Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The game currently has capacitor boosters, which give the ability to inject cap so long as you have charges for them, but once you've run out of charges you are dead in the water. This goes on past the end of the fight though -- if you survive a couple of fights you're almost certainly out of cap charges and if you're unable to loot them, you typically have to turn back.

I'd like to propose an alternative with a lot more flexibility: The Secondary Charged Battery Array.

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This mid-slot module would introduce a new mechanic and would work in conjunction with overheating:

When heated, every time the module cycled, rather than injecting capacitor INTO the ship, it would draw capacitor FROM the ship, and would gain an additional charge, up to a maximum of, say, 30 charges. This means that, even away from a friendly station, if you're being fed capacitor, or just have some time away from a fight, you can charge up your SCBA to its maximum potential, even if you have to completely drain your ship's primary capacitor several times to do so.

Without heat, it would work like a capacitor booster, but running on the charges that you had built up previously, allowing you to inject a chunk of cap every cycle, but without the ability to re-load it from an external source.

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Balance factors would include the total amount of gigajoules stored at max charge, and the amount provided per cycle, with clear variations available for meta versions (larger capacity/slower injection, smaller capacity, faster injection, heated cycle time etc). Maybe it takes 1.5x the cap to charge the module, than what you get back from it, maybe it's 1-to-1 but it takes longer to charge. There are great possibilities for T2 and faction/deadspace versions too.

It would open up some interesting new combat management techniques... getting neuted but tank holding? Use the last cap you have to store a few more cycles to use for your booster or rep later on in the fight, or to pulse your warp scram for just long enough to get the kill.

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That's my suggestion, and I've love to be able to try it out in game some time.

Feedback welcome.

Repair costs in terms of nanite paste is usually quite tiny, and more importantly, can be managed or even fully negated with player skill. Realistically though you'd never run out of nanite paste.

There's also existing attributes to control how much heat is added each time. Quite possible for heat to build up only very slowly.

Really we should have a similar system for nanites drones and ammo

Meh screw it just make it all infinite