Revamping SEIV Ship Hull Sizes & Features

[Fyron]

Interesting. Personaly I think that the accuracy mount should weigh the same as the LR mount, similar principles involved just different application.

And what would you think they should weigh? 125 or 150?

Concealed mount seems a little Uber. Tonnage 25%, structure 100%, and damage 90%? That is one hell of a damage ratio you're offering, and they can double as internal armour.

Hmm... I may have reduced the wrong trait. The hit points are supposed to be 25%, not the space taken. The concealed weapon should take normal space.

For the pre-fire bays, how are they working? have they tested out all right? I remember the problems with adjusting seeher range through mounts (it doesn't actually affect the characteristics of the seeker) but will the seeker launch even though it will wink out of existence?

They are designed against missile dancers and such. You can fire the seekers when they are out of range. The seekers move in, and hopefully hit them when they come in range to fire at you. If they are out of range when the seeker arrives at its max range (regardless of the mount), the seeker just disappears. No big loss, fire more! They would be more useful on Bases, which can't move to combat the missile dancing.

Edit: P.S. I noticed that you aren't intending for the AI to use any of the special mounts. Are you planning to keep it that way? If not, how are you planning to balance it?

I am not entirely sure. I might have them use the Heavy Mount because they can not react dynamically to a player using lots of emmissive or crystalline armor. The Heavy Mount is designed to combat such ships.

[ March 24, 2003, 19:38: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[PvK]

Originally posted by Slick:
...
There have been some inaccurate generalizations here if compared to real life. Larger ships are generally faster and longer range than small ones; yes there are exceptions. Larger ships are less maneuverable. ...

Current larger ships may be faster because they have nuclear power plants, while conventional ships don't. When large ships have the same power plant, it takes a proportionally larger amount (for space ships) of thrust to accelerate them. For most or all pre-modern warships of the same age and type of propulsion, smaller ships were faster. At any rate, it should almost always be EASIER to move a small ship at a certain speed, than a larger one.

In Proportions mod, there is a good analogy to the nuclear powered ships, in Gravitic Drives. Unlike other propulsion types, it takes a constant and fairly large amount of space to mount a Gravitic Drive, which directly adds to speed. Thus large ships equipped with them may end up as fast or faster than smaller designs without them, and small ships will tend not to have them because they'll use a larger proportion of space combined to the smaller size of small ships. Note that this was recently complained about by some players feeling that fighters should always be faster than Frigates (which isn't generally the case anyway unless you put a Gravitic Drive on the Frigate, and even then the fighters can usually keep up).

I would also give larger mounts an accuracy penalty to represent larger ship maneuverability.
...

If the ship is less maneuverable, it should be a property of the ship class, not the weapon mount, although larger weapon mounts can also be given less accuracy to balance them and make them more appropriate for capital ship combat than swatting small nimble targets. Proportions mod does this.

Also, although QNP is a good idea, the end result should not be that all ships will be equal. This conflicts with real life. As I stated below, larger ships ARE better and should BE better in the game. This is due to "economy of size". Larger ships are more efficient, not less efficient.

QNP doesn't necessarily make all ships equal. I'd say larger ships should be more powerful, but not better in all ways, or else you get the situation in the unmodded game, where there is seldom a reason to build smaller ships.

PvK

[ March 24, 2003, 21:33: Message edited by: PvK ]

[QuarianRex]

Fyron:

I'd say 125%. Paying half again the weight of each weapon for what is essentially targeting equipment is a little too steep. 125% hurts, especially with no damage increase, but it's an acceptable sacrifice.

[Slick]

Originally posted by PvK:

Current larger ships may be faster because they have nuclear power plants, while conventional ships don't. When large ships have the same power plant, it takes a proportionally larger amount (for space ships) of thrust to accelerate them. For most or all pre-modern warships of the same age and type of propulsion, smaller ships were faster. At any rate, it should almost always be EASIER to move a small ship at a certain speed, than a larger one.

[/QB]

I agree with everything you said except this (partially). Nuclear power is not necessarily used for speed, nor does it provide power levels far in excess of conventional plants; it is used for endurance (time at high speed and time between refueling); and, for submarines, independence from propulsion use of air to allow being submerged for extended periods. Indeed some of the older nuclear ships were slow. Current large ships are faster simply because they are designed to be faster. They can carry proportionally more fuel so they are also longer ranged, again in general. When we talk about "faster", need to consider sprint (for battle) and strategic speed.

Agreed about the mass & acceleration issue, yes, Newton was right with laws 1, 2 & 3. Also a propeller driven ship obeys a "pump law" which basically says that "speed is proportional to power cubed". So to double a ship's speed, you need 8x power. Now for small and large ships alike, this limits max speed. Space engines are just plain different, but "economy of size" has shown that larger is better and more efficient, at the cost of ...well, cost. Of course, there are limits to everything due to the laws of deminishing returns.

The US only has 2 kinds of ships that are nuclear: aircraft carriers and submarines. All other nuclear surface ships have been decomissioned. You should see one of our carriers ripping thru the water. The rooster tail is extremely impressive.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mean to speak unkindly toward QNP. I think it is a good idea and a way of making smaller ships more useful. My major point here is that the reason you don't see huge navies from all the countries of the world, more than any other reason is cost. It is relatively cheap to maintain a small costal navy of frigates, but it is tremendously expensive for the US to maintain numerous forward deployed carrier battle Groups.

If the intent of the original post in this thread is to make a mod where smaller ships more useful in the game, I think the way to do it is to make the larger ships very expensive. The accuracy thing was just a side issue. That way you have to really plan your construction by beefing up your economy and support them with a fleet for protection (to protect your investment). Their maintenance alone will limit the numbers. With limited numbers of large ships, you need to fill in the gaps with smaller ships and carefully choose where to deploy your large ships. This is consistent with real life.

Slick.