We already have AT modules! They exist in-game.
Excellent reading skills. Be sure to apply them to all of what was said however.
I’m not entirely sure if I feel that auto-targetting weapons should be implemented as such, as much as I’d like to see something akin to that implemented. Perhaps on a special class of ship.
We already have smartbombs which will give any frigates, drones, and potentially cruisers who get too close a bad time, the risk of which should be ideally preventing them from getting within ~5km of a battleship if they’re smart. Perhaps an extended range smartbomb with diminished damage output could work? -Though I’m sure such a thing could also be abused. A module like longer-range smartbomb would deter frigate attacks battleships, but the point should be that unless you’ve got SERIOUS skills, locking guns with someone way outside your weight class should be difficult and dangerous.
What I’d really like to see though in terms of point defenses is the frequently requested point-defense turret. Instead of shooting at ships, they would auto target and try to destroy any missiles within their operational range of the ship. Bigger missiles would (and already do) have more HP and thus should take more than one hit to knock out larger missiles, unless you get lucky and the turret gets a good hit in. This could even be balanced on both sides by having skill(s) that affect the rate of fire, accuracy and/or damage of the point defense turret. -And on the other side a skill could be added that increases the HP of missiles fired.
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The enhancement to an ATM (hah), even a T2/T3 variant, to allow it to bias against hull/mass ratings and possibly a range-band allows the large-ship pilot to focus on their main task while keeping one or more lock slots open to ping the AT and grab a desirable PD-target if one pops up and then manually set his small-guns on them.
What if these enhanced ATMs only held locks for a given time, something long enough, possibly skill-based for lols, to glance at the range indicator, purse their lips in concern, and left-click at least one target and assign a weapon/weapon group to it- ten? maybe fifteen seconds? 5%-25% more [10.5/12.5sec-15.75/18.75sec] for skilled clones, maybe a rare chipset that can just shy of double that bonus? maybe as low as 5 seconds [5.25-6.25sec, 7.42sec with maxed chipset] for the base rate?
This whole finagle would allow capsuleers to fit any small weapons system as a defensive small-ship response, even things as big as a rapid-light launcher (to save slot space?) to their needs and expected small-ship engagement profile, the advanced ATM would burn charges on pings, bias for range and mass/hull profiles set by the charge selection(s), deliver a ‘poker hand’ in the target lock UI and fade them out of lock according to the timer, unless the capsuleer selects one of the targets, enforcing the lock, and clicks a defensive weapon group to engage it; a fast capsuleer might be able to sift through two or even three? i suppose blindly- of these “potential lock matches” and assign small-guns, or even big guns if their profile seems to fit the engagement envelope, to the task of nibbling on the targets.
You could even mix missile-biased charges into the module’s scope and created extra-small (XS) anti-missile weapon packs for S/M/L/XL slots, the larger slots having faster fire rates, more shots per cycle, and/or more punch per shot, with the XL modules being roughly equivalent to the damage coming out of conventional S or M weapon modules- the advantage for this drop-off in damage potential? tracking suited for targeting missiles and the ability to auto-engage target locks on missiles. This would let an ATM ping biased against a particular missile profile to spew up half a dozen matches and the capsuleer would be free from having to allocate anti-missile defenses to the missiles and would only have to manage ATM cycles and small-gun defenses if they came up in addition to the normal combat routines.
As the above stands, it also allows supercaps and titans to mount a modest anticap defense by selecting M or L weapons and biasing their ATM for larger hulls. Perhaps an ATM capable of this is L-scaled and matched with L-scaled charges (making it relatively cheaper by proportion for a Titan to mount than a cap or supercap), compared to the XS/S-scale of the normal device, to prevent cruisers, most capitals, torp frigs, and bombers from abusing any probable fallout from first implementation. Maybe even make the larger variant a siege-specialty or create a new class/sub-class of capitals and super-caps that can use it alongside titans- or just make it a Titan-only item- this L-scale bit is sketchy.
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