Turret penalties

Things need to be adjusted around the new speed cap so I'd expect ranges to increase regardless. That said I wouldn't bet on 6km fights, SE is still a game, and combat games are typically more fun when you can still see what you're shooting at.

Fixed guns on larger ships is something we'll have to disagree on. I get that people can and will overdo it, but spinal weapons on maneuverable small to medium-ish ships are classic, and having something to let people punch up a bit when facing larger and less maneuverable ships can help produce a soft-cap on ship sizes.

As far as turrets having huge sections buried under the hull go... that picture looks to be the diagram of the USS Iowa's 16" gun-turrets, to get a similarly sized turret in SE1 you'd be building a custom large-grid rail-turret... I guess if Keen wants to add turrets of that size then it would make sense to have a large base like that, but if they limit us to turrets of the same size as in SE1, then that arty-turret+ conveyor block under it roughly matches the space required for similarly sized turrets on most main battle tanks.

If you want to limit turret spam then I'd advise a mixture of heat (a ship needing to dissipate heat requires additional surface area for its radiators, and so a bigger hull to mount it all), and bigger guns (as a 7x7 turret with 6 or more times the dps of the 3x3 turrets will encourage having fewer guns while still allowing the same or greater damage output on appropriately larger ships).

@Tael

I find your comments far too reasonable,

I was looking for more confrontation and disagreement.

I will have to try harder to provoke greater discourse.

Have a great new year, and all of the best.

Who knows, someone may get to "Turret spam is reduced by turrets by having more costs for the gain." and immediately jump to defending their gun-bricks, but as it is currently new years response times are probably delayed a bit while people celebrate.

In the meantime, cheers, please enjoy your new year as well.

As stated below, I really don't care about this "turret spam" complaint. But the added engineering challenge of heat dissipation could be interesting in and of itself. And having more range in weapon sizes sounds great for really big builds!

Hi Blade, happy new year!

Spam, spam spam, spam, wonderful spam. Viking food, sometimes served with egg, chips and beans.

Not gatekeeping, not whining, not stopping spam, just saying it should take more engineering than it does in SE1 and it should have greater cost by default, not saying it should not happen.

Do you have any pictures of ships that have lots of turrets that you are willing to post here?

I am kind of a visual being and prefer to see a few pictures, especially when there is a lot of text.

A good picture can communicate.

A battle scene between vessels would be good to see too, just for fun if nothing else.

@Deon: Why don't you start us off first with some examples of what you're calling turret spam because what I consider spam and what another person considers spam will be 2 different things. That's not to say I won't have something to post, but you're the one making the ask that it be changed, so you need to be willing to define your terms. Because if you (or anyone) are unwilling or unable to define your terms, how are we supposed to know what you're asking for.

Now that said I'm sorry but this kind of stuff screams gatekeeping to me and is something that needs to be left to individual servers to decide for themselves. Which thankfully if servers don't like the idea of "turret spam" they can already RIGHT NOW go into their settings and set limits for individual blocks of all types. There is no need for any of this "let's limit the gun bricks" nonsense I've seen people posting. So long as a person has put in the engineering to make their "turret spam" work or similar and they're not using exploits, what's the issue? Like legitimately I have to ask, what business is it of yours or anyone else how others in the community build their ships? The solution to folks who want to stop "turret spam" is to use server settings to limit the blocks instead of trying to force the community as a whole to change based on their subjective whims. It's gatekeeping because it's a small group saying by virtue of their actions "I don't like that this guy can have X amount of turrets on his ship, so he shouldn't be allowed to do it." Whether a ship is using 5 turrets, 10, or 100+, so long as they've done the engineering why does it matter?

As is in SE1 right now, and even in SE2 when it comes around to turret time, you have to support those turrets with connections to conveyors if you want them to be able to pull ammo and keep firing. If a ship has say 50 turrets just to quantify for discussion sake, that's connections to 50 independent turrets, meaning the ship has to be able to connect and supply the 50 turrets with ammo, meaning more weight, more thought is going to have to go into those turrets if they don't want them to blow themselves up the first time the trigger is pulled.

Since you asked for a few photos I included a few. The 2 of the big black station are my starbase with a red dot next to the engineer for size reference. that thing is covered on all sides with around 226 gatlings total because it's meant to be an Earth Spacedock type of station from Trek and a fortress. Each one of those turrets needs to have a way to pull ammo meaning I'm having to mine and craft my tail feathers off to support that thing. Then we have the red and white carrier dreadnought. That version of the ship was made prior to warfare 2 so all it has is gatlings and missiles and there's around 161 main turrets (93 gat, 63 missile), plus 18 forward static rocket launchers pointed forward, and 38 interior turrets throughout for boarding parties. The intention of the ship is to get below it's target and fire up because it borrow from the Kessok ships from Star Trek Bridge Commander that did that same thing. Then there is the smaller white, yellow and blue destroyer that's a modern ship based on my personally created mod that still has a healthy number of guns but not near as many as some of my older ships. It has 48 turrets of various types, gatling, artillery, missile, auto cannon and so forth. This destroyer is meant to use its speed to stay ahead of enemy ships while enabling broadside tactics more akin to traditional naval warfare.

With all of those photos I gave you, each of those turrets has to be supported and have a conveyor connection. Each one needs to be supplied with ammo, which requires ALOT to support. If I want them to work without blowing themselves up I already have to put in the engineering to do it. So tell me, which of those items if any are "spam"? Overall I've already put in the engineering to make those ships and station work. If folks don't like the way I build they're not required to play with me or anyone else that "spams turrets" or similar. They can always play on different servers or use block limits in their server settings. Whether folks like it or not, being able to have as many turrets as we can support is part of the game and I fail to see why I should have to change how I'm building the rest of the community builds just because a small group of wannabe gatekeepers doesn't like it. Whether it's 10 turrets or 10 thousand, so long as the engineering is there, it's none of anyone's business.

@Deon: And this is where I have to call shenanigans. If Spam isn't wrong as you admit, then it's not a universal problem either. It's only a problem for people and specific servers that don't like it. Luckily for those servers we already have several solutions they can employ right now and not have to deal with it. The biggest one is going straight into the server settings and setting individual limits on how many turrets of each type a grid can have. This takes care of the spam problem by placing a hard limit to the liking of that particular server and effects only them. Should they not wish to jump straight to the server setting, the players on that specific server can make agreements not to build certain ways and go over specific numbers of turrets. If certain players are just causing problems and being obnoxious jerks, the server admins can boot those people from the server. Or people could just not go to servers that play in ways they don't like from the start. All of this is free and costs people nothing and can be employed right now. Yet for some reason that's not good enough for certain people unless others are made to play exactly like them.

I will agree with you on a couple of things. I will agree with you that in an ideal setting you will have battles that are within said goldilocks zone of not being too long or too short, and good battles can be more memorable than a win. However what I consider an ideal length of battle, you consider an ideal length, and another random in the community consider an ideal length may all be completely different lengths of time.

Now with that said, I am not responsible for how other people build nor are they responsible for how I build in game. I am not responsible for anything outside of my server, nor are outsiders responsible for what happens on my server either. If I'm able to build a ship and use said ship efficiently enough to decimate a particular person each and every time we face off, then so long as I've not used exploits of some kind to do it, I've done nothing wrong and that's a him problem for not being good enough to beat me. If on the opposite end of the coin I'm never able to beat a particular person, then that's a me problem, not a him problem. The only thing we can do is set an initial starting point and line, and from there it's up to each individual person how far they go. The only way to ever guarantee the perfect lengths of battle is to account for an infinite number of possible builds and that's wholly unreasonable. Hence why you can only set the initial starting line and from there leave it up to players.

For the armor vs guns debate, this is where alot of people show their ignorance of how balancing works, be it legitimate or willful. With a game like SE, you can't balance around anything other than singular block performance and expect to have a good time, because then you would have to account for infinite possible build types and that's not happening. To balance around singular block performance you sit down and figure out how durable you want each block to be vs a singular weapon and adjust the numbers accordingly. Take a normal 2.5m heavy armor cube as an example. To balance that cube and the weapons, you must decide how many hits you want that cube to take from a single gatling before it's destroyed, then how many from a missile turret, how many from an artillery and so forth. Once you have that you adjust the numbers accordingly for the block health and also weapon damage. If a particular weapon or particular block ends up overly strong or overly weak, you address it as it pops up. Once you've established that baseline you ship it off to the players and it's an arms race among players. If a guy wants more survival and durability he can add more armor. If he wants more damage and DPS he can add more weapons. From there it's who brings more of what and who is better at using that what.

At the end of the day alot of this sounds like skill issues with people not knowing how to approach certain ships and their builds aren't as good as they think they are. Skill gaps aren't something you can game develop your way out of. You can give 2 people the same exact build and the better skilled person is going to win 9/10 times, maybe 8/10. If I'm going up against Johnny 2x4 and our battles are mostly even and back and forth, then cool. If I'm going up against little Timmy Turner and I'm smoking him every single time, then he needs to get a case of "git good scrub". Hopefully he doesn't try to use his fairies but that's a different can of worms entirely. Likewise if on the opposite end of the coin, I'm going up against a guy I can never beat, I'm the one that needs a case of git good. If a person is constantly losing to another person, this tells me that the other person is more skilled, has better builds, the superior tactics, or perhaps all of it. If the person constantly losing never changes anything but is expecting a different result that's insanity. Proposals like this strike me as Timmy making a fairy wish to win even though he would never do so normally, and as a small group wanting things changed for EVERYONE instead of using their already existing options.

I'd like to toss in my 2 cents, as a player with absolutely no interest in ever playing on a PvP server. I am not seeking some kind of ideal battle. However, in late game stages I would appreciate PvE combat that takes both engineering and piloting skills to win. For that, I like the way SE1's Factorum encounters have to be sought out, often at great distance - it discourages building giant, over-powered bricks of any kind because they will be too heavy to reach the encounter before it times out.

As for this idea of "turret spam," I have to agree that trying to prevent it seems a lot like trying to impose your building preferences on the entire player base. There is way too much variation in player preferences to decree that an entire style of build be rendered unfeasible. What does it matter to you if someone playing cooperatively with a few friends wants to cover their ship with turrets? Particularly since Blade says you can impose such restrictions on a per-server basis anyway.

That said, maybe it's because I don't PvP, but I don't understand why one would *want* to cover their whole ship in guns, except as a joke. It might be an interesting engineering experiment, I suppose, trying to design one with enough conveyor redundancies to keep all the guns firing through an extended battle. But then I'd need a way to keep my ammo stocks full and that sounds like way too much mining for my personal tastes.

Question : What is this assumption that everyone plays multiplayer through a server?

If I would like a private game and I do not have a spare server knocking around, I would locally host a game.

If I am locally hosting for friends, do I get all of these server controls?

Do I assume a gentleman's agreement will run the course of a game?

Now, I am going to call BS.

Please study the cut away image on the top of the post, The rotational support for the turret extends through multiple decks below the gun housing around the magazine housing, pretty standard for larger guns. This is real engineering and acknowledges the physical realities of mounting weaponry that has massive recoil. The physics will determine the engineering and the engineering will determine the available design choices. Weapon spam in SE is a consequence of not having to bare the cost of the physics. Less physics, less engineering, poor design choices, but does have pretty firework shows, garbage creation and frame rate reduction.

There are more images showing greater detail of a typical turrets construction available online if you are interested. The bigger turrets have interior space for maintenance access.

1. As previously pointed out, that kind of thing is for truly massive turrets. I can't think of any vanilla turrets big enough to justify that type of design. If you want it for modded turrets, go ahead and create that mod yourself.

2. If your "friends" can't be trusted to stick to an agreement (are you sure these people are actually friends? I'm not trying to be mean, but I would seriously ditch a friend who can't even play a video game with me without breaking pre-set rules) you can, in fact, create your own private server with SE Dedicated Server, a tool that comes automatically with the base game.

3. You are still suggesting that every other player in the game should be forced to play according to your personal preferences. Just because you don't like the way someone built their ship doesn't mean they didn't put lots of time and effort into it or get joy out of it.

1. Physics 2.Psychology and Dedicated Hardware 3.Throwing toys out of the pram, no need to do this.

It seems simple enough, though I will disagree with people in places... I know its long and it doesn't immediately get to Deon's idea, thank you for taking the time to read and consider it.

Turret spam is a problem for two reasons, it looks hideous, and it lags the game. The first issue is forgivable under the right circumstances, I wouldn't expect a new player trying to build a combat ship to not spam turrets on a gun-brick/death-wedge any more than I'd expect a child using crayons for the first time to create a photorealistic copy of the Monalisa. The second is a bigger problem, games are meant to be fun and lag is typically antithetical to that, so finding a way to gently optimize things to reduce the lag is a good thing.

To that end the best solution I can come up with is two-fold:

-The first is to add bigger guns. Say our basic turrets are 3x3x3, a 5x5x5 turret takes up 3 times the footprint of said smaller turret, and if the bigger one fires at half the speed of the smaller one yet does 6 times the damage then we've cut the number of physics calculations and objects needing to be tracked down by 6 times without significantly altering the damage output of the ship these turrets are mounted to. A 7x7x7 turret gets us even better optimization.

Obviously these turrets aren't going to work well on smaller ships, but turret spam is really only a big-ship issue... though when has that ever slowed anybody down, and this certainly wouldn't be enough on its own to stop a big ship from spamming guns, especially when someone starts thinking in "shotguns". So to that end we come to the second part of our solution: Heat. Heat irl is complicated, but even a hyper-simplified SE version waving vaguely in the direction of realism will result in exterior surface area being tied in some way to heat-dissipation. Skipping over the math-lesson, smaller objects have more surface area relative to their volume than larger ones, so they dissipate heat more quicky. Subsequently if we make the smaller turrets with a higher rate of fire produce more heat for their size, then the small ships will still be able to fit them well enough, but the larger ones will need to dial back their usage a bit to keep their surface-area to turret ratio and avoid overheating. Thus, a bigger ship that would be more able to spam turrets is incentivized to instead make use of a smaller number of equally effective but more thermally-efficient larger guns.

And thus we come around to Deon's idea: big guns needing a big below-deck space. SE1's large grid gat and rocket turrets are hard to properly work in to a lot of designs in any way that looks good. Keen knows this, its why the assault and artillery turrets look as low-profile as they do. A huge 5x5x5 or 7x7x7 surface mounted cube, cylinder, or dome would be even harder to visually work in to a design in a way that looks even vaguely decent. So if we instead make only the top-ish half a turret, while the bottom half is the shape of some kind of structural-base then we can use the shiny-new "place blocks in the hollows of other larger blocks" unified grid system to work said base in to the ship's internal structure, and so maintain the same visual turret-aspect-ratio that looks as good as SE1's warfare-turrets.

Big ships keep their DPS and look good, the player-base benefits from physics-optimization in combat, and engineers everywhere get a few more things to engineer in their engineering game. Everyone wins.

So, we all know Cap's response is likely to be something along the lines of "Define turret spam and hideous because everyone has a different definition so there is no definition and your argument of reducing lag would be an argument to remove everything from the game and delete the game and heat mechanics impede my build freedom and youre just trying to force people to play your way because no skill and fear and gatekeeping." probably in a longer post with at least a few fallacies and more punctuation, to which I still respond with "please get over yourself".

Does anybody else have any thoughts or ideas? Liking it just because you like it or not liking it just because you don't like it are perfectly valid input, and posts here help give Keen a better idea of what we do and do not want in SE2 and how it might be implemented. The more input we get the more we can tweak the idea to get it just right.

Thank you for your time.

@Deon: "If I am locally hosting for friends, do I get all of these server controls?"

Yes you do. Folks on the keen discord can help you with setting up the block limits. The block limits can also be baked into individual mods too.

"Do I assume a gentleman's agreement will run the course of a game?"

My dude, if you can't trust your friends to abide by the agreement you all made, you need new friends.

"The physics will determine the engineering and the engineering will determine the available design choices. Weapon spam in SE is a consequence of not having to bare the cost of the physics. Less physics, less engineering, poor design choices, but does have pretty firework shows, garbage creation and frame rate reduction."

The bits in bold are the most telling part of this. First, again you've still not defined for us what "weapon spam" looks like in the slightest other than saying "it varies based on density". Which in my book roughly translates to "whatever I feel like that day". If you're going to insist that weapon spam exists you need to be able to define it. Clearly you have a standard in mind if you're insisting it's a problem, so again I'm going to insist on examples.

Second, the turrets already contribute to the physics of the grids right now in the form of weight and taking up shapes towards the shapes limit. Sufficiently potent turrets can also effect the momentum of a grid through their recoil and back blast. So this idea of of them not "baring the cost of physics" is verifiably false.

Third and most telling, if someone is slapping 50+ turrets on their ship and it's not blowing itself up and you're constantly losing to it, that tells me it's not as poor of a design choice as you think, nor is it a garbage creation. If you're constantly losing to "turret spam" this tells me one of several things. Your tactics need to change, your piloting/build isn't as good as you thought, or their piloting/build is better, perhaps all of it. If you're concerned about so called turret spam, you can use the tools you already have right now to put a stop to it on your servers. If you choose not to use those tools, that's your problem and not mine. If you're not willing to use the tools you have right now which do exactly what you want in stopping turret spam by limiting the turrets, the rest of the community shouldn't have to pay for your willful stubbornness in refusing to use the tools you've been given.

@Tael: Funny how you just can't keep my name out of your mouth or keep showing your own elitism.

"Turret spam is a problem for two reasons, it looks hideous, and it lags the game. The first issue is forgivable under the right circumstances, I wouldn't expect a new player trying to build a combat ship to not spam turrets on a gun-brick/death-wedge any more than I'd expect a child using crayons for the first time to create a photorealistic copy of the Monalisa."

Per usual you tell more on yourself than you realize with your statements here. As I've said to you plenty of times now, still waiting on you to define "turret spam" for us. If you're going to insist it's a problem then you need to be able to define it. Until you're willing to do so, it's not a real issue. If you're going to demand the game change because of said issue, then you need to define what the issue is other than vague generalities. But if you did that then you would have to actually defend your point and not be able to move goalposts. As much as I disagree with Deon, at least he's tried to give an actual definition unlike yourself in the past.

Now with regards to your first argument of "turret spam is hideous", that sir is purely your own subjective opinion. If you think that "turret spam" is ugly you're entitled to that opinion. If you think it's ugly your solution is easy, don't build what you consider an ugly ship or play with people that build said ugly ships. I'm not a fan of modern houses that are decorated in and painted mostly black, white and gray because they feel lifeless and too cookie cutter to me, BUT if folks want to decorate their houses like that it's their right to do so. My approval isn't needed. Likewise your approval isn't needed for people to build what you consider "ugly" ships. Your example of a kid trying to reproduce the Monalisa with crayons assumes there is a "correct" way of building and people should be beholden to your view of what is acceptable and not. Idk what game you're playing, but SE is a game and not a beauty contest. If you want to try to go for the prettiest ship look, you do you dude. Otherwise your build style isn't the only build style that exists.

"Turret spam is a problem for two reasons, it looks hideous, and it lags the game. (...) The second is a bigger problem, games are meant to be fun and lag is typically antithetical to that, so finding a way to gently optimize things to reduce the lag is a good thing."

For the issue of lag, this tells me you don't know as much about computers as you would have us believe as there's a billion different things that can cause lag other than just giant ships. The quality of one's rig can and does effect lag. A $2000 rig with a modern CPU and a 30 series or better card, 32gb of DDR4 or DDR5 RAM running everything off NVME drives is going to handle games much better than a $400 all in one from Walmart running off integrated graphics. Internet speed and connection is also going to be a big factor. If you're trying to run off a dedicated 1gb fiber line, you're going to have a much better time than the guy on dial-up. Part of the problem in that department is far too many in gaming as a whole expect the performance of the $2000 rig and 1gb fiber line while running a $400 potato and dial up internet speeds. In addition placement of the router can effect speeds if there's too much junk between you and the router and you're not running a hardline ethernet. I could keep going but you get the idea.

Then we finally get to the game itself. Lag sucks in general and not just gaming and will never go away completely. All one can do is try to reduce the chances of it. Now there is certainly a point where trying to prevent lag crosses from caution to outright paranoia. By the logic you're using here of "turret spam causes lag so it shouldn't be allowed", I can just as easily say ships over 5000 PCU cause lag and the game as a whole should be limited to 5000 PCU per person. Or even better I can say combat as a whole causes lag so the game shouldn't include combat. If you're concerned about lag, you have several options to avoid it. First is making sure the hardware you and friends are playing on isn't an outdated potato, same with your internet connection. Second is you can again use the options you already have to reduce the chances of lag. You can create a lower PCU limit, you can USE THE SERVER OPTIONS TO LIMIT TURRETS THAT YOU HAVE NOW, make agreements with other people not to build over a specific amount of weapons or ship size, not have super large engagements, limit the amount of people on your server, and do it all on lower graphics settings.

For SE1 a chief reason we get as much lag as we do is they're using ye old 32 bit Havok physics engine which was borderline outdated even when they started making the game. Even then they've asked SE to do things it was never really designed to do initially and they expanded the project beyond its original scope. While it's largely worked out for the better, there are still issues. The modern 64 bit Havok doesn't have nearly as many of the issues as the old one does, plus their in house stuff is updated as well, meaning the game can handle far far more than it ever could with just SE1. While I despise lag as much as the next guy, you're never going to get rid of it, and your argument of "but it causes lag" as you've used it here is paranoia. You're free to take whatever steps you think are needed for your own personal experience. However you being afraid of lag on its own isn't a valid reason the entire community as a whole should be restricted.

"Big ships keep their DPS and look good, the player-base benefits from physics-optimization in combat, and engineers everywhere get a few more things to engineer in their engineering game. Everyone wins."

And you just contradicted yourself several times here and in your copy/paste from other threads. First up, if you're concerned about lag as you said prior, why are you now wanting to add even more calculations to the game's backend with moronic heat calculations and even more piping and similar that would be needed to support the additional turret upkeep? Because you're not removing any bloat, you're just changing the form of the bloat and even adding to it by demanding more backend calculations while optimizing nothing. Big ships having to do more to get the same result just means adding in more bloat to those builds and the game, and you've accomplished nothing.

You also keep saying "things to engineer in their engineering game" implying that builds right now aren't being engineered. If someone builds their ship with 50+ turrets and they don't blow themselves up, then they've had to do some engineering somewhere. You might not like said engineering but that doesn't invalidate it.

As for your "everyone wins" argument, the people having their builds trashed by gatekeepers such as yourself certainly don't win. You can try to spin this however you want dude, but as I've said prior elsewhere, all this junk amounts to is a bunch of neckbeard gatekeeper types whining that people are allowed to play different than them. They're mad that the "bads" are allowed to use "trash builds" like your stereotypical CoD streamers that whine about "why are you using that trash build".

If you're concerned about "turret spam" then use the tools you already have to limit the turrets and weapons on your own servers. Demanding others be limited purely because you don't like it violates the spirit of SE that Keen has been setting for years of "the need to create". Simply because others build different types of sandcastles than you in the sandbox doesn't make theirs automatically bad and yours automatically best.

Without the odd renegade and a little discord even Stardew Valley becomes very dull. Sorting through people to find the perfection of kindred spirits, is not to comprehend humanity at all. We are indeed an ever changing pattern.

Here is too much spam.

I believe that some players have calculated the thickness of the steel/iron used to construct both heavy and light armour blocks. Taking this into account would make the fixing of turrets onto armour blocks as in SE1 more game than science. If the surface area of connection between turret and supporting material was far more extensive I would be inclined to accept your argument, but in SE1 this is not the case. This is an SE2 post and a chance to take a different approach.

RE: Garbage creation - this is a reference to all of the little bits of block and scrap that fly around during a bullet storm. The rapid creation of many grids and floating objects can cause significant delays in processing each frame. It can be mitigated by server settings, but not by much when there are multiple vessels and too many guns.

May be I will write some more when I am less bored with.......sry fell asleep.

Now I am feeling guilty as I have not left enough holes and things to chew on and to pull apart. There are a few no doubt. Not answered all of the questions, not wriggled around enough in the ongoing reframe. Do I resign to constant filibuster, can I ever make a simple post? Well, it passes the time of day. (caught monologuing again, damn, got to run)

@Deon: If you're going to advocate something that has the potential to effect the entire community, you need to be able to define it. You're still not defining what constitutes turret spam.

"I believe that some players have calculated the thickness of the steel/iron used to construct both heavy and light armour blocks. Taking this into account would make the fixing of turrets onto armour blocks as in SE1 more game than science. If the surface area of connection between turret and supporting material was far more extensive I would be inclined to accept your argument, but in SE1 this is not the case. This is an SE2 post and a chance to take a different approach."

Or we could just leave it alone and not fix what isn't broke. I don't want to have to bust out a spreadsheet just to play the game. SE has never been this hyper realistic game you're wanting it to be nor should it be this far in. The turrets are fine as they are. The game doesn't need to be hyper realistic to be fun and I don't find micromanaging every little thing to the tiniest milimeter to be fun. Simply because we can do something different doesn't mean we should in stuff like this. This is one of those times we don't need to change things.

"Garbage creation - this is a reference to all of the little bits of block and scrap that fly around during a bullet storm."

Welcome to SE. This is taken care of by the trash cleanup settings in game.

"It can be mitigated by server settings, but not by much when there are multiple vessels and too many guns."

Do you want fun battles and combat, which means the chance for lag. Or do you want 100% lag free and have to keep the kid gloves on the whole time? Because you can't have both.

"Do I resign to constant filibuster, can I ever make a simple post?"

Problem is you're not making a simple post. You're proposing something that will negatively impact the community as a whole then complaining when people come back at you and tell you it's a bad idea. If you're posting something like this which negatively impacts the community as a whole, expect some pushback. No one wants to have to redesign everything they've ever built just because a small hardcore type of gatekeepers complaints about "muh turret spam"

@Deon Beauchamp I debated making a joke at Cap's expense about balancing a dodecahedron, but I wasn't sure how well anybody could roll with it :)

@Captainbladej52

"...can't keep my name out of your mouth..."

-You'd prefer that when I preemptively call out your most common bad arguments that I refer to you with an offensive nickname? That just seems so... low-class... and what will the rest of the forum think? This is no place for such impropriety.

That reminds me...

"Define turret spam..." - "...you need to be able to define it."

"...and hideous because everyone has a different definition..." - "...hideous", that sir is purely your own subjective opinion."

"...your argument of reducing lag would be an argument to remove..." - "...combat as a whole causes lag so the game shouldn't include combat."

"...trying to force people to play your way..." - "...your approval isn't needed for people to build..."

"...gatekeeping." - "...gatekeeper..."

That's five! BINGO! And I didn't even have to call out the fallacies :)

"...contradicted yourself..."

"...with Deon, at least he's tried to give an actual definition..."

"@Deon: ... You're still not defining what constitutes turret spam."

-I mean really, you should have seen this one coming.

"...if you're concerned about lag as you said prior, why are you now wanting to add even more calculations to the game's backend with moronic heat calculations and even more piping and similar that would be needed..."

-...Seriously, is this your pride/narcissism/dislike of people you disagree with overriding your ability to think clearly to such a degree that talk of a "hyper-simplified SE version" of heat reads as "highly realistic simulation of thermodynamics", or do you genuinely believe a simple system tracking buildup, storage, and dissipation both requires its own conveyor system and is more work than simulating likely hundreds or even thousands of objects every second in a 3d environment appearing, interacting with their environment, and then disappearing.

"You also keep saying "things to engineer in their engineering game" implying that builds right now aren't being engineered."

-You missed the word "more", it was obvious, people have noticed.

So, as I said previously, please get over yourself.

Deon's idea was for big turrets to have big structural base-supports built in to them for the sake of realism, mine was to come up with practical game-reasons to have those big turrets with big bases. It isn't hard, or unreasonable, people can play with a bit more or blow it off and keep on without it. Big ships keep their DPS and look good, the player-base benefits from physics-optimization in combat, and engineers everywhere get a few more things to engineer in their engineering game. Everyone wins.

@Semtex: I'll give you credit here for trying to back up your arguments with historical examples of real life stuff. Your diagram you lay out can be accomplished now without need for alterations to the game. But with that in mind there are several major issues with your argument and a few things you get straight up wrong.

"Most of the problems arise from the fact that conveyors in the game have unlimited capacity and weapon turrets consist only of firing units, without ammunition storage."

So first portion of business, the bit in bold is objectively incorrect. All turrets have internal magazine capacity to them which can also be used to store some bits of ammo if one desires until it's needed. Also regarding conveyors, if one thinks something like a turret, refinery or similar is pulling too much stuff at once and bogging things down, you can already limit the pull rate of various things. The biggest examples of this are refinery blocks and also ye basic uranium reactors. For example, let's suppose for sake of discussion you have a refinery that can hold a total of 100k kilos of material 50k unrefined and 50k refined product. Let's also assume the refinery can chew through 1k kilos of material every second. In SE, massive amounts of something moving around all at once can sometimes cause lag or other instability. To alleviate this, a refinery can space it's pull requests out so that it pulls 2k per second. Enough so that it doesn't stall out on progress of refinement, but also not moving around so much at once that it causes issues. It also only issues pull requests every so often as well so it's not calling for big huge chunks of stuff to constantly be moving. In other words you have two potential safeguards to try to prevent lag. I realize the actual numbers on the refineries will be different, but you get the idea for discussion sake. If you believe turrets are moving stuff around too quickly, adding these simple delays slows it down.

As for the first part of this, unlimited conveyor capacity isn't the issue here. The issue is in how the game processes the data and all the physics calculations and similar that go into it. To be frank there's alot of extra tedious calculations that don't really need to exist that get called too often.

"The turret and turret base have a special type of conveyor and cannot be connected to a standard conveyor. The ammunition storage unit has one special type of conveyor and several standard conveyors.

The turret base can be stacked to easily pass through armor of any thickness."

This just needlessly complicates things by trying to fix what isn't broke and glosses over the problem which is how the game processes various things moving. It also adds nothing of value to the game and defeats the purpose of having a unified grid system but 2 conveyor systems essentially. As for ammo storage, just slap a cargo bay down somewhere and call it good. No need again to fix what isn't broken.

"Turret spam... Each turret requires energy for its drives—rotation and charging system. Energy consumption is not negligible, as they move multi-ton parts at considerable speeds, and these parts must not only be accelerated but also braked."

Or we could just quit trying to fix something that isn't broken and trying to implement stuff that would just make the game worse while taking value away from the players. Turrets already require the grid to have power in order to work. Jacking up the power requirements isn't going to solve anything and just adds to the calculations and lag folks say they want to prevent. This game is also 10k years into the future and it's ridiculous to me to think they wouldn't have something that could move these parts around with minimal energy needed. If they can keep people alive for 10k years in cryo sleep and ships moving for 10k years without breaking down or further issues, they can make turrets that require very little electrical power to move.

"The second issue is PCU consumption... Not only the towers themselves, but mainly their targeting systems."

PCU is an irrelevant measure that's only used as a limiter per dev statements. It has no bearing on lag or similar in the positive or the negative. It's simply a number attached to a block that tries to limit how many of said block one can use to prevent builds from being the size of a massive black hole or similar. Reducing/raising the PCU value of a block has zero effect on its performance and resource demands overall. It simply tries to add a "resource" cost to try and limit builds.

"IMHO, the problem with turret spam mainly affects players who want to emulate the Red Baron, but lack Manfred von Richthofen's piloting skills and situational awareness"

Folks keep throwing around the term "turret spam" alot but I've yet to see anyone give clear concise standards to define what is turret spam and what isn't. So I'm going to as you the same thing I've asked others, what constitutes turret spam? At what point is a ship considered to have too many weapons, and why? If we take an average sized cruiser, how many weapons should it be allowed to have? We talking 10 weapons, 20, 100+? If folks are going to insist "turret spam" is a thing and are wanting Keen to impose changes or "solutions" on the community as a whole, they need to be willing to define what constitutes spam and what doesn't. If folks can't define it, then they have no grounds to say it's a problem.

"The phrase "agreement between players" was mentioned here :)))

It sounds like "agreement between sharks"...

The weaker ones will be eaten, the stronger ones will swim away to other hunting grounds."

Ultimately stuff like this isn't needed because folks can already place limits on various blocks RIGHT NOW with the tools we have in SE. If one thinks folks are using too many turrets, server owners can go into their settings and place limits on the amount of turrets a grid can have. Or as much as you might not like it, folks can make agreements with their fellow players on the server to not build in specific problematic ways. And if you can't trust the people on your server who are likely friends to abide by said agreement, you need new friends to play with and have bigger problems.

How would such a mechanic interact with penetrating and ricocheting weapons?

E/X:

-Penetrating- SE1's assault cannon deals 8,000 damage, a large light armor block has 250hp, would the assault cannon hit deal the full 250hp of damage and then carry the 7,750 on to inflict on whatever is behind the light armor block? Or would it only deal 126 damage (half the block's hp +1) and then take the remaining 7,874 on to other blocks behind the armor?

-Ricochet- When striking a block at a shallow angle the shot from an assault cannon will deal only half damage 4,000 and skip off (now moving in a different direction, potentially striking other things). In such an instance does it only deal 126 to the large light armor block it skips off of? What if it skips of a large gyro (63,105hp) instead?

To late to edit it seems... my apologies, small railguns do 8,000 damage, assault cannons only do 4,000 damage.

Don't fret about it, the concept is important. Using your example with 8,000 damage, I'd go with half the block's hp +1 and inflict the rest on what's behind. Meaning the remaining 7,874. And the block itself would be destroyed. That would still lead to the big gun doing more overall damage than a non-penetrating one, otherwise the damage would only be distributed between outer layer and inner layer.

In case of the richochet, I have not considered that. For the block that is hit first, I'd go with whatever mechanic is currently in the game as there is no penetration in the first place. If the projectile then hits another block, apply the original rule to that.