Harpoon Idea

[HamsterIV]

I had an idea to make the harpoon a little more interesting:

Use the orientation of the harpoon gun, after the line is attached, to exert limited control on the target vessel. I imagine this working somewhat like how a fishing rod works on fish. By swing it left or right you can pull the fish/ship in that direction. I know it is physically impossible but it would be cool to fling an enemy ship into the ground/near by wreckage/its own teammate. Also it would give large ships a chance to retaliate against those little ships that are always dancing outside of gun range.

If you want to make this more physically possible, after the harpoon makes contact the user has three seconds to re-aim the gun before the harpoon fires a tow rocket in the desired direction. The victim ship is pulled by the tow rocket a short distance before the tow rocket runs out of fuel and disappears.

I know this would probably be a lot of work and I have no expectation of ever seeing this in game.

[Helmic]

Alternatively, have the gun blow off absurd amounts of steam as it struggles to "reel in" the other ship through raw horsepower.  Too much tension and the rope will either snap or the harpoon will be pulled out along with a small chunk of the hull.

[Mattilald Anguisad]

Tactical use of harpoon can work miracles in game as it is. You can ise it to ram other ships into you or you can use them to slingshot enemies into terains of to slingshoy yourself fast into a new direction (the stuff you can see in the wailing matches).
Maybe ad another weapon for your ideas instead.

[HamsterIV]

I have flown a few harpoon only matches and "tactical use" it not how I would describe it. They always boil down to a bunch of ships randomly bouncing off each other until one falls out of the sky.

In my 250 hours of game time I have been killed by a harpoon once. I was approaching the back of a galleon in a squid when he harpooned me and dragged me into his hull. I think the other pilot was as surprised by what happened as I was.

[N-Sunderland]

I got a beautiful harpoon kill yesterday while engineering on a Galleon. We were about to switch the ship behind us onto our right side, and I grabbed the rear harpoon and fired. They got pulled straight into a wall, and exploded.

Later in the match, I fired a harpoon, and dragged them to the wrong side of the ship. Smollett was not amused.

[Mattilald Anguisad]

Get behind me (while on my galleon) with you squid, and 5 times out 10 I'll crush you on my hull, and the rest of the times I'll catapult you fowards toward my sides (assuming I don't miss the hull).

While harpoon only matches can be a lot of fun, they are actualy a really bad display of harpoon's usefullness (too many harpoons = chaos).