branch. correction:


if subsystem_hit:

if self.hull > subsystem_armor_threshold:
​

apply_damage_to_hull()
​

else:
​

apply_damage_to_subsystem()
apply_some_hull_damage()
​

else:

apply_damage_to_hull()
​

Anyway I realize it is a very naive piece of code, I was just trying to illustrate that it should be pretty easy to decide if the hull is low enough for subsystems to take damage.

The problem is we're talking about a mechanic that will be applied to very different outcomes. Do we want a single weapon (on the outside of the ship) taken out in the same fashion as the sole power plant for a ship?

So again, I don't think the power plant should even be a viable target. What's the point of it? It's tucked away too deep to target.

Every system you can target should have a none critical outcome on the ship. Knock out a weapon. Knock out pitch thrusters etc. Just being able to go for the power plant for an early kill seems daft IMHO.

 

[soma]

The problem is we're talking about a mechanic that will be applied to very different outcomes. Do we want a single weapon (on the outside of the ship) taken out in the same fashion as the sole power plant for a ship?

So again, I don't think the power plant should even be a viable target. What's the point of it? It's tucked away to deep to target.

Every system you can target should have a none critical outcome on the ship. Knock out a weapon. Knock out pitch thrusters etc. Just being able to go for the power plant for an early kill seems daft IMHO.

Interesting suggestion. It would make cheap "headshot kills" against powerful targets impossible. It would thus prolong fights and give the a meaningful tactical option to cripple targets. I like it.

 

[NeilF]

Interesting suggestion. It would make cheap "headshot kills" against powerful targets impossible. It would thus prolong fights and give the a meaningful tactical option to cripple targets. I like it.

Different targets need to be dealt with differently IMHO. Indeed they may indeed already be (to some degree).

Personally I don't like the current defacto-standard of aim for the Power Plant. I'd much prefer the idea of assessing the enemy ship and working out if the best approach is:-
- Take out a pair of its turrets, then go for the kill.
- Take out its heat vents to over heat it, then go in for the kill.
- Take out its pitch thrusters, then sit in its blind spot.
...etc...

At the moment it seems all this is usurped by "Power Plant", and I don't think that should be a target option.