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[whatdoesthisbuttondo]

For a ship that is basically built around a giant hull-integrated weapon, I'm curious if the following is possible.

The ship itself will feature standard weaponry, and an extreme burst-damage energy beam weapon, basically a doomsday device capable of one-shot killing a capital with considerable AoE splash at the impact site.

Now I'd like this to have a spool-up time before firing, and a couple of side-effects on the firing ship:

1) During spool-up, successively deactivate ship systems: first drop shields, then deactivate all other weapons, then engine flameout

- if the player decides to stop the firing process here, bring these systems online again -

2) When the weapon is fired, immediately put the firing ship in 'overloaded' state, and put all ship systems offline for a set duration, then activate them again in this order: shields -> weapons -> engines


Is something like this possible?

[Tartiflette]

Everything's quite doable except for

- if the player decides to stop the firing process here, bring these systems online again

On the other hand I'd advise against such ship gameplay-wise: getting your precious capital ship one-shotted without any possible defense isn't exactly fun.

[whatdoesthisbuttondo]

Thanks, I guess being able to stop the firing process would only be a minor concern.

As far as gameplay goes, I do understand your concern, though I don't think it is that much of an issue with SS mechanics as the player can always transfer to another ship in their fleet.

More of an issue probably could be the AI using such a weapon sensibly though, and nuking a random fighter instead of a cruiser that is approaching...

[celestis]

I guess you can make this weapon system-activatable. And for a system you can add disabling acceleration, turn, weapons and shields. All at once, though. But otherwise there will be no way to bring all this back on cancel.

[Farlarzia]

Being able to transfer to another ship doesn't really balance it though, the fact still remains that getting one shot by something is still really sucky, especially if its in your big expensive rare capital that you spend ages acquiring the money and looking for.

[whatdoesthisbuttondo]

Being able to transfer to another ship doesn't really balance it though, the fact still remains that getting one shot by something is still really sucky, especially if its in your big expensive rare capital that you spend ages acquiring the money and looking for.

Of course not, I hope to get some reasonable balance from the RoF (currently looking at 1 shot every 5 minutes, while it starts without charge upon entering combat), and the fact that the ships are rather low on firepower compared to vanilla (battlecruisers with 2-3 large turrets, 2-4 small turrets for point defense purposes, plus 8-16 harpoon missiles in 2-4 built-in silos to the broadsides).

The general shape and shield coverage also makes them extremely vulnerable to small strike craft, so for the player there would always be the option to simply not field their shiny ship, and take out the threat with fighters or frigates/destroyers instead.

The thing is, without straying too much from canon lore for the faction (which I do not want to), there is no way around a deathray that kills anything it hits, and possibly even punches through to the ship behind the initial target.