Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Imagine a module you could fit on your ship that gives a near 100% protection in one direction of the ship. I'm thinking some sort of module that you load with a script to have it directed either:
* front
* rear
* left
* right
* up
* down

So depending on which script you load your ship will have near invulnerability to damage from that direction.

I think this could provide some quite interesting fights, especially between larger ships, where they can establish perimeters in certain directions which would require some smart FCing to circumvent.
* Fights would become more tactical if a feature like this was added, with positioning of ones fleet much more important than today. Fast maneuverable ships will also be more important in large ship fights as the large ships can't turn around to face threats like that.
* Traps can be set where the enemy fleet is attacked from two directions preventing them to shield themselves from both.
* Fights won't just deteriorate into 100 ships one-shotting one ship at a time, because that ship will probably have it's damage protection in that direction. Instead the fleet will have to be divided in several smaller groups that try to dogfight into a better position than the enemy. It will be more important with different squads and a more distributed fleet leadership. Instead of the FC giving orders to the entire fleet they only give it to the wing leaders and they to the squad leaders.
* Ships that require to get to close range to inflict damage (read gallente) can equip such a module in a front direction to be able to close in on the target without taking damage.

From a technical standpoint I think something like this would be possible to implement on the server without too much complications. The angle of the ships and the relative position of the ships is known to the server and it can therefore easily calculate which quadrant takes the damage for each shot.

it would change the game dramaticaly. And yes I would love to see it. Only problem I see in 1 on 1 figths. Maybe if you could change it only once every 30s or so. +1

youd have to have a capacitor hit with every shot received. that way its like startrek where the focus the shields to the front, but after soo many hits they lose power and they cant maintain it.

I support ideas to make eve more complex, but there has to be limits, cant have god mode

Yes it shouldn't be possible to change the script very often, like you say every 30 seconds or perhaps as much as every 5 minutes. Just let the module have a cycle time that is that long.
Also you'd have to make sure one ship can't fit more than one or possibly two at the same time (a ship fitting six would be invulnerable and that would obviously not be a good thing).

One can think grand or one can think small, and it's pretty obvious how you think. It's lucky thinkers like Aristotle and Einstein didn't have the EVE features & ideas forum to visit or they would have killed themselves.
"E = mc^2?"
"Noob! it totally doesn't work like that!"
"You realize how many teaching books we would have to rewrite?"
"Phail!"
"I build card houses for a living and hardly graduated from play-school, but I can with 100% certainty say that the server can't handle those computations!"
"Physics is dying!"
"This is the worst thread ever"

Besides mathematically it's not complicated. All the data is there and can be used if needed.

Given it's not as simple as giving an afterburner +10% speed, but usually you can't get great reward without some effort.

Math is not so complicated, but it is in the books. Not in EVE. Ships in EVE - so far - are uniform spheres without left, right, front, back, top, bottom whatsoever.

Yes you are 100% right, however, the ships when moving have a movement vector, this vector is essentially the heading. Admittedly it's indeterminate when standing still, but that shouldn't be a major hurdle to fix.

I don't see this working well, because of the limited control we have over our ships attitude. When it decides to roll, spin, level off, etc, are all predictable, but not directly controllable, and would make this mechanics a royal PITA to use properly. Improve ship piloting first, then get on this one.

If this were an FPS, or at least a game with some limited ability to control the ship from the ship POV, than this *might* work, although I don't see it working too well. I don't think that this would be very usable without being exploited in EVE, so have to say pass on this one.

Aside from the fact that this would require a MAJOR change to the game engine, you just found the perfect way to completely negate sniping and 1v1 combat.