woo ឵឵ ឵឵ ឵឵ ឵឵ ឵឵ ឵឵
When you’re making all these changes just remember not to fuck the science shuttle. Joyriding in that thing is really fun.
During flight there is basically nothing to do. A bit like real piloting, the autopilot does all of the work and you just have to sit around doing nothing. There should be something at least to ensure that players need to remain vigilant while on the flight map.
I’d suggest manual piloting that requires you to account for the graviational pull of celestial bodies; also, you wouldn’t want the engines to be on all the time, being in space and all. Sure, you could go full throttle to the place you want to go, but you also need to slow down as you approach so you can even dock, wasting more fuel.
but what I’m suggesting may be a bit too complex for some people.
Sensor arrays
I’d also suggest that the size of shuttles affects the effective range of the senors - It’d make sense for small infiltrator shuttles to be easily overlooked over larger vessels
I really like the ideas that are being proposed here, though.
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Personally i don’t mind complex piloting but the efficiency of the base engines is atrocious, and the autopilot likes to overshoot to a huge degree, already forcing manual piloting unless you want to run out of fuel.
Furthermore upgrading engines without a bluespace RPED requires breaching the shuttle and a long time spent removing windows. arghhhhh
Remove it
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Summary Feedback
One of the things I oftentimes do as an independent explorer (read, assistant who hicjacked sci-shuttle from Lavaland) is re-build the ship itself to have more facilities and increase it’s independence when on long-term missions. This includes installing new facilities not related to the ship itself, but rather my activities: Exploration, Combat, capture of Materials and Technologies.
For instance, if the round has an explo team which occasionally dies and I have to ride to their rescue every now and then, then I’ll build an operating computer and a stasis bed or two so I can minimize bodyrot damage while extracting them. If I’m using the sci shuttle to mine asteroids, then I’ll build a mech recharging station and have a mining mech on board. If my main objective is exploration and build-up of my own means, then I’ll look out for an omnilathe.
My point with this being that flight and size aren’t the only important aspects of the ship. A larger ship can, to some degree, be it’s own station and require quite a number of resources and equipment to really finalize.
Combine with the above. A lot of people don’t use their flight time to do maintenance and improvements on their shuttle. I was guilty of this as well before I realized I could use time much, much more efficiently. I’d spend half an hour on lavaland, rebuilding the shuttle, and only by the time the round was coming close to an end that I really started flying. Until I realized that I can do most of the improvements while flying to and from my next objective and thus compress the two tasks into one. Flight time gets useful things to do, and I’m making progress on my shuttle. Win-win.
Changes Feedback
Engines:
- Slow acceleration is perhaps the leading problem of the “there’s nothing to do during flight” problem to be quite honest. Slowing down flight even more in order to create engine progression is only going to exasperate that problem further, in my opinion. Different costs only is a much, much better idea. I’d do it this way: Plasma engines consume fuel as normal. Ion engines consume 1/2. Void thrusters short-circuit and bypass the need for fuel completely. All engines should be as rapid as possible/acceptable.
Interdictors:
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I’d expand interdictors into a full Electronic Warfare suite. Aside from just locking the engines, interdictors should be able to infiltrate the opposing ship’s power systems for example (force a grid-check on the ship’s APC).
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Another possibility would be remote hijacking: Instead of interdicting and stranding the ship right there and then, better EW components progressively allow to take over more and more systems from the enemy ship. First by doing the above sabotage with power, lights or atmos. Next by allowing some interaction with the ship’s flight console. And finally, if the EW suite is fully upgraded, locking the enemy crew out of their flight console all together and remotely autopilot their ship in a location of your choice where you can then plan for assault easily, or just force-dump them into a danger zone if you want to destroy both their ship and crew.
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Have different EW abilities have different ranges, based on sensor arrays and quality of the EW suite. The more powerful the ability, the shorter the range. It’s pointless to kill the ship’s power if you already interdicted it. But it becomes useful if the interdictor range is short, the enemy ship is evasive and you can’t catch them otherwise. That’s when you use a longer range ability to force the enemy ship into less evasiveness. And if they don’t fix their systems fast enough, then you’ll be right on top of them and actually interdict.
Afterburners:
- Increase speed at cost of fuel is a decent idea. I’d say you’d need to add more than just speed however. Add something that only afterburners can do. I’d say vastly increase turning/rotation speed and not just acceleration. This would allow for “dogfighting” when being chase by a ship with the above EW suite and would create a tactic where one could disable the enemy ship’s afterburners to kill their evasiveness and get in range of the actual interdictor.
Map Hazards:
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Charged Ion Clouds: Will charge the ship’s APCs a little bit, but will also electrify doors and blow up lights due to surges. Can potentially be used to charge your ship and thus can be a ghetto charging station, at some cost.
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Supernovae: Will steadily increase temperature across the ship beginning at a certain range. Getting right on top, or too close to a supernova will heat your ship to a point where both the crew and equipment will start taking heat damage.
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Black Holes: Will have a slight pull and alter flight trajectory a little if the crew isn’t paying attention. If the ship’s engines are interdicted or EMP’d, and they get completely sucked in by the Black Hole, the ship gets placed in a z-level with a stage 2 or 3 singulo and the crew has to quickly restore their ship or get absorbed.
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Nebulae: Severly dampens or completely kills sensor arrays of all ships in the nebula. It can be both a positive and a negative effect: If you hide your ship in a nebula, the enemy can’t really see you. Their EW can’t reach you. But that also means you can’t EW them and are blind as well. If the enemy knows you’re in the Nebula, they can still attempt to blindly interdict you.
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this is starting to sound like ftl in ss13.
…why don’t we have ftl combat with crew doing repairs/boosts live? holy shit that sounds fun.
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Yep. That would be the best course of action to be honest. But something tells me that having a moving turf in Byond is going to be much easier said than done sadly. One can dream (and raise their expectations of bacon to make their life more stressful :p) though, besides getting as close to interactive battles as possible is enough.
P.S.: I never played FTL, but I did play stellaris.
in FTL you target ship components and there’s no turf interaction. you can only dodge by warping away or stealthing. translating that into ss13 would be easy. attacks do not travel, instead just having visual effects. crew fixes damage or mans weapons/engines/shields to boost them. sounds fun and not too nightmarish to code.
shoutout to anyone who remembers this Exploration Crew Testing - Intercepted by a Syndicate fighter - YouTube
7 Likes
extremely based
oh boy you’ll love to learn about beestation downstream server: NSV
Problem I am starting to encounter is how to make it so people are forced to choose between entering a hazardous zone or going around it?
Shuttles fly fast enough to get through most hazards pretty quickly, and the map is pretty small.
Hazards on the map only take up a small area (Max size of objects is 300 due to collection detection optimisations, however I could change this and add in a large object collision detection system).
Also I may need to add in some way to call for the space AA, since ion powered shuttles can get stuck if their battery gets EMPed.
Now my ship is getting taken over by glow mushrooms
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isn’t that only online on weekends
How about forcing multiple objects together to create a net of smaller danger zones which represent a large danger zone? Similar to how meteors are displayed on the flight map when they’re headed towards the station?
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This is actually a pretty good idea since rather than doing complex collision detection for non-circular objects I can put multiple circles and abstract the shape on the map.
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Glad to help! Thanks for the work you do by the way. Hope all these suggestions aren’t too intimidating.
Just don’t put walls to sides of your engines & Heaters.
Ez pz
Added in support for larger map objects, so the hazardous regions are more likely to be something you will have to avoid/manage your shield as you go through.
3 Likes
Bro, I can’t change the roundstart shuttle. (As in, i can’t change how it spawns. I’d have to be the one specifically spending 5+ min on this roundstart because the premade shuttle has ass engines)