Harpoon (Yes, this has been done to death.)

[DrTentacles]

So, if we wanted to make the Harpoon a "real" gun, I have on simple fix.

Make it pull entirely toward the user's position, without moving the user's ship. Currently, it's based on the mass of the harpoon and 'poon-ee's ship. This change would be unrealistic, but it would make it actually useful. You could use to drag enemies out of formation so you and an ally could isolate and attack. Or, pull an enemy into a minefield. It would be gun worth taking-instant, if temporary, chaos against enemy teams, and a chance to get good at a weapon that rewards user skill.

If they changed the harpoon so it pulled your enemy into you, I'd be willing to put it on the vast majority of my ambush ships for the surprise/isolation factor.

Thoughts?

[Daft Loon]

I wouldn't mind that. You could almost justify it as some kind of mechanical feedback into the steering to compensate. Having it pull at 50%,25% etc on the users ship would also be possible.

[Arturo Sanchez]

Velocity of the ships pull is highly affected by distance.

The longer distance the hit the harder the ram.

Imagine a ship flying towards you in paritan at twice the speed of moonshine squid and just before it slams into you it kills itself on a nearby building.

Naturally this speed would be from hitting at the very max range of a poon.

[Daft Loon]

Maybe to avoid building pulls being too strong something like the user taking 75% linear pull, 50% angular pull or thereabouts.

[Arturo Sanchez]

Maybe to avoid building pulls being too strong something like the user taking 75% linear pull, 50% angular pull or thereabouts.

Kind of reminds me of the old behaviour of the poon...

[Byron Cavendish]

Man, if the harpoon functioned like in mad max, or near like in mad max, it would be amazing. A true disable weapon that could pull guns or components off of ships for a limited or full (until the ship respawned) amount of time, lot's of different options for dynamic combat. And if they could match the way the car in mad max moves when it's harpooned something, that would be the real exciting thing.

[DJ Logicalia]

Bottom line, the harpoon needs to work as a gun. The fact that there's a weapon that's in the game that is entirely broken is completely unacceptable

[Daft Loon]

Maybe for a start to making it useful swap out the pointless balloon damage (9 shots needed!) to mercury level shatter damage. To simulate more thorough disabling maybe have the harpoon lock the cool-down on components for as long as the rope lasts preventing repair/rebuild, probably only guns/engines though.

[Arturo Sanchez]

Maybe for a start to making it useful swap out the pointless balloon damage (9 shots needed!) to mercury level shatter damage. To simulate more thorough disabling maybe have the harpoon lock the cool-down on components for as long as the rope lasts preventing repair/rebuild, probably only guns/engines though.

burst poon might become a thing. And make even less sense.

[Koali]

Maybe for a start to making it useful swap out the pointless balloon damage (9 shots needed!) to mercury level shatter damage. To simulate more thorough disabling maybe have the harpoon lock the cool-down on components for as long as the rope lasts preventing repair/rebuild, probably only guns/engines though.

burst poon might become a thing. And make even less sense.

But that's what would make it fun!

[Dryykon]

Bottom line, the harpoon needs to work as a gun. The fact that there's a weapon that's in the game that is entirely broken is completely unacceptable

[Extirminator]

Before thinking how to make it work, which we all know will take weeks if not months to come up with an idea and then implement it, why not in the meanwhile revert the gun to the previous state that actually functioned? Instead of keeping a gun in the game that does absolutely nothing to contribute to gameplay.
while a suitable replacement or rework is worked on, the least you could do is compensate for already a few months of having a broken gun in the game by giving us the older version that worked...

[Daft Loon]

The old force combined with the current click to (barely) pull and a bit of 'free' time to decide to activate or not before you start losing pull time would make for a semi-useful gun with a probably fairly limited implementation effort.

[Extirminator]

Everything has a fairly small implementation time. It's the question of do we wanna work on skirmish or co-op for the decision makers.

Also, the current harpoon doesn't pull in, all it does is attach to the ship hit by it and make the physics into a problem with two masses connected by a string - similar to the co-op balloon you can connect to your ship. And the change to the harpoon wasn't a feature but a bug, which I assume was caused due to the development of exactly that balloon in co-op because of the similarities of both mechanics and the timeline of the changes.

[Daft Loon]

There is a pull, triggered instead of zoom. It is however really weak, to the point that it takes multiple shots to pull a target dummy from its deploy range to collision.