Making small ships relevant - Utility slots

[Chaffers]

Allow us to purchase them basically. Extra ones welded to the outside of the hull.

Don't really care about the cost, logarithmic depending upon the current number would be fine by me, though being able to unlock further upgrades particularly in the form of the utterly broken shield boosters, would breathe new life back into the small ships in the game. Seeing as Fdev are highly unlikely to fix them...

As I detailed in the carrier thread the compounding effect of utility slots allows the eighth booster to be 0.1% of the cost, 4% of the weight and 79% of the effectiveness of an unengineered 8A prismatic shield. Though with resistances the effects are actually far more compounding. If the prismatic is itself engineered then that single eighth booster provides more shielding than the original 320 tonne unit!

Indeed the popularity of a particular ship appears to be entirely based upon the number of utility slots it carries.

Frankly if I could spend hundreds of millions on a Cobra III then I would in preference to having a garage full of more niche types. So give us the ability to add more utility slots to the outside of our ships, hell even the titchy courier has 4, for a hefty sum of money if you like, to bring these types back into the game.

 

[Misty_Dark]

Allow us to purchase them basically. Extra ones welded to the outside of the hull.

Don't really care about the cost, logarithmic depending upon the current number would be fine by me, though being able to unlock further upgrades particularly in the form of the utterly broken shield boosters, would breathe new life back into the small ships in the game. Seeing as Fdev are highly unlikely to fix them...

As I detailed in the carrier thread the compounding effect of utility slots allows the eighth booster to be 0.1% of the cost, 4% of the weight and 79% of the effectiveness of an unengineered 8A prismatic shield. Though with resistances the effects are actually far more compounding. If the prismatic is itself engineered then that single eighth booster provides more shielding than the original 320 tonne unit!

Indeed the popularity of a particular ship appears to be entirely based upon the number of utility slots it carries.

Frankly if I could spend hundreds of millions on a Cobra III then I would in preference to having a garage full of more niche types. So give us the ability to add more utility slots to the outside of our ships, hell even the titchy courier has 4, for a hefty sum of money if you like, to bring these types back into the game.

I am for this kind of thinking...

 

[Wyldwiisel]

There are actually a lot of unused utility slots on the outside of a lot of small ships frontier nerfed them for balance
Id love to have an imperial eagle and normal eagle with an extra utility

 

[Chaffers]

As I say they clearly have no understanding of compound interest.

Nerfing said utility slots might even have been correct back in the day when flight models were thought to balance ships. Maybe they did at the time..

Since then of course we've had endless power creep with engineering, new shield types, resistances and the like, to the point where almost the only relevant stat of a ship is the number of utility slots it has.

The real problem though exists between their legs rather than their ears. They simply don't have the balls to change it.

 

[RamirezKurita]

Shield boosters don't have a compounding effect, they are multipliers from the base shield value rather than from the boosted value. If you have 500 MJ of shield, a single A booster would put you to 600, two would give you 700, three 800 and so on until the max 8 leaves you with 1300 MJ of shielding.

Even with resistance boosters, it isn't a compounding effect and never produces the exponential growth, but instead a polynomial scaling until soft caps kick in.

 

[Killnine]

Lack of utility slots really is a huge limiting factor for small ships. Especially roles that require both combat and utilities, eg. bounty hunting and piracy, suffer from this. They have to forgo defensive utilities, such as PD, chaff and shield boosters. But adjusting the slots would possibly have quite a big effect on overall balance, so I think the possibility for extra slots should be very limited. Perhaps only allow one extra slot, with cost based on number of existing ones - the more slots you have to begin with, the more expensive the extra one would be. It would also have a small penalties to hull and heat signature: installing the extra slot requires removing some armour plating, introducing a weak spot and leaking heat.

Or, something even less intrusive: have KW and cargo scanners be "add-on modules" to the basic sensor suite. Cost money, add a bit of weight, but not take up a slot. Would also make sense, since the discovery scanner also doesn't take a slot after the Q4 update.

 

[Daynen]

I see merit in this discussion, partly because I'd like to see more small ships in game--and not just these SLF tin cans either. It's also partly because I firmly believe that passive modules should not require utility slots and active devices should. Shield boosters and cell banks, for example: a passive extra shield booster should take up a module slot just like the generator itself, wouldn't you think? It's really just extra redundant circuitry and power sources, so why does it have to sit outside instead of safely tucked away with the generator? It's just a set of weird internal consistency things that kind of bugs me.

More small ships though!

 

[moorison]

I see merit in this discussion, partly because I'd like to see more small ships in game--and not just these SLF tin cans either. It's also partly because I firmly believe that passive modules should not require utility slots and active devices should. Shield boosters and cell banks, for example: a passive extra shield booster should take up a module slot just like the generator itself, wouldn't you think? It's really just extra redundant circuitry and power sources, so why does it have to sit outside instead of safely tucked away with the generator? It's just a set of weird internal consistency things that kind of bugs me.

More small ships though!

Considering that the Guardian shield reinforcements are internal and comparable to shield boosters, there is a point. In general I find the situation "fine", a fundamental change would imply a "hard cut" which I would try to avoid in their shoes but at the same time wouldn't mind it as player.
And who would say no to more small ships?