So, I had this really cool idea. It comes from the CCP structure idea that kind of looks like this:
What if, we could build interstellar cannons that have a deleterious effect on the systems they shoot that would be system wide. Essentially, it’d piggy back on the “Space Weather” mechanic that CCP developed for Abyssal space but player controlled. Some ideas for various ammos that can be used:
An ammo that slows all ships warp speed by X%. Tech 2 does X+5%.
An ammo that reduces everybody’s kinetic, thermal, explo, and/or em resist.
An ammo that reduces everybody’s cap regent.
An ammo that de-buffs all structure damage caps.
Maybe a faction type that harms asteroid mining yield?
The idea is that these structures would harm a system’s income potential while also adding metagaming to fight planning. Using an ammo that damages cap regen in a system you want to invade? Bring Minmitar ships. Want to harm your opponent’s isk making capabilities with/without AFK Cloaky camping? Kill the warp speed in a heavily used constellation. Enemies use fast ships? Use webbing ammo. Could you imagine the diplo game for setting yo “defensive” batteries to create a buffer?
These guns would have a range that outstrips all cap ship jump ranges so people couldn’t just LOLALPHA them without advance warning or a fight; leaving the middle ground as potential conflict points.
These effects would last a long time; like 1 hour per round shot. But the cycle time would be equal so that it actually hinders the people who are being shot enough to hopefully drive conflict. They would be a sov structure too.
If they’re Reinforced, they break until repaired or dead. However, they only have 1 timer; like low power citadels.
I think this would be a good conflict driver that actually gives people of an organization reason to hate another entity; they ruined their favorite ratting systems.
It’s hella powerful though and the ultimate troll weapon. This could be more powerful than afk cloaking but with a fraction of the effort.
Don’t have to pay for an account. Don’t have to evade gate camps and travel to a system. Don’t have to form a fleet to drop on bears. Just screw up their ratting/mining from a safe distance.
A gun that charges up and nukes something somehow could perhaps be a conflict driver. I’ve also found scorched earth an interesting strategy.
I like the idea of this in nullsec to nullsec content but allowing them to exist or fire into lowsec or highsec im against. Nullsec is too powerful and the current wardec system is already a serious and uninteresting imbalance between highsec players and players from other areas of the game (especially nullsec). I would not like to see that type of imbalance spread any farther than it already has spread.
I really love the concept, but I can’t figure out a way you’d ever make this work without any of the following:
-Big alliances get more powerful, because they have enough space to have “deep territory” out of range, while smaller alliances don’t have space far enough from the nearest enemy and so all of their space it targetable, this means you can drop mining neutralization on every system they own and grind their production to a halt, while they cannot fire back because you have systems out of range to fuel your industrial production.
-Big alliances get more powerful because they can keep more systems suppressed at once and tilt their already-significant production advantage into “insurmountable” territory
-Trolls can take popular or powerful systems and nuke them into unusability. I imagine the first on the list would be anything with certain complexes or pirate epic arcs. It’s the ultimate in content-denial weaponry and EVE needs MORE stuff for people to do not less.
-You can lock down systems into unusability and unprofitability and wait for everyone to abandon the corp or alliance. It’s anti-content there as well because instead of having to GO there and blow up structures or contest sovereignty you can just make it so annoying to live there everyone leaves for greener pastures (or more likely, and dangerously, quits eve in an epic forum rant and never comes back).
Each cannon needs access to an extremely rare ruined dyson sphere that needs to be activated, pulled out of abyssal deadspace, and have its systems maintained to keep it from diving back into deadspace and being lost. Then you need to invent the BPCs for the T4/T5 components to fabricate the gun’s housing station, then install invented-BPC rigs to actually fit the gun. THEN you need to make the T4/T5 ammo chages from more invented-BPCs which fits each of the Rig mods’ ammo limitations.
Find ‘Kardashev Ruins’ in Deadspace
Establish Permanent Accesspoint to Deadspace Ruins via “Triglavian Filament Gate” anchorable (Triglavian tech, no security access, anyone can use it with the appropriate abyssal filament, stations in range ‘x’ take abyssal deadspace damage, must be guarded by active fleets, gate must be kept fueled or lose the connection to the Deadspace Ruins)
[OPTIONAL] Establish one or more Triglavian Filament Gates in the Deadspace pocket (F-Gates are the only things that can survive long-term inside of Abyssal Deadspace, all F-Gates in the pocket lead to the F-Gate that accesses the pocket; allows one F-Gate at a time to be active, providing a new gate-in/gate-out point from the entry F-Gate in normal space)
Scan down “Access Layer Sockets” in the Kardashev Ruins, Hack the Precursor-level Security systems or decrypt Relic ‘keys’ found inside the deadspace pocket to open them. Whoever hacks them will have access to the socket until a ‘keyholder’ unlocks them and resets the security system to their control.
Once all Access Layer Sockets have been claimed by a clone, corp, or alliance, the Ruins can be activated, powered up (on a timer and/or via fuel block consumption) and the Ruins pulled into normal space near the entry-point F-Gate (i.e. within the station-damage deadspace bubble).
Now you can build the ‘Stargun’ Station
iBPC Station Components= Tx ‘Precursor’ Stargun Station
iBPC Rig Components= Tx ‘Precursor’ Stargun Rigs (each have unique ammo restrictions)
iBPC Ammo= Tx ‘Precursor’ Stargun charges (must match all rig restrictions, maybe call them “Fuses”?)
Get all three parts working together and you now have a functioning Stargun that ceases to function if the Kardashev Ruins run out of power/fuel blocks, causing them to dive back into deadspace, but otherwise recoverable once fueled again; the Ruins are shunted back into its deadspace pocket by using a hack on the Socket Access Layer(s), disrupting the delicate control-paths and destabilising Triglavian-derived jerry-rigging on Precursor systems built by non-triglavian backwards-engineering teams; or the entry Triglavian Filament Gate is destroyed, shunting the Kardashev Ruins explosively back into deadspace (i.e. “Doomsday Smartbomb on Everyone” effect) and permanently cutting access to the deadspace pocket that contains the Ruins. You can also directly siege the Stargun as normal for citadel warfare.
To make it even further restrictive, the Ruins themselves could only ‘power’ certain types of Stargun Ammo as well, meaning each Stargun needs to be tailored to the Kardashev Ruins found and create a semi-deadspace effect on the system it’s pulled into. A Stargun could also only be targetable on cynosural beacons (and uses jump fuel equal to the geometric factor of distance to the target system/cyno) as well as having a capacitor recharge time measured in multiples of days based on the star-type of the system used to host this whole project as well as the attributes of the installed Rigs.
Whee, a reason for S-Rigs and very small ‘citadels’ and it brings deadspace effects into nullsec interactions in a very limited/costly way that can sink massive resources and Corp/Alliance efforts to provide massive amounts of “productive” content to the entire membership. Not only that, but Starguns would be inherently unstable setups, cannot be directly defended by larger Citadels, and would encourage raids and/or large offensives against relatively weak assets that turn more towards fleet-based strategy, in lo-hi TiDi to boot, to interdict/repel the raids/assaults than to simply out-tank or outnumber the enemy. Large citadels would help basing operations around the Stargun and associated parts, but not be able to directly influence them, making big sieges optional content as part of a larger strategic effort. High-end economy would be needed just to drive the effort of building the necessary capital to dig up Stargun and Stargun Rig schematics to invent into BPCs and construct the relevant assemblies and charges as well as keep the final stages of the endeavor constantly fueled once a suitable Kardashev Ruin is found. It creates a long-chain logistics network for a semi-chaotic ‘grid-effector’ weapon that ideally would be made to have uses in high-level conflicts, presenting myriad opportunities to disrupt the operation at multiple levels and endless room for good administration of the project to keep weaknesses to a minimum.
With certain systems’ stellar types having an effect on recharge rates and that variable being mostly invisible to players outside of actually constructing a stargun or building some “Triglavian Mapping Beacon” that lights up like a cyno but identifiable on its own and having a large cycle time (so as to be disruptable) and having some temporary but deleterious effect on the system it’s used in (so as to encourage not using it in built-up “deep” systems), the entire nullsec terrain may be changed with one procedural variable and create avenues of conflict to use Starguns towards. Breaking out of “deep territory” stagnation the rate of discovering Kardashev Ruins can be inversely related to the number of stations in-system (or even in nearby systems via some woo-woo subspace anchor timey-wimey stuff), making unpopulated systems farther away from established territory the best spots to “dig” for Stargun tech in deadspace pockets (possibly even encouraging corps/alliances to break down some or many stations to create areas for this ‘digging’), WHICH if you’re able to read all this without needing a drink, means Corps/Alliances would need to create weakpoints in their territory to build up their power to take and hold new territory, creating more opportunities for conflict and thus content that sinks materiel and provides “productive” content to memberships in the form of ‘fighting for a purpose’.
every shot could potentially cause a hit to your corp/alliance-wide security status. The lore reasoning is obvious, the meta effects I can’t fathom, so probably ignore this.
@Daichi_Yamato I’m all for not only the ‘Star-mapper’ pinging on cyno-views as well as the cyno used to target a system, but also a big “massive cynosural event” effect creating a… how about a damage-related filament link (scan-down object) between the systems? How’s that sound? making a quantum-raid into the Stargun’s home system while it’s in a recharge period for a 20min time-limited raid or scouting foray on any assets there during the first… third? of the Stargun’s recharge cycle? better star types give shorter recharge times and thus shorter raid windows and the raiders are encouraged by the filament-access’ deadspace mechanics to use smaller forces or disposable ships because of the risk of getting podded by the timer.
That quantum-cynosural link could also be held open by a fueled “Triglavian Filament Gate” as described above and keep the Stargun from targeting any system but the F-Gate-locked one (the F-Gate holding open the cynosural event so a cyno-beacon forward observer is no longer needed) and giving the target system potentially indefinite time to send ships over via the inbound F-Gate link (a scanable object appearing somewhere randomly outside of a set distance from the Stargun, F-Gate, and Kardashev Ruins objects).
Would ships be able to use gates while traveling via F-Gate or would some timey-wimey feedback effect auto-pod them? Not sure how exploitable it is to have 20min lifetime ships running amok through a Corp/Alliance’s backyard via the backdoor created by their own Stargun firing.
The effect caused by the Stargun “impacting a stellar mass” could also attenuate over range, meaning that despite its ability to strike anywhere an ally? lights a cyno (special module requirement?) for a geometric cost over range, a Stargun has the most powerful and longest-lasting system-effects on nearby systems. Allowing them to harass distant targets, but absolutely suppress (with cumulative effect? no, most likely broken with effect values and/or timers stack, but it would allow “Scorched Earth” tactics and create “Stellar Wasteland” meta terrain) a local area, probably slightly larger than the longest jump range with ideal Rig setup and star type selection.
LOL, you’re wanting this and CCP hasn’t even figured out how to make the stars and planets solid, physical objects. I’m sitting inside of a star in my Machariel right now…
It has nothing to do with stars being solid, the effect of the gun just bathes a system, per the OP a Stargun charge “impacting a stellar mass” is just lore fluff
