Modding Star Wars Ion Cannons

[Graeme Dice]

In the crossover mod I am working on, I'd like to include ion cannons as both a very large planetary Version for the rebels, and smaller ship mounted Versions for both fighters and capital ships. I'd like a temporary disabling effect when the weapons are fired. Now I know that one way to make them work is to give bridges, crew quarters, and life support components the boarding defense ability and make ion cannons security station only damagers, but this takes the ship out of the fight completely. The other option I'm looking at is to use either the disrupt load time or increase load time damage types.

In the opinion of some of the more experienced modders out there, which would be a "better" way to achieve an effect like I'm looking for?

[Ruatha]

Could you use Psychic tech? There is one weapon that makes the ship fired upon confused so that they don't fire back for a couple of combat turns.
Here at work it's name deludes me but you can find it in the psychic tech tree and in components.txt.

[Rollo]

IMO the best way to make an ion cannon work is the 'Disrupt Reload Time' ability from the Energy Dampener. Because 'Increase Reload Time' from Mental Flailer doesn't work on ships with MC, which doesn't seem right for an ion cannon.

Rollo

[Andrés]

SW Ion cannons should destroy supplies in the target, and have the ship disabled because of lack of supplies. A disabled ship should not be able to move, fire weapons or raise shields until its reactor is reset.

So that's the difference between Disrupt and Increase reload time, thanks Rollo.

In the Sci-Fi Crossover Mod I'm giving them "Only Security Stations" damage type, and give a few components such as B, LF and PDC "Boarding Defense" to have them destroyed and simulate the ship being disabled with very litte damage.

BTW Graeme Dice it would be nice if we can join efforts to create only one crossover mod instead of two Versions of the same thing.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Andr&eacutes Lescano:
BTW Graeme Dice it would be nice if we can join efforts to create only one crossover mod instead of two Versions of the same thing.

We could, but I think I've gone in quite a different direction than you have from what I've seen of your mod.

For instance, an Octuple turreted Very Heavy Turbolaser X does 20000 damage, has a reload time of 4, very poor minus to-hit and uses 6000+ supplies per shot. On the other end, a single light turbolaser X does 50 damage, uses 2 supplies, and fires every other turn. Of course, there's a huge size difference there, and the LTLs are far more accurate, but in damage/turn/kiloton, the VHTL is king. I've also totally removed weapon mounts for the time being.

Because I want the four order of magnitude difference between heavy weapons and fighter weapons, I'm also creating superlasers as a single "emitter", and several "superlaser capacitors" that all do damage and only fire once per combat. The emitter destroys planets, while the capacitors provide the ability to use partial beam discharges. Thus, a bank of superlaser capacitors can be used to destroy ships with partial discharges.

[Andrés]

That doesn’t sound so different to me.

Yes, even the smaller of the weapons you describe looks terrible oversized compared with what I have, but contrast between different weapons is one of the things I want to emphasize.

I like the smaller scale because I think it makes things look more starwarish, a single shot does relatively little damage but the combination of many shots is devastating, relatively small ships can carry a good number of cannons, you actually see a lot of fire even if the battle involves a little number of ships.

With all new features in weapon mounts what I did was to separate the mount part from the basic weapon.
In other words to make the "Octuple turreted Very Heavy" part be a weapon mount applied to a basic "Turbolaser X"

Unfortunately mounts cannot change reload time. But have other interesting uses:
like reducing the number of components not only making it easier to mod, but also to play: only 10 turbolaser components * 11 mounts = 110 combinations, plus all these size variations are also available to Ion cannons, and other direct fire weapons, including the capturable alien technologies, it’s also easy way to restrict large mounts to large ships.

So far the biggest turbolaser variation is:
"Turbolaser V" in "Massive Quad Battery Mount", 120 kt, 480 damage, range 10, fires every turn, has a 30 minus to hit, can only be used in SSDs and larger.
On the other hand the same "Turbolaser V" in "Normal", 6kt, 11 damage, range 4
And the "Superlaser Mk II" is 20000 kt, 50000 of damage, reload time 8, and of course destroys planets without being destroyed (but that's not in combat anyway).

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Andr&eacutes Lescano:
I like the smaller scale because I think it makes things look more starwarish, a single shot does relatively little damage but the combination of many shots is devastating, relatively small ships can carry a good number of cannons, you actually see a lot of fire even if the battle involves a little number of ships.

An ISD should have somewhere upwards of 500,000 shielding points under my system, which definetly allows for lots of weapons fire.

like reducing the number of components not only making it easier to mod, but also to play: only 10 turbolaser components * 11 mounts = 110 combinations, plus all these size variations are also available to Ion cannons, and other direct fire weapons, including the capturable alien technologies, it’s also easy way to restrict large mounts to large ships.

I don't want large weapons restricted to large ships. That's an unnatural restriction that I've never really liked. I'm restricting weapons placement by limiting supply generation per turn. You can put a massive weapon on a corvette, but it won't be able to fire many times, and it will hit other corvettes about 5-10% of the time.

[Andrés]

An ISD should have somewhere upwards of 500,000 shielding points under my system, which definetly allows for lots of weapons fire.

What do shield points have to do with anything? The ability of absorbing lots of enemy fire?

If you're talking about tonnage, my estimation is that an ISD is about 51,000 kt, slightly larger than a B5 Omega Destroyer (a ship of similar size and "known" tonnage)
But to allow larger ships without hitting the max tonnage of 65,000 and make them more practical in SE4, I'm reducing their tonnage to 5001.

Shield points are roughly twice the hull rating, considering that average components have structure=tonnage plus armor and other more resistant components, hull rating of an ISD should be around 6000, and shields about 12000.

I don't want large weapons restricted to large ships. That's an unnatural restriction that I've never really liked. I'm restricting weapons placement by limiting supply generation per turn. You can put a massive weapon on a corvette, but it won't be able to fire many times, and it will hit other corvettes about 5-10% of the time.

I'm not fully convinced by the "supplies=energy" method used among others in the B5 mod. The game was designed for the "supplies=fuel" model and there are some ugly side effects in the "supplies=energy", like for example all ships having unlimited range.

The size restrictions I've made are not as heavy like in the stock game.
Just a little to prevent abuse and absurd designs.
And of course lighter mounts are still used in large ships when accuracy is the priority.

Many players have made mods to keep small ships useful until late in the game, but my worry is exactly opposite.
There is too little incentive to research and use large ships, even when the largest stock SE4 ships are ridiculously small compared with most sci-fi ships.

I've never seen a small ship carrying a single massive weapon anywhere in the starwars universe (hmm... maybe the Suncrusher, but that's a really special ship); why should it be so important to allow that?

From what you described, and my guess of the involved tonnages, your massive weapon wouldn't fit in a corvette anyway.