So I've pretty much had it with this.
Most equipment, such as weapons, shields etc, takes up cargo space. Tell me, how does this make sense: EXTERNAL equipment taking up INTERNAL space, which has been specifically DESIGNED for cargo. I do not understand why has been implemented in the first place.
Okay, okay.
I can understand armor, cloaks, jump drives etc taking up cargo space because they are extraordinary equipment and the ship may not be designed for mounting such gear. Therefore parts of that equipment has to be installed to the cargo hold. But weapons and shields taking up cargo space? No.
The only reason why I think this is the case is balancing. And even that is kinda stretchy. Like, for what purpose? To not allow players to have 100 Battleship Cerberus in their freighter?
(to be fair here, it wouldnt make sence for a fighter to have 10 Battleship Cerberus in his hold, however you can still carry ∞ of any fighter gun)
Why am I bringing this up?
Several reasons.
I was making a jumpship and I calculated it so I have just enough cargo space for 2 jumps. I make the ship and it has 100 less cargo space that I calculated. It was the Battleship shield. It takes up 100 cargo space. Let that sink in.
Also there's nothing more frustrating when carrying 4955 of X to your base and realizing you need 45 more units to complete whatever you're doing. All because you 5000 cargo ship can carry 4955!
equipment should take cargo space because :
1.balance: so you don;t carry battleship weapons in a LF(extreme example but you get the point)
2.as for mounting on exterior:what kind of weapons IRL or other SF doesnt uses room on the inside??none..
your problem seems to be more about jumpdrives uses fuel(commodity) and not charges/ammo as we were told is gonna be soon(in an update)
*as for transporting to your pob..why not get extra for another day?or another type of commodity you'll need next?so...there's not problems there
It is easy.
When we are talking about limited cargo space, we are not talking about physical cargo, but rather the safe mass of the ship that the designer has specified.
You can slap armors and guns and whatever on a ship, but they do make it heavier. At some point you cannot add more stuff to it or into its cargo hold because the handling systems are not meant to support that and would make the vessel unsafe to use.
That is what we see as cargo limitation and stuff taking up cargo space. That would be an IRP explanation.
Shield's generator has to be placed somewhere, as well as the turrets - because turrets also require their own energy banks inside the ship due to their size and damage they deliver.
This should explain how real life turret looks anyway, as you usually see
something like that on the ship and I think the fictional energy guns wouldn't be different - just replace ammo storage with energy banks that converts powercore energy into deadly weapon.
As for fighter/freighter turrets, they are simple and don't require separate energy banks, unlike transport, gunboat and capital turrets.
As for the Armor, I second Spazzy, because 1) balance reasons 2) logical reasons. As for the second, I see Armor Upgrades being not an outer piece of armor, but actually I see it as reinforcing the hull from inside with alloy, titan and steel.
I want to make this very clear:
Ships should have special internal compartments for external equipment. Such as for weapon ammo, electronics, mechanisms.
Pay real attention to this.
Also, because I didn't make it clear in my post (my bad),
I agree that armor, cloaks, cloak disruptors, jump drives and hyperspace scanners should take up cargo space. Because they are extraordinary equipment and not every ship is designed to have internal compartments for such gear. And armor because it reinforces the hull from inside and outside. Also balance (armor explanation suggested by )
I don't agree that weapons and shields should take up cargo space, as such gear should have specific internal compartments.
I understand I wouldn't make sense for LF's to carry BS weapons (or any small ship carrying huge gear),I really do , but the thing that bothers me is that weapon still take up cargo even when they are mounted externally.
If the devs REALLY don't want us to carry a Mortar in our Eagles, there should be a better way to do this. As it stands, I don't think its a real issue. The negatives outway the positives, in my opinion.
A very interesting thought and I can see it making sense, in a weird non-explained way but still. I mean, "I finished the Battleship design. I'm hoping nobody will mount Battleship weapons and shields. That would be too much."
Joke aside, it's a really good RP explanation.
I'm going in this discussion as open-minded as I can, I hope you guys do the same as well.
Instead of reading "cargo space", read "useful space" and your issue is solved.
Pretty sure LF's wouldn't be able to mount cap weapons anyways...regardless of space available? don't classes of weapons matter? If you have weapons slots, they should have space for the weapons they can mount automatically. its not like your weapons are in your cargo hold when mounted, they're on the outside of your ship. How does this effect what's in your cargo hold? I've agreed with the OP for some time, but hey, any chance to make this game harder seems to always be taken.
Since we are invoking the "real world" so heavily, I have a question for the "leave it alone" crowd. It will be at the end of my writing, if you feel TL;DR.
In Freelancer, ships normally are designed as short term deployment vessels because they have ready access to ports of call for resupply and repair. Consider that a real world warship in the destroyer/cruiser class carries 90 days of consumable supplies, common repair parts and allocations for ammunition that take up a majority of the ship's volume. Add in living, command and control, engineering & fighting hardware and every bit of space is crammed full. In spite of this, warships are far smaller than most ocean-going haulers.
By contrast, once you go beyond a gunboat, the warships in Discovery are equal to or larger than even the biggest haulers. In spite of this, they do not carry the supplies, presumably do not carry as substantial a load of repair parts since they are not expected to be away from base services for months, and it has been stated repeatedly that they have markedly smaller crews due to automation and technology, thereby reducing crew living spaces. Even if you leave in the months long fuelling requirements and a comparable amount of volume for engineering spaces, the volume that a warship in Discovery occupies is enormous.
If you have to dig into the cargo hold to mount weapons/shields/tech that has space allocations in smaller vessels, what are you using that huge amount of space for?