Exterior / roof weapons and parts

b2ku

Love the game!

I would love to see variants of the various weapons and perhaps defense rooms/parts that expose their capabilities on the exterior/roof of your ship designs. IE: cannons, lasers, launchers, point defense that can be built in the middle of your ship designs that have a 180deg or 360deg firing arc and are visible from the exterior view on the "roof" of your ship. This avoids piling up all your weapons and defenses on the "edge" of your ship designs.

If anyone knows of prior discussions on this idea let me know. Search isn't giving me much.

I very much enjoy the ship design and building aspect of cosmoteer however I'm starting to notice that because weapons and defense parts can only be placed on the outer edge of your ship, designs tend to fall into two categories:

Wall of fire: all weapons and defenses are placed one side of the ship and the battle strategy is to simply stay pointed at your enemy
Cube / Triangle of fire: weapons and defenses are placed on multiple sides and the general strategy is to change your orientation to the enemy as one side's offensive/defensive capability gets worn away.

Of course choosing to build weapons and defense in the middle of your ship entails some type of trade-off mechanic of either range, damage, reload, or health etc.

Since current weapons MUST hit enemy ships from the edge inward currently, I suppose weapons can traverse the exterior of a enemy's ship ONLY if the exterior weapon/defense part is being targeted

Thoughts?

Lafiel

Welcome to the forum.
Before your execution begins 😆 look at Trello, Wiki.
Play MP and use mods

Walt

I know I've talked at length about this in the past, but I can't find any discussions either. So I'm going to take this opportunity to explain, hopefully with some thoroughness and finality, why I won't be adding* roof weapons to Cosmoteer.

There are a handful of major problems with roof weapons:

Roof weapons are too easy to defend. You could just surround all your weapons with 20 layers of armor or a dozen stacked shields.
There is much more interior space than exterior space, meaning you wouldn't have to decide how much space to allocate between weapons and defenses or between different kinds of weapons. Those decisions are interesting for the player and help keep ship design diverse.
If roof weapons could shoot without hitting your own ship, then the shape of your ship becomes much less important and less interesting to strategize about.
Roof weapons, if they have 360 degree arcs (as I think is natural for a roof-mounted weapon), would greatly reduce the importance of maneuverability, both offensively and defensively.
Roof weapons would be less fun and more frustrating to play against since you would have fewer viable targets to shoot at, especially early in battle.
Roof weapons would make the existing perimeter weapons obsolete unless the roof weapons were extremely weak, which would feel weird and not be very fun.

*Okay, so I am probably going to add some roof weapons, but only weapons that are extremely powerful, expensive, and have major downsides (like causing collateral damage to their own ship whenever they shoot) such that you can't solely rely upon them.

Dibs

Walt maybe slide nukes into the big roof mounted category. Im also keen for a massive energy based gun, seeing as railguns already kind of fit the bill for big ballistics weapons 😁

Jenwuf

Walt
Hmm... well you could change some things there though to make it easier to balance:

1+2+3: Unfortunately armour and roof turrets will always be an issue...
However! you could force the part to be connected to a part like a heat vent, that MUST be placed on the outside of the ship.
Possibly the part acts like a target designator laser, and if destroyed makes the roof turret useless and unable to fire.

Essentially, it could be implimented like the railgun launcher is.
But instead of accelerators, its heat vents, or something else.

4: you do not need to make them have 360 degree arcs, as many turrets in real life cannot turn around the whole ship.
Maybe make them 200 degree arcs, so players have to manoeuvre their ship to let all their weapons broadside a target.
Possibly this also makes players decide whether or not to make their turrets face fowards of back, or left of right.

5: As i said for 1, 2 and 3, you could make them require an external part to function.
Maybe a cannon that fires a sticky target flare, that the roof turrets then shoot at once it hits an enemy ship.

Also, maybe when a roof turret explodes, it causes a HUGE explosion... making them a glass cannon type weapon.
+to fix the "internal space" issue, make roof turrets quite big, so people cannot spam them.

OH!
And one last bit, is that utelizing the "SourceShipCollisionDelay", you could make it so that the shot hits the shooter within a certain radius, to prevent it from being placed 20 blocks within a ship.

Edit:
image https://i.imgur.com/uho0Y9C.jpg
HMS Bellerophon, or just any other dreadnought class ship, is a good example of why not all turrets can rotate 360 degrees.
Essentially, if you could find a way of blocking a turret's rotation, roof turrets would need planning and fore-thought to work properly on a ship.

Walt

Jenwuf Also, maybe when a roof turret explodes, it causes a HUGE explosion... making them a glass cannon type weapon.
+to fix the "internal space" issue, make roof turrets quite big, so people cannot spam them.

Yeah I think this is the only way to make roof turrets viable, so you can't have too many of them. They need huge downsides, like being huge or causing huge explosions, plus probably other downsides as well.

Also, if roof turrets block line of sight for other roof turrets, then you can't just spam them infinitely deep.

Jenwuf And one last bit, is that utelizing the "SourceShipCollisionDelay", you could make it so that the shot hits the shooter within a certain radius, to prevent it from being placed 20 blocks within a ship.

I think it would be unintuitive for the player if a roof cannon shot just suddenly exploded on top of their own ship for no apparent reason.

Jenwuf HMS Bellerophon, or just any other dreadnought class ship, is a good example of why not all turrets can rotate 360 degrees.
Essentially, if you could find a way of blocking a turret's rotation, roof turrets would need planning and fore-thought to work properly on a ship.

Exactly, there needs to be some justification for why a roof turret can't rotate 360 degrees. Without multiple decks (which Cosmoteer will never have), I'm not sure what that justification would be.

bluurgh

Walt Maybe there could also be a connection between ship speed and roof turrets, making them unable to fire if you are going to fast, or having them on the ship/firing them slowing you down drastically.
It does not have to be a big bad cannon, A long range (smart) torpedo perhaps.

I don't think roof turrets need to be in the game but the more the merrier 😃

image https://i.imgur.com/70jxeye.png

(Smart torpedo, explosive charge is hot-keyed)

Tobi-wan_Kenobi

Walt huge downsides

•Heavy - maybe double the weight-per-tile of armor.
•Slow turret traverse speed. Impossible to track and fire on quick ships, only able to track targets that are moving slowly relative to the turret.
•Expensive.
•Explosive.
•Crew intensive. Many crew stations to man, many crew required for ammo supply.
•Difficult to keep supplied. Uses ammo so fast that after the initial few salvos, it fires sporadically unless you hold fire. Few crew entry points to bottleneck supply.

Atarlost

Walt Exactly, there needs to be some justification for why a roof turret can't rotate 360 degrees. Without multiple decks (which Cosmoteer will never have), I'm not sure what that justification would be.

You could do automatic decks. Some components could have increased height. Cockpits, reactors, factories, sensors, other roof turrets, railguns, 2x2 crew quarters. These would occlude roof turrets.

dafeeeeeeeeeesh

Walt
(necropost but)
you could have the size impact the arc so if you had a 360 degree large cannon it would have to be 6x6 but you could fix a large cannon to an angle to only make up 3x4 space but if you used a 180 degree cannon it would be 4x5 this would make it so if you wanted a 360 degree cannon area you could but you could also make a 180 degree cannon area for cheaper and it would take up less space the justification for this would be the cannon would have to have more hydraulic systems to move it at a wider angle more hydraulic systems= more space you could also make them take more power the wider the angle because it would take energy to move the cannon around