Our larger funding milestones include playable capital ships and asymmetric warfare. Unfortunately we aren’t expecting to raise that much money unless we start convincing people to buy virtual ships ;).
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The on line one.
That was a good one.
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agreed that one is disgrace, that do not deserve to bear the name. 
I can see that it was most likely misunderstanding.
My english skill are rather poor. My apologies.
What he said was what i meant by my first comment.
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I assume that’s for single-player capitals, as in EVE Online. I am a vehement proponent of crewed capitals. Gameplay balances better that way, and certainly it is an opportunity to give groups of players a chance to closely coordinate. Run a tank in ARMA 3 solo and then with a crew of three to get a sense of this.
It is my hope that asymmetric warfare will follow the patterns that I described above (or something equivalent). The goal of it all is to avoid bullying; to have asymmetric forces in the game world, but where the player groups have incentives to bring as little force to bear as possible.
When the group of 1000 decides to take out that little 10 man operation, they send 20 guys. Enough to be sure that they’re going to get them to move without spending inordinate resources. If there are dozens of 10 man operations around, then constantly sending 20 guys to clear each of them out is going to start to get expensive. Maybe sending 15 guys would be better. And so on. Those would be the challenges of policing one’s empire.
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With modernized power supplies and thrusters, mounted to main load bearing structure just like jack stands for cars. Lots of added gameplay in consequence.
That’s a loaded premise/fear.
The right way to do it is to recognize that potential imbalance, and to give it the right counter-balance. A simple possible e.g.: capitals would be on the steep end of an exponential curve to vulnerability/ineffectiveness while in atmosphere. For some more or less handwavy reason. Just the sheer expense in energy for lugging that mass around could be enough.
Capitals in atmo could be so hamstrung that they become mere resource assets. Force multipliers by passive presence, not direct actors. In transit to/from orbit, capitals could become impromptu escort missions.
I get the whole thing about space ships being made to keep air in, not out, and their frames made for certain stresses while landing is a huge extra stress (especially when you look at modern aircraft and what it costs to have carrier takeoff and landing capability).
But these are still massive future ships, and they have armor. If they can keep out explosions and shells, they can keep out air.
I do like the whole idea of being able to maybe land but to likely sustaining damage. Why shouldn’t you be able to turn a capital ship into a turret system for a factory on a planet, after all?
And they can have very limited flight maneuverability close to a planet since they need to use so much power to just stay aloft, and they’d probably deal very poorly with rolling over since their upper thrusters wouldn’t be made to deal with fighting a planets gravity like the bottom thrusters would. And by virtue of that, in space capital ships would generally strafe upwards faster than downwards.
That way, it could actually be a legitimate strategy to force an enemy capital ship to roll over that’s close to a planet’s surface over to try and get it to crash.
But as long as the downward thrust is a TWR of at least 1.0, there shouldn’t be any arbitrary restriction on getting a capital ship down to that altitude. And even then, the capital ship could nose up and surely have enough thrust to stay aloft near the surface of even high gravity planets, but then it’d be even easier to tip one over and make it crash.
Just handling it realistically with physics and not making arbitrary restrictions can make a lot of neat gameplay stuff happen.
I liked the old idea on the previous forum of AI crewed turrets but that players could optionally control which could potentially be much more effective.
Just because you don’t like manning a gun on a big ship doesn’t mean other shouldn’t be able to. What does it detract from your gameplay? Not everyone wants to fly a fighter or bomber or be the “captain” of a cap ship.
But it’s something that mostly just makes sense if they go for the RTS controls where you just give an attack order. Doesn’t make as much sense if you control it in third person or something and all the guns point at your crosshair.
If you have to have “tug” ships taking over all of the capital ship’s propulsion in-atmo, then you’ve just made those tugs the single failure point. Immediately, you can balance said capital ship’s vulnerability with how many and/or how vulnerable those tugs are.
It wouldn’t take much experience playing the game to recognize that those tugs are basically targets painted on the cap ship. A most-vulgar way to draw player attention to them could be (random e.g.) oversized thruster plumes visible from long distance. Aren’t there already some rocket launchers, today, whose exhaust plumes are actually that bright (so bright that you can basically see them all the way to horizon distance)? Keeping something the mass of a small city aloft ought to translate into a pretty bright thruster. And if it’s the propellantless type, it could be just as bright elsewhere in the EM spectrum, or something.
If a ship can afford to have a fleet of tugs following it or in a service bay, why can’t their engines just be built into the chasss?..
And why can’t you just shoot the bottom thrusters to disable those, if not push it over?
You can make the thrusters and engines explode with more force to damage more of the ship in an oxygen atmosphere, as well.
There’s plenty of sensible, intuitive, and easier to implement ways to make them vulnerable near the surface of a planet.
You should be able to in effect beach a capship on a planet, but by beaching I mean you are done, it’s on the ground and there is no way in hell it can reach escape velocity again. In a game where you need to pay for ships from your teams wallet such a move basically means you just lost a capship.
… but seriously reinforced the facility that you beached it next to.
I say if you are willing to pull off an ace maneuver like that and are willing to turn all that cash into essentially a turret then go for it.
I would imagine the factories and such would have defenses that are at least as strong as a Destroyer/Cruiser to begin with. And I imagine capital ships will have guns on the bottom that are now useless.
And also you can have weapons made for no atmosphere ballistics that aren’t as powerful when they’re going through atmosphere.
Honestly, I would have liked to see ballistics in the prototype where cannons shoot straight-enough-to-tell-no-difference in space, but they are pulled by the gravity of a planet/moon when closer too it.
You can then even have gravity wells that inhibit warp like a planet does, which also pulls on projectiles that have mass.
Just make things work realistically and you have a lot of neat things that also make interesting gameplay. You don’t need to make up unobtainium stuff to explain weird gameplay interactions like why a capital ship is supposed to just explode when it gets near a low gravity moon’s surface.
Just throwing this out there for the sake of lateral thinking: some particular capital ships created by joining together a bunch of smaller ships (of a particular type)?
This would solve atmospheres in the sense of it breaking apart into its component pieces!
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The idea was that ships are built for space, and that the bigger/biggest capital ships would take the tradeoff in mass for (in practice rarely needed) high gravity operation in exchange for the performance and affordability in micro/zero grav.
As Gene was sketching out. It’s not necessarily unobtanium handwaving, anymore than the rest of current fiction. Have we really made all the CFD studies etc for the ships as currently designed in concept art? 
I don’t believe, at all, in the impossibility (fiction and gameplay wise) of caps landing in planets. But if that’s supposed to be the game design, then crafting intuitive and sensible gameplay and fiction around it could be doable. If capital ships can’t land (for whatever reason), then maybe they can land in exchange for effectively being bricked.
And if they can’t “drop cities”, maybe they themselves can serve as interim cities (a kind of instant-FOB). After all, that’s basically what they need to be in space.
Atmospheric gunnery being different from space gunnery sounds really awesome; just like ships flying differently in space and atmo. Really 
That is IIRC a real thing – guns don’t act the same at the highest altitudes that modern jets can reach.
Okay, I mean, that sort of makes sense.
But then you have the thing where they have such absurd amounts of power that not being able to handle 1bar of pressure is just super silly.
It just comes off as so arbitrary when capital ships fighting near moons and planets surfaces can add to gameplay, rather than detract from it. I don’t really get why everyone is assuming it’s a bad thing, most of all.
If anything, a giant capital ship emerging out from some clouds and dragging the clouds along with it is a massive selling point that’s going to hype people’s space boners off.
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As I understood Gene, it’s not the ambient pressure but the mechanical loads.
Spaceships are constructed to separate 1 atm inside from vacuum outside, then adding propulsion loads, and then adding the damage contingencies, etc. Compared, in atmo, with 1 atm on either side, and (I reckon) various differences adding up to (I have no idea if more or less) some different structure for propulsion and damage strengthening (submarines and other naval designs are probably good starting point for reading).
It’s definitely not the same mechanically to thrust something in vacuum, as in atmosphere and down a gravity well. C.F. the ISS being very inadequately built for moving it to some graveyard at a Lagrange point or down to Moon surface. It’s just not made for it, and so maybe there’s some different and yet comparable design issues that would make operating I:B capital ships a not-worthwhile proposition.
And if not, then it seems like (maybe) an opportunity to treat them as an inert resource asset, should it be sent to surface for [left field strategic/tactical gameplay reason].
[quote=“innociv, post:55, topic:841”]
If anything, a giant capital ship emerging out from some clouds and dragging the clouds along with it is a massive selling point that’s going to hype people’s space boners off.
[/quote]Yes!! Hehe.
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Random idea - surface AAA batteries are too inaccurate/slow/something to be useful against ships in orbit, but at lower altitudes (e.g. <10-25km) capital ships would be vulnerable to them due to their size/speed/something. Capital ship shields ineffective in denser atmosphere? Energy budget too tight to both power landing thrusters and shields and defenses simultaneously?
I could easily see gas giants being a favorite for capital ship pilots. Maybe some gas giants could have cloud types and weather that would obscure sensors and stop capitals from being found. That could also be used to hide assets and resources.
How can 1g of stress be too much of a ship that might accelerate at more than 1g, and that will take impacts far greater than 1g?..
It’s silly. Just silly.
But yes, making surface artillery far more powerful against closer ships is sensible. Artillery that can reach space is likely going to be a lot stronger with less atmosphere to pass through and less gravity to fight against. But a planet/moon isn’t covered with artillery.
The load bearing structure could be very different.
Like I intimated, I don’t know because I don’t have the relevant knowledge (CFD, and what such superstructures look like in Navy, aircraft, etc) and we have zero actual blueprints etc to go on from. I do reckon that you would have some fairly different structures if you designed something like the I:B capital ships (esp. the cruiser and carrier) to operate in atmo+gravity VS in vacuum+0g.
But they have to be built to take at least 1g of impact force to hold up against weapon impacts from the bottom. Much more than 1g…
Turn a tank on its side and upside down and it’s still going to be largely fine except for the turret ring, perhaps.