Player Features and Ideas Discussion

TLDR Version.
The concept for battle platforms is to replace dozens of POS guns with a single object. (Or possibly several)
This object would have multiple 'arrays' of weapons on it, with it only able to fire a single array at a pilot.
The array would be equivalent to a decent number of individual weapons.
The platform could engage multiple pilots at once.
The platform would follow normal ship rules, would have mid/low slots, could have utility (RR/Cap) arrays also, could have Ewar arrays.

Reasoning.
The reasoning behind this is to simplify 'defence' management in all environments both PvP & PvE. Currently it's extremely time consuming setting up weapon arrays on POS towers and taking them down, while also not being particularly intuitive.
Pve Environment we either have very weak sentry guns or overly powerful instant kill single target death stations.
Null Sov space we have.... well. Nothing.

So the idea is to provide a platform that is reasonably robust, capable of coming in multiple sizes that outputs damage at multiple targets but isn't so overwhelming that it instantly kills a lone target so that it has some scaling based on the size of the attacking force.
That the players then have a lot of customisation options over, and that could also be created in a large number of variants for NPC's to use.

Expanding the example.
A small battle platform could have four high slots which can take arrays, four mid, four low slots.
You can then decide if you want it to be a laser death star using an Amarr base variant, a long range rail sniper to avoid people loitering anywhere on grid with your POS, or a RR/Dickstar variant with lots of Ewar, an armour tank and designed to work in pairs.

A small POS tower might then have four 'slots' in a predefined location around it to make for easy set up, that can take a small battle platform each.
Since they are preset it would be very easy to rapidly set up a tower like this. While still keeping customisation via the Platforms fittings. Much like carriers you could even allow them to be refitted on the fly mid fight by an active POS defender, which would mean that active defenders make things a lot harder vs passive defence, promoting bothering to show up to defend your POS before it's reinforced.

These Platforms could also be used by NPC's in Anomalies & Sigs, presenting a mixed challenge, especially if fitted with Remote assistance arrays that would then rep/cap the NPC ships, creating more interesting challenges. If there are two of them both with remote reps, you need to ewar them to break the rep chain so that you can kill the other one for example.

And finally in order to stop cheesy station camping, Sov outposts could gain a few slots for these also if it was so desired. Not enough to affect any kind of large scale fleet, and since they can't focus everything on a single ship, not enough to alpha strike a tough ship either, but enough to cause a small harassing fleet some serious trouble if they want to sit outside the station long term.

Could these be placed anywhere? Or would they just be for POSes?

I was thinking players they would come alongside structures that can be attacked. So expanding into the future large deployables possibly also. The bigger the structure, the bigger the platform.
NPC's would use them along side NPC structures (Which are a lot more varied).

But certainly wasn't thinking open space or worse at gates.

Basically lore fluff kind of thinking was that they require some form of transferred power from the main structure, or something like that. Which explains why there is a limited number of slots for a POS, rather than 'as many as you want'.

I like it.

Might help simplify future coding for posses to just lump it into things like this, anyway

This would be akin to the use of older ships at D-Day such as HMS Warspite. It needed a refit so couldn't travel far but the guns worked fine hence it was used as a mobile battery to support the landings. These battle platforms could be modelled after BS's for ease but unable to use gates (jump drives removed) and the power rerouted to weapons/ewar (higher cpu/PG).

reserved

I like it, just has to be balanced so that it takes about the same time to kill and has about the same firepower as current towers. Would also simplify the process of POS gunning.