GSB Modding brainstorming center

After a bit of wandering through the forum, I didn’t find anything matching this idea, so here’s a new thread to contain it.

The Concept

My intent with this thread is to provide a centralized place for modders (experienced or otherwise) to toss out ideas for new modules, ship designs, race concepts, basically anything that could add to a mod or start a new one moving. (I’ve got a few seeds I will use to start off the thread myself.) Pretty much anything is good, from the more technical ideas (exploring the effect of different variables etc) to more high-concept notions.

Naturally, it’s also a place to comment on the ideas that are presented - constructive criticism only, please (mind you, while “that idea sucks!” is clearly non-constructive, “I don’t think I’d ever use a module like that” is actually useful feedback). It is OK to comment with “that sounds like module A from mod B” or “I tried that and never could get it to work”.

The Caveat

Part of the idea here is to share ideas. This means that any concept put here should be OK for other modders to use. If you’ve got an idea for a concept that you want to be unique to your mod, that’s awesome, but this probably isn’t the place to share it.

That being said, it’s probably also helpful to note if you are going to use a given idea, so that we don’t wind up with a dozen mods that all play the same. (It also helps to make sure credit is given where credit is due.)

Now I’m aware that the active modder population is pretty slim these days, and this idea may be coming in a day late and a buck short. But I think it’s still worth a whirl. If the thread withers and dies on the vine, well, sometimes that happens. But here’s hoping for some interesting ideas to start flying!

Here’s a few ideas that have been kicking around my head, for your consideration:

A repair module with a relatively high repair rate, an effectively infinite block of supplies (maybe maxrepairsupplies = 10000?), but a ridiculously high peace interval (maybe as high as 1000, where the vanilla modules are all around 150). Makes for a ship that folds pretty quick under a constant beating, but if you give it any significant breather, you’re right back at square 1.

A fighter-mounted flak gun with AoE just under its min range, pretty high rate of fire, with something like damage = 1 and AoE scalar = 1. Give the fighter a good chance of hitting its wingmates (assuming it has any) but also a moderate chance of flying into its own blast zone.

The “Armageddon Clock”: A radiation gun with 0 SP and 0 AP, moderately accurate at best (tracking speed < 1), and very low initial radiation damage - but with radiation_decay > 1, meaning that each rad pulse actually deals more damage than the last one. Once it deals you hull damage, your ship’s seconds are quite literally numbered. Can you take down enough of the enemy fleet to win before your ship is shredded from within?

Wasabi started a race concept thread a while ago. Here’s my race idea contributions in the form of awesome links (the thread is really dead):

Feel free to use, abuse, tweak, critique, etc.

The Reptavians
Synopsis: Uber Cruisers, Terrible Fighters, No Shields, Bonus to Armor. Lots of shrieking, squawking, feathers, and a constant need of newspaper.

The Polypoids
Synopsis: Low Cost, no fighters, High Crew costs, slow as a snail, low accuracy. Mindless, power hungry, shiny black polyps looking for their next meal.

The Smugglers
Synopsis: Insane Speed that sacrifices hull integrity, fighter and frigate focus, support modules buffed. “Depart, Deliver, Done.”

The Occult
Synopsis: Three different classes of ships (Kyud’ar, Jun’yal, Ch’all de Tese), No ballistic weaponry, beam weapon focus. Religious fanatics seeking galactic domination through brain washing and bodily manipulation.

The Assembly
Synopsis: Shields bonus with a debuff to speed, defense focus. An Alliance AI gone rogue, hiding in Order space, it’s main objective: self-preservation.

The Clones
Synopsis: Slow, Weak hulled, but super bonuses to shields. Laughable fighters, strong frigates and even stronger cruisers. Caste divided, diplomatic “starfish” with “humanitarian” goals.

The Mercs
Synopsis: Balanced ships, low cost, small amounts of module space. A Securities company that prides itself on cheap, efficient, and effective protection or aggression that is above the competition.

I just realized what the point of this weapon would be - cheap dogfighters. Set a squad of maybe 4, with Stick Together and a large separation distance, and get the damage output of a full normal squadron of dogfighters. Sure, maybe they die off quick, but should deliver a good beating to enemy fighters in the process. I knew I thought of this for a reason! :slight_smile:

These are ideas for a mod that i plan on doing when i get better at 3D modeling and texturing.

Hailcon- A crysatilne race that specializes in energy based technology
Ships- Hailcon con ships are crystalline in shape an nature
Pros-Ships with high shield and high Armor values(they are diamond like in structure) and powerful beam weapons
Cons- very slow ships with huge weight values. poor structural integrity (when the armor and shields are pierced it is toast)

Gorn--A race of apes that advanced in technology rapidly due to a crashed terran science vessel.
Ships - The gorn have taken human technology and advanced it by approximately 100 years in the span of 10. their ships reassemble the covenant with larger fish tale engine arrays.
Pros- gorn ships use expensive engine arrays formed from many MANY inefficient engines creating fast ships
Cons- Gorn ships have sacrificed Practicality for anesthetics and because of this they are delicate, but use very powerful mass drivers.

Dredge- an insectoid race that recently emerged from hibernation and now ally themselves with the terran alliance to once again gain galactic dominance
Ships- The dredge ships mimic their insectoid nature and feature appendages sporting ‘feeder beams’ that leach energy from opposing starships to boost the power of the individual dredge ship.
Pros- dredge ships are quite fast, and have thick carapace’s. Sensor arrays that greatly help boost targeting, efficient repair systems
Cons- Massive shield penalty and delicate flesh. limited choices of weapons.

Terran- due to a rapid, and violent expanse into the cosmos akin to old imperialism and the conquering of the new world, the now dubbed ‘terrans’ seek refuge in asteroid belts nebulae , and low orbit above stars and gas giant, place inhospitable to other races.
Ships- ships are a standard cliche’ boxy metal ships with frontal mounted engine sections.
pros- strong armor and hull integrity, efficient sensor arrays and moderate speed large variety of ballistic weapons
cons-poor shields little, to no beam weapons

Sorry if there are loop holes or the descriptions are lacking, i cannot for the life of me find the papers where i wrote all of this down. (P.S. there were like 3 or 4 more races i had in mind but i can remember them D:)

This one is pretty cool. Kind of like a “plague” gun of sorts. Virus? Nanites? Enemy ships being “nom nom”-ed to death would be pretty epic. More reason to put shields and armor.

Here’s another couple of ideas:

A cruiser-class flak cannon with long range (max 950/opt 800/min 700?), 0 SP, moderate AP, tracking ~.75. Damage 100, AoE scalar = 0.1, AoE 50ish. The idea is primarily to take out enemy escort fighters by pinging shots off the escorted ship’s shield bubble.

Fighter-based radiation blaster, where the initial rad damage is something like 24, but the radiation_decay = .4 or something similar. Nasty first punch but decays pretty quick into nothing. My concept here was an organic corrosive sting sort of weapon.

(I realize I keep hitting the flak/radiation buttons pretty hard, but most of the concepts I come up with seem to be most easily implemented that way. Plus I think there’s a lot of unused "what-if"s that deserve some exploration.)

And another idea:

Fighter Chaff Cannon: A gun designed for strafing runs against enemy cruisers and frigates. Stats: max range maybe 100, min about 40, fire_interval = 5, salvo_size = 15, salvo_interval = 750, medium tracking, 0 SP, 100 AP, damage = 2.
Effectively, it gives you a quick burst of armor-shredding shots that do little damage, but could be horribly effective en masse.

Hmmm…I like the idea. However, I did run into a problem with a similar weapon in my mod. See equation below.

2 damage x ~1 salvo/sec x 15 shots/salvo x 16 fighters x 60 seconds x 1 = 28,800 DPM (damage per minute).
2 damage x ~1 salvo/sec x 15 shots/salvo x 1 fighter x 60 seconds x 1 = 1,800 DPM (damage per minute).

That would tear a cruiser to shreds in about 5 seconds since fighters slip under the shielding of said cruiser. In addition to anything without shielding.

Even at .5 damage, a squadron would yield = 7,200 DPM. Better number but still a little OP.

Maybe lowering the salvo to about 5 might help and reducing the damage to 1 would balance it out a bit.

Fair enough. One could also: extend the salvo_interval to put in more downtime/give armor repair modules a chance to catch up; and/or drop the tracking to reduce the chance of every shot hitting. Also the module could be given a significant-enough weight to slow the fighter down and make cruiser/frigate AA countermeasures more deadly. Or even drop the AP value so that cruisers protecting themselves against the big beams also get some protection against these buggers.

I like this idea. However, if it’s gonna be anti-fighter then maybe something like 8 AP and at least 1 tracking. Damage would probably need to be reduced down to about 20/30 and scalar = .5 so that it is much less effective against the cruiser. The radius at 50 seems about right. Maybe even 100 since fighters tend to space apart more when in escort mode.


Too bad there isn't an EMP type weapon class that could disable fighters for a brief time.  Like knock them out of commission for a few seconds before they start moving again.

As far as it being anti-fighter, keep in mind that the shot itself isn’t meant to ever hit the fighters. It’s meant to hit the giant, lumbering ships nearby and take the fighters out in a wide swath of destruction. And with 0 SP, it’s not going to be remotely effective against the crusier directly (though experience shows the flak bubble will still hurt if it goes off close enough).

That’s an idea that’s been floating around for a long time but never got any real traction (along with hard shields that fighters can’t get through).

New idea that popped into my head today: decoy launchers. One of the many underused modules from the core game. Why are decoys underused? Quite frankly, because they’re not all that useful. So, here’s a thought on a decoy launcher that might fill the intended niche:

Give the launcher the largest number of missiles possible (I recall reading that it’s 6 per shot?) and give them a speed somewhere around 50% greater than fast missiles. The idea is to keep the air constantly filled with flying metal tubes to keep enemy PD and scramblers way too busy to catch everything. If the decoys are cheap enough, you could build cruisers that pack nothing else, and keep them in reserve for when an enemy brings their full scrambler might to bear.

(Yeah, I know the standard tactic against heavy scrambler/PD is just don’t use a bunch of missiles. I don’t see an additional strategy as a bad thing.)

Okay, here’s another idea that I’d love others’ perspective on.

Fighter rockets: one of the favored frigate-slayer techniques, an effective one no doubt.

So how about a new, lightweight fighter rocket that a) doesn’t penetrate any kind of shield, b) has an extremely short range (think min/max range something like 30/100), and c) has a short enough fire interval to take advantage of the short time its rockets will tie up the launcher? Essentially, this is a version of the fighter rocket that is intended to strike at the enemy’s big cruisers (and maybe even their fighters if you give it high enough tracking).

On a related note, I can’t recall if I’ve seen this anywhere so I’ll ask: has anyone determined if salvo works for missile launchers? If so, it could be a useful balancing tool for some of the ideas here and elsewhere in my head.

Thoughts?

I think that the idea of an extremely short-ranged fighter to attack cruisers could be interesting, especially with salvo limits. I think that the starblazers mod uses fighter missiles with salvo as limited ammo missiles, so it could work.

An interesting idea I had while messing around is a race with ridiculously low weight, but low-thrust engines. The missile knockback actually scales with weight, so you could knock portions of their fleet away while you attack the rest. Another fun Idea I had was a beam with 1 damage, but a fire rate of around 50-100 and a similar beam duration for a constant attack.