- Edited
I'd like to state that others helped with the initial conceptualization of a fair few of these ideas.
I suggest that there be a heat based resource which could have different potential purposes, but primarily serving as an ingredient to alternative utility ammunition that trades damage for firestarting. From here on out I'll just refer to it as Scorium for convenience and because it sounds cool.
- Ammunition for plasmathrowers
Plasma throwers could be implimented by using scorium as a direct fuel source rather than energy. They could potentially use energy primarily and be enhanced with limited scorium to deal more damage to melt through armor (maybe turning red flames blue?), rather than be limited to light damage as stated in the trello.
- Incendiary Ammunition
Incendiary ammunition, an alternative to regular ammo, would be produced using scorium and serve a utility purpose of causing more fire at the cost of reducing damage. Higher penetration and velocity when used in cannons or railguns for the sake of piercing armor and causing fires, but dealing practically no direct damage (maybe tritanium armor can bounce shots or outright stop penetration?). Perhaps incendiary rounds could fragment randomly midflight, further reducing damage of each shard but ultimately causing more fires. Cannons and railgun loaders would recieve different modes, similar to missile launchers, that can accept [Armor Piercing?] flame rounds.
< Silly idea that might be popular or worth considering is flak use flame rounds to increase damage at the cost of defensive firing, since defensive firing was already a utility function.
- Inflammatory MIRVs
Similar to incendiary ammunition, you could use scorium to make MIRV parts. A missile launcher would hold a MIRV that moves similar to an EMP, but splits into 5 HE-like missiles when near an enemy that then cause fires. MIRVs would be similar to EMPs: hard to avoid and rapid missiles that deal effectively no direct damage. Alternative form might be a clusterbomb, where after homing into sufficient proximity releases several unguided flame-causing charges.
- Reactor Overcharge
Scorium could be used to overcharge reactors and boosting energy production, perhaps spawning fires in or near the reactor. Should totally color the reactor with a red or orange hue as it's being boosted.
< Increased energy production could come in the form of producing more regular lime batteries, or by producing red batteries that are worth more raw energy such that a weapon can fire for longer when fed by red batteries.
< Blocks that recieve red batteries, storages and shields especially, could have an increasing chance per battery to randomly spawn fires, to disincentize stocking up before a fight. Is a more interesting alternative to red batteries reverting to lime (less energy dense) over time at least. Something needs to counterbalance the higher effectiveness of the batteries, which may just be rarity/price of scorium
- Thruster Overcharge
Scorium could be used to overcharge thrusters or engine rooms, doing some combination with varying results of decreasing ramp up time, increasing raw thrust, and making thrust exhaust deal damage (perhaps extending the dead zone mid-match so that internal thrusters burn away your insides). These benefits come at the obvious cost of limited scorium, but overcharged thrusters could start fires or require direct access to deliver scorium (and to put out otherwise isolated fires), rather than routing it through an engine room.
< Rather than the relatively vanilla buffs, scorium could change thrusters functionally into pulse engines: expending all their energy and scorium at once to provide a massive burst of thrust. It'd be cool to see such pulses used offensively to cut through opponent ships at extremely close range, or to pull off otherwise impossible manuevers.
Concerns
"Why add any of this?"
Besides 'why not,' having more weapon systems, different approaches and win conditions would encourage diversity in ship-building, and by adding more variables it helps prevent the game becoming 'solved' like it sort of is now, where a few ship archetypes dominate and everything else is unviable.
"Won't the game already be different enough with the newer version?"
Admittedly yes, and the goal above be satisfied, but adding a few or all of these ideas helps ensure it, and it's incredibly cool. Imagine if you will a ship is losing a battle, but suddenly all the reactors start glowing red and it's shields harden to indestructible and its weapons refuse to power off as it pounces forward, coming apart at the seams in search of a pyrrihc victory.
"Seems frivolous at best and Walt's a busy man"
Fortunately this type of implementation of new concepts is easier, simply because it builds off of existing blocks and structures that don't have to be rebuilt from the ground up. New artwork, as an example, isn't as necessary because the difference is just ammunition being used, rather than something like a tesla coil needing a new block, new lightning visuals, new mechanics and code to support/generate lightning visuals and the projectile itself, etc.
"Scorium is a dumb name"
Scorium was just my favorite out of a list of thermal sounding names. Alternatives that may strike one's fancy are: Blazia, Incendium, Infernium, Pyratine, Scorchine, Thermine, Thermium. Ultimately it's just a naturally hot resource.
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