Weapons, engines and mods, Oh my!

[PvK]

Well yes, that's sort of my view, as well. Ship classes don't just represent to me the ability to build a ship of a certain size, but the ability to build a certain design, or which size is only one part. I have 1800kT colony ships available from the start, but I don't think that includes the ability to build a 1700kT propulsion system for a 100kT command module, and have it be linearly efficient compared to a more reasonable design.

I did consider adding a "Faster Ships" tech area, to allow developing engineering for ship designs with more propulsion capacity. I also considered other tech areas for other types of ship classes. However SE4's interface starts getting clunky when there are tons of ship classes, so it seemed like more clunk than it was worth, although I did add a couple of areas for specialized "Fast Colony Ships" and carriers, due to fan requests.

There are also issues to consider from the very abstract SE4 movement and combat systems, as well as from a game balance perspective. Most basically, if a ship design has enough of a speed advantage over its enemies, it can do silly things in combat compared to weapon ranges. This can cause imbalances with unrealistic tactics that take advantage of the lack of opportunity fire in the combat engine, such as ramming or hit-and-run without the enemy being able to fire back at all. Moreover, it can imbalance the need for research into (and ship design related to)propulsion if speed increases can be acquired by tacking on an extra engine for 10kT, compared to having to do extensive research and costly deployment of advanced engines.

Now, there might or might not be a way to re-design the entire set of values for combat and propulsion components in order to address all of this in a different way, for the purpose of satisfying a desire for more flexibility in the number of engines that can be stacked on a design, but that wasn't what I was trying to do.

PvK

Originally posted by geoschmo:
We likely could strap 30 engines on the shuttle if we assembled it orbit.

Actaully in reality I think their would be no concrete limit to the number of engines you could put on a ship. Although what would happen, and I think this is what Fyron and SJ were trying to say, is that putting an engine on a ship by itself increases the mass of the ship. In SEIV terms there is a limit to the number of engines for a specific hull size becasue once you reach a certain number of engines you have in effect changed the hull to the next size up.

Geoschmo