class-specific armor upgrades?

[Ursus]

Got to thinking about armor upgrades and cargo consumption etc., and it seems to me that it is kind of awkward arrangement now with the basic AU and the CAU that can be used anywhere it fits and provides the same "upgrade" for the same price everywhere. It makes no sense where the double hull plating from a UA8 costs the some for a fighter and a battleship, or that they would both consume the same cargo space...

Best thing would be to have something that consumed a percentage of ship mass, so an armor upgrade that provides x% extra hull plating would use x% of the available cargo, and come at a cost that is appropriate for the materials.

I assume this can't be done reliably with dynamic calcs, so it seems that the right thing to do here is to come up with class-specific armor upgrades, so that fighter is one class, bomber is another class, etc. Also it would be nice to have them be sold in increments, so that there was a light, medium and heavy upgrades that provided relative armor at cost of cargo and money. Basically 3 upgrades for each distinct ship class, fighters through battleships.

The question I don't know the answer to: is this possible? Does the game engine provide the ability to restrict armor upgrades to ship class? Does the engine need to learn about ship classes above "freighter" for it to work with caps? Are there any other implementation problems?

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[Mímir]

It would take some balancing, as some gunboats for instance cant mount cau8, where others can - and that is done intentionally. There might arise some balancing issues due to this in combination with the light, medium, heavy set of armor you propose. Other than that, I'd say it would be cool.

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[Govedo13]

There is no need for this specific armor types since you can always regulate it with the cargo space that they take and the cargo space of the ships.

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Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)

[ryoken]

Good idea, but devs had said many times that it is too much work. They have said in past if you write up all the programming they can impliment it, but it is not going to be on thier to do list.

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[Ursus]

The biggest balance issue is that the classes have such wide variety that the averages are arbitrary. For example the range of ships in the bomber class makes an average meaningless. You need to split some of the classes into light and heavy flavors for a fixed percent-of-average to work.

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