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Author Topic: Underslung Weapon Mounts  (Read 901 times)

Vanshilar

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Re: Underslung Weapon Mounts
« Reply #15 on: March 19, 2023, 01:03:38 AM »

I've considered this before, basically "what would it cost to buy an extra weapon mount". The closest analogy we have in the game is of course Converted Hangar, through which we can buy an omnidirectional mount that can provide a variety of weapon functions, such as hard flux (Broadswords, etc.), EMP damage (Claw, Xyphos), burst damage (Dagger, etc.), PD (Sparks, Xyphos, etc.), and so forth.

Realistically, I think a balancing lever for such a mount, if it existed, would likely have to be increasing the ship's DP, similar to the new Converted Hangar. A new mount is simply too strong. Off the top of my head:

* Adding a large missile enables Squall spam, which makes it a lot easier to deal with tougher fleets, especially Ordos fleets.
* As already mentioned, adding ballistics to High Tech ships shores up one of their biggest weaknesses, the inability to deal hard flux at long range.
* A bit more subtle is that adding an energy mount or two could help with some Low Tech ships or otherwise non-energy ships, for example a medium energy mount could allow them to mount an Ion Beam, especially since they can apply hard flux at long range.
* Something like the Falcon (P) being able to mount a Cryoblaster would be crazy fun...and scary.
* Many ships that use Safety Overrides could use more mounts, depending on their OP. Since the Hyperion is the poster child for SO I'll throw that here as well.

I can think of plenty of examples of ships that would benefit greatly from another weapon mount, even if it's limited to a weapon mount that they already have. Some examples off the top of my head:

* Any ship that already has a large missile would of course benefit a lot from another large missile mount.
* Many ships that rely on burst (especially phase ships) could benefit from another mount.
* Gryphon could of course benefit from another missile mount. But more than that, a second medium ballistic would mean it could put another HVD, helping to keep other ships at bay.
* Fury could benefit from a second energy mount, to mount dual Cryoblasters. One of the main reasons why I'll usually use Medusa as flagship if I'm going High Tech is that it's one of the cheaper ships that can mount dual Cryoblasters.
* Similarly, Aurora could benefit from more Cryoblasters or more Minipulsers -- in this case, I feel like some of its synergy instead of energy mounts actually weaken it somewhat by preventing it from using more Omega weapons. Though synergy could mean more missiles which would be useful too.
* Champion could use another medium hybrid mount, so that it could use 3 HVD along with its Squall and HIL. That third HVD helps out its offensive power and hard flux a lot, to enable it to use its HIL goodness.
* Apogee could benefit from another mount that pointed forward (in addition to the craziness if it had 2 large energy or 2 large missile mounts).
* Eradicator with another medium ballistic mount would mean that it could potentially just ditch its small ballistics, or at least not use them much. After all, a new weapon mount could replace the use of an existing mount, rather than supplementing them. An HVD will contribute about as much overall battle DPS as 3 Railguns with BRF, or 4 Railguns without BRF, but only cost around 2/3 of the overall OP (including flux usage), making it a better choice.
* I highly suspect that Conquest with 3 Mjolnirs would actually do more overall battle DPS than Conquest with 2 Mjolnirs and 2 HVD's, and it has the flux to support that. For Conquest with dual Squall / dual Mjolnir / dual HVD / dual Harpoon, the HVD's did around 40% of the damage of the Mjolnirs, so the two HVD's did about 80% of one Mjolnir, and mounting 1 Mjolnir instead of 2 HVD means it gains 12 OP due to HBI.

I'm sure I could come up with a lot more examples, these are just off the top of my head from playing around with (mostly) cruisers recently. In all these cases, the ships could have enough OP to pay for the extra mount, if that OP cost isn't too high. So it really depends on the cost/penalty.

A potential way to limit the power of this is to make it so that you can only install a mount that's one size smaller than one that's already on the ship. That might make it too weak though, if you can only add mediums/smalls on ships that have the corresponding larges/mediums. Maybe just make it so that larges can't be installed in this way but only mediums and smalls. After all, large mounts presumably take up too much space to retrofit afterward (like a battleship's turrets, which extends down most of the height of the ship).

Another way to keep it in check may be to reduce the fire rate (increase the refire delay). Having an extra Mjolnir may not be as overpowered if that extra Mjolnir fires only half as often, for example. Similarly, beams may have their DPS cut in half (or some other fraction). If this is the case, then making it built-in could reduce that penalty somewhat, i.e. say to firing at 2/3 the rate instead for example.

Mentally I think of this as a ventral weapons pod, like what's on the underside of the Arilou Skiff (can be seen here). In which case it makes sense lore-wise that it gets whatever penalties it has. Easier to disable because it's on the outside of the ship's armor as something installed after original manufacture, etc. Same thing with a ventral missile bay/pod.
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