Good afternoon,
This suggestion is to alter the statistics of new small and large ships. Specifically, please see below list of potential changes for the small and large ship categories that would differentiate them further from each other, and from Medium ships, providing worthwhile niches for ship size classes as a whole rather than on a ship-by-ship basis. These would ideally be applied to only new ships to begin with, as changing basic mechanics of existing ships probably won't go over too well with their fans...
Small Ships
Large Ships
I'm curious to know what people think.
Thank you
This suggestion is to alter the statistics of new small and large ships. Specifically, please see below list of potential changes for the small and large ship categories that would differentiate them further from each other, and from Medium ships, providing worthwhile niches for ship size classes as a whole rather than on a ship-by-ship basis. These would ideally be applied to only new ships to begin with, as changing basic mechanics of existing ships probably won't go over too well with their fans...
Small Ships
Design Intent: To create a 'fighter jet' niche. Decrease maximum potential hull/shield values, while increasing speed across the board and providing special small weaponry to make it worthwhile. The reasoning behind this is that small ships are surpassed and made obsolete in most aspects by medium ships, which have similar maneuverability and speed with typical outfitting to smaller ships, but with much greater armor and armament. Take the Vulture, the premier small combat ship, and compare it to any of the medium combat vessels for evidence to this point.
- Speed: Increase by enough that small fighters are consistently faster than the average medium ship at both cruise and boost speeds. Using the Eagle as a baseline, I imagine this would be 450/600 on A-rated thrusters, before engineering.
- Armor: Limit defensive optional internals (e.g. Shield Cell Banks, Hull/Module/Shield Reinforcements, Shield Boosters) to (1) per module type.
- Armament: Offer alternate versions of existing weaponry in Class 1 size only, to fill support roles, e.g:
- Gimballed weapons with near-perfect accuracy (like the snub fighter weapons), but with less damage. Good for hitting modules.
- Weapons with strong shield penetration (e.g. damage through shields), but with less damage. Again, good for hitting modules.
Design Intent: To create a 'Frigate' niche, making large ships slower to move and maneuver, but vastly improve the efficacy of their turrets. This makes larger ships a center point and geographic anchor in a battle, much like capital ships, and should make them more capable at controlling an area (e.g. a conflict zone).
- Turrets: Provide a new power-hungry turret control unit as an optional internal module which provides near-perfect accuracy to turrets. Additionally, the install of this module should allow the pilot to switch to the gunner view normally only available in a multicrew session at the expense of being able to maneuver and use forward-mounted weaponry.
- Optional: This new module could increase the slew/pitch rate of turreted weapons. I'm unsure whether this would be necessary, as I don't use turrets often.
- Optional - Carrier-Spec: Large ships could choose to replace much of the armor they could carry with additional fighter bays, with multiple fighters (say, up to 4) able to be launched at once. I list this as optional because it tends to break multiplayer instances as-is, and the cost of additional crew would be prohibitive, so this would involve multiple changes to work, and may not be feasible.
Thank you
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