Actually, there’s a mechanic in there for shield disruption / stability. There’s a frigate torpedo that breaks shields temporarily.
Oh i see… thats allright then.
Yeah, I like spinal mounts that cut CAs in half, as well.
This is exactly how i design my fleets anyway, and i never have problems defeating any challanges. Doesnt sound like that much of a downside. Fit 50 ships with 1 each, an engine and a powerplant and let er rip.]
Also, spif, higer enough armour to block everything doesnt exist. Having an armour rating of 136 (Or whatever the max is) and it still doesnt reflect/absorb all the shots, like shields do. It differs, and i havent exactly found out how yet.
Critical hits Crakker. That’s the down fall of Armor. Plus trying to slap enough of it on a ship to stop beams cold.
New idea!
Freeze Rays. If you run into a fleet with super high armor stats, and you just can’t pound it down fast enough before they fill your cock pit with misses or laser beams, try the freeze ray! Acting like a “armor disruptor.” It causes the already very cold armor to become temporarily brittle, leaving it open for a plucky fighter pilot to ram a missile into it! In real space, this makes no sense whatever, but it would be so very gratuitous to watch ice grow over a cruiser and shatter. Muwhahahaha!
Bizarre… But yes, a weapon that is designed to disrupt (or damage) only armour would make for a novel addition to the arsenal.
Freeze ray could be good, except for the fact that armor sucks already.
At least in my opinion, all my experiments show shields are infinitly better than armor.
Thats why there should be a space pirate race, that is insane with armor. But just tons of health armor, not armor that can block everything.
how about a spatial anomaly where disruptions in nanostructure of cosmic wossnames meant that armor became brittle and was at half strength 
How about weapons that could CAUSE spatial anomalies? Almost like a Metagame weapon, where you throw down a nukeclear carpet mines, and with the detention and Rads, no fighters could be used! =O
Okay. Trying to go back to realistic suggestions:
I would like to see perhaps some form of super-weapons, either a nuclear missile launcher or a superlaser as earlier suggested, something with high power and high cost, perhaps something that takes up multiple hardpoints.
Indeed. Some over powered weapon with redicolous cool down time would be a nice change from the normal.
My two favorite ideas so far is a railgun and a nuke-launcher.
The game would definately gain something with the addition of some ‘formation breaking’ weapons, like area effect weapons (not necessarily damage dealers) to diminish the advantage of squashing cruisers together (power plant explosions have much too small an effect on cruisers for this to disuade dense formations, although it does the trick at compromising too-dense frigate formations.)
I disagree on the AOE type stuff.
Here’s why: We can’t control the craft.
Many of the ‘doorstop’ fleet arrangements put a tank ship(s) running out ahead in the middle of the formation. Your ships will beeline for those and will naturally bunch up in the process. No reasonable deployment arrangement or order set will reliably prevent that sort of thing - save for a single lockstep formation order, which is just impractically bad. Even for ranged attackers, you can’t use keep moving so they just naturally drive straight towards the next target, eventually leaving them sitting together in clumps.
Abuse of this behavior would seem pretty easy.
My son just suggested a tractor beam that does damage. This would be general utility weapon with good defense perks since it would eat fighters for lunch. For you star fleet battle fans, think of the tractor/repulsor beams that rip enemy vessels to shreds.
For that matter, the lock on and dump damage model of the ‘plasmatic pulsar’ beams would be interesting as well.
TAZ
How about a weapon that seems quite powerful on its lonesome, but gets more and more ineffective that more are trained on the same target? Promotes versitility, and it would be interesting to see how people use it. Though theyre would be problems balancing it.
Also, at this point, shouldnt the thread be moved to the suggestions sub forum?
What about a weapon that firers acid useless against sheild but slowly dissloves a ships hull until it’s gone
Fighter Scale Anti Fighter missiles.
Figure
Armor Penetration 10
Shield Penetration 0
Damage 2
Fire interval 1000
Range 400
Minimum Range 200
Tracking 10-13
Speed .45
The Balance point is to make it hell on fighters, effectively forcing them to use armor (As a HP buffer the Armor penetration is high enough that a fighter shouldn’t be able to shrug off hits.) instead of relying on speed alone, But not have enough DoT that it can crit it’s way through armored hulls any time soon.
The Long Minimum range and lack of shield penetration make it useless against anything with intact shields.
All lasers should have a beam effect, the only thing that should very is the duration.
I’d love to see all manner of spinal weapons. I’d like to see something along the line of a spinal gatling heavy-plasma weapon, to a mega-beam laser that just MELTS ships, to a linear accelerator that hurls asteroids, or a linear accelerator that rapidly fires massive numbers of small solid projectiles. How about a Katyusha mod that launches massive numbers of unguided rockets? Naturally the spinals would be fitable only to one specific cruiser/frigate per race, and takes all, or all but one weapon hardpoint.
Nanotech payload missiles. Two types: Shield disrupting, massive damage to shields, no damage to hull or armor, and Gobbler. . . slowly eats armor and won’t stop without a nanotech or armor repairer on the ship.
I’d like to see inertial dampeners that let ships turn faster.
How about matter/anti-matter weapons or singularity bombs that create small black holes for a limited duration. Gravitational field effects would be kinda cool in general to create terrain hazards.
Nanite/drone missiles that cause a shield piercing damage over time effect as they chew at the hull.
I was also pretty disappointed by the kinetic weapons both by their overall lack of effect and only being available to one race. Maybe some larger mass throwers would be cool, like hurling small(ish) asteroids that do a damage over path of travel kind of effect, in other words, anything that it contacts along its line of travel takes damage.
Those are just a few off the top of my head. Now if only I could actually make them.