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[Sergius]

It would be pretty cool if instead of having some abstract "shield value" there was angled shields so that you have to put them around your ship to get good coverage.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

I hope this change mean they are willing to consider shields too.

Why not have a plating that can be grinded through easily and is not able to be used structurally, but is immune to Gatling weapons and completely stops explosive weapons for one hit?

.......and after all that, we just get a magical "superscience" jump drive that teleports your ship after all.

Why didn't they just uncap speed and have physics besides collision stop applying after the current maximum to prevent ships from shredding?

[Execute/Dumbo.exe]

I hope this change mean they are willing to consider shields too.

Why not have a plating that can be grinded through easily and is not able to be used structurally, but is immune to Gatling weapons and completely stops explosive weapons for one hit?

.......and after all that, we just get a magical "superscience" jump drive that teleports your ship after all.

Why didn't they just uncap speed and have physics besides collision stop applying after the current maximum to prevent ships from shredding?

But it's space, why would going much faster than the current speed maximum shred your ship without removing certain aspects of physics?

[n9103]

Plus the already mentioned physics frames are more or less incompatible with both higher speeds and reasonable collisions. (i.e. pick one)

[Sensei]

Powerful computers can handle a speed cap a good deal higher than the default. However, as speeds climb into the hundreds of meters per second, reacting to anything depends on having a great framerate. There's the matter of draw distance too, if that's too low with a high speed cap you might have a surprise collision with an asteroid before you can do anything.

So, the speed cap is set pretty conservatively, to make the game less awful to play on mediocre setups. I'm sure that having playable dogfights (as opposed to shooting at a streak of color for a split second before turning around to do it again over and over) was a factor in the low speed cap too.

[Sergius]

Why not use vector collision detection, if frame rate is an issue?

[BurnedToast]

I hope this change mean they are willing to consider shields too.

Why not have a plating that can be grinded through easily and is not able to be used structurally, but is immune to Gatling weapons and completely stops explosive weapons for one hit?

How could they make it not able to be used structurally? Just make it unable to "connect" except for one side? Then you couldn't layer it.

IMO (if they aren't going to add shields) large ship heavy armor (and large ship blast doors and *maybe* airtight hanger doors) should be immune (or 99.9% reduced damage) from gatling turrets. It's really obscene how fast they slice through it because they can all focus fire on the exact same point. Rockets don't have the same problem because if they focus fire, the first rocket blows the rest up and only one does damage.

Then people would just build walls of rocket launchers, but at least they have to be manually aimed and rockets are expensive so it would be a little better.

Powerful computers can handle a speed cap a good deal higher than the default. However, as speeds climb into the hundreds of meters per second, reacting to anything depends on having a great framerate. There's the matter of draw distance too, if that's too low with a high speed cap you might have a surprise collision with an asteroid before you can do anything.

So, the speed cap is set pretty conservatively, to make the game less awful to play on mediocre setups. I'm sure that having playable dogfights (as opposed to shooting at a streak of color for a split second before turning around to do it again over and over) was a factor in the low speed cap too.

The game process 60 physics updates per second no matter how fast your computer is. Even the current speed limit is enough to warp very small objects through each other.

They could increase the physics updates per second (unless there's some limit in havok) but that would severely impact performance, even on high end computers.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

They could increase the physics updates per second (unless there's some limit in havok) but that would severely impact performance, even on high end computers.

Why not just make it a setting that only applies to single player and changes to what the server uses when joining that server (server being set when one is launched)?

[BurnedToast]

They could increase the physics updates per second (unless there's some limit in havok) but that would severely impact performance, even on high end computers.

Why not just make it a setting that only applies to single player and changes to what the server uses when joining that server (server being set when one is launched)?

Because it wouldn't make much difference, it would be a lot of work for nothing. Doubling the speed would require them to double the physics UPS, which would more or less double the CPU load. Even high end computers would struggle with double the CPU load, and for what? 208.8 is still far, far too slow.

They can't really increase the speed enough to matter without making the game grind to a halt on any existing hardware.

[Aseaheru]

IMO (if they aren't going to add shields) large ship heavy armor (and large ship blast doors and *maybe* airtight hanger doors) should be immune (or 99.9% reduced damage) from gatling turrets. It's really obscene how fast they slice through it because they can all focus fire on the exact same point. Rockets don't have the same problem because if they focus fire, the first rocket blows the rest up and only one does damage.

What, did they nerf heavy armor? Last I knew, heavy armor made cannon fire near useless.

[BurnedToast]

IMO (if they aren't going to add shields) large ship heavy armor (and large ship blast doors and *maybe* airtight hanger doors) should be immune (or 99.9% reduced damage) from gatling turrets. It's really obscene how fast they slice through it because they can all focus fire on the exact same point. Rockets don't have the same problem because if they focus fire, the first rocket blows the rest up and only one does damage.

What, did they nerf heavy armor? Last I knew, heavy armor made cannon fire near useless.

Heavy armor has never made cannon fire useless, and I have no idea why people think it does.  A large heavy armor block has 15,000 integrity.  Gatling guns do 60 damage per shot at 600 RPM - which equals 600 dps. Thus a single gatling turret takes 25 seconds to punch through a heavy armor block.

Sounds good right? But you're never going to encounter only a single gatling turret on an actual warship. Let's say the enemy has 5 of them (which is still a pretty low amount). Now that block is shredded in 5 seconds.  Or more likely, I built a smallish warship that has 12 gatling turrets it can bring to bear on the same target. That's about 2 seconds to punch through a layer of heavy armor.

You're building a small ship? small ship gatlings have 700 rpm with the same damage, so 700 dps. A wall of 25 gatling guns is cheap as hell and will punch through a large heavy armor block in less than one second (actually I'm not 100% sure 25 gatlings will focus on a single block so maybe not).

Layer more armor? sure. But heavy armor is heavy, and you need to cover the whole ship since you can't know what part will be shot at. Turrets and gatling guns are both *very* cheap, and reasonably light so you can stack tons of them on there.

[forsaken1111]

Can't you make decoy pods, with decoy blocks surrounded with heavy armor? Heh.

I remember someone showing off an automated factory that shat out armored decoys to confuse turrets.

[Creaca]

Layer more armor? sure. But heavy armor is heavy, and you need to cover the whole ship since you can't know what part will be shot at. Turrets and gatling guns are both *very* cheap, and reasonably light so you can stack tons of them on there.

This is a point I'll disagree on. One of the major parts of ship armor design (And really any design involving armor) is engineering yourself with limitations for your task.

If you're going to be designing a Destroyer meant for attacking a Station or other Heavy Warship, you'll likely want your Bow heavily armored for taking the brunt of punishment from Slow Moving or Immobile targets. You can afford to be less armored on your Aft side because the targets your designing around aren't likely going to be able to capitalize on that.

As just an offhand real life example, you can look at Tank design. Or, perhaps far more relevant, ship design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Naval_armour

Adding more firepower to counter heavy armor is a perfectly reasonable strategy, however (And this is extremely the case for small fighters) is every weapon is also a vulnerability.

Each Turret is a  block with less defense than a typical light armor block, and (Unless you're a masochist or only designing ships to work in Creative mode) an armor-less conveyer system beneath it.

And while each Gatling gun is a very cheap block that can en masse chew through heavy armor, you do have this balanced around fact that the Turrets you're flying into will chew through undefended weapons much quicker, at a farther range.

[Sergius]

That's why in real life, plinking heavy tank armors with machineguns will do 0 damage no matter how many are shot at it, and you actually need to make bigger cannons. The thicker the armor, the bigger the cannon just to make a dent. No hit points.

Still, the arms-vs-armor race will favor the weapon side but it's not as ridiculous as when you have the death of a thousand papercuts.

[jocan2003]

Heavy armor need a damage threshold or damage reduction thingy, if it does less han say X damage apply no damage.