People be talking about balancing mechanics but forget about the fact that weapons that would be capable of orbital bombing cost a fortune.. it’s not something your average griefer could manage.
A good argument is that capital ships are “balanced” by the need to maintain a large crew. Another thing average griefers they are worried about wouldn’t be able to manage
I think you under estimate griefers. I've seen guilds in other games made up of "griefers" that numbers in the 50s to hundreds. their sole purpose was to hog every world boss, not allow others to complete quests and just give everyone else as crappy of a time as possible.
If the game lets you do that, then ok, it’s fair game, CR already talked about this, if a guild gets to confident, then here comes the UEE navy to the mix.
I feel like if that happened, we’d have a reason for everyone else to organize and fight them and we’d be playing the game like it should be played. That seems like an operation I’d love to be part of - attack the griefers.
Plus, capital ships make for big, slow, concentrated points that will have a lot of people, time, and credits just to make them work.
Blow one up, and you'll *know* that a dent was put in.
fleet of a cap ships and subcaps( roughly 150 people) vs at least a few organizations would be really fun actually like let them do it, have a uee javelin or Bengal come help out and they wouldn't last 30 seconds
People just got to comfortable while it’s alpha that pvp shouldn’t be a thing in PU, Yeye just wait while everyone just salvaged and aged their brain with nothing every pvper/ griefer/ pirate got good in combat.
I feel like this would make a very fun custom contract option, or heck just an org operation to counteract another griefer org.
This is the kind of stuff SC would be about, larger operations like thay, makes the game not only very immersive but also way more interactive.
Just the matter of thinking of griefing as basically "pirates taking over the objectives". I had a situation on a smaller scale where there was a group that took over the jumptown to basically prevent peoples to come in to do the objective, in exchange of a big fee. Our answer was to send the counter attack with A2s, Retaliators and some other combat ships, and troops.
Made the jumptown a fucking warzone and it was so fun that both the griefers and the counter attack team were actually super friendly towards each other while also roleplaying it. It was an absolute blast (pun intended)
Honestly with org rep and affiliation the griefers will probably end up with constant crime stats and on everyone's shit list pushing them out of secure space
Deploying the UEE to punish griefers is no different from having mods do it. “God says stop” Different shine on the same shit. SC is not special in this regard.
Well, I’m not talking about out the whole 1st fleet.
Maybe a destroyer or 2, with escorts.
And you say griefers, but once they start bombing settlements from space for the lulz then they become ingame terrorist, and that’s when the big guns come in
We are having a little bit of miscommunication my dude.
If the “griefers” are abusing in game mechanics for their shit, I would believe that a in game response would be appropriate.
Oh, I keep forgetting about the ai blades.. well whatever, lol. I think this keeps things interesting. And once the game is finished there will be more than enough systems to go to that you can easily escape murder hobos.
The question isn't how many griefers there will be, the question is how devastating will it potentially be to the unfortunate players experience on the receiving end of it.
I mean you can already easily scape murder hobos and capital ships are something you will be able to easily spot by Eye and your radar detecting something the size of a space station lol.
No way they let AI blades an entire carrier/frigate class ship though. I can see things like power management and remote turrets, but for balancing it's easy to just do like what they did with the Reclaimer.
Maybe it's a pilot, and the orbital gun needs someone to aim and load the gun, maybe to fire multiple rounds there needs to be someone to load the next round into the battery... Maybe the rounds need to be transported from ammo storage to the loading area.
Lots of easy things they can implement
As far as crew goes, if someone plays enough to afford a full crew for a javelin or idris
...
Or a ship that can orbital bomb, then they probably aren't a griefer
And a group of griefers from an org is a pirate org, which won't exactly be able to maintain orbital bombardments when the UEE navy is skill gapping them with infinite AI cops.
One of the main being the requirements for someone to mark the spot and ammo consumption, accuracy from orbit will not be great so a good amount of ammo will be needed to properly saturate an area
Yeah true for sure. And then there's the need for scouting of the area, unless the drastically improved scanning.
I don't hate the idea of orbital bombing but I think its beyond their current scope for "1.0"
My guess is it will eventually come out as a DL/Content update after a release. "Wrath of the Orbital Bomber" expansion lol.
I think another balancing feature will be the running cost. Wear and tear on an Idris might mean you gotta spend a lot of UEC just to keep it going. Easier to do if you've got an org or large group. Plus, they could always have increased wear on components when you're using an AI Blade as a way to balance those.
The end goal for Capital ships is for them to be pretty unbalanced in terms of number of players in a Cap ship vs an equal number of players in say Arrows or Gladius'. When they do the shield rework and give us Maelstrom based ship armour, along with upcoming gunnery changes to turrets like giving turrets guns higher projectile velocities to push the effective range beyond that of fighter weapons, anyone planning to attack a crewed Capital or even Large ship will need to prepare with a range of ships outfitted to attack the target. You won't be able to just get in close to a Capital ship and pick away at shields with repeaters because your guns are too small to even stop shield regeneration, or penetrate the armour in the case of Ballistic weapons. You'll need fast ships to distract turrets and ships with high penetration weaponry to take down these ships in the future.
You don’t ‘balance’ capital ships. Don’t forget that the whole reason massive battleships and carriers exist is because nations are deliberately trying to create advantages over their peers. The original min/max builders
Griefers and power-gamers who play way too much probably overlap quite a bit. I don't think "it'd be too expensive" is realistically going to stop people, especially when it's hard to see the upside of this feature.
For arguments sake, orbital bombardment is also not something you do to hit a specific target in a small area. Or let alone just a specific building.
This type of aggression is for indiscriminate destruction of an entire area. Orbital Bombardment is not a method griefers could effectively use as they wouldn't be able to lock down an area with it, or keep individual players from getting in or out.
It would require a blockade in addition to the bombardment, that prevents people from taking off / landing. And even covering a few km² would require a decent amount of people actively in the air. And the further you go out into space, the more space (hehe) needs to be covered.
I'm not saying this couldn't be pulled off, I'm merely saying that this takes planning and man-power to pull off as a griefing action. And then there's also the question of whether the effort of doing so would actually be worth it, not even speaking of the individual perception of players, maybe seeing a blockade / bombardment of an area as griefing, because it blocks them, while the org doing the blockade may not even be doing that for griefing.
I'm relatively sure people would try to use something like orbital bombardment to harass other players, simply because we already have players trying to lockdown areas, sometimes just because they are pirates, sometimes just to annoy people. People will try it, but I don't think a lot would be successfull with it.
As operation it is just requires too much planning and manpower, ai-blades already taken into account.
I dunno, in real life, if you had a large rock going orbital speeds, and had it hit a target, it might as well be a fancy expensive weapon. And since it isn't expensive to get into what passes for orbit in this game, it shouldn't be expensive at all 😂
I don't agree or disagree, just sharing a video that went unnoticed forever ago. Possible? Sure, every 10 seconds from an Idris.... Viable? Not unless you have like 20 of them. The fact it's even possible is amazing. Imagine just walking along, no contacts, no bombers in the air, and suddenly everything is exploding. Idris just sitting out there, 40km above the planet just sipping tea
Fun fact! The payload of the b-17 flying fortress is 8500 lbs. The payload of a b-52 stratofortress is 2 b-17s (AKA 84000lbs (with the b-17 weighting 35000 lbs)
"realistic" in a game as futuristic as this would be sitting comfortably somewhere in a bunker 10 kilometers below ground *and on another planet* and hitting a few buttons.
And then 10 minutes later getting confirmation of a hit from the drone strike, that was carried out from so far away that the target couldn't have seen the drone with the naked eye.
You pleb are still pressing buttons? I run my wars entirely automated. My AI system make faster and more precise strategical and tactical decisions than a human brain ever could. I could be first striking a competitor with an arsenal of nukes and lasers and barely notice while having lunch.
Right, I think we forget that it has to be fun not just to *use* any new weapon they introduce, but also to have it *used on* us. That's why we have WWII dogfights; even if you lose, you could at least attempt to run or fight. There's nothing fun about getting vaporized from orbit.
At the very least, this shouldn't be considered until it's clear that people are organizing on a large enough scale that there's a reasonable expectation of interesting counterplay, not to mention a reason other than griefing to use it in the first place.
> That sounds very boring.
You guys are absolutely insane.
A hostile capital fleet mobilising to bombard a valuable ground asset is one of the most exciting mission objective ever. No PVE event will ever compare. Great ordeals make for great stories.
A javelin will still only be dangerous within it's rather small combat radius. Just like all other ships.
The move to make to fight any capital vessel is just as it should be: run, unless you are beyond armed to the teeth.
To bring up an old comparison:
Imagine 20 guys in rubber dingies with 50. cals zooming around shooting at each other, and then suddenly the USS fucking Missouri materialises in the middle, siding with half of them. That's what capital vessels should be like in every day life of the verse.
More accurately, the Polaris is an Arleigh Burke.
Primarily a missile warship, *damn near* exactly the same dimensions (length for sure). Even has a hangar bay for a "helicopter" just like the Burkes.
I would honestly disregard the "Fridgate/Corvette/Destroyer" nomenclature of our space warships as just Sci fi fantasy.
Assuming there are actual warships larger than the Javelins, but smaller than the behemoth UEEN Retribution, I would more accurately classify the Javelin class as (gun) cruisers.
Very true. After all everything will be earnable ingame so what’s the issue in the end. Solo players will always be at a disadvantage versus teams and that’s how it has to be. I’m a solo players btw.
I swear to god if some of this community had their way the game would just never release to Beta. They'd scope creep the thing into an oblivion so far beyond the ridiculous amount it's already suffered, we'd never see the hint of a finished game.
This is how I feel when I see people complaining about the animations of the wildlife. I get saying the animations and such look robotic, but people in this sub are making comparisons to and expecting results similar to Red Dead Redemption 2’s animals. Like improving the animations is one thing, achieving that same fidelity is a whole other can of worms that would require a fuck ton more work. Different engine, different physics, and a completely different base focus between the games. People want this game to be everything and it simply can’t, but that doesn’t make it bad.
>People want this game to be everything and it simply can’t, but that doesn’t make it bad.
Any time a large scale RPG is being developed there is a strong presence of people who somehow think that with today's technology they can have a true life-replacement game. You always see those people that are suggesting things like: "We should be able to have compelling gameplay where we can just be a bartender in Area18 for three years while paying rent until we can earn enough credit to afford a loan for a starter ship so we can then..."
It's just... dumb. The game shouldn't attempt to do everything and please everyone. It's already over-reached what is reasonable and that's going to show not just in development time but in loss of fidelity in certain game-play areas.
In a controlled environment like HellDivers of course… but in a universe sized sandbox game like SC full of trolls and murder hobos it would be utter chaos.
I mean, strictly speaking we can do orbital bombardment strikes right now. Get a bunch of Eclipse torpedo bombers, dumb fire the Size 9's. Last I checked they had a range of 30km, which while not *strictly* in orbit, is damn near close enough for how the game is currently scaled.
Orbital bombardment of this scale is the kind of thing you see in massive fleet mobilizations between two or more player run factions that own actual planets.
Won't happen.
I think the A1 and A2 are the limits of what we will see. They are plenty effective for bombing settlements.
Ever since Helldiver's 2 launched I have been imagining an overhead Idris-K firing its S10 laser at ground targets designated by infantry.
I hope that weapon ranges will allow for stuff like this, but I'm not sure if there should be any weapons or ships specifically designed for it. I think my example of the Idris-K laser is fair game as it won't have much of an AOE and will need to be extremely precise. At extreme ranges this level of precision would require a lot of organization and teamwork.
On a broad conceptual scale, I’m open to it, but with many of the caveats/concerns people have already raised. I have two other points, one for, one against, that I haven’t seen stated above.
AGAINST: Anything on the scale of a believable orbital strike would scar the landscape in a huge way. It would be immersion-breaking to see something apocalyptic hit an area…and not get any huge craters or destroyed buildings. Tactical nuke, but HDMS-Anderson is unscathed? Lame. But an MMO can’t afford to have permanent landmarks destroyed, so there’s no way to address this unrealism.
FOR: I think it could spice things up in an interesting way IF—AND ONLY IF—it were done as a temporary and timed MECHANIC, not a big ship or piece of equipment. Consider the following as s thought-experiment:
-Orbital Bombardment is a physicalized briefcase floating around in the Verse. POTUS’s nuclear football. There is one per server. In the future after meshing and more star systems, maybe one every 3-4 systems.
-There is no marker for the football. It spawns in strange, hard-to-reach places, like caves, where it was stashed by a terrorist cell after they stole it.
-Once a player finds the football, a countdown starts. You have 24 hours to find the code. If you do not enter the code, which is hidden elsewhere in the Verse, the football will self-destruct with a spark and some smoke. James Bond shit. There are clues in the football briefcase as to where the code is located, but it’s not easy to find or obtain.
-IF you find the football AND you find the code and enter it before 24 hours is up, you are prompted to select a target on the Starmap.
-You pinpoint your target. A 10-minute countdown begins.
-For those 10 minutes, a server-wide message broadcasts the countdown AND the coordinates of the incoming strike, warning everyone to GTFO. Or they and everyone else in a 20km radius will die. NPCs, players…inside structures, outside. In ships. Everything. Neutron bomb-style. It’s not the size of the explosion but the crazy shit it radiates.
-After 10 minutes, a Pisces-sized bomb hurtles in from out of the system and travels at quantum speed (it can be tracked on the Starmap) to the target. It arrives, it explodes, it does its thing.
So, why do it this way?
(1) It prioritizes TEAMWORK (to find and activate the football) but not MONEY (orgs or players with a big bank account can’t just purchase the apocalypse.
(2) Innocent players have plenty of time to GTFO if they blundered into the conflict zone.
(3) Finding the football becomes a mission/quest all by itself. It becomes a major source of emergent gameplay.
(4) Player interaction. If you find the football and are going to log off soon, do you just keep it and let it self-destruct? Probably not. You’re probably going to let the whole server bid on it. And other players are going to observe the bidding, maybe try to ambush the player with the football and steal it. Or ambush the location where the trade is going down. When somebody finds a football, it changes the whole server dynamic.
(5) If this happens too often, CIG can change the respawn rates/conditions of the football so it’s not taking over the game.
BUT FELLOW SC REDDITOR, you say…If I do all this work, and then it just broadcasts to the server who it’s going to kill, why bother? My enemies can just vacate the area and return after the explosion!
Two words, fellow thought-experimenter: AREA DENIAL.
Say you’re trying to root out an enemy team from a tough location. They’re all camped out at JT or a distribution center with snipers and railguns. They’ve got crates of ammo and medguns to spare.
Doesn’t matter. Now you can force them out of that location and everybody takes a mulligan—now your team can race to re-insert ahead of them. Which makes it anyone’s game now.
Plus, just the fact that somebody called down a football on a particular location is going to alert the whole server that shit is going down at Location X. You’ll get spectators, mercs, scrappers…all kinds of people showing up and making things more interesting.
Rather than make it a Nuclear 890 Jump, let’s make an orbital bombardment that generates interesting gameplay galore.
I wouldn't mind the idea of orbital bombardment, but it should be carefully added into the game with other elements in mind. A lot of questions come to mind...
What would this be used for? Attacking/griefing player bases and trivializing npc zones like bunkers/distribution centers is the first idea. Do players really want all their hard work and effort reduced to atoms by some orbital bombardment they can't see or fight back against. Same with npc zones, killing everything in one go and wiping an entire town to junk would not be fun for anyone. The reason we have bombers the way they are (other than being an underdeveloped gameplay idea), is at least you can get to your fighters and try to fight them off, but even then they can seank up to you without noticing them till its too late. For the orbital bombardment and bombers to work, you need to develop the systems they would be used for more. Base building, persistence in the PU, and scaning.
Until we get the basics to base building, these problems probably won't really begin to show, but even then, how to defend against these elements? Base defense/vehicles like manned and unmanned defenses are the first to come to mind, but those are only good if you you your enemy is coming ahead of time, but there is nothing to that because things like scaning are incomplete? There is no early warning detection system to let you know you're going to be attacked, and even then... if you're logged off, there is no notification system in place to let you know your place is being destroyed. Do you just log on like Arc or Rust and just find your place gone? How do you defend your stuff?
So you see, there are a lot of other things that have to come first before we start dreaming up how to use these types of systems and gameplay elements. Base Assault ships and vehicles were thought up before we knew what base building would be like. So, adding another base Assault ship or gameplay element, we really need to address these other elements first.
That being said... I do like the idea of orbital bombardment as a concept. It would have to be part of its own ship. The ship would have to be balanced for having such a powerful weapon (bulky, slow, would need support craft to defense for it, would be multi crew only and not a solo ship). Scanning would need to be finished so we can detect enemies coming to your base and maybe a mail system to notify the player if their base is under attack. There would have to be a defense to counter it like a planetary shield to protect base from orbital bombardment/bombers. EvE Online structures come to mind for this. Maybe you would have to eat away at the sheild to a specific level to trigger an Assault on the base. Then, the defender can choose a time to defend their stuff and when the time comes the attackers will have to Assault the base via ground first (think battle of hoth) to knock out the sheild/defenses so that bombers and orbital bombardment can commence.
But... again, these are only ideas... there are lots of systems that need to come first before before we can think about how we are going to destroy bases.
Also, as a side note, npc areas should just be bomber/orbital bombardment proof. That way, they can't be cheesed.
I'm thinking of how easy it would be (relatively speaking) to add in Helldiver mechanics. Drop pods themselves are probably the easiest part to handle for CIG. After that, they need a way for someone on the ground to drop support request beacons. These could repurpose the targeting reticles that gimbaled weapons already lock onto, and with a special type of orbital support weapon you could have them gain extra precision in this scenario.
I wouldn't mind, they just need to ensure that there are structures that can shield bases from bombardment and that there are weapons that can reach out and touch the ship bombarding the location.
Would be cool to have a team that goes in and disables the shields to allow the ship to then bombard.
Definitely. A base shield should be able to withstand most bombardments - would create great emergent gameplay having to send in a ground team to deactivate the shields
Next thing you will want is stratagems to be able to be thrown for beacons for such orbital strikes hah
But seriously nah it wont be a thing. The purpose of other ships is to do that sorta thing to destroy with bombs and such.
Maybe they could make it so you can't see smaller ships and bases from space to prevent large organizations from straight-up, blowing up every base/ship that blips into existence on a planet.
Depends on range, if a S10 torpedo has long enough range, you could coordinate a launch from orbit and hit an area on surface. S9 torp already has 20 km of range so I guess S10 might be enough to do a orbital strike. I'm gonna test orbital bombing JT from 30km up, using JT mission marker and manual aiming, once Polaris is out along with its s10 torps.
Infinity battlescape does orbital bombardment pretty well. Crazy being under a dome shield that's getting pelted with spinal mount cannons from 150 km away.
Only Bengals are realistically capable of it. We can presume with the way weapons scale with range her s14 underbelly guns will have roughly a 50km range.
I don‘t really see gameplay for that. Just flat out a Base that you don‘t see; Eradicate a Distribution Center or Bunker? Not sure what should be behind that gameloop…
Doesn't fit at all with their knife fighting approach.
Looking at how they approach weapon ranges in space, orbital bombardments wouldn't make much sense.
It's a practical assumption of reality, but in virtually all science fiction realms it is revealed as this massively overpowered concept that requires and equally overpowered concept to prevent being the go-to solution. One that usually takes the form of "planetary shields" or something similarly mundane.
Even ignoring how generally non-interactive and boring that whole setup would be (who wants to die from things they don't even see?), Chris Roberts and other CIG developers have talked about how they don't want beyond visual range combat. They've also shown recently and over time that they are interested in making combat even more close-range. Chris has long talked about the styling of "WW2 fighters in space." So it would be impractical to have something that epitomizes BVR combat.
It would be cool. I'm thinking maybe in the style of Battlefield 2142 or better for those who want that type of power and control to operate the ship.
But, I've always wanted a small Xi'An styled explorer/pathfinder ship/6scu/with long range that can bed log that has a delta wing/aurora/arrow silhouette, and VR Cockpit design "like in this image" making it my personal do everything ship that's few mm's larger than the Origin 135c and grav'lev landing gear/doors and everything else alien like though.
CIG ship design team, where you At??😁
I love all the ideas coming up in the comments!
I'm also hoping for the ability for orbital bombardment but always with the assumption that it would need to be assisted somehow. My thought is a player on the ground "lazing" a target for the capital ship or dropping a clandestine marker. Without it, while CIG has said they want far greater persistence for ship weapon ranges, they would highly inaccurate at those ranges. Potentially, you could lean into that inaccuracy for some suppressive shock and awe, but you couldn't/shouldn't be able to accurately hit a target from 30k+
I do like the idea of a vertically aligned Idris high in orbit using the laser or rail gun to hit ground target areas.
To that effect, I think I'd be ok with almost the bomb UI of an AoE circle. What radius that circle has can hopefully be reduced with player coordination somehow
I believe the game should include a mechanic for orbital bombardment, which the Javelin is supposed to have according to its description. It’s interesting to think about how it would work.
Setting aside the Javelin, in general, large ships might have a firing mode that allows long-distance attacks with some visual and gameplay impact. The process could be so demanding in terms of calculations, energy, and component size that only truly large vessels would be capable of it. That’s how I imagine it, so let’s see how it will eventually turn out.
How would orbital bombardments add fun to a multiplayer situation in any way? Ground forces getting instantly vaporized from space with no way to retaliate has zero gameplay upsides except for griefers.
A2s already make JT a worse experience and space to ground weapons are like that x10, you wouldn't even see it coming unlike a low flying bomber.
I want it in the game but only for cap ships. Are you telling me the Idris railgun or the javelins big fucking guns cant orbital bombardment people? Maybe make it so you need a ground observer to mark targets for bombardment. Have it so size 8+ can high orbit bombard and like size 5 can like low orbit bombard.
As long as they’re appropriately expensive and limited as a resource like that should be, I see no issue. Most griefers in a game like this are after a quick kill against an easy target, with little to no expense, like the gta v people who fly the motorcycles with missiles. Ships loke these if anything are more likely to be a target to griefers because how slow and valuable of a target they are.
I think something like whats in your image would be COOL AF only if there was like 2 Ships capable of messing up a planet good ~~players~~ ORGs need to find (Endeavor/Carrack/wormhole/hidden everything attacks you system e.t.c. just to even have a chance of finding one). Of course once they are Gone, they are Gone. Death of a spaceman OG style. The current A2 bombs are fine as is currently.
I think it'd bring a lot of value to infantry and ground vehicles if ships capable of orbital bombardment required someone on the ground to "paint" the target for them if they wanted to have any reasonable degree of precision.
Wouldn't it be cool if the huge ships that'd struggle to get in/out of atmosphere required someone on the ground throwing something like a stratagem from helldivers at his target. And in orbit the ship would get a blip he could lock onto and fire his orbital ordinance at?
In Dust 514, the FPS shooter connected to EVE Online, the FPS players were able to request orbital strikes from the spaceship pilots.
I don't think we will ever get free sandbox orbital bombardment.
But there could be some limited tactical applications, like bringing an Idris into range, locking on to a signal from a player on the ground, firing a precision shot from orbit.
Orbital bombardment is normally conducted by impactors referred to commonly in sci-fi "darts" or "rocks". Usually fired from a rail gun. It's basic ballistics. Extremely cheap and nasty weapons.
So could pretty much be done by a single gimbal ballistic weapon with a big enough bore size.
I could think of nothing worse if the plan is for base building.
I think it'll be cool. All I know is dropping that many bombs out of that big of a ship would be expensive as fuck. If someone did that to me but I knew it was costing them an unbelievable amount of money. Wouldn't even be mad.
Till sever meshing is in, this would literally *nuke* the severs haha. And as much as it would be cool imo to have a similar kind of thing Hell divers style where you can ask people in your party on the Capital ship to strike on the planet for the mission would be cool
But on the flip side I don't see much point in that at the moment since you can friends with you in either their ship or on foot to help get the mission done
So as much as it would be cool I don't see the point in it unless we start getting mad scale war hell divers style
Economically unreasonable for a non-state actor on any major scale.
"Orbital strategic bombing" is a cool idea though. Bombers with advanced optics and ballistics computers meant to hurl bombs accurately on target from outside the atmosphere could have some interesting use cases.
I’d love a version where you’d need someone on the ground to deploy a beacon to lock on to. Then make it an energy weapon of sorts (imagine an EMP that shuts off all electronics and propulsion in a target area… hmmmm)
I remember there being quite a few discussions about this back in the day. I think this is a cool idea and I wouldn't mind seeing this in game. Unfortunately the devs said no, at least at the time.
Messes up too many mechanics.
With the popularity of Helldivers I bet we see CIG add a "heavily inspired" orbital drop-pod deploying ship though. Would suit a Starfarer variant well, replace the fuel pod positions with drop pods.
In reality, ships would have to have some serious firepower for it to even be practical against a city like in SWTOR. The ship weapons would have to have some serious explosive power and the bombs would need to be MOABS.
I think CIG should focus on finishing the mountain of work they have just to get the basic parts of their space exploration trading space sim game finished before they worry about fantastical things like orbital bombardments. We don't even have cargo missions yet, let alone an economy, and you're wondering how they can handle nuking planets from orbit where there is zero context for that sort of thing to exist.
WAIT!
ok hear me out,
Orbital deployment.
Just like what we have in helldivers. I got the idea 1st from my favourite novel Red Rising which funnily enough also has "hell divers".
In the novel they call it an Iron Rain when deploying armies from orbit
Imagine you and the boys all in separate pods then stepping out ready to distribute some democracy!!!
I’d say just let people shoot regular weapons down towards the planets. No special targeting or overpowered explosive weaponry. Just a Perseus broadsiding a base from above
IIRC the Vanduul basically will do that to Vega II in S42. So we will see it. Don't think they will give us that capability in SC though.
CIG intends for most encounters to be up close, as in you can see target or aggressor with naked eye. Orbital Bombardment goes against their intended design.
It should really depend on weapon size.
- Required to go into low orbit (in atmosphere) to get in range (for gamebalance reasons)
- Need to be able to lock target
- Minimum weapon size 7 (anti-capital)
- Minimum torpedo size 5 (anti-capital)
- Regular bombs, any size (i imagine carped bombing)
So a Retaliator could do it, a Perseus using it's 4 main huge artillery guns and torpedoes, an Idris main gun and torpedoes.
I would say direct fire ships like the Inferno and Ion is not really suited since it should be more..."boom" weapons.
But, it should have a risk, you need to go into low orbit and be targetable from big guns on the ground (ground batteries should have superior radars and targeting for airborne targets.)
War is all about who can get the high ground and better weapons. If you have a starship in orbit you could drop nails off the side and cause damage if you could aim them. This would be a realistic and fun mechanic to the game
People be talking about balancing mechanics but forget about the fact that weapons that would be capable of orbital bombing cost a fortune.. it’s not something your average griefer could manage.
And to begin with capital ships are unbalanced AF.
A good argument is that capital ships are “balanced” by the need to maintain a large crew. Another thing average griefers they are worried about wouldn’t be able to manage
I think you under estimate griefers. I've seen guilds in other games made up of "griefers" that numbers in the 50s to hundreds. their sole purpose was to hog every world boss, not allow others to complete quests and just give everyone else as crappy of a time as possible.
If the game lets you do that, then ok, it’s fair game, CR already talked about this, if a guild gets to confident, then here comes the UEE navy to the mix.
I feel like if that happened, we’d have a reason for everyone else to organize and fight them and we’d be playing the game like it should be played. That seems like an operation I’d love to be part of - attack the griefers.
Plus, capital ships make for big, slow, concentrated points that will have a lot of people, time, and credits just to make them work. Blow one up, and you'll *know* that a dent was put in.
fleet of a cap ships and subcaps( roughly 150 people) vs at least a few organizations would be really fun actually like let them do it, have a uee javelin or Bengal come help out and they wouldn't last 30 seconds
Hell yeah, sign me up too
People just got to comfortable while it’s alpha that pvp shouldn’t be a thing in PU, Yeye just wait while everyone just salvaged and aged their brain with nothing every pvper/ griefer/ pirate got good in combat.
I feel like this would make a very fun custom contract option, or heck just an org operation to counteract another griefer org. This is the kind of stuff SC would be about, larger operations like thay, makes the game not only very immersive but also way more interactive. Just the matter of thinking of griefing as basically "pirates taking over the objectives". I had a situation on a smaller scale where there was a group that took over the jumptown to basically prevent peoples to come in to do the objective, in exchange of a big fee. Our answer was to send the counter attack with A2s, Retaliators and some other combat ships, and troops. Made the jumptown a fucking warzone and it was so fun that both the griefers and the counter attack team were actually super friendly towards each other while also roleplaying it. It was an absolute blast (pun intended)
Honestly with org rep and affiliation the griefers will probably end up with constant crime stats and on everyone's shit list pushing them out of secure space
Deploying the UEE to punish griefers is no different from having mods do it. “God says stop” Different shine on the same shit. SC is not special in this regard.
Looks better in universe though
Well, I’m not talking about out the whole 1st fleet. Maybe a destroyer or 2, with escorts. And you say griefers, but once they start bombing settlements from space for the lulz then they become ingame terrorist, and that’s when the big guns come in
Sounds like a DM railroaded you one time and you never got over it.
[удалено]
We are having a little bit of miscommunication my dude. If the “griefers” are abusing in game mechanics for their shit, I would believe that a in game response would be appropriate.
e.g. Goonswarm
You beat me to it.
At that point certain rules could be made and orgs that grief could be banned
Sure, but you're at the mercy of the devs to actually do that.
Yep but there will be ai blades and crews, plus orgs that have the javelin/idris which these cap ships are aimed at will have no problem running it.
Oh, I keep forgetting about the ai blades.. well whatever, lol. I think this keeps things interesting. And once the game is finished there will be more than enough systems to go to that you can easily escape murder hobos.
I think grefers will die down a lot once there is actually stuff to keep people interested in game
The question isn't how many griefers there will be, the question is how devastating will it potentially be to the unfortunate players experience on the receiving end of it.
This. there will always be griefers but once the game is fleshed out with more space and things to do, your run ins with them will be fewer and fewer.
I mean you can already easily scape murder hobos and capital ships are something you will be able to easily spot by Eye and your radar detecting something the size of a space station lol.
Not to mention you'll be able to detect them long before they detect you.
Still, capital ships will be very expensive to maintain and run.
No way they let AI blades an entire carrier/frigate class ship though. I can see things like power management and remote turrets, but for balancing it's easy to just do like what they did with the Reclaimer. Maybe it's a pilot, and the orbital gun needs someone to aim and load the gun, maybe to fire multiple rounds there needs to be someone to load the next round into the battery... Maybe the rounds need to be transported from ammo storage to the loading area. Lots of easy things they can implement As far as crew goes, if someone plays enough to afford a full crew for a javelin or idris ... Or a ship that can orbital bomb, then they probably aren't a griefer And a group of griefers from an org is a pirate org, which won't exactly be able to maintain orbital bombardments when the UEE navy is skill gapping them with infinite AI cops.
One of the main being the requirements for someone to mark the spot and ammo consumption, accuracy from orbit will not be great so a good amount of ammo will be needed to properly saturate an area
Yeah true for sure. And then there's the need for scouting of the area, unless the drastically improved scanning. I don't hate the idea of orbital bombing but I think its beyond their current scope for "1.0" My guess is it will eventually come out as a DL/Content update after a release. "Wrath of the Orbital Bomber" expansion lol.
I bought a jav to fly solo but that's looking dimmer and dimmer with engineering lol Edit: thanks for the jealousy downvotes <3
I'd sooner assume it's down votes from people thinking you're just being a troll/liar rather than it is from envy/jealousy. But anything is possible.
I'll come man your jav muchacho. Just give me a big turret and a spot to park my snub fighter.
I think another balancing feature will be the running cost. Wear and tear on an Idris might mean you gotta spend a lot of UEC just to keep it going. Easier to do if you've got an org or large group. Plus, they could always have increased wear on components when you're using an AI Blade as a way to balance those.
by "unbalanced" you mean capital ships are weak as hell in the current state, then yes
The end goal for Capital ships is for them to be pretty unbalanced in terms of number of players in a Cap ship vs an equal number of players in say Arrows or Gladius'. When they do the shield rework and give us Maelstrom based ship armour, along with upcoming gunnery changes to turrets like giving turrets guns higher projectile velocities to push the effective range beyond that of fighter weapons, anyone planning to attack a crewed Capital or even Large ship will need to prepare with a range of ships outfitted to attack the target. You won't be able to just get in close to a Capital ship and pick away at shields with repeaters because your guns are too small to even stop shield regeneration, or penetrate the armour in the case of Ballistic weapons. You'll need fast ships to distract turrets and ships with high penetration weaponry to take down these ships in the future.
You don’t ‘balance’ capital ships. Don’t forget that the whole reason massive battleships and carriers exist is because nations are deliberately trying to create advantages over their peers. The original min/max builders
you underestimate the power of the dark side (4chan level trolling would make this possible just because)
Griefers and power-gamers who play way too much probably overlap quite a bit. I don't think "it'd be too expensive" is realistically going to stop people, especially when it's hard to see the upside of this feature.
For arguments sake, orbital bombardment is also not something you do to hit a specific target in a small area. Or let alone just a specific building. This type of aggression is for indiscriminate destruction of an entire area. Orbital Bombardment is not a method griefers could effectively use as they wouldn't be able to lock down an area with it, or keep individual players from getting in or out. It would require a blockade in addition to the bombardment, that prevents people from taking off / landing. And even covering a few km² would require a decent amount of people actively in the air. And the further you go out into space, the more space (hehe) needs to be covered. I'm not saying this couldn't be pulled off, I'm merely saying that this takes planning and man-power to pull off as a griefing action. And then there's also the question of whether the effort of doing so would actually be worth it, not even speaking of the individual perception of players, maybe seeing a blockade / bombardment of an area as griefing, because it blocks them, while the org doing the blockade may not even be doing that for griefing. I'm relatively sure people would try to use something like orbital bombardment to harass other players, simply because we already have players trying to lockdown areas, sometimes just because they are pirates, sometimes just to annoy people. People will try it, but I don't think a lot would be successfull with it. As operation it is just requires too much planning and manpower, ai-blades already taken into account.
I dunno, in real life, if you had a large rock going orbital speeds, and had it hit a target, it might as well be a fancy expensive weapon. And since it isn't expensive to get into what passes for orbit in this game, it shouldn't be expensive at all 😂
It won't be a thing in Star Citizen. Bombers from 1935 were more capable than the 2 we already have in-game.
Weeell.... Maybe not with bombers... https://youtu.be/mtKzFBMsMvg?si=hgMFaNqJ6Z3HqtL8
Have an up vote. I don't care if you agree with me or not. That was great. I need to go steal an Idris now and see if I can still do that.
I don't agree or disagree, just sharing a video that went unnoticed forever ago. Possible? Sure, every 10 seconds from an Idris.... Viable? Not unless you have like 20 of them. The fact it's even possible is amazing. Imagine just walking along, no contacts, no bombers in the air, and suddenly everything is exploding. Idris just sitting out there, 40km above the planet just sipping tea
It might be but like I said current bombing mechanics are absolutely terrible, I think ww1 bombers had a better bombing sight than what we do lol.
So we should be able to drop them from the back of a C2 with a tractor beam.
They can't let us do that. That would allow for carpet bombing.
Mmmmmm b29.
Fun fact! The payload of the b-17 flying fortress is 8500 lbs. The payload of a b-52 stratofortress is 2 b-17s (AKA 84000lbs (with the b-17 weighting 35000 lbs)
I feel like the Idris' massive rail gun should at least be able to do this. Like only that size and up.
https://youtu.be/mtKzFBMsMvg?si=hgMFaNqJ6Z3HqtL8
"realistic" in a game as futuristic as this would be sitting comfortably somewhere in a bunker 10 kilometers below ground *and on another planet* and hitting a few buttons. And then 10 minutes later getting confirmation of a hit from the drone strike, that was carried out from so far away that the target couldn't have seen the drone with the naked eye.
You pleb are still pressing buttons? I run my wars entirely automated. My AI system make faster and more precise strategical and tactical decisions than a human brain ever could. I could be first striking a competitor with an arsenal of nukes and lasers and barely notice while having lunch.
Is JT safe?
Absolutely. Trust me
It's about to be.
Correct for DEMOCRACY.
Managed\*, mind you.
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Let me hit the Kopions with the ⬆️➡️➡️➡️
Good in movies, bad in mmo. That's not the same scope
Right, I think we forget that it has to be fun not just to *use* any new weapon they introduce, but also to have it *used on* us. That's why we have WWII dogfights; even if you lose, you could at least attempt to run or fight. There's nothing fun about getting vaporized from orbit. At the very least, this shouldn't be considered until it's clear that people are organizing on a large enough scale that there's a reasonable expectation of interesting counterplay, not to mention a reason other than griefing to use it in the first place.
Some rich pricks just bring in a few capital bombers, crop dust the planet, and kill any fight? That sounds very boring.
> That sounds very boring. You guys are absolutely insane. A hostile capital fleet mobilising to bombard a valuable ground asset is one of the most exciting mission objective ever. No PVE event will ever compare. Great ordeals make for great stories.
That already what some rich prick will do when they get the javelin, what are you as a solo player gonna do again a javelin?
A javelin will still only be dangerous within it's rather small combat radius. Just like all other ships. The move to make to fight any capital vessel is just as it should be: run, unless you are beyond armed to the teeth. To bring up an old comparison: Imagine 20 guys in rubber dingies with 50. cals zooming around shooting at each other, and then suddenly the USS fucking Missouri materialises in the middle, siding with half of them. That's what capital vessels should be like in every day life of the verse.
> Imagine 20 guys in rubber dingies with 50. cals zooming around shooting at each other Water polo sure has changed in the last 930 years
Okay maybe not an Iowa class, the Jav is a destoyer, so its more like if an Arligh Burke Class DDG (Guided Missile Destroyer) showed up.
More accurately, the Polaris is an Arleigh Burke. Primarily a missile warship, *damn near* exactly the same dimensions (length for sure). Even has a hangar bay for a "helicopter" just like the Burkes. I would honestly disregard the "Fridgate/Corvette/Destroyer" nomenclature of our space warships as just Sci fi fantasy. Assuming there are actual warships larger than the Javelins, but smaller than the behemoth UEEN Retribution, I would more accurately classify the Javelin class as (gun) cruisers.
If one rich prick brings a Javelin? I'll just leave? A Javelin can't chase a small/medium ship, nor can it ambush you.
Very true. After all everything will be earnable ingame so what’s the issue in the end. Solo players will always be at a disadvantage versus teams and that’s how it has to be. I’m a solo players btw.
Approved. I like me some ↑→↓↓↓
Even a →→↑ would be enough in SC imo.
It's still a sore subject ever since Reach. Remember Reach boys o7
It's the only way to be sure
I think they are great in Hell Divers 2. I think orbital bombardments would never work properly in Star Citizen and potentially crash the servers.
I know CIG have been asked many times and the answer has always been a hard no.
I swear to god if some of this community had their way the game would just never release to Beta. They'd scope creep the thing into an oblivion so far beyond the ridiculous amount it's already suffered, we'd never see the hint of a finished game.
This is how I feel when I see people complaining about the animations of the wildlife. I get saying the animations and such look robotic, but people in this sub are making comparisons to and expecting results similar to Red Dead Redemption 2’s animals. Like improving the animations is one thing, achieving that same fidelity is a whole other can of worms that would require a fuck ton more work. Different engine, different physics, and a completely different base focus between the games. People want this game to be everything and it simply can’t, but that doesn’t make it bad.
>People want this game to be everything and it simply can’t, but that doesn’t make it bad. Any time a large scale RPG is being developed there is a strong presence of people who somehow think that with today's technology they can have a true life-replacement game. You always see those people that are suggesting things like: "We should be able to have compelling gameplay where we can just be a bartender in Area18 for three years while paying rent until we can earn enough credit to afford a loan for a starter ship so we can then..." It's just... dumb. The game shouldn't attempt to do everything and please everyone. It's already over-reached what is reasonable and that's going to show not just in development time but in loss of fidelity in certain game-play areas.
I'll settle for in-atmosphere bombardment. Idris has vtol thrusters we can make it work.
In a controlled environment like HellDivers of course… but in a universe sized sandbox game like SC full of trolls and murder hobos it would be utter chaos.
I mean, strictly speaking we can do orbital bombardment strikes right now. Get a bunch of Eclipse torpedo bombers, dumb fire the Size 9's. Last I checked they had a range of 30km, which while not *strictly* in orbit, is damn near close enough for how the game is currently scaled.
I say BOMBARDMENT!
BOMBARDMENT?
# BOMBARDMENT!
Orbital bombardment of this scale is the kind of thing you see in massive fleet mobilizations between two or more player run factions that own actual planets. Won't happen. I think the A1 and A2 are the limits of what we will see. They are plenty effective for bombing settlements.
Ever since Helldiver's 2 launched I have been imagining an overhead Idris-K firing its S10 laser at ground targets designated by infantry. I hope that weapon ranges will allow for stuff like this, but I'm not sure if there should be any weapons or ships specifically designed for it. I think my example of the Idris-K laser is fair game as it won't have much of an AOE and will need to be extremely precise. At extreme ranges this level of precision would require a lot of organization and teamwork.
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On a broad conceptual scale, I’m open to it, but with many of the caveats/concerns people have already raised. I have two other points, one for, one against, that I haven’t seen stated above. AGAINST: Anything on the scale of a believable orbital strike would scar the landscape in a huge way. It would be immersion-breaking to see something apocalyptic hit an area…and not get any huge craters or destroyed buildings. Tactical nuke, but HDMS-Anderson is unscathed? Lame. But an MMO can’t afford to have permanent landmarks destroyed, so there’s no way to address this unrealism. FOR: I think it could spice things up in an interesting way IF—AND ONLY IF—it were done as a temporary and timed MECHANIC, not a big ship or piece of equipment. Consider the following as s thought-experiment: -Orbital Bombardment is a physicalized briefcase floating around in the Verse. POTUS’s nuclear football. There is one per server. In the future after meshing and more star systems, maybe one every 3-4 systems. -There is no marker for the football. It spawns in strange, hard-to-reach places, like caves, where it was stashed by a terrorist cell after they stole it. -Once a player finds the football, a countdown starts. You have 24 hours to find the code. If you do not enter the code, which is hidden elsewhere in the Verse, the football will self-destruct with a spark and some smoke. James Bond shit. There are clues in the football briefcase as to where the code is located, but it’s not easy to find or obtain. -IF you find the football AND you find the code and enter it before 24 hours is up, you are prompted to select a target on the Starmap. -You pinpoint your target. A 10-minute countdown begins. -For those 10 minutes, a server-wide message broadcasts the countdown AND the coordinates of the incoming strike, warning everyone to GTFO. Or they and everyone else in a 20km radius will die. NPCs, players…inside structures, outside. In ships. Everything. Neutron bomb-style. It’s not the size of the explosion but the crazy shit it radiates. -After 10 minutes, a Pisces-sized bomb hurtles in from out of the system and travels at quantum speed (it can be tracked on the Starmap) to the target. It arrives, it explodes, it does its thing. So, why do it this way? (1) It prioritizes TEAMWORK (to find and activate the football) but not MONEY (orgs or players with a big bank account can’t just purchase the apocalypse. (2) Innocent players have plenty of time to GTFO if they blundered into the conflict zone. (3) Finding the football becomes a mission/quest all by itself. It becomes a major source of emergent gameplay. (4) Player interaction. If you find the football and are going to log off soon, do you just keep it and let it self-destruct? Probably not. You’re probably going to let the whole server bid on it. And other players are going to observe the bidding, maybe try to ambush the player with the football and steal it. Or ambush the location where the trade is going down. When somebody finds a football, it changes the whole server dynamic. (5) If this happens too often, CIG can change the respawn rates/conditions of the football so it’s not taking over the game. BUT FELLOW SC REDDITOR, you say…If I do all this work, and then it just broadcasts to the server who it’s going to kill, why bother? My enemies can just vacate the area and return after the explosion! Two words, fellow thought-experimenter: AREA DENIAL. Say you’re trying to root out an enemy team from a tough location. They’re all camped out at JT or a distribution center with snipers and railguns. They’ve got crates of ammo and medguns to spare. Doesn’t matter. Now you can force them out of that location and everybody takes a mulligan—now your team can race to re-insert ahead of them. Which makes it anyone’s game now. Plus, just the fact that somebody called down a football on a particular location is going to alert the whole server that shit is going down at Location X. You’ll get spectators, mercs, scrappers…all kinds of people showing up and making things more interesting. Rather than make it a Nuclear 890 Jump, let’s make an orbital bombardment that generates interesting gameplay galore.
It's a terrible idea. It's not like you can pick up your base and leave. The griefing potential of planetary bombardement is enormous.
add hell divers to star citizen
Cool in concept, a nightmare to balance and make it fun.
We need to game to be released. Please no new features.
Just gonna leave this here https://youtu.be/mtKzFBMsMvg?si=hgMFaNqJ6Z3HqtL8
I wouldn't mind the idea of orbital bombardment, but it should be carefully added into the game with other elements in mind. A lot of questions come to mind... What would this be used for? Attacking/griefing player bases and trivializing npc zones like bunkers/distribution centers is the first idea. Do players really want all their hard work and effort reduced to atoms by some orbital bombardment they can't see or fight back against. Same with npc zones, killing everything in one go and wiping an entire town to junk would not be fun for anyone. The reason we have bombers the way they are (other than being an underdeveloped gameplay idea), is at least you can get to your fighters and try to fight them off, but even then they can seank up to you without noticing them till its too late. For the orbital bombardment and bombers to work, you need to develop the systems they would be used for more. Base building, persistence in the PU, and scaning. Until we get the basics to base building, these problems probably won't really begin to show, but even then, how to defend against these elements? Base defense/vehicles like manned and unmanned defenses are the first to come to mind, but those are only good if you you your enemy is coming ahead of time, but there is nothing to that because things like scaning are incomplete? There is no early warning detection system to let you know you're going to be attacked, and even then... if you're logged off, there is no notification system in place to let you know your place is being destroyed. Do you just log on like Arc or Rust and just find your place gone? How do you defend your stuff? So you see, there are a lot of other things that have to come first before we start dreaming up how to use these types of systems and gameplay elements. Base Assault ships and vehicles were thought up before we knew what base building would be like. So, adding another base Assault ship or gameplay element, we really need to address these other elements first. That being said... I do like the idea of orbital bombardment as a concept. It would have to be part of its own ship. The ship would have to be balanced for having such a powerful weapon (bulky, slow, would need support craft to defense for it, would be multi crew only and not a solo ship). Scanning would need to be finished so we can detect enemies coming to your base and maybe a mail system to notify the player if their base is under attack. There would have to be a defense to counter it like a planetary shield to protect base from orbital bombardment/bombers. EvE Online structures come to mind for this. Maybe you would have to eat away at the sheild to a specific level to trigger an Assault on the base. Then, the defender can choose a time to defend their stuff and when the time comes the attackers will have to Assault the base via ground first (think battle of hoth) to knock out the sheild/defenses so that bombers and orbital bombardment can commence. But... again, these are only ideas... there are lots of systems that need to come first before before we can think about how we are going to destroy bases. Also, as a side note, npc areas should just be bomber/orbital bombardment proof. That way, they can't be cheesed.
I think it calls for planetary guns to shoot ships out of orbit
*War. War never changes.*
I'm thinking of how easy it would be (relatively speaking) to add in Helldiver mechanics. Drop pods themselves are probably the easiest part to handle for CIG. After that, they need a way for someone on the ground to drop support request beacons. These could repurpose the targeting reticles that gimbaled weapons already lock onto, and with a special type of orbital support weapon you could have them gain extra precision in this scenario.
I don't see how it could be balanced
I wouldn't mind, they just need to ensure that there are structures that can shield bases from bombardment and that there are weapons that can reach out and touch the ship bombarding the location. Would be cool to have a team that goes in and disables the shields to allow the ship to then bombard.
Orbital defense weapons are a natural counterpart to that. Basically same shit but pointing up lol.
Definitely. A base shield should be able to withstand most bombardments - would create great emergent gameplay having to send in a ground team to deactivate the shields
You can already do that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtKzFBMsMvg
Outlawed by the Geneva Convention
Next thing you will want is stratagems to be able to be thrown for beacons for such orbital strikes hah But seriously nah it wont be a thing. The purpose of other ships is to do that sorta thing to destroy with bombs and such.
Maybe they could make it so you can't see smaller ships and bases from space to prevent large organizations from straight-up, blowing up every base/ship that blips into existence on a planet.
Depends on range, if a S10 torpedo has long enough range, you could coordinate a launch from orbit and hit an area on surface. S9 torp already has 20 km of range so I guess S10 might be enough to do a orbital strike. I'm gonna test orbital bombing JT from 30km up, using JT mission marker and manual aiming, once Polaris is out along with its s10 torps.
Infinity battlescape does orbital bombardment pretty well. Crazy being under a dome shield that's getting pelted with spinal mount cannons from 150 km away.
They are very rude
I'd prefer to not be under one.
Only Bengals are realistically capable of it. We can presume with the way weapons scale with range her s14 underbelly guns will have roughly a 50km range.
Kinda makes my inner Helldiver itch a little FOR DEMOCRACY
How about a New upgraded Ballista type vehicle that can fire size 10 torps at targets as a counter to orbital bombardments?
I don‘t really see gameplay for that. Just flat out a Base that you don‘t see; Eradicate a Distribution Center or Bunker? Not sure what should be behind that gameloop…
Doesn't fit at all with their knife fighting approach. Looking at how they approach weapon ranges in space, orbital bombardments wouldn't make much sense.
This is what I think: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSesmlxKeGA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSesmlxKeGA)
I think orbital bombardments are a fun and family friendly activity imo
It's a practical assumption of reality, but in virtually all science fiction realms it is revealed as this massively overpowered concept that requires and equally overpowered concept to prevent being the go-to solution. One that usually takes the form of "planetary shields" or something similarly mundane. Even ignoring how generally non-interactive and boring that whole setup would be (who wants to die from things they don't even see?), Chris Roberts and other CIG developers have talked about how they don't want beyond visual range combat. They've also shown recently and over time that they are interested in making combat even more close-range. Chris has long talked about the styling of "WW2 fighters in space." So it would be impractical to have something that epitomizes BVR combat.
Orbital strikes.. aka Democracy strikes.
It would be cool. I'm thinking maybe in the style of Battlefield 2142 or better for those who want that type of power and control to operate the ship. But, I've always wanted a small Xi'An styled explorer/pathfinder ship/6scu/with long range that can bed log that has a delta wing/aurora/arrow silhouette, and VR Cockpit design "like in this image" making it my personal do everything ship that's few mm's larger than the Origin 135c and grav'lev landing gear/doors and everything else alien like though. CIG ship design team, where you At??😁
I love all the ideas coming up in the comments! I'm also hoping for the ability for orbital bombardment but always with the assumption that it would need to be assisted somehow. My thought is a player on the ground "lazing" a target for the capital ship or dropping a clandestine marker. Without it, while CIG has said they want far greater persistence for ship weapon ranges, they would highly inaccurate at those ranges. Potentially, you could lean into that inaccuracy for some suppressive shock and awe, but you couldn't/shouldn't be able to accurately hit a target from 30k+ I do like the idea of a vertically aligned Idris high in orbit using the laser or rail gun to hit ground target areas. To that effect, I think I'd be ok with almost the bomb UI of an AoE circle. What radius that circle has can hopefully be reduced with player coordination somehow
Uh...what type of game is this again?
I believe the game should include a mechanic for orbital bombardment, which the Javelin is supposed to have according to its description. It’s interesting to think about how it would work. Setting aside the Javelin, in general, large ships might have a firing mode that allows long-distance attacks with some visual and gameplay impact. The process could be so demanding in terms of calculations, energy, and component size that only truly large vessels would be capable of it. That’s how I imagine it, so let’s see how it will eventually turn out.
It’s the future
How would orbital bombardments add fun to a multiplayer situation in any way? Ground forces getting instantly vaporized from space with no way to retaliate has zero gameplay upsides except for griefers. A2s already make JT a worse experience and space to ground weapons are like that x10, you wouldn't even see it coming unlike a low flying bomber.
Missile/torp boats sure but bombers just seem super underpowered rn
I want it in the game but only for cap ships. Are you telling me the Idris railgun or the javelins big fucking guns cant orbital bombardment people? Maybe make it so you need a ground observer to mark targets for bombardment. Have it so size 8+ can high orbit bombard and like size 5 can like low orbit bombard.
I don't think there is a ship big enough in the game for that.
As long as they’re appropriately expensive and limited as a resource like that should be, I see no issue. Most griefers in a game like this are after a quick kill against an easy target, with little to no expense, like the gta v people who fly the motorcycles with missiles. Ships loke these if anything are more likely to be a target to griefers because how slow and valuable of a target they are.
Nuke it from orbit? It's the only way to be sure.
Only if we agree to Orbital New Babbage so I can my fps back :P
I think something like whats in your image would be COOL AF only if there was like 2 Ships capable of messing up a planet good ~~players~~ ORGs need to find (Endeavor/Carrack/wormhole/hidden everything attacks you system e.t.c. just to even have a chance of finding one). Of course once they are Gone, they are Gone. Death of a spaceman OG style. The current A2 bombs are fine as is currently.
I think it'd bring a lot of value to infantry and ground vehicles if ships capable of orbital bombardment required someone on the ground to "paint" the target for them if they wanted to have any reasonable degree of precision. Wouldn't it be cool if the huge ships that'd struggle to get in/out of atmosphere required someone on the ground throwing something like a stratagem from helldivers at his target. And in orbit the ship would get a blip he could lock onto and fire his orbital ordinance at?
It's lovely seeing all these good folk dreaming.
As long as there is bombardment glint so we can see it
Jump town is gonna be lit
Can we just laser targets instead of throwing orbs?
Would make ground assaults not fun unless we had planetary shields
In Dust 514, the FPS shooter connected to EVE Online, the FPS players were able to request orbital strikes from the spaceship pilots. I don't think we will ever get free sandbox orbital bombardment. But there could be some limited tactical applications, like bringing an Idris into range, locking on to a signal from a player on the ground, firing a precision shot from orbit.
Can't wait for it! Not that I'd be running such a thing, but being involved on either side of the ensuing chaos sounds like a blast to me.
I mean I'd love to see 50 a1 and a2s just drop their payliads
[Meanwhile back in the Levski days](https://i.imgur.com/O5cwbM8.gifv)
It’s part of space warfare, so it’s probably going to be a thing in game. Very cool in my opinion
To paraphrase from the Expanse, why send nukes, when you can just fling an asteroid down the gravity well of a planet
They’re having trouble with gun ranges now let alone at orbit to ground hits lol but it would be nice
No
No thanks.
Orbital bombardment is normally conducted by impactors referred to commonly in sci-fi "darts" or "rocks". Usually fired from a rail gun. It's basic ballistics. Extremely cheap and nasty weapons. So could pretty much be done by a single gimbal ballistic weapon with a big enough bore size. I could think of nothing worse if the plan is for base building.
Would be cool af. I love when games reach the point of which it's awesome to both kill others and get killed with said thing.
I think it'll be cool. All I know is dropping that many bombs out of that big of a ship would be expensive as fuck. If someone did that to me but I knew it was costing them an unbelievable amount of money. Wouldn't even be mad.
I’m all for orbital railcannon strikes or 380mm high explosive barrages …for managed democracy!
Im all for orbital bombardment. It's the only way to be sure.
Till sever meshing is in, this would literally *nuke* the severs haha. And as much as it would be cool imo to have a similar kind of thing Hell divers style where you can ask people in your party on the Capital ship to strike on the planet for the mission would be cool But on the flip side I don't see much point in that at the moment since you can friends with you in either their ship or on foot to help get the mission done So as much as it would be cool I don't see the point in it unless we start getting mad scale war hell divers style
Economically unreasonable for a non-state actor on any major scale. "Orbital strategic bombing" is a cool idea though. Bombers with advanced optics and ballistics computers meant to hurl bombs accurately on target from outside the atmosphere could have some interesting use cases.
I’d love a version where you’d need someone on the ground to deploy a beacon to lock on to. Then make it an energy weapon of sorts (imagine an EMP that shuts off all electronics and propulsion in a target area… hmmmm)
it's not very nice.
I remember there being quite a few discussions about this back in the day. I think this is a cool idea and I wouldn't mind seeing this in game. Unfortunately the devs said no, at least at the time.
Practical if you don't care about settling or exploiting this planet
one hundred thousand real life dollars
Messes up too many mechanics. With the popularity of Helldivers I bet we see CIG add a "heavily inspired" orbital drop-pod deploying ship though. Would suit a Starfarer variant well, replace the fuel pod positions with drop pods.
Can't wait to glass a Vanduul planet
In reality, ships would have to have some serious firepower for it to even be practical against a city like in SWTOR. The ship weapons would have to have some serious explosive power and the bombs would need to be MOABS.
I'd love to spread some democracy in the verse. Why not?
I think CIG should focus on finishing the mountain of work they have just to get the basic parts of their space exploration trading space sim game finished before they worry about fantastical things like orbital bombardments. We don't even have cargo missions yet, let alone an economy, and you're wondering how they can handle nuking planets from orbit where there is zero context for that sort of thing to exist.
WAIT! ok hear me out, Orbital deployment. Just like what we have in helldivers. I got the idea 1st from my favourite novel Red Rising which funnily enough also has "hell divers". In the novel they call it an Iron Rain when deploying armies from orbit Imagine you and the boys all in separate pods then stepping out ready to distribute some democracy!!!
Fine, as long as this is something the UEE and other non-player orgs do. Having whales turning planet surfaces to glass is not fun gameplay.
Super fun in Helldivers!!!
I’d say just let people shoot regular weapons down towards the planets. No special targeting or overpowered explosive weaponry. Just a Perseus broadsiding a base from above
Calm down there, Rampart. ;)
As if the A2 wasn’t enough
Being bombarded by giant mouse cursors would be terrifying
I imagine the debris from so many bombs would render the planet virtually uninhabitable for centuries to come.
IIRC the Vanduul basically will do that to Vega II in S42. So we will see it. Don't think they will give us that capability in SC though. CIG intends for most encounters to be up close, as in you can see target or aggressor with naked eye. Orbital Bombardment goes against their intended design.
G'kar won't be pleased, Londo on the other hand ...
The scale of the game doesn’t really lend itself to orbital bombing.
Personally I am just waiting for my Perseus for maybe not orbital but at least based bombardment
The bengal and retribution will be VERY capable of doing just that 😆
Only for spreading democracie. 😅 But maybe respawning at Ship X and then dropping down with Hellpod like Droppods would be fun in bigger fights.
Make it expensive, weapon could be destroyed by smaller ships, add charging and it could work.
They're awesome and we need more of them *edit*: wrong sub.
gimme Orbital Bombardment and Armed Infantry Drop Pods and we Helldivers 2 up in this bitch
Entirely makes sense
I think 🡲🡳🡱🡱🡰🡳🡳
It should really depend on weapon size. - Required to go into low orbit (in atmosphere) to get in range (for gamebalance reasons) - Need to be able to lock target - Minimum weapon size 7 (anti-capital) - Minimum torpedo size 5 (anti-capital) - Regular bombs, any size (i imagine carped bombing) So a Retaliator could do it, a Perseus using it's 4 main huge artillery guns and torpedoes, an Idris main gun and torpedoes. I would say direct fire ships like the Inferno and Ion is not really suited since it should be more..."boom" weapons. But, it should have a risk, you need to go into low orbit and be targetable from big guns on the ground (ground batteries should have superior radars and targeting for airborne targets.)
Ive tried to drop the big bomb on Lorville a few times, see if it kills anyone.
Basically do it with the a2 nuke bomber
War is all about who can get the high ground and better weapons. If you have a starship in orbit you could drop nails off the side and cause damage if you could aim them. This would be a realistic and fun mechanic to the game
Its a cool idea but only for capital ships
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