I was thinking about the dynamic of cap ship battles. And it seems that there's a problem with larger ships. The bigger they get, the easier they are to hit. And they really have few ways of defending themselves.

Even if missiles are destroyable, they are fundamentally weak against blaster fire.

This means that any midrange ship, like the trident, or the new TPG ship, is going to be, apart from a curiousity, not particularly dangerous outside of just a brawl.

I think that having the instant hit beam weps is a cop out, it keeps people with blasters out of range, but it tends to disperse combat, rather than clustering it, which I think should be the goal.

So if the problem is that the surface area of the ship is just too great to defend. Then make only certain areas of larger ships vulnerable.

Weakpoints, roughly the size of your typical 1-man ship.

If these are what the ship needs to defend, then it can dodge just like any other ship. moving that weakness around in such a manner as to avoid fire.

Stronger weapons could pierce the other armor, but they would be weapons that are destroyable, like missiles or rockets.

Just give the capships swarms. Ha ha ha haaaaa...

In all seriousness, there DOES need to be a way to help capships keep smaller ships at bay - perhaps some kind of flak/concussion weapon that keeps you at a distance?

What about having destructible subsystems like in that other thread? The capship MUST have a crew doing damage control, Give it a healing rate and make some of the weapons/propulsion systems/targeting/warp systems destructible. Say that those subsystems must be destroyed before you can damage the rest of the ship's structure.

Would that help?

Healing rate is the answer... as well as damage reduction.

Capship armor should probably negate about *looks a wiki for a bit*... 500 damage... sound reasonable?

same thing should probably apply to the levi.

and... something about the damage fragmentation effect... if you don't get it... ignore it.

-Zoras

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/1416

The ideal solution (IMHO). Cap ship armor simply blocks the first x damage per shot. So if a blaster weapon does 800 damage per shot, and the cap ship armor blocks the first 900 damage per shot, the blaster is useless agianst the cap ship.

energy weapons arent that big a threat to the HAC. a partial deffence grid of beam turrets (perhaps full coverage on the broadsides but none on the dorsal or ventral sides, with other weapons such as AGTs or Uber Gauses covering all arks) is enough to make attacking it with a fighter foolish but not as imposable as it is now. you should have to be an extreemly good pilot to take a fighter within 800m of an enemy cap ship and expect to live.

You have to calibrate the proportions. In real life you can not take down a heavy armored unit with a hand gun; you need heavier weaponry for it.

A single shot from the cap ships turret can take down the best fighter or even the whole squad. On other hand, the fighters most heavy cannons can only scratch the hulk of the capship but they could be good against the turrets and sensors.

Regards,

Darkwood

Why are we even talking about this?
Capitol ships are boring as hell ever since the mining beams.
They're just lag in b8.

possibly because we'd like to make them.. umm.. UN-boring?

I'm still for celebrim's basic idea, as modified here..

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/10941

and here

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/10940

my most recent uhh rambles... on the subject of larger ships and larger weapons.

How about this...

A cap ship is invulnerable until all it's turrets have been downed?

So, it needs turrets that can switch from attack beam to nanite dispenser.

Once those are gone, well, bye bye baby. You're going down soon.

I still think damage reduction on the capship (but not the turrets) would be a good thing. That would mean fighters could take out turrets, but taking out the entire capship would be difficult.

turrets should probably slowly regenerate health and re-activate once above 50%

I dunno, I wanted some part of the Cap ship to be weak to blasters, so that an intelligently flown ship could be dangerous. But if you make the turrets the vulnerable part, they're still going to need the beams.

If you make maybe 2 areas of the ship weak, then the ship can dodge with just those 2 areas in mind, rather than trying to dodge all incoming fire for 30 turrets.

We have to do something to get rid of the mining beam weps.

I like the beam weapons. Why do we have to get rid of them? I can see them having more limitations (require a charge time before firing, during which it cannot track; have damage decrease over distance; decrease/remove autoaim; lots of other possibilities), but they are a unique variety of weapon, which IMO is a Good Thing.

Here's what I don't get about this whole "make it so the fighters can attack cap ships" opinion that everyone seems so worked up about:

If you think about it, the Levi is exactly the same way and odds are it's going to be released at around the same time as the U-C cap ships. Yet, people have accepted the fact that fighters can't do squat to a Levi.

If you ask me, the whole point of cap ships is to have a ship that is nearly impossible to take out with fighter-class ships.

Levi has AI support.

Capship has human support.

Transitive property? AI > Human

Would it be feasible for capships to have Strike Force class escorts?

AI>Human? Geez, what do you fight in, a Gov Bus?

The Levi actually has a decent balance in this regard, not because of its own weaponry (powerful though they may be), but because of the swarm of bots surrounding it. The bots do most of the work of taking out incoming fighters and bombers (when we aren't leading them away from the battle), and heal the Levi when its health becomes critical.

Without the bots, the Levi can easily be destroyed by a small fighter, even with all of its turrets still active. (it just takes a while).

My point exactly. Without a fighter screen, both ships are vulnerable, which means that it needs all the turrets it can get. Without a few ships to guard it, bombers can sit just outside the turret range and swarm the thing to bits. If anything, the turrets should have more power and more range.

Re: AI>Human? Geez, what do you fight in, a Gov Bus?

For the purposes of my post, the equality stands true. The AI's purpose is to guard and defend the ship in question. Humans tend to strive from that goal, switching to offensive strategy. The end result is that the number of offensive human pilots weighs more than the number of defensive pilots. Without a strong (persistent) defensive barrier., the capship is doomed.

Hence, you took my assertion out of context, and applied it to Single Fighter vs. Single Fighter. One on one, a human pilot will win against AI a majority of the time. That, however, is not the topic of discussion.

well then they need AI escorts, anything, just not those bloody beam weps.

As weapons go, they're way too strong, gunnery doesn't even enter into it. And I miss the clustering effect you got with the early cap ship battles.

I'd love to see flak cannons with remote detonation. (fire projectile, hit secondary to splode any in the air at one time)

What if we modified Roguelazer's thread-a-ported suggestion - That a ship has multiple plates, and can absorb without harm, say, 5000 points per second (for a capship) to any given face before that plate turns molten, fails to protect the ship, and damage starts to accumulate. It would then continue taking damage until it cooled off (went unhit for 1 second).

This would create an initial "damage hump" that certain smaller ships could not bypass alone.

I can't think of a single configuration that would let a bus bypass this hump, even if loaded with Sunflares. Thus, you'd need another capship or a horde of little fighters to turn a plate molten, and to keep it molten long enough to dump some damage into the ship.