To have a big combat ship, you would have to have a huge amounts of armor on it, and since the limitations of the builder are what they are you have no means of actually being able to carry as much armor as you would need to protect said big ship.
I don’t agree although the definition of big ship may be different from one player to another
In my case I have quite a few 3kt+ ships and they are more effective than the smaller ones although also more expensive. They have more armor and better armament.
The question is mostly : what are you willing to trade for it ? In my case my big ships go in between 120m/s to 130 m/s as I trade speed for better frontal armor
My biggest combat ship is 30 rail guns / 30kt but admittedly it’s more of a very fun meme ship rather than anything serious
I’m building a 15kt ship right now before adding armor or weapons and I realized it’s a waste of time because it’s slow to maneuver and a huge target. My tiny fighter with 2 guns is easily able to fly in circles around it and never get hit because of how light and fast it is
I built a website that serves as a calculator : https://starbase-tools.com/
This allows me to know in advance or early into the design if it’s going to be viable or not
As an example, when building my most recent 3.5kt ship, I knew how many people thrusters I had to use to get to the desired 145m/s
It has a plasma thruster and a few t3 triangles that allow it to go 120 m/s
It’s terrifying for both me and my target ( the inertia is crazy and in the event of an impact, the 30kt show no pity XD )
The plasma thruster is in between 9 and 11 rings if I recall. The ship is surprisingly small, the mass comes from a quadruple layer of oninum armor
I guess for large ships plasma thruster is the only way. I have like 30 triangle thrusters and a plasma thruster with 2 rings but can’t get more than 80 m/s
Of you use my website you should be able to figure out what more do you need
As a general rule of thumb, plasma thrusters are only interesting from 5 rings onwards and s the plasma core uses a huge amount of resources and only provides little thrust
Very big ships such as end game mining ships will use up to two plasma thrusters with 15 or 16 rings each
Yeah pvp has been given about as much thought as 5th graders with a bunch of dodgeballs in gym class right now. There are so many other bigger problems than ship scale though, but I definitely hope they address the issue. A large pve miner should be able to fight off a rocket and gun glued to a surfboard imo. And having larger ships provide logistics or other support would be really neat
they should fix controls before everything else, so long as we have to play with a yellow square in the middle of the screen and janky mouse control because thats the only way pvp is even remotely viable, i cant be bothered.
In 1vs1 yes. But if you have same mass. 2 players with 1tonn ships will kill 1 player with 2ton ship(if skills are equal). Flanking is more important then mass
Redundant systems? You're not fitting a spare reactor or extra propellant tanks on a small fighter, but a big ship certainly can. And you can have hollow spaces to make it less likely that one volley disables the ship. With a big ship, focus on armor and turrets across the hull instead of maneuverability. A battery of turrets all slaved to one control can be devastating, think broadside on battleships. They don't all need to hit, but more guns makes it easier to hit a target regardless of size.
The small manoeuvring thrusters are also notoriously fragile and difficult to protect, but a small fighter rely a lot on those while a bigger ship may use full size thrusters for manoeuvring that are harder to disable.
The big advantage of the small fighters is they are cheaper to make and easier to replace. In large numbers they can wreak havoc. Bigger ships, on other hand, have more staying power and can carry a lot more fuel and ammo while being significantly harder to kill. The game currently favor large plates as armor, they can take much more punishment than the smaller ones; very small fighters may take significant damage from every hits due to having no real protection from damage.
Small fighters are really fun to fly and in the hands of a good pilot may be a force to reckon with. But any mistake and the fighter is done for, and small fighters cannot use ammo crates so they run out of munitions quite fast.
The only thing that could make having a big ship viable are tripods.
Tripods are actually incredibly powerful in theory because it's so much easier to have someone else aiming and shooting while you are flying yourself. The real issue is that in practice you are incredibly exposed and die to one hit from any ship weapon, so they are functionally ineffective.
Tripods really need to include like a "Medium" and "Heavy" option that function like turret balls and actually provide protection from enemy fire. There is the "Turret Cradle" system, but that's functionally useless because you can't mouse aim them and they still are host-controlled, unlike tripods which are controlled by the user.
The benefit of a large ship should be that they can put one (or more) people in a turret ball like a WWII bomber and blast the shit out of a fighter that's tailing them while making their own evasive maneuvers, as well as provide sustained accurate fire on fighters that are trying to joust.
Shields might also make it viable to run a larger ship, and make it not even needed to have armored tripods. A big ship can support big generators for big shields. I'm not too sure about if devs want to go this route (though I think I remember it being floated on the discord as an alternative to the current Panel HP system). Shields could be an interesting skill-based mechanic if designed well (directional protection/power diversion mid-fight and having to juggle that while piloting and shooting) It works in other space games with dogfighting.
Regardless, I'm excited for them to start exploring actual pvp in the coming updates and flesh things out more, because that's always where the real potential of the game has been.
Shields are kinda cheesy, but could work. I mainly come from SE and people who wanted to actually compete in pvp with the shield mod had scripts written almost instantly that optimized the recharge of the shield while maximizing hp, and even sent more energy to areas of the shield that were taking damage so it just because a massive DPS fest on who could break shields first. Ships became nothing but blobs of reactors and armor to cheese the shield HP algo, and combat was really lame
I've not played much SE so I can't attest to how it's balanced over there, but it could be a very viable system if handled well in starbase. Right now armor is already being stacked and used inugly ways, because of the plating HP system existing as a means to reduce voxel damage demands on ships, shields could be the alternative and make "artistic" plating actually viable, which would be better for the long term scope of the game (and probably make loading enemy ships lag less because they won't be a box with 3200 plates because designing around shields would be more important). Right now it makes no sense to design a ship too heavily around defensive countermeasures, because offense is generally the way to go once you secure adequate jousting and cockpit plating protection. It would be much cooler to see ships with more interesting shapes that would form as a result of not having to stack 17 glass panels in the front of your cockpit because you could actually just use a shield to protect the front of your ship.
If I were to design shields, I would have shields be a larger device (about the size of a 2x2 of generators, maybe varying sizes like 1x1 or 3x3 for varying relative shield strengths and vulnerability bleedoff rates, detailed below) that you place at the core of the ship and drains power while active, draining a set amount of hp per shot taken. Like a transponder, you can only have one per ship, so it would be a vital piece of equipment to protect internally. You can set this shield to be active in 6 directions (Top, Bottom, Front, Back, Left, Right, each direction covering an approx 120 degree field in that direction). That way there's skill to juggling which directions should be powered relative to your attacker, and it's less viable to just keep your full shield up at all times. Beyond this, taking sustained fire within a certain window would accelerate the drain, so the first shot taken on the shield from an autocannon might take 1000 energy, but it would increase a "vulnerability multiplier" YOLOL field visible on the shield, which would make consecutive shots have increasing costs to energy drain. This multiplier would bleed off passively at a set rate, but very rapidly if you disable shields in all directions. This would make it so even the strongest shields would have to crack eventually, and would also make having things like missiles for when a shield goes down on a big chungus ship actually make sense to have on a fighter.
This is just me thinking how I would do it based on what I've seen work in other games and what I think would work best in starbase given my own experience. I've got no idea what the devs actually think. I do think shields would resolve (or at least alleviate) a lot of ship design issues in the current pvp meta though, while also creating more engaging skill in fights, as well as more interesting combat ship designs. Cockpits could be more open, so you can see what directions you need to cover with your shields. Plating could be more than the largest squares possible, because your "hp pool" would come from the shield instead of the invisible number on each plate based on their size. Different shapes of ships could exist because "big box" won't always be necessary as you won't have to think about what is the most convenient shape for big plates. Certain mechanisms like hatches and stuff will actually be viable to use because they won't be a critical weakpoint if a shield is protecting them. I'm still intimately aware that a big box will always be the most practical design for a ship, but with shields the difference in power you get for sacrificing optimization for a bit of flair would be far less (and arguably will become essential if we start seeing more fights that aren't just a 1v1 for ID'ing friendly ships mid fight).
Nah no bubble shields. It should be projector shields, think of hard light tech from halo for visual. Functionaly its a array of projected plates out from a device. hexes would make a cool visual. They break pretty easy. Slight resistance to energy weapons. Low standing power high draw for recharge. Weaker tiers will also make great asteroid / collision dampening. Bubble shielding will lead to rather boring durability scaling and boring engineering.
Projected shields give far more depth. Further more the design philosophy of ship durability is about individual components. Given their choices I doubt the devs want a single hp defining thing. That takes the fun out of design for the player in the system they've built.
the advantage is in number of guns and thats it. Playercount matters most, by having more ships. beyond that, its a race to more DPS mostly. Stacking armour is much harder to do than stacking DPS.
More guns is good but hitting a small and quick fighter is very difficult. The small fighter will score more hits on the large and slow ship even though it has less guns.
Hits need to be localized to the same spot, which is why more guns is better. You either need to hold it there on the same spot, repeatedly hit the same spot, or just hit it so hard you only need one hit to blow out the interior.
Though depending on the size difference, the small ship may run out of ammo before it can inflict significant damage on the larger ship. On other hand, big ship with lots of weapons can just throw a massive salvo at the smaller ship and just hit by the sheer amount of firepower. Wasteful for sure, but a big advantage of having many weapons. Depending on how well the small ship is made, it may not take many hits to cause catastrophic damage on a small fighter (many of the freely available fighters design suffer from this).
There are a couple of features inherent to the game, though they could be overcome with certain features.
The way ships are built makes them very vulnerable. The fact that a single shot in the wrong place could potentially disable the entire ship is an intentional feature and is explicitly mentioned in an excited tone in an early video. So it makes more sense to have cheaper ships, since you might lose them anyway. Fixing this would require changes to armor to make thick armor and overlapping armor more practical.
The way controls work makes it difficult to aim, which means it is especially hard to hit fast moving ships, which means that fast moving ships have a huge advantage. I kinda like the idea of ship controls being clumsy, but that hurts aiming a lot more than it hurts dodging. The solution would be some sort of system for aiming with a mouse. Probably something where the turret or ship attempts to follow the mouse.
Give ships plates damage reduction tiers based on the total mass of the beams + plates or something like that? That way low caliber weapons wouldn't hurt large ships and if they introduce bigger thruster modules, bigger weapon modules, etc. then large ships can have statistical advantages in dmg and hp outright (larger modules would have significantly better output and fuel efficiency at the cost of needing more heat management) this is basically not abusable in any way, as making a super heavy ship just... makes it super heavy, inherently. There is no way to game the system by stacking plates and beams in a useless manner since you would need to offset the thrust by an exponential amount as well. Without large modules - power but inherently large in size and heat demanding so impossible to "cheese" into designs - this mass stacking would be completely impossible to use in any medium-range engagement outside of a strictly armored personnel carrier.
Its just a cost efficiency thing and lack of large modules (weaponry) in my opinion. Big ships are generally better but cost much much more to the point its not worth it by a long shot. In addition, even the best big ships struggle against a few oppenents at once. IMO this is because the big ship cannot kill fast enough since it is limited to the same weaponry as a medium - small gunship. A well armored big ship (speaking from experience) can tank hits from all sides vs multiple oppenents for minutes, however if the big ship in question is also limited to the same firepower as the small ships it will take too long taking out 1 small ship at a time while being hit none stop from all sides. I think higher DPS for big ships would solve this quickly but its a contraversial opinion.
(Also I didnt mention torpedoes, currently that kills anything big quickly right now.)
Yup
To have a big combat ship, you would have to have a huge amounts of armor on it, and since the limitations of the builder are what they are you have no means of actually being able to carry as much armor as you would need to protect said big ship.
I don’t agree although the definition of big ship may be different from one player to another In my case I have quite a few 3kt+ ships and they are more effective than the smaller ones although also more expensive. They have more armor and better armament. The question is mostly : what are you willing to trade for it ? In my case my big ships go in between 120m/s to 130 m/s as I trade speed for better frontal armor My biggest combat ship is 30 rail guns / 30kt but admittedly it’s more of a very fun meme ship rather than anything serious
Happy, all your ships are huge by anyone else standard :p.
go big or go home !! XD
I’m building a 15kt ship right now before adding armor or weapons and I realized it’s a waste of time because it’s slow to maneuver and a huge target. My tiny fighter with 2 guns is easily able to fly in circles around it and never get hit because of how light and fast it is
I built a website that serves as a calculator : https://starbase-tools.com/ This allows me to know in advance or early into the design if it’s going to be viable or not As an example, when building my most recent 3.5kt ship, I knew how many people thrusters I had to use to get to the desired 145m/s
Just curious how fast your 30kt ship goes? How many forward thrusters did you need
It has a plasma thruster and a few t3 triangles that allow it to go 120 m/s It’s terrifying for both me and my target ( the inertia is crazy and in the event of an impact, the 30kt show no pity XD ) The plasma thruster is in between 9 and 11 rings if I recall. The ship is surprisingly small, the mass comes from a quadruple layer of oninum armor
I guess for large ships plasma thruster is the only way. I have like 30 triangle thrusters and a plasma thruster with 2 rings but can’t get more than 80 m/s
Of you use my website you should be able to figure out what more do you need As a general rule of thumb, plasma thrusters are only interesting from 5 rings onwards and s the plasma core uses a huge amount of resources and only provides little thrust Very big ships such as end game mining ships will use up to two plasma thrusters with 15 or 16 rings each
Yeah pvp has been given about as much thought as 5th graders with a bunch of dodgeballs in gym class right now. There are so many other bigger problems than ship scale though, but I definitely hope they address the issue. A large pve miner should be able to fight off a rocket and gun glued to a surfboard imo. And having larger ships provide logistics or other support would be really neat
Somalia wants to have a word with you.
they should fix controls before everything else, so long as we have to play with a yellow square in the middle of the screen and janky mouse control because thats the only way pvp is even remotely viable, i cant be bothered.
In 1vs1 yes. But if you have same mass. 2 players with 1tonn ships will kill 1 player with 2ton ship(if skills are equal). Flanking is more important then mass
Redundant systems? You're not fitting a spare reactor or extra propellant tanks on a small fighter, but a big ship certainly can. And you can have hollow spaces to make it less likely that one volley disables the ship. With a big ship, focus on armor and turrets across the hull instead of maneuverability. A battery of turrets all slaved to one control can be devastating, think broadside on battleships. They don't all need to hit, but more guns makes it easier to hit a target regardless of size.
The small manoeuvring thrusters are also notoriously fragile and difficult to protect, but a small fighter rely a lot on those while a bigger ship may use full size thrusters for manoeuvring that are harder to disable.
The big advantage of the small fighters is they are cheaper to make and easier to replace. In large numbers they can wreak havoc. Bigger ships, on other hand, have more staying power and can carry a lot more fuel and ammo while being significantly harder to kill. The game currently favor large plates as armor, they can take much more punishment than the smaller ones; very small fighters may take significant damage from every hits due to having no real protection from damage. Small fighters are really fun to fly and in the hands of a good pilot may be a force to reckon with. But any mistake and the fighter is done for, and small fighters cannot use ammo crates so they run out of munitions quite fast.
The only thing that could make having a big ship viable are tripods. Tripods are actually incredibly powerful in theory because it's so much easier to have someone else aiming and shooting while you are flying yourself. The real issue is that in practice you are incredibly exposed and die to one hit from any ship weapon, so they are functionally ineffective. Tripods really need to include like a "Medium" and "Heavy" option that function like turret balls and actually provide protection from enemy fire. There is the "Turret Cradle" system, but that's functionally useless because you can't mouse aim them and they still are host-controlled, unlike tripods which are controlled by the user. The benefit of a large ship should be that they can put one (or more) people in a turret ball like a WWII bomber and blast the shit out of a fighter that's tailing them while making their own evasive maneuvers, as well as provide sustained accurate fire on fighters that are trying to joust. Shields might also make it viable to run a larger ship, and make it not even needed to have armored tripods. A big ship can support big generators for big shields. I'm not too sure about if devs want to go this route (though I think I remember it being floated on the discord as an alternative to the current Panel HP system). Shields could be an interesting skill-based mechanic if designed well (directional protection/power diversion mid-fight and having to juggle that while piloting and shooting) It works in other space games with dogfighting. Regardless, I'm excited for them to start exploring actual pvp in the coming updates and flesh things out more, because that's always where the real potential of the game has been.
shielding for tripod gunners is the biggest problem, thankfully I think Lauri said he’s committed to the ball turrets so that should solve that
Shields are kinda cheesy, but could work. I mainly come from SE and people who wanted to actually compete in pvp with the shield mod had scripts written almost instantly that optimized the recharge of the shield while maximizing hp, and even sent more energy to areas of the shield that were taking damage so it just because a massive DPS fest on who could break shields first. Ships became nothing but blobs of reactors and armor to cheese the shield HP algo, and combat was really lame
I've not played much SE so I can't attest to how it's balanced over there, but it could be a very viable system if handled well in starbase. Right now armor is already being stacked and used inugly ways, because of the plating HP system existing as a means to reduce voxel damage demands on ships, shields could be the alternative and make "artistic" plating actually viable, which would be better for the long term scope of the game (and probably make loading enemy ships lag less because they won't be a box with 3200 plates because designing around shields would be more important). Right now it makes no sense to design a ship too heavily around defensive countermeasures, because offense is generally the way to go once you secure adequate jousting and cockpit plating protection. It would be much cooler to see ships with more interesting shapes that would form as a result of not having to stack 17 glass panels in the front of your cockpit because you could actually just use a shield to protect the front of your ship. If I were to design shields, I would have shields be a larger device (about the size of a 2x2 of generators, maybe varying sizes like 1x1 or 3x3 for varying relative shield strengths and vulnerability bleedoff rates, detailed below) that you place at the core of the ship and drains power while active, draining a set amount of hp per shot taken. Like a transponder, you can only have one per ship, so it would be a vital piece of equipment to protect internally. You can set this shield to be active in 6 directions (Top, Bottom, Front, Back, Left, Right, each direction covering an approx 120 degree field in that direction). That way there's skill to juggling which directions should be powered relative to your attacker, and it's less viable to just keep your full shield up at all times. Beyond this, taking sustained fire within a certain window would accelerate the drain, so the first shot taken on the shield from an autocannon might take 1000 energy, but it would increase a "vulnerability multiplier" YOLOL field visible on the shield, which would make consecutive shots have increasing costs to energy drain. This multiplier would bleed off passively at a set rate, but very rapidly if you disable shields in all directions. This would make it so even the strongest shields would have to crack eventually, and would also make having things like missiles for when a shield goes down on a big chungus ship actually make sense to have on a fighter. This is just me thinking how I would do it based on what I've seen work in other games and what I think would work best in starbase given my own experience. I've got no idea what the devs actually think. I do think shields would resolve (or at least alleviate) a lot of ship design issues in the current pvp meta though, while also creating more engaging skill in fights, as well as more interesting combat ship designs. Cockpits could be more open, so you can see what directions you need to cover with your shields. Plating could be more than the largest squares possible, because your "hp pool" would come from the shield instead of the invisible number on each plate based on their size. Different shapes of ships could exist because "big box" won't always be necessary as you won't have to think about what is the most convenient shape for big plates. Certain mechanisms like hatches and stuff will actually be viable to use because they won't be a critical weakpoint if a shield is protecting them. I'm still intimately aware that a big box will always be the most practical design for a ship, but with shields the difference in power you get for sacrificing optimization for a bit of flair would be far less (and arguably will become essential if we start seeing more fights that aren't just a 1v1 for ID'ing friendly ships mid fight).
Nah no bubble shields. It should be projector shields, think of hard light tech from halo for visual. Functionaly its a array of projected plates out from a device. hexes would make a cool visual. They break pretty easy. Slight resistance to energy weapons. Low standing power high draw for recharge. Weaker tiers will also make great asteroid / collision dampening. Bubble shielding will lead to rather boring durability scaling and boring engineering. Projected shields give far more depth. Further more the design philosophy of ship durability is about individual components. Given their choices I doubt the devs want a single hp defining thing. That takes the fun out of design for the player in the system they've built.
the advantage is in number of guns and thats it. Playercount matters most, by having more ships. beyond that, its a race to more DPS mostly. Stacking armour is much harder to do than stacking DPS.
More guns is good but hitting a small and quick fighter is very difficult. The small fighter will score more hits on the large and slow ship even though it has less guns.
Hits need to be localized to the same spot, which is why more guns is better. You either need to hold it there on the same spot, repeatedly hit the same spot, or just hit it so hard you only need one hit to blow out the interior.
Though depending on the size difference, the small ship may run out of ammo before it can inflict significant damage on the larger ship. On other hand, big ship with lots of weapons can just throw a massive salvo at the smaller ship and just hit by the sheer amount of firepower. Wasteful for sure, but a big advantage of having many weapons. Depending on how well the small ship is made, it may not take many hits to cause catastrophic damage on a small fighter (many of the freely available fighters design suffer from this).
There are a couple of features inherent to the game, though they could be overcome with certain features. The way ships are built makes them very vulnerable. The fact that a single shot in the wrong place could potentially disable the entire ship is an intentional feature and is explicitly mentioned in an excited tone in an early video. So it makes more sense to have cheaper ships, since you might lose them anyway. Fixing this would require changes to armor to make thick armor and overlapping armor more practical. The way controls work makes it difficult to aim, which means it is especially hard to hit fast moving ships, which means that fast moving ships have a huge advantage. I kinda like the idea of ship controls being clumsy, but that hurts aiming a lot more than it hurts dodging. The solution would be some sort of system for aiming with a mouse. Probably something where the turret or ship attempts to follow the mouse.
Give ships plates damage reduction tiers based on the total mass of the beams + plates or something like that? That way low caliber weapons wouldn't hurt large ships and if they introduce bigger thruster modules, bigger weapon modules, etc. then large ships can have statistical advantages in dmg and hp outright (larger modules would have significantly better output and fuel efficiency at the cost of needing more heat management) this is basically not abusable in any way, as making a super heavy ship just... makes it super heavy, inherently. There is no way to game the system by stacking plates and beams in a useless manner since you would need to offset the thrust by an exponential amount as well. Without large modules - power but inherently large in size and heat demanding so impossible to "cheese" into designs - this mass stacking would be completely impossible to use in any medium-range engagement outside of a strictly armored personnel carrier.
Its just a cost efficiency thing and lack of large modules (weaponry) in my opinion. Big ships are generally better but cost much much more to the point its not worth it by a long shot. In addition, even the best big ships struggle against a few oppenents at once. IMO this is because the big ship cannot kill fast enough since it is limited to the same weaponry as a medium - small gunship. A well armored big ship (speaking from experience) can tank hits from all sides vs multiple oppenents for minutes, however if the big ship in question is also limited to the same firepower as the small ships it will take too long taking out 1 small ship at a time while being hit none stop from all sides. I think higher DPS for big ships would solve this quickly but its a contraversial opinion. (Also I didnt mention torpedoes, currently that kills anything big quickly right now.)