Hello all!
Next stop on our tour of space: Ship Weapons. This includes a balance pass on existing weapons, and two new weapon types: Turrets and Laser Beams. But before we get there, let's talk Missiles and Cannons.
We feel it's important to not change cannons and missiles too much at this point, since they have been the staples for so long. But we have tweaked some numbers. We also intend to return to countermeasures in a little bit. Cannon II, Massive Cannon II, and Targeted Missile II in particular were in need of an identity. Rather than being a strictly worse version of the IIIs due to their capacitor and shipsim requirements, we've split the difference in these requirements between I and III so that they occupy a proper midground. Meanwhile, since the hardpoint change, Cannon I's proved a bit too capacitor effecient. Lastly, 1.5s firing time was simply too fast to fulfill cannon's identity as the perfectly average weapon option, as faster timers than that are unwieldly and we wanted design space for faster weapons. To compensate, since Cannons deal with it the most, we've reduced the module recovery malus from shipsim component damage. Massives also get a bit more definition from normal cannons via reduced Falloff. Thus:
Cannon I: Damage down from 400 to 300, capacitor up from 100 to 150
Cannon II: Capacitor down from 300 to 250, Power from 300 to 200, Cycles from 2500 to 1750.
Cannon III: Damage up from 900 to 1200. Charge up from 300 to 350.
All Cannons: Fire speed up from 1.5s to 3s.
Massive Cannon I: Damage down from 1100 to 900.
Massive Cannon II: Damage down from 1750 to 1450. Capacitor down from 500 to 400, Power from 500 to 400, Cycles from 5000 to 3750.
All Massive Cannons: Fire speed up from 1.5s to 4s. Falloff reduction down from 15% to 10%.
Missile II: Capacitor down from 500 to 400, power from 500 to 400, and Cycles from 5000 to 3750
I know, I know, "Neritus, I don't care about your wall of numbers, what was that you said about lazerz?"
New weapon modules: Turret I, Turret II, Turret III, requiring the new Captaincy skill, Turrets. These use new "projectile" ship ammo and comes in all four damage types, EM, Kinetic, Thermal, Gravitic. Compared to Cannons, Turrets have shorter range, higher firing speeds, larger clip sizes, and, most importantly, make use of a secondary, rotatable targeting cone that can be manually rotated using SHIP TURRET <dir>. If you have turrets activated on your ship and the secondary cone isn't simply pointing forward, you will actually see it drawn on your spacemap as a visual aid. For VI players, SHIP TURRET by itself will report the turret's current orientation in space. If you require anything further do let us know! Additionally, when a turret is set to autofire, the secondary targeting cone will automatically attempt to rotate towards your target. Turret rotation speed is fixed no matter your superstructure or the size of turrets you're using, but turret rotation speed can be ShipMo--. Nevermind.
New weapon modules: Laser Beam I, II, and III, requiring the new Captaincy skill, Lasers. These use the new "lens" ship ammo, which comes in only three of the four damage types: EM, Thermal, Gravitic. No kinetic, because... well... lasers. Lenses are expensive, but hold 1000 shots. Be careful about swapping ammo, though, reload times on lasers are very long, and you'll waste all those unspent charges on the lens. Compared to cannons, lasers have higher range, higher damage, reduced falloff, much higher capacitor, cycle, and power requirements, and fire slower. All told they have fantastic burst potential and overall higher dps, but less sustain. They also require that the target be in the ship's Narrow Cone. What is the Narrow Cone? If you have a laser active on your ship, you'll see a visual aid on the spacemap. It's basically a narrow arc pointing directly out from the front of your ship.
We're putting the new ship ammo types onto the Battery autofactory for now, at least until we get around to a closer look at Refineries and Autofactories. Feel free to have a look at their recipes if you care to!
Lastly, we've fixed up SF STORAGE not working properly with quantities greater than 1. Also, turns out there was an exploit to print new Components for free. Everything should work as expected now.
Happy space pew pews,
Neritus
