Shields, Guns, and Hazards Update

[zha everything broken]

Purpose: The Horizon's shield systems, gunnery systems, and general space hazards currently have minimal if any impact on the average shift. More ideally, with sufficient crew available to handle those systems, the Horizon should be subject to larger risk of meteors given random drift on the overmap. With that increased risk, it should also be able to use its systems mid-round to handle these problems. The greater the Horizon's current ability to respond to the crisis, the more severe we'll potentially allow the meteor swarm to be.

Notably, off-ships will be given immunity to roaming meteors given their much smaller size (a handwave given their significantly lesser means to handle them).

In addition to meteors being able to drift like carp on the overmap, thus providing Command with motivation to both avoid large meteor patches pre-emptively and to move the ship if exposed to drift, Ops and Engineering will also have activities to undertake:

For Command & Ops, the Grauwolf flakbox will be able to be used to fire on meteors during encounters and reduce the total number approaching the ship. This would be a secondary configuration option- instead of a fancy targeting screen, directions, etc., they'd have a 'Point Defense' mode to switch to, and would be able to happily hammer the Fire Button and reload as quickly as we care to let them.

Engineering will have a MUCH more power hungry Shields system. Maximum charge rate for the capacitor will increase from 1.25 MW to 6-8 MW (working numbers), and the generator itself will have commensurately higher draw. At low settings, shields will provide some protection against meteors, but may still subject the ship to some breaches. At high settings, if power generation and consumption can be configured and balanced appropriately, the shields will provide very high protection.

Example scenario:
A large field of asteroids is drifting to occupy the same tile as the Horizon. Without sufficient Command, Ops, and/or Engineering crew active, the Horizon will be 'lucky' enough not to run into any issues. Space is big, after all, and we don't want to hole the Horizon while everyone's asleep.

However, IF sufficient Command, Ops, and/or Engineering crew are currently on-shift, AND we pass some % roll (to be determined- how frequently would we even want this to happen?), the ship is at risk of significant outer hull damage without one or several of the following actions being undertaken.

Preventative (Round-Start) Actions:
1. Command can move the ship as far away from major meteor clusters as is reasonable, to minimize the chance of any drifting onto the Horizon's current tile.
2. Engineering can configure the shields to use their full strength. Realistically, they'll want to have both the SM and INDRA running at full tilt, and RCON fully configured to keep the maximum power available to the shields. Potentially, they could build a specialized secondary SMES to provide an extra energy buffer.

Remediative (Meteor Drift Event) Actions:
1. On receiving the alert that meteors are inbound, Command can have the ship moved to a new tile. IF no Command staff are active to move the Horizon out of danger, the meteor barrage will be brief. If Command staff ARE active, the meteors will continue until morale improves (or the ship moves).
2. Engineering will be boosting power to shield systems and reducing power to non-shield systems, and if they're unlucky, patching holes in the ship caused by meteor impacts that slip by.
3. Command and Ops will be manning the Grauwolf Flakbox, firing as frequently as targeting solutions are provided to them, to help reduce the total number of meteors spawning to impact the Horizon.

(Loose) Steps to implement:
1. Updating the Shield Generator power draw will be the easiest to accomplish technically, and can be done without making changes to any other system. Running the shields at low draw (like we generally do now) will be business as usual, and if Engineering wants to run them higher, it's a self-imposed exercise. Reactor SMES changes likely too- less coils at shift start, couple extra IO coils in storage, higher upgrade ceiling.
2. Updating meteors to drift and exempting off-ships from dealing with them. Frankly, at this stage, we could make it so meteors will only hit the Horizon if there's an engineering population, and we'll tone down their impact. It'll mean basic shield startup will effectively 100% protect the ship, and all that needs to be done afterwards in-game is to cycle the shields after the meteors die down (which they will on their own).
3. The rest of it. Lol.

(Meteor gamemode will be all this on steroids, forever.)

I can handle implementing 1., and Probably also 2? The rest I'd have questions on. Dropping proposal here for thoughts!

Edited April 18 by zha everything broken
Formatting, details

[Fyni]

We actually have a "massive moving meteor is on inbound to the Horizon in the overmap" event, however it seem to be extremely bugged that I do not think I have seen it genuinely fire in the 6 months or so it has been in the code.

Additionally, security does not need any more gameplay. Ideas for loading and operating guns should be within the purview of Operations - as it currently is.

[zha everything broken]

Extremely correct re: ops- completely misremembered that they were the ones who ran gunnery! Disregard Security- original post updated to reference the correct department, that's my bad!

[NerdyVampire]

16 hours ago, Fyni said:

We actually have a "massive moving meteor is on inbound to the Horizon in the overmap" event, however it seem to be extremely bugged that I do not think I have seen it genuinely fire in the 6 months or so it has been in the code.

Additionally, security does not need any more gameplay. Ideas for loading and operating guns should be within the purview of Operations - as it currently is.

Yes, it was implemented but recently (~2-3 weeks ago) we talked about it on discord, and the developer of it realized that its configuration wasn't adjusted properly, so it couldn't actually fire at all. I think (hope) that they fixed/are fixing it so it can actually fire soon.