Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Yay! It's the old making-target-locks-interfere-with-each-other thread! OH WAIT, no it isn't. This one's about more realistic effects of the weapons we use.

When nuclear (or antimatter) weapons go off, in addition to the huge 'splosion, they also cause an electromagnetic pulse or EMP (pronounced "emp" ), which disrupts electronic systems and communications. Now, obviously our shipboard systems are hardened against this sort of thing, but you can't harden a radio wave. THUS:

Nuclear Projectile, Fusion Projectile, Antimatter Hybrid, and Radio Laser ammunition should have an effect on communications, in sufficient quantities.
Note that appropriately-armed missiles and rockets should also count, but I can't remember the name

"Sufficient quantities" is measured in the number of the appropriate shots that have hit in the last...five or ten minutes, on grid.
The number required for EMP saturation varies by shot size. For example:
Small Turret, Light Missile, Rocket: 100. Medium, Heavy (Assault) Missile: 50. Large, Cruise Missile, Torpedo: 25. XL, Citadel Torpedo, Siege Missiles etc: 15.
Note that these are examples, actual numbers may be balanced suitably.

The effect is a randomly applied selection of the following:

- Distorted chat messages: A few words in the message are garbled or have parts missing. This applies to: All messages when viewed by a pilot on an EMP'd grid, and all messages sent by a pilot on an EMP'd grid (when viewed by anyone).
EDIT: This is on a chance-per-message basis.
- Drone connection issues: Drones failing to respond to commands. Also, camera drones have a reduced zoom-out limit. This applies to: Non-sentry drones that are not flown from a Gallente ship or a dedicated drone ship, such as an Arbitrator or a carrier. Note that drones do not become inactive, they simply have a chance to fail to respond to commands such as Return and Orbit and Engage Target.
- EWAR interference: Jamming strength, remote repair range, and other remote module range (or strength, as applicable) is reduced. This applies to: ECM, remote ECCM, remote repair, neutralizers, NOSes, cap transfer, target painting, warp scrambling. NOT: Stasis webifiers, local ECCM, sensor dampeners, fleet boosts, drone control modules.
- Sensor interference 1: The overview has a small chance to fail to display ships, drones, and cans on grid. This is "rolled" every five minutes (open to balancing) of interference, for every applicable object on grid. This applies to: Drones, most ships, containers, bombs, pods, fighters, asteroids, small collidable objects. NOT: Stations, planets, moons, outposts, POSes, Customs Offices, Supercarriers, Dreadnoughts, Titans, large collidable objects (except the player, unless she's flying an SC, dread or Titan), mission structures. Note that this does not apply to the space view. The camera drones can visually identify objects, so they still appear in space.
- Sensor interference 2: Directional Scan range is reduced. This will be more important in null when the D-scan is the intel tool instead of local.

The aim is to create a situation where a large number of ships simultaneously firing nuclear weapons will cause an appropriate level of EM interference. In addition to realism, this should either:

1) Make players selling non-nuclear ammunition filthy rich
or 2) Reduce blob size because people don't want to suffer the inconvenience (or people might not be able to win with the interference going on)...and larger ships being involved will make the interference apply sooner.

So there it is. Bad poasting, sw33tness, meh, or needing discussion? Reply Button is down thataway vv

Soooo.... what you're saying is that you want to get rid of chat?

If you're even going to consider this, then EMP rounds should disable any ship hit by it. Engines, comms, warp drive, everything. Dead in space.

In other words, heh.