Re: DevNull and Emissive Armour
Introducing scale to ship construction as was done with 'mounts' will inevitably create balance problems. The real problem is that the job was only partially completed. Other components like engines and shields don't scale, or only scale with the addition of more cumbersome mounts. I hope SE V will introduce a different system that lets all components scale to the size of the ship without having to search out a special mount. Then smaller ships can be truly cheaper and more efficient than larger ships.
There is a possible solution to the problem of smaller ships and high Emissive Armor values even in SE IV, though. If there were two Ratings for Emissive Armor, one for the 'per hit' damage limit and one for the 'total per round' damage limit, you could still over-whelm a high-value Emissive Armor with huge amounts of lower grade weapons. Considering the description given of how Emissive Armor works, this makes perfectly good sense. Surely there is a limit to how much energy your armor can 're-emit' into space per combat round? As it is now, yes, any weapon below the 'threshold' value is totally useless. This is Yet Another Example of the 'All or Nothing' problem so common in SE design. If an accounting were kept of total damage absorbed per round and damage above a threshold total were applied to the armor anyway this would allow the 'swarm of ants vs. the frog' kind of battles.
[ March 19, 2003, 05:20: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]
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