New way to do non-jumpable ships

[Azatol]

I've seen the highliner mod, and thought it was a neat idea, but making non-highliners fighters removes a lot of things they can do really. So I recently came up with a way to basically prevent small ships from warping but allow large ships. It involves modding solar system and galaxy generation, like the quad mods and such. You also can add in a few components but don't have to remove any, to make it work a little better. It may be that this kind of solar system modding is not possible but if it is this might work better for a highliner type of thing.

Set up all your types of solar systems such that every warp point does a high amount of damage when you warp through. Whatever the level is, it should be enough to destroy any or most small ships that go through, but not big ships. Then, you can have harder and easier warp points that need bigger or smaller ships to get through them.

Then the components you can add to make warping easier on the large ships is a VERY LARGE (say 800kt) armor piece that has great enough resistance to absorb the warping damage. It should be expensive and can represent the cost of your warping technology, whatever it is. Then small ships can't fit in the armor piece, but large ships can. It shouldn't be so good that highliners never die, but it good enough to have no or almost no damage in warping where a small ship would die.

Then small ships can be used for combat by giving them to hit bonuses or some other sort of thing. This is a bit different than highliners though, I guess because they will never be able to go to a different system since they can't be in cargo. You could still have a lot of fighter tech for your highly mobile fighting vehicles and let smaller ships be highly effective system defense vessels.

There is some question about how warp damage applies across fleets (does each ship take the damage or is the damage applied once across the fleet?), either answer could be interesting though. This would make in system colonizing much easier than out system, if the highliner colony ships were more expensive.

[Will]

Interesting... how about making all weapons armor-piercing, and making this version of the mod have leaky armor? Then "armor" just becomes a bunch of high-hitpoint components that are more likely to be hit first, rather than comparatively medium-hitpoint components that are always hit first. Then the highliners would get protection from the warps, but can be killed just as easily since weapons will skip the armor "warp" component.

[Azatol]

That would work, I'm not in charge of the highliner mod or anything, I've not seen how it works except that is uses fighters as ships. But if anyone is interested in using it, it just seems like a neat way to have system defense ships vs regular or highliner ships.

[Azatol]

Something like:

Warp Generator
800kt size
4000kt structure

8000 m, 0 o, 12000 r

Obviously a lot of fiddling could be done based on how expensive the ships are, and then:

Small Highliner -- 1000kt (hardly anything but the warp gen)
-5 to defense

Medium Highliner -- 1200kt
-10 to defense

Large Highliner -- 1500kt
-15 to defense

Huge Highliner -- 2000kt
-20 to defense


Or whatever you want the sizes to be with increasing defense penalties, because of their bulkiness.

I've been playing EVE online which uses warp to get to different places in system (because the system is close to scale)

They had warp in system, and then used gates to warp to different stars. I don't think gate battle stations can be done though, unless you make them mobile and use warp openers on them. (component -- Warp opener combined with 1 movement would work, except you could move them prior to opening the gate. I would think a very short range on the opener would fit the gate theme).

Now here's an even more bizarre thing, I don't think this is possible, but you can you make warp openers create damaging warp points?

[Ed Kolis]

You could also prevent *large* ships from warping (they're too big to fit in the wormholes) by using a mount which restricts the warp generator to small ships... interesting!

[Alneyan]

I think wormhole damage is applied to the whole fleet, but rather randomly. Fyron had a bit of trouble in Adamant013 with a damaging wormhole that destroyed a whole fleet of ships slightly tougher than scouts.

Some ships can avoid getting damaged, but I suspect the odds are somehow linked to the amount of damage dealt. In any event, it may make sense that small ships might make it through by luck, just like large ships can end up ripped apart (leaky armour would do that).

[Azatol]

If you want non-jumpable large ships you'll need to make the level of structure on the warp generator much higher, so big ships can't just make up the structure using smaller armor components. Armor and shield would have to be thought about carefully to prevent that problem. But I think it could be done with like 10k structure on the generator.

[Captain Kwok]

Wormhole damage is applied about 2/3rds of the time.

[Alneyan]

If you really had nothing better to do, you could always create a map with one blackhole system between "real" systems, with an unavoidable pull towards the middle. Ships would cross "hyperspace" in one turn or be destroyed, making speed very important, and from there you could tweak a lot of things to your liking.

The caveat is, of course, the amount of work needed to create the map (besides the mod, of course). Still, it might be interesting for certain concepts.

[General Woundwort]

If you want to rework the HM for these ideas, I have no objections. HM was a thought experiment on my part to see how far I could push the SEIV ship/fighter mechanics.