Author Topic: Zenith (concept for a new ship)  (Read 23359 times)

Offline redria

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Re: Zenith (concept for a new ship)
« Reply #30 on: March 17, 2014, 12:46:40 pm »
2 front light guns, 2 rear light guns, and a heavy gun on each side.
The 2 front facing guns are each angled 20-30 degrees away from the center-line of the ship, so the point forwards and out. The 2 back facing guns have similar angles, just facing backwards.
Mass at 175: Less than a pyramidion, but higher than anything else. Capable of ramming, but not set to out-do the ramming ship.
600 Armor
1000 Permahull
Speed 32m/s
Acceleration 3m/s2
Turning Speed 9 degrees/s
Turning Acceleration 5 degrees/s2
Vertical Speed 17.03 m/s
Vertical Acceleration 3.25 m/s2

Basically from the firepower you want to pack on this thing, I see a light galleon. You also want to get rid of blind-spots, and keep maneuverability. You can't have it all.
Rolling with the light galleon idea, and the lack of blind spots, I gave it the ability to get coverage on every angle, with the drawback of poor overlaps. This means you can always keep a gun on an enemy, but the odds of getting 2 at once are much lower.
Since weapon combos are the strongest part of a build, and my design takes those away from you, I gave it good speed and decent acceleration. I left it having the highest vertical speed and upped its vertical acceleration a bit due to what I took away in other areas.
I nerfed your turn speed/acceleration because you have no blind-spots. You shouldn't need to turn as much.

I would leave the captain on a raised plinth at the back of the ship.
Standing in the middle of the ship, facing backwards, would be a set of stairs going directly up to the wheel. The plinth would be raised above head height, and there would be 2 support columns at the back of it holding it up. You would be able to walk underneath. Underneath I would put the balloon, with appropriate tubes going out around the pilot's plinth up to the balloon.
On that main deck there would be 2 engines split wide. An engineer could easily access the 2 turning engines and the balloon (similar to a junker, but below the pilot spot).
On the bottom deck would be the 2 heavy guns and the main engine.
On the top deck again would be the hull towards the front, a small walk from the balloon. The 2 front guns would be on the main deck.
On the pilot's plinth, behind him, above the turning engines, would be the 2 aft guns.

Upon further consideration, this would be a heavy junker/light galleon.

The big consideration in movement design for players would be to make sure that they could easily move between guns. Since you sacrifice a lot for continuous coverage, you need to make sure that players can actually maintain that continuous coverage.

Offline Milevan Faent

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Re: Zenith (concept for a new ship)
« Reply #31 on: March 17, 2014, 04:38:04 pm »
2 front light guns, 2 rear light guns, and a heavy gun on each side.
The 2 front facing guns are each angled 20-30 degrees away from the center-line of the ship, so the point forwards and out. The 2 back facing guns have similar angles, just facing backwards.
Mass at 175: Less than a pyramidion, but higher than anything else. Capable of ramming, but not set to out-do the ramming ship.
600 Armor
1000 Permahull
Speed 32m/s
Acceleration 3m/s2
Turning Speed 9 degrees/s
Turning Acceleration 5 degrees/s2
Vertical Speed 17.03 m/s
Vertical Acceleration 3.25 m/s2

Basically from the firepower you want to pack on this thing, I see a light galleon. You also want to get rid of blind-spots, and keep maneuverability. You can't have it all.
Rolling with the light galleon idea, and the lack of blind spots, I gave it the ability to get coverage on every angle, with the drawback of poor overlaps. This means you can always keep a gun on an enemy, but the odds of getting 2 at once are much lower.
Since weapon combos are the strongest part of a build, and my design takes those away from you, I gave it good speed and decent acceleration. I left it having the highest vertical speed and upped its vertical acceleration a bit due to what I took away in other areas.
I nerfed your turn speed/acceleration because you have no blind-spots. You shouldn't need to turn as much.

I would leave the captain on a raised plinth at the back of the ship.
Standing in the middle of the ship, facing backwards, would be a set of stairs going directly up to the wheel. The plinth would be raised above head height, and there would be 2 support columns at the back of it holding it up. You would be able to walk underneath. Underneath I would put the balloon, with appropriate tubes going out around the pilot's plinth up to the balloon.
On that main deck there would be 2 engines split wide. An engineer could easily access the 2 turning engines and the balloon (similar to a junker, but below the pilot spot).
On the bottom deck would be the 2 heavy guns and the main engine.
On the top deck again would be the hull towards the front, a small walk from the balloon. The 2 front guns would be on the main deck.
On the pilot's plinth, behind him, above the turning engines, would be the 2 aft guns.

Upon further consideration, this would be a heavy junker/light galleon.

The big consideration in movement design for players would be to make sure that they could easily move between guns. Since you sacrifice a lot for continuous coverage, you need to make sure that players can actually maintain that continuous coverage.

This can work, but it removes the unique idea of changing the gun positions. I'll have to think more on this.

Offline redria

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Re: Zenith (concept for a new ship)
« Reply #32 on: March 17, 2014, 04:51:29 pm »
Naturally more tweaks would actually be needed, but the problem with having gun swapping is that you ask the devs to put a massive amount of work into creating a feature not already in the game, to add a gimmick that doesn't necessarily add that much to gameplay. No ship has a distinctly unique feature like that that stands out from the rest. All ships are just different in layout and hardpoint locations. There is nothing inherently unique about any of them outside of their layout.

I can understand wanting to add something unique like that to the game, but you always have to keep in mind the limitations of what we are working with. This isn't a big studio. It is an indy developer supported initially by kickstarter. Everything takes more time than it would elsewhere, so each new characteristic like that must be carefully considered before the devs even think about looking at it.