Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Save/Load UI, Autosave, Intel Map Markers, and More (04/10/24)
1) You don't get to hear how each and every of your lost crew died in a very unpleasant way;
2) You don't pick any specific crewmate into the specific ship; The closest parallel to this is officers, but they - what do you know - don't die.
3) There's a difference between crew and pets. Crew, at the end of the day, in-universe are people who choose this life, knowing all the dangers. Pets can't do that. And even we disregard it, while i would mourn a death of a soldier on the battlefield, it would be quite worse if the same soldier got back after the war to be blown up by some gas leak or any other nonsense that he would never see coming.
If i read the source code correctly, this can only occur on ship destroyed in battle (doesn't matter recoverable or not), so such hullmod won't do anything.
But either way it would require to write completely new code that takes this into account.
was caught in an EMP and melted
was reduced to atoms by a stray projectile
was caught in an explosion
was sucked into space through a breach
was caught by a sudden decompression
burned to death in a trapped room
burned to death after hit by a laser
imploded due to a sudden pressure spike
was removed from existence by a missile
was vaporized by a plasma burst
was dismembered by falling debris
was incinerated by damaged machinery
was eviscerated by a shattering bulkhead
suffocated in a breached room
died of acute radiation poisoning
died of sudden atmospheric deficiency
died of poisoning after exposure to damaged research materials
was shot by a crewman after blocking the way
was electrocuted by a failing flux conduit
was caught in a flux stream and burned to death
was caught by an emergency shutter suddenly descending
died of blunt force trauma
was hit by shrapnel from an explosion
was electrocuted by a dangling power conduit
was trapped in a malfunctioning escape pod and died
was fatally wounded by a falling beam
was emergency ejected along with burning ammunition
was vaporized by tachyon rays
imploded in a weaponized strange matter event
was vented into space by an explosion
As much as would like to love the mod, it seems that balance is completely off. From some few hours of playing i noticed that shields were beyond useless because for some reason any source of kinetic damage just insta pops them, and shield is the only defence of high tech shields, so they are beyond useless. And armor seems to be way too good, on somethung not made of paper it basically just laughs at the face of anything short of reaper or hellbore. And enemy ai doesnt really know what its doing, it just eats kinetic damage, gets overfluxes and dies horribly. The fact that vanila layouts arent the best in the mod doesnt help it.
Given that the feature would not work for the plasma dynamo, and that it could cause incompatibilities with other mods, I think it's best not to make changes to allow disabling special items on stations, especially since the player can simply not install them if they don't want to.
What mod allows for disabling special items on non-TASC stations? I didn't provide this option for technical reasons but if someone else found a good solution perhaps I could implement it in TASC.
By default, stations cannot slot the "no atmosphere" special items, but I fixed this by overwriting the no atmosphere condition, putting it on all stations, and having it hide and suppress itself on stations so visually the player won't see it. This will break compatibility with any other mod which overwrites no atmosphere, but to my knowledge there are none at this time that do so.
HE & Energy projectile damage seems very extreme. Everything you put on your ship should be slow heavy punches. 100 damage or 200 damage or 400 damage projectiles seem to do next to nothing versus even durable frigates. Nothing in the small HE ballistic / small energy projectile class will deal more than a bee sting to a frigate, except the antimatter blaster. In the medium class, bring a heavy blaster, a heavy mauler, or don't bother. And same with large class, bring a hellbore, a mjolnir, gigacannon, plasma cannon, or you're just wasting flux.
Energy beam damage is the most deadly, the most variable, and only really works fighting up ship classes. If you put beams on a capital ship and try to take on a cruiser, the enemy can stay far enough away to allow the beam to diffract to nothingness. And this pairing works on pretty much every class size difference; if it can out-speed you, you can't get your beams close enough to do anything. Reverse this, and you can wreck the enemy. Fly a sunder with a HIL into an onslaught's butt, open fire, and it will explode in less than a minute. Create a fleet of carriers slotted with wasps, and watch as the enemy dies off in seconds unless they've got a large amount of PD cruisers/capitals. Because of this, energy beam also works great as a dual-purpose PD / "keep the f away from me" deterrent. Most all small beams have excellent/perfect tracking and fast rotation, so they can instantly lock onto threats. And as missiles or strike craft get closer to the ship, the damage increases by up to 6x its stated value, meaning more durable strike craft that fragmentation projectiles couldn't take out will die off from beam damage when they hang around your ship for an extended period of time. Harassers will also hate this, the closer you fly in to try and fire off missiles from point blank range and minimize the time the target's PD has to react, the worse you're getting hit with beam damage, and the quicker the PD beams can knock out your missile; it might take a mining laser 3 seconds to knock out a missile from 2000 sus, but maybe only 1/5 of a second to take it out from 200 sus, so you're screwed either way whether you fire from max range or try to suicide bomb.
Missiles rule, then run away or die a fool. If you aren't going to try for a carrier beam swarm, the best fighting you can do is a mix of ships that will kinetic hard flux and distract the enemy, and then launch nuclear weapons into the enemy once it cannot block or destroy the wave of hammerheads / atroposes, or that singular reaper that will end its life. Of course, missiles aren't infinite, so you can pilot your kite into your bombing run to destroy that cruiser, then run for your life to the edge of the map and wait for the next battle.
Carrier swarm dominates. 75% wasps to deal damage, 15% claws or thunders to short out the enemy's weapons and engines, maybe a broadsword wing or 2 to chew up the enemy's flux in shield damage and divert their PD away from the wasps and claws and onto decoy flares, and a cobra or dagger/trident or 2 to take out cruisers and capitals faster than the wasps. Have your carriers stay at extreme range, and watch as enemy frigates blow up as soon as the engagement starts, and heavier ships curse you staying out of their range while your bombers slam them with missiles.
Considering that kinetic weapons are dedicated to that damage type, it makes sense that that they fire specialized rounds. Kinetic energy is more difficult to stop with even modern armor. Chemical/explosive energy, even when made into an anti-armor tool, is more easily defeated by composite protection. Kinetic rounds are thus generally better at penetrating the hardest targets, but deal less post-penetration damage. Explosive anti-armor rounds are inferior at dealing with the hardest targets, but cause lethal damage to anything they can actually penetrate. Only exception is very heavy explosive ordnance (i.e large anti-ship or air-to-ground missiles, bombs) which just obliterate part or all of the target
RC currently appears to follow these points, which feels sensical. Some vanilla weapons are left to the wayside in the face of realistic armor/damage mechanics, but that's expected - I faced similar issues when giving missiles realistic speeds and having to rework vanilla PD weapons in my own old mod.
On the subject of said mod I said I'd post when done updating it, I think I'll write up an explanation of how I've reworked certain weapons and my reasonings.
You don't have to go to all this trouble--I'm on top of it! That said, I'm glad you're so interested as to investigate the settings, which I put for just this purpose. Yes, small-damage weapons will struggle against thick armor, but high-damage weapons will penetrate and destroy ships. I am dismayed to see my documentation did not make the working of these numbers obvious to you! I will extend the documentation to help.
Penetrate it at all angles! "angles" on its own was not an empty field.
The mod does increase all projectile damage by two. See WeaponSpecs.json.
It's not about resistance but effective thickness, which must be penetrated to deal substantial damage.
Toggles.json has just that toggle.
Version 1.31.0 is out! Fixed the damage model and added a multiplier for projectile weapon damage in data/config/WeaponSpecs.json. Damage seems balanced to me, but please post any suggestions you have about the numbers.
