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[FooF]

The Juggernaut

The Invictus had me thinking about "archaic/obsolete" Low-tech ideas that kind of make sense but were replaced for obvious reasons. The backdrop is that this is a super old design that predates modular weaponry.  Since you didn't want to get caught without some Kinetic or some HE, most ships were built to have a little of both at all times, diluting the overall effectiveness. This ship attempted to have the best of both worlds by having a heavy HE battery and and a heavy Kinetic battery, just not at the same time.

This Luddic Church exclusive Heavy Cruiser is in the same vein as the Invictus and replaces the Dominator in its fleets. The ship is built around a system that switches between a primary and secondary Ballistic main battery. Technically, it has 8(!) Medium Ballistic mounts, but only 4 are engaged at a time. A pair of Medium Missiles straddle the alternating main battery to round out a very aggressive, forward-facing assault ship. It has no rear weaponry but does have a single Flight Deck in the back and a pair of Small Ballistics on the flanks for minor PD. Flux stats and armor are comparable to a Dominator but it doesn't have the luxury of Burn Drive (base speed is slightly faster at 40, though).

DP is in the 22-25 range. Relative to the Eradicator, it is much slower, significantly tougher and due to its unique design, can punch much harder if utilized correctly. The Dominator obviously supplanted the Juggernaut in the Domain with longer-reaching and harder-hitting main guns, more flexible secondary batteries and ditching the hangar to add more powerful engines capable of fast pursuit. However, the Juggernaut found its place among the Luddic Church faithful who did not have access to the Hegemony's blueprints but still needed a heavy cruiser capable of system defense.

Alternating the main battery does not cost flux and only has a 1 second transition period but if you allow the inactive battery to stay inactive for 5 seconds, when you rotate them forward, they do +200% damage for their first salvo (or 1 second of sustained fire for rapid-fire weapons). A visual indicator on the weapon mounts indicate when they're "fully prepped" and ready for bonus damage. While modular weapon mounts have replaced the locked-in versions of yesteryear, it still behooves the modern Juggernaut captain to go "All-Kinetic" and "All-HE" for its alternating batteries to make the most out of the bonus damage, whether that be an impressive Kinetic alpha strike to overwhelm shields or a powerful HE follow-up to obliterate armor.

Very rough mock-up of what I had in mind (don't mistake the gold circles for hybrid mounts, they're still Ballistic. I just wanted to color-code the batteries). The Primary and Secondary batteries literally slide back and forth. Also, the inactive battery can't be directly disabled via EMP and instantly repairs disabled weapons. For all practical purposes, the inactive battery doesn't exist until it gets activated and slides forward. If not immediately obvious, the main batteries are hardpoints, but the missiles are turreted with a wide arc facing forward.

[Cruacious]

While this is an interesting concept, I would make some changes for balance's sake.

First off, retracted weapons can still be hit and disabled but have a significant boost to repair speed via a built in ship mod specific to the ship. I say try 50% as that can easily be boosted by other existing mods.

Next, I would have a cooldown on the swapping of batteries in general, 5 seconds as you said, with the initial first shot of the swapped guns dealing double damage as you said. This I feel is a more fair balance for the ship and adds a "clunkiness" that would go a long way to explaining why the ship was retired in favor of the Dominator.

Continuing on, I would keep the DP cost at 25 to match the Dominator. The reason is this ship can put out some terrifying amounts of firepower similar to a Dominator, especially with advanced Ballistics in player's hands. This ship could easily outmatch an Eradicator in theory with the right circumstances.

Finally, I think the name Juggernaut likely will be used more for something else than this. Don't get me wrong, it's a fine name, but it doesn't "feel" like what I would call a Juggernaut. Anyway that's my two cents on this.

[FooF]

Everything is fair game, as this is only a suggestion. A longer switch time may be in order, as well as being able to attack the inactive battery. I was considering giving this ship the Invictus' "Distributed Fire Control" hull mod so that the guns don't get taken out nearly as easily but with this ship being so slow, it really needs the range upgrades from DTC/ITU. Maybe it just has DTC built-in so that's not even a consideration... (this can be S-modded to equal ITU so no harm, no foul there).

A couple other thoughts:

• Right-click could be a Damper Field instead of shields. This is, after all, an antiquated design and may predate shields. This would also go a long way in this ship earning its "Juggernaut" name. Not only does it have tremendous forward firepower, it's an absolute brick.
• 8 Medium Ballistic slots will require a ton of OP. My thought is the equivalent of "Heavy Ballistics Integration" except for Mediums. Halves the OP cost and makes downgrading for Smalls much less attractive.
• The Fighter Bay is definitely negotiable. This does make it unique but it also introduces some competing design goals. The thought would be to use the support fighters like the Sarissa but the original design for the ship would be for 3-4 of these things to form a battle line and use their fighters to deal with Frigates and faster craft that can get behind them.

[Cruacious]

Swapping the shields for a Dampner would make sense if you are copying off of the Invictus and be a unique way of handling the ship. Not sure if that would present an issues in vanilla coding (although mods do exist for this I believe). Also, such a ship will need an integration mod as you said or alternatively a LOT of OP. Since tons of OP can be abused, go with integration.

As for range... I am a bit split on how much would be fair as the HVD and Mauler are things. Your mileage may vary, but this ship is definitely a very interesting and unique design. If not vanilla, I feel this ship would be an epic mod ship.

[FooF]

Swapping the shields for a Dampner would make sense if you are copying off of the Invictus and be a unique way of handling the ship. Not sure if that would present an issues in vanilla coding (although mods do exist for this I believe).

The Vanguard already does this in vanilla. In all honesty, I see the Juggernaut to be the logical conclusion of the Vanguard train-of-thought in Cruiser form.

[Zsar]

Mmh... in terms of lore, there is a bit of an inconsistency here: If the ship predated shields, then it would also predate a need for kinetic weaponry. But if the ship does not predate shields, why make with a complicated mechanical weapon swap design instead of - shields?

I think such a design only really has two ways to come into being:

• as fighter, as means to conserve hangar space (similar to quick-detachable or foldable wings on old carrier planes)
  ... But I think we should first see the much more obvious and (in-universe) simple/solid solution of fighters receiving different loadouts depending on their target, before we see a fighter with on-the-fly switchable weaponry.
• as a pipedream design of some design bureau inventing new work for themselves (like german post-Bismarck battleship designs)

In the Starsector setting, where blueprints are the ultimate ressource, that does not mean the ship cannot work, but it should probably be pitched as such.

... As a side-note, on a pre-shields design, maybe collapsible weapon mounts, specifically with faster repair time and armor bonus (when closed) to the contained weapon, seems to me like a much more likely development (and has the added charme, that mods already provide some such vessels, making for less effort in implementation).

Anyway, not much critique at the ship design itself. ... Just... it would be nice, if we could keep down on the "obviously 2D" designs - currently the Colossus variants and come next update also the Invictus look a lot as if they were designed within a 2D world, with their brick-y hull shape and the turrets concentrated on one side of what looks like a wide front, as if in 3D there were a large dead zone around the ship, where those turrets could not aim. These designs kind of cry for mounts below or on the opposite side, but unless we'd get rotatable 3D designs in the refit menu, that would seem like quite an UX downgrade. Even a "flip ship" button that only switches between top and bottom of the ship would probably at first rather confuse. Considering that most designs avoid this problem to begin with by looking appropriately angled (and relying on the Space is an Ocean trope), I think that's not currently desirable.
As such, I think the optical design of the swapping parts should look differently from the sketch, e.g. as if the two cannons rotated around a common axis orthogonal to the view, or as a hatch that swallowed one weapon to shortly afterward spit out the other.

[FooF]

I like the lore critique, hadn’t thought of that, but I can handwave that away real quick. Let’s say it doesn’t pre-date shields but came at a liminal state where there were still higher-ups against their inclusion. You’d have to fight against shielded vessels but you didn’t want them in your fleet! Old-school, stubborn types in the Admiralty and such…

Regarding how the mounts switch, oh absolutely: I’d love a pop-up or hide-away version for realism reasons but for gameplay reasons, you need to be able to see what is firing at you (and what isn’t!) at all times. I’m sure there’s a better and more clever way to visualize this than my rough draft but it was only meant to convey the idea. Likewise with the “flat” design. I’m sure Alex/David could come up with something much more striking. This was more of a proof of concept/thought experiment.

Likewise, the name, the size, the mounts, etc. are all up for debate.

[Zsar]

Mmh... I think if there were a ship that changes armament mid-way throughout the fight, it really should hide the non-active weapons, should it not? We do not have infinite sensor range either and the game is richer for that. Compared to perfect information, it has its own distinct gameplay effects - as evidenced by the "Go Dark" and "Transponder" abilities - not just a lack of gameplay effect.

In a post-combat analysis as some mods provide, the weapons should of course be listed - they were observed, after all - but I dare say that even for the opposing AI, as visible through the ship API, those weapons and their stats should be hidden or possibly "unidentified" placeholders until first used / swapped in.

... That would allow future proliferation of the mechanic, e.g. in Q-Ship or Pirate variants of other, regular ships. Would be a shame to code all these additions for a single hull, after all.