Hardpoints, Heat, Cooling and You.

[SpiralRazor]

Heat Allowance Questions:

What is the maximum heat allowance for a single mounting position?

Does it change via ship or class? Is there any item or skill in the game that can increase heat allowance?

Is there a difference in heat allowance between a fixed position and a turret?


Cooling Questions:

Weapon Heatsinks actively reduce per shot heat counts and are capped at 5 mods per crafted weapon.(I believe this should be doubled btw, to 10.) This one is easily seen.

Equipment Heatsinks add to the cooling value of the ship in some manner that im not quite understanding. For ease of discussion, lets use the Titans base cooling of 50% per mounting position. How do equipment Heatsinks further work with this value?

Is it ever possible to achieve 100% cooling?


Talent Questions:

How does the Beam Cooling talent of 10% apply? Is it flat ? In what order is it applied in?

[Laious]

In the ship setup (or hangar) it says at the bottom of the stats how much cooling you currently have per second. So in fact you can achieve 100%, which means the weapon slot will be entirely cool within 1 second.
Right now every weapon slot has a limit of 100 points, when it gets over 90 it begins shutdown to cool.
It needs some more work like damage when overheating too much, or different heat allowance per slot type..

[SpiralRazor]

100 points are problematic though...because even the basic drops like heavy plasma cannon and charging heavy laser generate 116 heat in one shot causing them to immediately overheat and shut down.

The heat system needs to be overhauled or the limit of each hardpoint increased beyond 100 to even use basic store bought weapons.

[Laious]

its not a big problem because overheating right now takes the same amount of time to cool, either it being from 150 or 110 heat. So you can still use any weapon, just have to wait a bit between shots. I realise it needs more work, different limits, but it's not a priority right now.
Thanks for your feedback tho :)

[SpiralRazor]

Understood, but it makes those weapons unusable since if they fire faster then 1 shot per second, it only fires one shot and goes on a longer cooldown then its refire rate would be. In essence you are paying lots of extra space etc for a weapon that only is ever able to deal half, and in some cases, 1/10th of its DPS. Its even worse when it comes to burst fire weapons because it immediately puts them on cooldown AND restarts its firing sequence cooldown modifier from burst fire. You cannot "wait between shots" as a single shot knocks out the whole hardpoint.

[Laious]

If you put rapid fire where each shot do less than lets say 80 heat, you still get the benefit from high cooling, you just have to be careful to wait when shooting. The problem starts when a single shot heats more than 80, 90.. Energy beams and really fast firing do not suffer from that. So I guess for now in endgame some weapon types should be avoided.

[phoenix_54d]

Was watching (and spent about 2 hours tinkering on crafting myself) a friend with early-access and as far as I can tell the balance on the bottom crafting options is going to need some fine-tuning especially with scaling but has a lot of potential. A few of the pitfalls when crafting at the moment:

Cores Right now, adding more cores is mostly detrimental. Energy usage seems direct (always same ratio per number of cores) but otherwise: Adding a 2nd core gives you 90% of the damage and 94% of the heat generation than if you'd simply installed two of the weapon. Technically the single weapon would require less boosters, but their rapid and drastic effect on space requirements can mean that it gets too high too fast anyways

Smaller ships will want a way to upgrade things: As is multiple weapons is generally more effective due to heat and total damage than one heavily boosted ones, but the smaller ships also have less spaces to work with and can't really use the crafting upgrades as a result since Space reqs go up so fast.

Boosters For their space, their effect's a bit low particularly the heatsinks.
The ship mounted sinks don't appear to affect anything other than the cooling rate and do not increase your heat capacity, so those bigger weapons overheat immediately anyways if they'd fire over the limit (seems to help with the weaker kinds of weapons if they're given the Rapid treatment though)

Mods Things get multiplied a bit ridiculously here with the mods: A blue beam laser that wants to lower its heat output to 46/second is now size 3 if you have the special engineering point... 4 otherwise. That's enough for a whole second weapon. Making a weapon into a Heavy Mount increases damage and range, and lower efficiency's fine, but it's more than doubling the costs: double space, more than double heat, more than double energy cost or +60% ammo per shot, and more materials. As-is engineering-upgraded pair of 1-core Blue Lasers with 3 range boosts each would be significantly more efficient damage/DPS per space and only slightly worse in energy and heat usage per point of space than a single heavy laser.

More weapons need to have access to interesting things, like your Piercing Lasers (which can't be crafted but can be bought). I'm sure anyone who's played panzer dragoon would love to see Continuous applied to a missile launcher somehow for expensive screens full of twisty homing beam somehow. AP's pretty nice but few things are allowed to equip it.

Missiles I was devastated to discover that the burst form only basically rapid-fires them while holding the button, rather than firing off a swarm. "Rapid" is flat out a trap for these as well, as the ammo use will skyrocket while damage does not increase as fast.

Obviously this is still early (you're probably aware you can craft core-less weapons entirely, using a booster as a base), and the numbers will almost certainly see several passes on the way, so, looking forward to it.

[SpiralRazor]

Ah...you beat me to it lol......I was about to give roughly the same analysis.

in short, the math is way off for crafting. IE, Just take a look at the DPS loss from adding Burst more then 3 times to anything..yet costs skyrocket for every other parameter as your dps goes down:)

As far as i can tell, currently, the only thing to build past size 1 is for base busting...using ranged mods and heat sinks to keep your heat below 90 per second cause of the heat cap. You just need enoujgh to stay out of range of most of there weapons and overcome the shield regen rate.

[Laious]

Sorry on the delay to answer you guys, both were very interesting analysis :)
This is a very first crafting version, pretty much the same as alpha, so yeah need improvement.

What would you say would be urgent changes to make on it?

[SpiralRazor]

Thank you for the response Laious!

Fixes as in right now? The best and easiest fix (For Now) is to scale turret heat caps according to ship class. It would also be a QOL option to have a piece of equipment that could increase heat cap as well. These changes would allow larger ships to actually fire the larger weapons available at for sale at stations without modification(Limiting you to a specific Skill set to build heat sinks at .25 space) and the equipment would allow choice between further increasing cooling, or further increasing heat cap or some combination of both...depending on the style of weapons you like to use.

As far as the actual build formula's, Burst fire is the biggest offender right now, giving you a net DPS loss if you go past 3 shots and horrendous heat per shot scaling. Ultimately though, all build formula's will need to be tweaked so that there is a reasonable return on investment DPS wise across all options. Its pretty hard right now to justify building more then 1 Core Lasers, and just stacking them vs making 2+ space weapons due to heat, energy use and limited weapon space. IE, using the Juggernaut as an example, in most cases its better to have 20 1 space weapons then four 5 space weapons.

To be honest, i havent really used Cannon, Missiles or Vulcan type weapons very much, because the Ammo has to compete with very limited cargo capacity.

This could be fixed easily with a piece of equipment called "Extended Cargo Bay" which would trade equipment space for cargo space in essense. The best versions could be found on both miner and syndicate factions but basic versions should be available to all.

3 types of higher rarirty lvl equipment could also be instituted that when activated, would consume energy and metal ore and spit out the appropriate type of ammunition over time similar to how the Automated Repair works now.. Call it something like Nanotech Ordnance Generator, and give it to a combat oriented Faction with standard rep level requirements...more rep for better versions etc.

While im on it, Drone Parts are too expensive and hard to find to use a "Carrier" based strategy...i tried and its dismal and super expensive. Ditto with repair bots vs Automated Repair.

Many thanks for a great little game, interested in seeing where this goes! As No Mans Sky Next came out today, i may be vanished for a little while but i will follow the threads and would like to discuss if you care to!

[phoenix_54d]

Two quick-fix ideas for now I guess would be:
Miniaturization: This should probably be based on max ship category: The smaller the ship the more effective it is but the more you shrink things down the more expensive.
A weapon miniaturized down to "fighter only" might take 70% off of it for triple the cost, while something that's been slimmed but still perfectly usable by battleships would only shrink 20% for maybe 200%

Someone willing to put just as much money (and way more materials) into their corvette as someone else did in their battleship would at least be getting a whole lot of performance from their little ship. This could be one of the ways they do that.
It does lead to people asking "why can't I just put the smaller weapon on the bigger ship" though.

Heat Well the heatsink should probably be doubled (-20% per for that cost and space). Other ideas would be longer-term.

Longer-term stuff:
Upgrading should generally be positive. Tradeoffs are great especially to specialize a system, but they do have to be worth it. Growth in the game so far doesn't seem to be as exponential as some other games: It's not like at level 20 you need to be doing 5 times the damage you did at level 1 or else you're guaranteed dead (I might be wrong though?) which keeps things easier.

Cores: The main 'generation' system of the weapon. The number of cores should improve the weapon's efficiency more than anything - power a little but not as much; from there all the other modifications will be what makes the weapon into what it is.

Visual opportunity: Multiple cores on just one hardpoint could change the looks. Spices things up and also lets experienced pilots know at a glance what it is they're dealing with. This can even vary by core across continuous and normal fire too if you want.
Examples: A blue beam that gets wider than a corvette with enough upgrades or looks like a cluster of bolts for normal shots. Maybe plasma looks like X intertwined beams while the green continuous is multiple pencil-thin lines close together. Go wild!

Heat: Two ideas here.
1) If a weapon has more than one core, you can split it across multiple hardpoints. Total stats (DPS, energy use) are unchanged but the shots are now split evenly (so visually if the graphics change then a 4-core weapon produces two 2-core shots) which can make damaging tiny targets tougher, but also means that instead of a 60 heat shot burning out your mount on the second of a three-round-burst, it's 30 heat shots eating at two different mounts.
Plays nicely with ship heatsinks and the Delay function on weapons, and also lets you do quad-lasers and the like. Really really good for point-defenses probably, but the split damage might make killing those incoming things much harder?

>Equipment upgrade could literally include additional heat-tanks that eat a % of all heat generated while they're not overheated. At that point you'd probably want to make overheating a little more detrimental once there's more and easier ways to avoid it though.

2) Heavy/charging weapons might have a toggle spinal/centerline mounting option: if on this ties in directly to the ship's systems: heat generated is increased by 50% but ALSO split across all of the ship's mounts (so a 100 heat shot across 4 hardpoints would add 37.5 to each of the four every shot). Any mounts that overheat and no weapon attached to it including that heavy can fire.

Ammo: Ammo-using weapons should have a little bit of free space for a basic ammo load. That would fix most of their cargo issues. Like say, maybe each space of the weapon (sorry mini-launchers, you cannot in fact hold a cavern's worth of missiles there!) internally holds up to a quarter space worth of ammo for it.

[Laious]

Heeyy.. A lot of good ideas there! Writing down here for when I begin crafting patch, and some I might implemented now.

Thank you both again. :)

[Stoneskull]

I know this is a bit off topic of weapons, but I was thinking about additions to the game.

It is super annoying that you can only deposit items into local stations, and then you have to shuttle all these items around personally when you need them for crafting.

Why not maybe allow still the same mode of depositing locally, but have the option for the player to buy a warehouse where items can be shuttled.....or even buy a station of your own? This way you could have a money sink of buying a station, and buying defenses for said station....and a fleet to go actually get items that you deposit locally to shuttle to your station. And you could loose some of these items in transit due to transportation getting destroyed while it is shuttling these items to your station. Would also create a mini-game of sorts where you would need to defend your station from raids?

Just a thought, I hate depositing stuff all over the galaxy, and when I need those items I have to run them all down again.

[Laious]

Yeah later on you'll be able to buy and/or manage your own stations, so you'll have kind of a base :)