Power surplus. Let us use it.

[Tryst]

When you fit most larger ships, you often start having to juggle the power to get everything to fit. However, the smaller ships can be fitted fully A rated with some power left over.

What I'd like to see is the ability to utilise that excess power in other systems. The better you are at power saving, the more surplus you have to push around for shields, weapons and engines. The Power distribution system could give an indication of the surplus and allow you to allocate it where you want. You normally have 2 pips in everything but up to 2 extra pips below could be left unassigned to be assigned by the pilot to any system they want. balancing the systems again leaves 2 pips in everything with however many unassigned below. This allows you to assign up to 2 pips extra to shield or weapons or engines without subtracting it from the other systems. The better you are at saving power, the more you have to spare, that means more surplus to allocate as you need.

This would help to prevent cookie cutter builds as some pilots may use better power saving mods so they have the ability to boost other systems. It also gives smaller ships that don't have power hungry systems a small edge against larger ships. You can't do so much damage with a smaller ship that has smaller weapons, but you have the overhead in power that you can assign to shields or engines for better survivability that would be less possible for larger ships.

It also helps for explorers who may put it to shields or engines to avoid accidents or utilise the extra agility from the engine pips to get out of tricky situations.

 

[Somillian Hiigara]

This would work... The problem is that the not-enough-power problem doesn't lie with all larger ships. It's a common issue for combat-focused ships, strangely enough. My Vulture runs power-deficient. When I pop open my hardpoints, every system other than combat-focused (and the KWS) goes offline. Under such a flexible system, someone that simply kits out his ship with the best modules he can find, the power requirements be damned, would face ships with less-capable modules being able to fight on even terms.

So while I get where you're coming from in a logical perspective, I'd say no, purely from a game balance point. Someone that's invested more money into his or her ship should be flying a more capable ship.

 

[Myrogia]

Your suggestion will basically be incorporated with "moddable" weapons and modules. Basically you'll be able to give your weapons and internal modules different effects at the cost of other things, such as power.

 

[Psycho Romeo]

Initially I was for this idea but Somillian brings up a good point. Modules that suck up less power are almost completely inferior to modules that use more power. There are no power-save options for the best module. Your idea would not work in a world were strength is so linear, unfortunately.

 

[Tryst]

Initially I was for this idea but Somillian brings up a good point. Modules that suck up less power are almost completely inferior to modules that use more power. There are no power-save options for the best module. Your idea would not work in a world were strength is so linear, unfortunately.

I can understand that you wouldn't put an inferior shield on a ship and expect it to be boosted to values above the superior one by the reduction in power requirement. However, the logic you present escapes me. If you have a low power KWS a short range FSD and such to save power in other areas that don't affect combat itself, You could still have A grade shields, weapons and thrusters. If you use C grade thrusters to reduce power use, putting that saved pip in engines would only do what an A grade thruster would have done anyway, it doesn't give you any advantage.

Deciding not to use chaff, point defence and other power hungry defensive systems also saves power and also leaves you more vulnerable. This vulnerability should be possible to translate into a boost in another area. That is what balance is all about is it not? A big ship is slow and lacks agility so it makes up for that in heavy armour and good shields. A fast and light ship is poorly armoured and weak shields because it is agile enough to avoid being hit.

If you deliberately gimp your setup in one area, let's say with missile defence, it makes sense that you should be able to make up for it in another way. You can either spend that power saving on shields which does pretty much the same thing or maybe a bit better firepower to hit hard before they can launch enough missiles to get you. Alternatively, better speed to enable you to avoid their targeting reticle. Either way, you still have a defence against their missile attack.

Traders could use it to boost the shields slightly on big Lakon ships while they wait for backup or try to escape. Alternatively, they can use those extra pips in engines to help them escape or utilise the extra speed and agility or divert it to firepower to fight back.

All the idea does is add a new non modular way of adding a new dimension to the setups. It won't suddenly boost the power in shields for example to recover the shields instantly, it will increase the power being diverted to the shields to aid in slightly better recovery time. Also, you are still restricted to 4 pips max in any system so 4 pips in shields is the best you can hope for no matter how much surplus power you have.

A bit like overclocking a graphics card, you can only go so far before it can't handle the speed. Overpowering systems can only go to 4 pips max or you burn it out. If you already have 4 pips in any system, you have to assign the surplus elsewhere. At present, 4 pips in any particular system, means nothing else has any pips at all.

 

[Jackie McMackie]

What they're saying is instead of choosing what high performance parts to buy, instead, you have a dynamic ship setup that allows this to be adjusted on the fly, so why the heck would anyone bother buying high-power high-performance parts if you could just as well increase the power on the lower-performance parts to be on par with the higher performance parts?

on any level even if it is small, a part only does what is rated; I don't expect an E class set of thrusters to haul as much ass, think of it like a 4-pot engine, and then the A class set of class 4 thrusters is a V16 - One of these things is going to be designed to handle a lot more power and torque, and this "surplus" power wouldn't work because it offsets the need to choose your parts carefully

 

[Psycho Romeo]

I can understand that you wouldn't put an inferior shield on a ship and expect it to be boosted to values above the superior one by the reduction in power requirement. However, the logic you present escapes me. If you have a low power KWS a short range FSD and such to save power in other areas that don't affect combat itself, You could still have A grade shields, weapons and thrusters. If you use C grade thrusters to reduce power use, putting that saved pip in engines would only do what an A grade thruster would have done anyway, it doesn't give you any advantage.

Deciding not to use chaff, point defence and other power hungry defensive systems also saves power and also leaves you more vulnerable. This vulnerability should be possible to translate into a boost in another area. That is what balance is all about is it not? A big ship is slow and lacks agility so it makes up for that in heavy armour and good shields. A fast and light ship is poorly armoured and weak shields because it is agile enough to avoid being hit.

If you deliberately gimp your setup in one area, let's say with missile defence, it makes sense that you should be able to make up for it in another way. You can either spend that power saving on shields which does pretty much the same thing or maybe a bit better firepower to hit hard before they can launch enough missiles to get you. Alternatively, better speed to enable you to avoid their targeting reticle. Either way, you still have a defence against their missile attack.

Traders could use it to boost the shields slightly on big Lakon ships while they wait for backup or try to escape. Alternatively, they can use those extra pips in engines to help them escape or utilise the extra speed and agility or divert it to firepower to fight back.

All the idea does is add a new non modular way of adding a new dimension to the setups. It won't suddenly boost the power in shields for example to recover the shields instantly, it will increase the power being diverted to the shields to aid in slightly better recovery time. Also, you are still restricted to 4 pips max in any system so 4 pips in shields is the best you can hope for no matter how much surplus power you have.

A bit like overclocking a graphics card, you can only go so far before it can't handle the speed. Overpowering systems can only go to 4 pips max or you burn it out. If you already have 4 pips in any system, you have to assign the surplus elsewhere. At present, 4 pips in any particular system, means nothing else has any pips at all.

I understand the issue you're trying to address. I think a cleaner way to deal with it without changing the underlying infrastructure would be to add more types of modules such as super mega power hungry modules and super lean power saver modules that are a slight deviation from the E to A that we already see.

 

[Tryst]

What they're saying is instead of choosing what high performance parts to buy, instead, you have a dynamic ship setup that allows this to be adjusted on the fly, so why the heck would anyone bother buying high-power high-performance parts if you could just as well increase the power on the lower-performance parts to be on par with the higher performance parts?

on any level even if it is small, a part only does what is rated; I don't expect an E class set of thrusters to haul as much ass, think of it like a 4-pot engine, and then the A class set of class 4 thrusters is a V16 - One of these things is going to be designed to handle a lot more power and torque, and this "surplus" power wouldn't work because it offsets the need to choose your parts carefully

You have it wrong. You don't get any more out of the engines than you would normally with 4 pips. Therefore, E class thrusters won't perform any better than they do already. The only benefit is that you can assign 4 pips to engines and have an extra pip from the surplus to assign elsewhere, to shields or weapons. You would still have only 4 pips max on any system.

You normally have 6 pips that you can assign. If you spread them, you have 2 in each system but if you increase the engines by 1 for example, you lose half from each of the other 2 systems. All I propose is that you can run a ship with a single weapon and save the equivalent of 1 pip of power that the other weapons would normally use and you can assign 3 to shields and 3 to engines and the extra pip to either one or the other to give you a total of 7 pips, leaving no pips in weapons. That means you can max out the pips in either shields or engines but not both. If you had 2 spare pips by not having any weapons at all, you can assign a maximum of 1 pip to each of the two systems to give the maximum of 4 in both shields and engines. You cannot assign 5 pips to either engines or shields since 4 is the absolute max.

It would take quite a lot of power saving to have a single pip left over with everything powered up. Even with modules turned off like the cargo bay, AutoDock, FSD and so on, that power is still needed for them if they are powered up so it would not add any to the pips. The only way you would get extra pips is from any surplus AFTER everything is powered up. So, if you run everything and have 110% power use, you don't get any spare pips. You don't get any spare pips until you are running everything with only 95% use or better. That 5% is spare power that will NEVER be used, even with everything running, 10% spare gives 2 pips which would be the maximum amount of surplus you can have.

 

[Jognt]

How about being having something like 1 extra pip per 0.5 energy unit (MW?) with which you can "overcharge" a system? (to a mac of 2 extra pips)
Overcharging a system would increase the effectiveness of modules attached to that system (for 5 seconds?), but would also damage them as long as they are being overdriven.
The overcharge pips could be shown as red to show that it's more than the system is designed to handle.

So your shield would be more resistant, but would get damaged over time.
Your weapons would have a few % higher RoF or something.
Your engine would move the optimum mobility area upwards from 50% to 60-70% so you can move around well at faster speeds (but damaging the thrusters/drive in the process).