Small Combat Ship Concerns

[DragoonKnight]

Maybe the word 'Combat' in the title is throwing everyone off?

I get what you're saying, and it's make sense at a certain scale, but for now what we have in ED is just not able to accept that type of scale.

Imagine, the Small ships able to do 500ms, the mediums 400, and the large only 300. The uproar from the Large and Rich would drown the forums. But it would be cool to see.

Imagine, turrets that do as much damage as fixed weapons. Just like weapons in real life. The uproar from the small fast ships crowd would drown the forums.
So I propose a trade, you can have your 500 m/s eagle if my slow Conda can have turrets that do as much dmg as fixed guns.

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There is one reason why i up to some degree agree with the OP: Each of the ships we have required a lot of development time to create. Still some ships are just "get out of me as fast as possible" models, despite all the quality work put into them. A too high number of ships we have are mere "stepping stones" and become worthless to the player in much too short time, which is a painful waste of perfectly good assets and the reason why while we now have the promised 30 ships in game, the number of -usefull- ships is significally lower.

What i really would love to see would be something like the "plus variant" of the low tier ships. Why not have an "Eagle Military Refit", costing the same or even a bit more than a Vulture, but also having combat capabilities similar to the Vulture? In terms of development it would require less work than a new ship. Keep the models, keep the cockpit graphics, keep the sound, just adjust module sizes, add a few utility slots and perhaps increase the size of some of the installed weapons. (Although a good capacitor allows even smaller weapons to shine. ) At the same time it would give us a number of new ships which would actually see player use.

And on the topic if we -need- more ships of the same profile: good question. There are also many car producers in RL producing very similar models... in theory all we need would be like five different car models worldwide... *grin* In terms of gameplay those ships would and should be very similar, spending 4 millions on a Vulture, Enhanced Viper, Military Eagle or Boosted Diamondback would be a matter of style and preference. (And again, you might later either spend almost 60 millions on a FDL, or you rather spend that ammount on the "Vulture Model 2" or other ships of similar price range. Variety is good. )

You already have the Eagle, Imperial Eagle, and Imperial Courier. That is basically the Eagle MK1, Eagle MK2, and Eagle Mk3.
If you want an Eagle MK4, that option is called the FAS. Sure it is ugly, but still the same style of ship in terms of flight mechanics.

 

[Kylby36]

Imagine, turrets that do as much damage as fixed weapons. Just like weapons in real life. The uproar from the small fast ships crowd would drown the forums.
So I propose a trade, you can have your 500 m/s eagle if my slow Conda can have turrets that do as much dmg as fixed guns.

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You already have the Eagle, Imperial Eagle, and Imperial Courier. That is basically the Eagle MK1, Eagle MK2, and Eagle Mk3.
If you want an Eagle MK4, that option is called the FAS. Sure it is ugly, but still the same style of ship in terms of flight mechanics.

Your first reply with the turrets that do as much damage as weapons in real life is mostly what I was going after when I suggested how it would heat up the wing vs wing combat. I'm fine with turrets that have huge ass turrets that can absolutely shred me, but I have to be fast enough to dodge them. IMHO, if a ship lacks firepower and armor, it should completely blow other ships out of the water with speed/agility for balance.


And also, the problem is, is that again those are all just stepping stones to the conda/corvette/clipper.

Honestly they need to make it to where certain parts can completely change the speed/agility/firepower of the ship. Fully customizable parts for ships. In fact I may make a suggestion about that in a separate thread since it just came to mind. That way every player can play the way they want to, while sacrificing parts they don't want/need. This would eliminate the whole stepping stone problem, as well as give people a reason to pick a favorite ship to stick with.

Keep in mind this is actually already a feature technically with the hull reinforcements.

 

[Ydiss]

Really? That's weird because I found it the other way round. The FDL did feel slightly less agile than what I was used to but the FAS felt like a whale by comparison. Having said that, when I'm up against a FAS, they do appear to be able to turn on the proverbial sixpence. I may have to try another one and see how it compares to my FDL.

You must have accidentally bought the gunship

There's no way anyone could fly the fas and immediately think "Whale"

 

[Sylow]

You already have the Eagle, Imperial Eagle, and Imperial Courier. That is basically the Eagle MK1, Eagle MK2, and Eagle Mk3.
If you want an Eagle MK4, that option is called the FAS. Sure it is ugly, but still the same style of ship in terms of flight mechanics.

Did you ever read what i write, or did you just answer out of reflex? Because you seem to without even knowing it made my point. What i mean is:
- How often do you see a player who has a little money spare in a Sidewinder?
- How often do you see a player who has a little money spare in an Eagle?
- How often do you see a player who has a little money spare in a Hauler?
- How often do you see a player who has a little money spare in an Adder?
- The list can be continued for a long time.

The game has 30 ships, but only very few of them are worth using once you made it out of pilots Kindergarden and have learned how to make money. Thus a lot of design work (models, skins, sound, etc. ) has gone into those awesome ships, where we pilots quickly grow out of and thus don't have any actual use any more for us. At the same time only a small number of ship types gets very frequent use by veteran pilots. Unfortunately one of the big rules of (online) games is that obsolete content is no content at all and thus is a waste.

So to give you another example, outside of combat ships: why is the Imperial Cutter the very one absolute trade ship? Why is there not the Type 9 V2, which costs as much as the Cutter, flies as bad as the cutter, has hardpoints similar to the Cutter and can carry as much cargo as the Cutter? And while Larkon themselves are not interested to rival their own top tier product with another ship, there might be refits of the Type 7 available. Just put some text that this ship was reworked at some backplanet shipyard, reducing luxury as well as engine capacity for additional cargo space.

Voilà, without needing any additional art or sound and just very limited coding effort, we'd have not one but three top-tier trading ships, saving valuable assets from obsolescence with very limited effort. There is a long list of benefits for this, my top points would be:

1. For us players, we don't gain power, but we get choices and variety.
2. More choices and variety are beneficial for the longlivety of the game.
3. If more ships models are actually viable choices for the later game, players potentially buy more ship skins.
4. If the same ship skins of lower tier ships will also be useful on their "V2" version, players will be more ready to buy those skins. Nobody i play with buys skins for all the many "stepping stone" ships. They only go shopping once they reached the ship they plan to spend a lot of time in. Things would look different if the skin for the "stepping stone" ship would promise to be useful again later in an upgraded version of this ship.
5. In effect this limited effort of manpower can create more incentive for players to spend a few bucks for ship skins. I think Frontier is able to handle this additional income.

 

[CariadocThorne]

I'd like a small, agile ship that had the size, speed and agility of a viper, but vastly better shields and weapons.

That would be massively OP. If Vipers or DBS even had a bigger distributor without losing anything else to retain balance, there would be no point in flying anything bigger, because a Viper or DBS capable of continuously firing the weapons they can already mount would destroy bigger ships with relative ease.

I do feel that if small, fun to fly ships are your thing you don't have much of an upgrade path past a vulture.

Of course not. The Vulture is the biggest of the small fighters. Anything bigger is no longer a small fighter.

Small fighters are simply not meant to be able to take on heavy combat ships on even footing.

Before you think I'm a big ship pilot who wants to maintain the status quo, I'm not. I have spent maybe 6 hours each in the vulture the asp and the DBE, but other than that haven't flown anything but my DBS since my second day in the game. It is a slight upgrade over the viper, but is still underdog against any bigger combat ship, starting with the vulture. That gives me the fun of flying such a fast and nimble ship, and the challenge of taking on a bigger stronger opponent.