Geoff the Medio wrote:
I'd still prefer not to earmark particular slots for particular types of parts. Rather, I'd just have 2-5 generic internal slots that can be filled as a ship designer desires. This way, you can sacrifice having any armour or shields in order to make space for other parts in a specialized ship design.... or add multiple shield and armour parts to make an extra tough ship, or an extra engine to make it extra fast, etc.
Agree.
Geoff the Medio wrote:
That said, some general restrictions on ship design such as "must have at least one FTL engine" would probably be necessary.
Yes, although if you designed a ship with no FTL engine or no engine at all, and built it. Well it may still be useful. Its a stationary defense platform that is extremely cheap (no engines!). So do we even need to restrict such things.
Geoff the Medio wrote:
Not all engines will necessarily be rocket-like, and needing to be at and point in the direction of the back. Various Star Trek ships had nacelles on the sides, for example. I suspect utilae will want to have some sort of sail-engine that attaches on the front. Something like a gravitic drive could function regardless of where it's located within a ship.
Yes, I would like sail engines very much. In any case, assuming rocket style engines, it is just as likely that a player could have engines on the back, sides and front of the ship. In space ships don't fly like a plane does in air, so a ship could travel forward, then activate full reverse if needed. It might seem unusual to have engines on all sides of the ship, but imagine the strategies that could be employed.
Geoff the Medio wrote:
Is it impossible to make ship models that have an obvious "front" and "back", but which don't have obvious "engines" in the base model? If we have parts, such as engines, appear on the model, then they can both appear to and actually be at the same, arbitrary, location...
Ugly ships (without obvious front) look cool anyway. I think you could identify the front of a players ship as the side with the most weapons/weapon coverage. The player would likely want that side of the ship facing the enemies, rather than the side with no weapons. So you could have some kind of line of sight/laser sight to show the 'fronts' of the ships.
eleazar wrote:
To streamline the internal parts, several kinds components (marked with *) could be assumed to be installed even without taking up a slot. For instance all ships might come standard with minimal shields and sensors, but to enhance either a slot must be used.
Probably not necesary. That could count as the base structure of a ship (without armour). In anycase, if you say the ship has a computer, shields or armour, even in basic form, the player might want to remove those or have that option. So just say that the base structure of the ship is that part. And assume no shields, no computers, etc unless the player adds those parts. Some things which really take little space, eg computers could be auto installed without taking a slot, but you could put in a super computer core to take a slot. So there may be some cases to do this.
eleazar wrote:
...engine should be limited to a subset of external slot(s). I don't think we need to deal with the ramifications of an engine placed on the nose. However at this point i can't think of any other necessary restrictions on what can go where.
I want to see the ramifications. The ship could fly full speed into strike range, then start firing and activate full reverse to get a good hit and run tactic going. And yes, it could be posible to have spacial related engines, that can work from the ships internal sections.
eleazar wrote:
"Facing must matter."
An obvious ramification, "The player must be able to figure out what the facing is."
The most obvious way to do this, is to put the engines on the ship-model pointing away from the front. Instantly understandable by all players. The engines will obviously appear to be in a particular location on the ship. Allowing the player to "locate" the engines in another place where they obviously aren't is not sensible.
If like you say the model is based on its parts, then problem solved.
eleazar wrote:
Also i'd like to make the fighters with the same slot system as the bigger ships. Fighters might have only 2 or 3 capacity-1 slots, and obviously no star-lane drive, i.e. not much room for customization, but you still get to choose the weaponry. MoO treated them as automatically generated ammo, which seems over-simplistic compared to the rest of the game.
Moo3 made missles and fighters as little ships. We could do the same, and for example put a stealth generator, or laser or missiles in to the fighter. Put a shield device into the missile, etc. Then the component 'fighter bay' / 'missile salvo' could be put in a slot. 'Fighter bay' could hold 5 fighters.
And if you can design fighters and missiles, then can you design mines, and other devices that may need snazzy features such as stealth, onboard mini weapons, etc. The result could be great depth in strategy.