I was thinking of something like universal to All ships something that you can carry in your cargo hole that you can jettison and it will be expendable after the time of effect and can give you area of effect positive or negative bones
I was thinking it would be something to mask your signature like a fog or creating a small artificial nebula that it can be over X-km radius and when you are within the limits you getting the bones ,
Or something similar but when you are in it the faster you move more damage you get
Not the same I’m talking about something you can have in the cargo and deploy it could be variety of things that can be used strategically depending of the way you fight even swarm of space mines , or things that can manipulate the physics of space like a wormhole types let’s say in a 20 or 30 km radius
Things like this would have to take up a module slot. A high slot module that can fire “smoke” that would create a temporary quazi cloak effect.
Ships in the smoke wouldn’t have access to overview information or d-scan and wouldn’t show on on the overview / d-scan of other ships. All target locks in either direction would immediately be broken upon activation.
There would likely need to be some anti spam measures in effect to prevent the mechanic from being abused, such as:
anti-targeting smoke cloud lasts for 10 seconds and has a radius of 5km for 10 seconds from activation.
residual scattering (prevents smoke from taking effect, and thus the ship’s computer wont fire) lasts for 60 seconds and has a radius of 10 km from the center of where the smoke was activated during it’s 10 second activation.
Once upon a time, that’s how ECM worked. It was horribly abused and was literally the “I-win” button. To this day, my corp R1FTA still retains the defunct “will not use ECM” clause.
It was so abused that ECM was nerfed into what we know of it today: doesn’t protect the ship that fired it off.
ecm was cancer. The smoke cloud mechanics I proposed are very different.
To be fair, the current ecm mechanics aren’t that bad, they’re effectively a taunt. The larger issue is the ships that are bonused for them are shield tank ships so its not a viable tanking strat against dps.
The fact you can use them against enemy logi is pretty strong though.
ok… old ecm. Was a targeted module that would break your enemy’s lock and prevent them from reacquiring it.
smoke cloud: aoe centered on your own ship, with the small range of 5km. Breaks your own lock as as well as any ships targeting you and prevents target lock for 10 seconds. An aoe exists in the same location that prevents smoke from being fired for 60 seconds from the initial activation… and the cooldown on the module is 60 seconds as well (this an anti-spam. measure to prevent ships from dropping a bunch of smoke on a single ship to keep it from being targeted.)
note: it’s more or less a temporary cloak that can break locks.
I suppose you could also make the stipulation that it would prevent warp too… so people can’t use it for escape. But I suppose that could be abused as well. Perhaps that part is only local, and couldn’t be used offensively.
Yeah mines went over so well when they were in the game, we really should add them back.
You can slow ships, prevent ships from warping, pull ships out of warp, break locks, increase sig all with different types of deployable. They are (for the most par) restricted to modules that are restricted to certain ships for a good reason.
The issue with mines was due to the janky sec system. Mines deployed in null sec would cause people in high sec to get concorded.
That said, they probably are a bad idea these days. Some people are too rich and it would be impossible to get through some gates if they were reintroduced.
this was just one of the issues. they also caused ridiculous lag and were almost exclusively used in cancerous ways… like intentionally causing a system to lag and crash people out of the game.
