As long as we're getting small, easy to do things like ribbons while the more complex background work is going on; would making weapons stack in cargo holds fall under easy or difficult to do? If it's too lengthy of a process of course, stability obviously has the higher priority. Just thought this might be something easy to put in while the invisible work is going on, but if it's not; ignore away.

I think that isn't as easy as it sounds. Cause weapons and ships have extra paramters. You can't treat a half empty swarm launcher and a full one as 2xswarms like how it's done for cargo. That's the way I understand it at least.

There might be other issues. I know that when I pick up weapons dropped from a cargo ship, things that do not normally stack are somehow stacked in the debris. Advanced rails do this all the time.

Then, when trying to equip them from the stack, something goes wonky, and they just end up in my hold, as individual items, never to be stacked again.

So there is something that allows them to stack, but the moment you try to handle them unstacked, it breaks in interesting ways.

I would suspect that in addition to the half empty issue, there is something about the way the client tries to equip first, then put into the hold, as the default behavior of weapons. It can't deal with multiple items going into a single slot, so it just drops one into the hold.

That said, I would certainly rather live with monkeying around with stacks of items that behave oddly when equipping, than to have pages of the same item cluttering up my holds, and station cargo.

yes I think thats a grand idea Ghost. I would like to be able to hit load one time to load a stack of say 50 law neuts to transport rather than hitting load 50 times. And yes it does clutter the station interface when you have alot of one item.

Elbryon

Yes, good idea.

For ammo-based weapons, I suggest separating the launcher from the ammo.
The launchers would then stack just fine.
Ammo for said launchers would be another item that you could purchase and load into the launcher or treat it as cargo.
Ammo would then stack as well.

PLUS, then we could have things like "ammo carriers", like a Behemoth parked 1 sector outside a battlezone with lots of sunflares. You run out of sunflares, then you go back to the "Ammo Dump" ship, the Behemoth pilot jettisons another 12 sunnies, you pick them up, and you can go fight some more.

maybe if there was a standard stack-count, say 5x and 20x, things would be easier (data-wise, anyway), as well.

Ooo, I love that idea leber. Make ammo a separate widget.

I also like Leber's idea. It has the side effect of neatly solving the "ammo doesn't weigh anything" problem that's been annoying me for some time now!

[stamp of approval]™ @ Leber

Yeah, Ammo as a widget would be awesome. Even more, it would be nice to offload some of the weight of a widget to the ammo. So, for example, a Sun Flare currently weighs 1000kg, but really most of the weight are the rockets. So say the launcher weighs 400kg, and the rockets weight 50 each. That would also allow you to shed weight as you fight, since each rocket launched decreases your ship weight.

Or leave the launcher weight as it is and still make the rockets weigh 50 each. Dumb ships all move like jackrabbits these days...

You are just getting old.

Giving ammo weight might require some pretty close attention. I can imagine Sunflares starting at 1000kg and shedding weight with each launch being pretty uber.

I think if sunnies weighted around 700kg, then it wouldn't be too uber.

Now there's another question, can you simply load ammo into the launcher/gun from cargo hold in mid flight? Or is there some special process/item involved? A time delay maybe?
Or can you just shoot directly from cargo hold?
Now that could be interesting, making ships with bigger holds much better for rocket platforms. I'm not sure i like that idea too much tho, because of possible rocket/missile spam(swarm moth with 400 of those? - not a very pleasant idea). (not to mention vult couldn't use flares)

I think the ammo issue might be too complicated at present. Something as simple as being able to reload in flight could be terrible for balance. Anyone remember sunflares back when they had 16 rockets per tube?

/me did!

Yeah, no reload in flight, please. But yes to weight lessening as ammo gets expended.

reload in space makes the moth a spam ship from hell especially if it reloads automatically, can you imagin 4880 missiles from just one ship? .003 fps tops you could actually solo constellations then.

What if you can only reload after spacing the cargo? That would keep the spam from hell at bay, because a moth especially would never survive long enough to reload.

It would also make for some interesting team tactics as well.

Hmm, I think Lebermac's idea is pretty neat. But, I don't think this is necessarily an easy thing to do. For one thing, it would require a substantial reworking of how weapons.. work. For another, you'd need interface context to handle "loading" of weapons. But, umm, yeah, it's worth looking into.

Unfortunately, if the whole weapon/ammo stacking problem were simple to fix (or, at least, if we were aware of a simple fix) we would have done it already. It's not just annoying for you guys, it's annoying for us to have like a bajillion weapons in the database. And all that data has to get transferred around with the user. Very annoying. Anyway, re-assessing that would somewhat fit with the other database work Ray is doing lately, so I'll talk to him about it.

Think of this also incarnate once you can stack ammo separately from the lauchers you could introduce multiple ammos for them instead of whole new launchers.

Elbryon

Separating ammo from the launchers wouldn't make the launchers stack. You can't stack batteries, for instance. It's a completely different reason (and not a very good one, obviously).

But Ray is laying some groundwork for stacking weapons actually. I think it makes the most sense to just force all the ammo to the "top" of the stack, such that if you stack up 10 guns with 1 ammo each in them, then unload one gun, the single unloaded gun would have 10 ammo (or whatever its max was). That way if you equip from a stack you get full ammo (although if you sell, you sell off all the ammo too). Ray agrees, and that's what he started on; it is somewhat involved though due to the assumptions throughout the engine so I don't know whether we'll fully pursue it right now.

That, and ammo will be able to have mass separately from the launchers.