Weapon blocks & Missiles

[Morbo513]

As an alternative to turrets, I'd like to see weapon blocks implemented. They would be fixed-forwards weapons, but more powerful than turrets to compensate. This would put ships with a focus on maneuverability on par with tankier ships, and would require a bit more skill to use effectively since you're aiming the ship, not an independent turret - for this reason, they wouldn't require gunners, but increase the overall number of engineers needed. This also gives us the ability to condense a number of turrets' worth of firepower into a single barrel, so the offset between weapons is less of a problem. Finally, they'd also be more aesthetically pleasing, to me anyway.

 

I'm not sure how well this'd work with weapons currently being a separate thing from blocks from a development standpoint. In the ideal world, when the player goes to place a block weapon, they must place three separate block components - barrel(s), magazine/battery, cooling.

The X/Y surface area of the barrel is determined by the weapon's damage, while the player can adjust length to balance its size vs accuracy. The weapon's magazine/battery size determines how long it takes to overheat, while cooling determines how quickly it cools down. Both must be placed adjacent or close to the weapon block.

 

This means a player can exchange mass and internal space or increased external vulnerability for higher damage output, provided their ship is maneuverable enough to bring the firepower to bear.

 

 

As for missile weapons, these would act quite different to the current ones - Rather than a mass-fire weapon, these would be single "strike" missiles that do a big old chunk of damage, but take a long long while to reload - their damage types would be specialised to deal with shields (Plasma missile), hull (High Explosive, doing more damage to individual blocks) or armour (HEAP) They would also be split into components - the hardpoint(s) and targeting core. The hardpoint is the rack the missile(s) is launched from, while the (optional) targeting core determines whether it has guidance, and its quality. The weapon its self would have some stats relating to the missile, ie its mass and payload, determining whether it'd be more suitable as a dumb-fire torpedo, or a counter to fast and small ships.

 

How one would go about acquiring these, I'm not sure. They could have to be constructed in a similar manner to turrets via the turret factory, but I'd prefer the player to be able to freely swap in and out a number of turrets to put in to a template, with the end product's stats, including the material of the blocks it's encapsulated in, being determined by those of the turrets used. 4 chainguns gets you an autocannon, 4 double/triple chaingun turrets gets you a rotary autocannon etc.

Not sure how missiles would fit in to that though.