Player Features and Ideas Discussion

OK, I'll admit that I straight-up stole this idea from David Weber's Honor Harrington novels. In EVE terms, this would be a special drone that would carry a single salvo of missiles. It would fire said missiles, and then be destroyed.

Now, what would be the point of this?

The answer: alpha strike capability. Ambushes would of course be much more dangerous. In larger battles, pods would be used to quickly eliminate major targets like ewar, command, or logistics ships. Outnumbered fleets might deploy in pod-carrying ships in an attempt to even the odds by cutting down on the enemy fleet at the start of the battle, although that would put them at a risk of being without conventional drone support once they've expended their pods

The exact capabilities of pods, particularly the types and numbers of missiles each pod can carry, would be important to balancing them. I admit that there's potential for this to seriously unbalance the game - in the Honor Harrington novels, the introduction of missile pods revolutionized space combat. Still, I think it's an interesting idea. What do you think?

I like the idea.

Make each 5m3 in size, they occupy space in the drone bay, they're immobile like sentries, each has a single cruise missile and they can't be reloaded.

Drone assist would work as normal.

Cruise bonuses on the pods matches those of the controlling ship.

This would let a raven with 75 Mbit/s of bandwidth put 15 extra cruise missiles in flight, essentially tripling their alpha capability, at the expense of completely exhausting their sustained drone dps. (I guess they could have 5 extra ligthts in the hold)

(Also a fan of the honorverse books)

If we're talking about drones that can fire only one shot and then are destroyed/useless, wouldn't it be better to have the drones themselves fly at the ship and explode to cause damage?

Which is very much like another idea I've seen around here..

Unless of course you're saying that after firing their payload the drones would then be useful for the aggro they'd draw, even if they were destroyed relatively quickly.

Also, in before someone says "It sounds like missiles so just use missiles".

I was leaning towards pods carrying multiple missiles. I do like the idea of pods with defender missiles acting as a screen. And I originally was going to suggest that each pod carry about half its volume in missiles, but then I realized how absurd that would be. Maybe each pod could carry, say, 40 missiles? Light pods carry standard missiles, medium pods carry heavy missiles, heavy pods carry cruise missiles or torpedoes, and carrier-launched pods carry capital torpedoes. We could even get a specialized carrier that gets bonuses for using pods... the podnaught.

The server load IS a potential problem, and certainly makes an argument in favor of reducing the number of missiles in favor of bigger missiles.

Also, operating pods should require both drone AND missile skills. For that matter, perhaps they might be advanced technology - tech 2 or even tech 3.

Another problem I thought of is that pods would render stealth bombers virtually obsolete. The only solution I can think of is that the expansion which included pods would also revamp stealth bombers around using pods. That actually fits with the stealth bomber concept better than the current system - a stealth bomber decloaks, rolls pods, unleashes a massive salvo of torpedoes or cruise missiles, then warps off. Presumably stealth bombers would have their drone bays enlarged.

Also, there could be a hislot module that allows a ship to command additional pods. It would normally have insane CPU requirements, but stealth bombers could use it.

I disagree, I don't think the pods would render bombers obsolete. I would say that these provide a sort of backup for ships, with two distinct uses:

• If the pods are used in the anti-missile setup (either defender missiles or a sort of CIWS), the pods could be dropped if a missile ship warps onto grid in order to nullify its attack power
• If the pods are used with damage missiles, they could be used to provide backup firepower against bigger ships, or in an attack role for alpha-tanking (or even a defensive alpha-tank to quickly destroy high-threat attackers)

However they are used, however, bombers would have a separate role in dealing primary damage, in a hit-and-run fashion. Primarily in nullsec, their bombing runs would not be obsoleted by these drones, since they are likely to be in and out before they can be targeted for the drones. Also, the bombers can change damage type in response to changing feet compositions on the field, and can make multiple runs on the battle, unlike these drones (unless each drone is loaded with multiple damage type missiles, giving them omni-damage, or customizable loadouts, which would make these hard to implement due to over-modularization). I think these pods, on the other hand, would be used in a primarily defensive fashion.

As for their tech level, I think at least the rocket variant should be fairly low-tech. After all, its only task is to line itself up with its target, and launch everything...

As much as I enjoy the thought of Missile pods and overwhelming missile saturation of defenses as well as ECM and C&C missiles, the whole Honorverse missile warfare system is completely OP in the Eve universe and would instantly put a system into TiDi if a fleet of more than 50 used it.

Just call them "kamikaze drones" and be done with it. They fly towards their target and 'splode like a mobile smartbomb.

Missile pods / all this other naming hoopla just sort of adds a layer of confusion, imo.

With all those ideas you put here... aren't he things you, guys, described more like naval mines?

So, we get mines back, with a way to limit them, and some new, fun twists on them -> a lot of people get happy!

And we also get a limit, which prevents people from spamming mines.