Fighter hull power bonuses

Gratuitous Forum Gratuitous Space Battles
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Currently there are two fighter hulls with power bonuses in the game, the Federation Falcon and the Imperial Ballista. I’ve been tinkering with the Falcon and I cannot come up with any kind of setup that actually uses the extra power that the small bonus grants.

Fitting one of the three different generators on the Falcon with the 12% bonus will give you 6.36, 7.48 or 8.60 power (does anyone ever fit more then one?). The power values without the bonus would be 6.00, 7.00 or 8.00.

The highest of these, 8.60, is too little to fit a pulse laser and the fastest engine (need 8.70 for that). If you switch the pulse to an ordinary laser you need 7.90 power, the bonus is wasted. If you downgrade the engine instead you will be way below the generated power so you might as well downgrade the generator too.

With the nr 2 generator you get 7.48 power. That’s too low to fit the fastest engine and a laser cannon (7.90). Fitting the nr 2 engine and a pulse laser needs 6.80 power and the bonus is wasted again so let’s switch to the smallest generator.

Using the smallest generator, you get 6.36 power, not enough for the pulse and nr 2 engine mentioned above (6.80). Switching to the laser cannon instead of the pulse means you’ll need exactly 6.00 power, what you’d have without the bonus. Sticking with the pulse and downgrading to the weakest engine you’ll need 5.80 power.

Those are the only setups demanding power for the Falcon that I can think of (ignoring the rocket setups*). Can anyone come up with a setup were the bonus is needed for the Falcon? Is it the same for the Ballista? If the bonus power is never used the bonus should probably be changed or maybe the power output of the hull could be increased a little to give you that tiny bit extra needed to use one of the setups mentioned above. Perhaps the power bonuses would make more sense on fighters that can fit more than one weapon?

Sorry if this got a bit long, I kinda got carried away having fun testing stuff in the ship designer…

*I actually just managed to come up with a rocket setup that needed a bit of the extra power. Using the smallest generator, you can fit a rocket launcher, the nr 3 engine and a nr 2 engine for a total power requirement of 6.10. Removing the weaker engine makes it faster though so nevermind that… :stuck_out_tongue:

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chuckles

Yeah, I’ve come to the same conclusion about the power bonuses. I think the fighter bonuses (except speed!) should be more like 50% than 10%.

I also think the fighter power generators need a little rebalancing. Most of the time, if I need to upgrade the power generator in order to fit a bigger engine, I lose speed. This shouldn’t be the case.

Currently the power generators provide 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0 power respectively.
the fighter engines require 1.0, 2.0 and 3.9 power respectively.

So to upgrade the engine by 1 step, you usually need at least one upgrade in power generator. Trouble is, the effect of the extra weight of the better generators is often close to, or exceeds the extra thrust you get.

Example:
Icarus with Pulse laser and Rocket launcher.
With a Power Generator I and Engine II it produces and uses 7.0 power, and has a speed of 1.86.
With a Power Generator III and Engine III it produces 9.0 power and uses 8.9. All I’ve done is upgrade the power almost exactly enough to upgrade the engine yet, rather unexpectedly, it’s slowed down to 1.85 (but it’s plenty more expensive :wink:

Proposed solution: All fighter power generators should be much closer in weight to each other (or weigh the same.) Additionally, to maintain balance, the better generators should probably cost a little bit more than they currently do.

Oh, and all this talk of “weight” … Throughout the game, all references to “weight” should actually be to “mass”.

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True. Weight comes from the fact that something is pulling you towards it and the more mass you have the more gravity “has something to grab on” and pull you more towards it, hence you weight more.

Mass is independed from this towards pulling or gravity. Mass is amount of matter in an object.