Actually, it's not logical that fighter-to-fighter weapons would be used to kill armoured capships. That's something along the lines of using a handgun to take down an aircraft carrier...

Capships are big. They explode in big ways. If you want to finish one off, get in a longer range ship or call in heavy support.

I think they should increase the range of large-port energy weapons (literally the projectile max range) so that bombing with, say, plasdevs/queenguns etc is a viable option.

EDIT: also, I think capships should have a randomised timer from when they are killed to when they explode.

So after you reduce their health to 0, they would show up as a burning, diabled hulk for some random time from 5 to 60 seconds and THEN violently explode.

This would be more realistic, would allow the victors to pull back afterwards (including other capships who like their turrets intact :P) and would also look supremely cool. :D

Don't reduce splash radius, don't increase range. Soulless1's idea is GREAT! The ship drops to 0%, and there's some way to show it's going to boom. Maybe you have all the windows turn red and start flashing on an HAC to imitate an emergency alarm or something, I dunno. Or you could have warning red warning lights all around the center seem of a trident, or a couple big red bulbs for a teradon.

This would allow attackers time to retreat, and people manning the capship time to get the hell outa there. For people manning the turrets and those inside the cappy, you could have a big red flashing message across your screen saying "VITAL SYSTEMS DAMAGED. EVACUATE CAPITAL SHIP <NAME HERE> IMMEDIATELY" and a annoyingly loud BREEEE BREEEE BREEEE alarm or something.

My god that would be cool. 20 fighters in an HAC hearing that, and all scrambling to undock and run as fast as they could.

-Calder

Seems like the heavy bombers now have a role.

Related to this: Do turrets have incredibly high health, or are they just pretty hard to hit?

both? :P

ok not quite .. the big gauss turrets can take some serious beating but the smaller ones on the teradon already blow up after a few flare hits.

I really like Soulless One's idea as well. A 10-second countdown or something before the Teradon or HAC explodes.

related :: bring back Avalons!

ooh yeah, I hadn't thought of the idea of an 'abandon ship' message - that would be awesome :D

A random timer for exploding caps would be awesome!

I'm not sure how soon that could be implemented, but in the meantime, what if the explosion of cap ships caused less damage but more concussion? So that you don't die if you're 600m away from the cappie when it explodes, but you still get tossed around quite a bit. Though of course if you're right next to the cap when it explodes, you should be toast.

[STAMP OF APPROVAL]

For Souless' idea, which Calder expanded upon. :D

in addition to souless's idea perhaps purely as eye candy have escape pods launch from the cap ship during that time as it gets very close to detonation then as the escape pods get almost out of splash radius range the ship blows taking escape pods with it. That would be sweet. Cause those massive ships have to have *some* crew so you'd think they would try to escape

Nice idea, but more sprites == more lag!

it'd be nice if everyone stopped refering to everything under the sun as lagg. For that purpose I mentioned it is more that the server cant handle even the slightest amount of effort and not that it would actually lagg people in a network sense. if say 100 more constantly online users were to join the game at this point in time I would be concerned that the stability of the server engine would probably collapse if they all happened to frequent the same parts of the universe. It may also choke people with really crappy video drivers (note drivers, not cards). As for the most part physical network latency isn't a common problem and most things people call lagg are one of the 2 things mentioned above.

** Excluding people in far reaches of the earth

But that being said, yes it probably isnt feasable at the moment but it would still be cool

unfortunately i haven't been able to catch the BS fights yet, but it seems to me that if the teradons are fighting within 700m of one another their main weapons could use a serious range boost, i mean isn't that like 2 ship lengths away at most?

as fo fighters being cought in the blast, i have to agree with the delayed explosion idea. it would look cooler, and it would be more realistic than the curent esxplosion sequence. plus it would allows fighters to retreat to a safer range. However i also agree with the coment that using S port weapons against a cap ship is like firing a machien gun at a wall. sure the wall will be damaged, but you shouldn't expect the wall to collapse under that sort of attack, it just isn't going to sustain the sort of damage needed.

Big weapons are needed to take down the big ships. The Avalons are coming once they are targetable and destructible; their only purpose will be to take down capships (if your fighter gets taken out by a direct hit from one you should be ashamed).

Small energy weapons should not be able to take down large ships (this has been discussed before, the Devs saying they might make the capships immune to weapons that don't deliver certain amount of damage), and a capship explosion should be a big thing. Soulless' idea is a good one.

I love Soulless1's idea (and Person/Calder's expansion on it). Seeing a horde of partially-damaged ships pouring out of a crippled HAC would be awesome. :D

(Keep the blast radius the same as it is now - big ships boom bigly.)

(Bump)

Any word if Soulless' idea would be possible to do? Or maybe decreasing the damage caused by cap explosions. Being 500m away and having my ship drop from 100% to 10% from an exploding teradon seems a bit much.

There's a lot of good ideas in this thread.

NO!

Cap ships are big. They go big boom. You just had to keep an eye on them and move away. They should go big boom!

In fact, I opt for even bigger booms!