Life Support

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OzoneGrif_slith
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Life Support

Post by OzoneGrif_slith »

Hi,
Is life-support actually doing something in designs?

I got ships almost completely destroyed, without life-support, and they where still able to move.
Isn't everybody onboard supposed to be dead, without life-support?


I feel that a ship should have limitations when life-support fails, in speed, weapons, shields, etc...
And if all life-support were to be destroyed, then the ship would become a "remain" open to repair to every civilization.

That will make adding more life-support than necessary (as backup) interesting. Right now it feels useless and only a design constraint.
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Osito
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RE: Life Support

Post by Osito »

I think what happens when life support is destroyed is that everyone has to put on their spacesuits until the ship can get back to the spaceport and repair its systems. The life support is there so that the crew can move around without having to wear the spacesuits all the time.

Hope this helps.

:-)

Osito
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OzoneGrif_slith
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RE: Life Support

Post by OzoneGrif_slith »

Hi Osito,
You are trying to explain a gameplay defect with a roleplay theory...
But I don't adhere. No ship would have as many spacesuits as its number of workers. Plus it would be impossible to work efficiently with a spacesuit.

I really think Life-support should have a real gameplay impact, so it wasn't just a constraint for the player.
Everytime I design a ship, I ask myself : "Why the hell the game doesn't add life-support itself since it's useless in the gameplay anyway".
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tjhkkr
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RE: Life Support

Post by tjhkkr »

[:D]
Or everyone held their breath...
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Osito
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RE: Life Support

Post by Osito »

No, no, no, all of my ships are designed with one spacesuit per crew member. It's the law ...

Seriously, though, in fact it's all roleplay, but it depends on your perspective. When you say that no spaceship would have a spacesuit for all the crew, how do you know? You saw it in Star Trek? Your conclusion that no spaceship could operate like that is a role play.

I don't have a problem with life support being inessential (in the sense that the crew can survive without it), but I agree it would make sense that ship efficiency should ideally be somewhat compromised.

Osito
ReadeB
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RE: Life Support

Post by ReadeB »

That would be a nice game mechanic, especially if you could EMP the life support systems and force the crew to head to the life pods.

I'd like to see several new game mechanics like that, but it would take a bit of programming and playtesting to get it right.
Aeson
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RE: Life Support

Post by Aeson »

That would be a nice game mechanic, especially if you could EMP the life support systems and force the crew to head to the life pods.

I'd like to see several new game mechanics like that, but it would take a bit of programming and playtesting to get it right.
It'd have to be quite the EMP to force the crew to head to the life pods soon enough to matter in battle, as in all likelihood there's sufficient air in the ship for at least a few hours of operation even without functional life support equipment. Combined with other battle damage contaminating or venting the ship's atmosphere, sure, but on its own an EMP on the life support systems probably shouldn't be a ship-killing event.

I would also tend to partially agree with Osito, in that I would generally expect that there's at least a backup oxygen supply for the majority of the crew and passengers carried by a ship, although I'm not certain that I'd agree that you could expect a full space suit. On the other hand, given that battle damage to starships most likely includes hull breaches, I would not be terribly surprised if the crews of warships heading into battle wore spacesuits capable of allowing crew members at least a few extra minutes to get things under control or get to a safer location in the case of a nearby hull breach, as it would tend to reduce casualties and might save the ship. Such spacesuits might not be suitable for prolonged exposure, but having even a little extra time might be all that's needed to get enough of a seal restored to allow the life support to kick in, or keep the surviving crew in the section functioning long enough that the ship isn't crippled.

Regardless, giving the ship a time-to-live timer or reducing its performance after losing the last of its life support components is something I could support.
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Erik Rutins
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RE: Life Support

Post by Erik Rutins »

Adding more meaningful effects for certain components (including life support) has been in our internal wish list for a while too. I agree in principle, just hasn't made it to the top of the list yet.
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OzoneGrif_slith
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RE: Life Support

Post by OzoneGrif_slith »

Seriously, though, in fact it's all roleplay, but it depends on your perspective. When you say that no spaceship would have a spacesuit for all the crew, how do you know? You saw it in Star Trek? Your conclusion that no spaceship could operate like that is a role play.
It makes no sense. Life-support is what it is : Support to be able to stay alive. Without it, you won't live long. You won't have water, air, food, pressure, light, whatever. Try to live for month, if not years, in a spacesuit. It just doesn't work like that, it's just common sense. But it's not the point, now please let's speak about gameplay mechanics. :)
especially if you could EMP the life support systems and force the crew to head to the life pods.
That would be over-powered if just one weapon could insta-disable an ennemy ship.

Right now I would just like to see Life-support have a meaning in gameplay.
When you start a new game, there are ship remains everywhere. It would be really cool to see ship remains in space as a result of wars. Maybe you could steal that other civilization's technology by repairing the ship and bringing it to your spaceport.

It would also solve the problem of heavily damaged ships breaking some game mechanics because it can't move fast enough to get repaired. A ship is too damaged? It's removed from your fleet (/civilization). Still want to recover it? Send a construction ship to repair and reclaim it.
Adding more meaningful effects for certain components (including life support) has been in our internal wish list for a while too. I agree in principle, just hasn't made it to the top of the list yet.
Really cool to read that. Thank you Erik :)
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Osito
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RE: Life Support

Post by Osito »

ORIGINAL: OzoneGrif
Seriously, though, in fact it's all roleplay, but it depends on your perspective. When you say that no spaceship would have a spacesuit for all the crew, how do you know? You saw it in Star Trek? Your conclusion that no spaceship could operate like that is a role play.
It makes no sense. Life-support is what it is : Support to be able to stay alive. Without it, you won't live long. You won't have water, air, food, pressure, light, whatever. Try to live for month, if not years, in a spacesuit. It just doesn't work like that, it's just common sense. But it's not the point, now please let's speak about gameplay mechanics. :)

If you look at my post you will see that I did agree (joking apart) that it would be nice to adjust the mechanic. It is true that 'life support' (unlike habitation) does not appear to add anything other than the resouce requirement, the space requirement and the cost requirement.

But in terms of the role playing aspect, you're way off base. The point is that anything can work there. Who knows how a spaceship would function in the future? So what I'm saying is, yes it's fine to say the mechanic is inadequate, but not that it can't be role played away. That was kind of the point of my first post.
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OzoneGrif_slith
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RE: Life Support

Post by OzoneGrif_slith »

We can imagine anything I guess.

I just hope the "future" won't be to live in tight spandex spacesuits and be feed by direct proteins injections. ;)
FireLion1983
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RE: Life Support

Post by FireLion1983 »

ORIGINAL: OzoneGrif

We can imagine anything I guess.

I just hope the "future" won't be to live in tight spandex spacesuits and be feed by direct proteins injections. ;)

Battle stations in the Navy always required battle dress and gas mask to be worn on hip. It's not shocking at all to me to think that battle stations in a future space armada would require a space suit - at the very least for damage control teams. It would be impossible to repair a hull breach during combat otherwise, no?
hewwo
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RE: Life Support

Post by hewwo »

I totally support this idea here that components should have more individuality to make things (ship designing!) should be more interesting.
feygan
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RE: Life Support

Post by feygan »

In it's current form life support and hab modules are totally useless. Since we do not have a "crew" factor in ship designs we have no way of knowing if a ship requires 5000 or 5 crew to pilot it to it's full abilities. In addition we have no way of killing the crew even if they were there and so they are moot regardless.

In this case all life support does is eat up ship space for the sake of an rp argument, but without any other rp elements that back up the argument.

I can understand that adding in a full crew mechanic would take some time and effort but until that can happen it would be better to scrap life support. If a ship requires 50 spaces of life support/hab modules, then just make the ship size 50 spaces smaller. You still get the same number of engines/weapons etc and now don't have to deal with what is at the moment just an annoying warning in the design screen.

Hopefully it can be modded out so ships do not need such things until the proper mechanics for them can be implemented.
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Osito
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RE: Life Support

Post by Osito »

Hab does have an effect on game mechanics, however, in that it increases boarding defense strength. Oddly enough the effect remains the same, regardless of your hab tech level. Life support, on the other hand, adds nothing to the game mechanics, other than its cost, size and resource requirement.
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FireLion1983
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RE: Life Support

Post by FireLion1983 »

ORIGINAL: feygan

In it's current form life support and hab modules are totally useless. Since we do not have a "crew" factor in ship designs we have no way of knowing if a ship requires 5000 or 5 crew to pilot it to it's full abilities. In addition we have no way of killing the crew even if they were there and so they are moot regardless.

In this case all life support does is eat up ship space for the sake of an rp argument, but without any other rp elements that back up the argument.

I can understand that adding in a full crew mechanic would take some time and effort but until that can happen it would be better to scrap life support. If a ship requires 50 spaces of life support/hab modules, then just make the ship size 50 spaces smaller. You still get the same number of engines/weapons etc and now don't have to deal with what is at the moment just an annoying warning in the design screen.

Hopefully it can be modded out so ships do not need such things until the proper mechanics for them can be implemented.

As Osito said, hab modules tell you exactly how much crew you're getting, and they go toward your boarding defense.
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Erik Rutins
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RE: Life Support

Post by Erik Rutins »

To add to the fact that hab modules increase boarding defense, every component is also a potential target for damage bypassing the armor. Ships with more life support and hab modules are more likely to take hits on those spaces instead of on reactors, weapons, drives, etc.
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Aeson
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RE: Life Support

Post by Aeson »

Hab does have an effect on game mechanics, however, in that it increases boarding defense strength. Oddly enough the effect remains the same, regardless of your hab tech level. Life support, on the other hand, adds nothing to the game mechanics, other than its cost, size and resource requirement.
Since the size of the habitation modules does not change, I tend to feel that the amount of personnel carried per habitation module does not change, which makes sense with the lack of impact that habitation module improvements have on boarding defense. Instead, I feel that upgrades to the habitation module really represent improvements in the computer systems and automation routines which allow the personnel carried to be used more efficiently; after all, there's a limit to how many people you can pack into a given amount of space, but improvements to the computer systems could potentially come without requiring a significant increase in the volume dedicated to them, while more efficient algorithms which allow for better use of the existing computer systems could arguably be installed on the fly.
I can understand that adding in a full crew mechanic would take some time and effort but until that can happen it would be better to scrap life support. If a ship requires 50 spaces of life support/hab modules, then just make the ship size 50 spaces smaller. You still get the same number of engines/weapons etc and now don't have to deal with what is at the moment just an annoying warning in the design screen.
This isn't quite the same - ship speed is equal to something like the total thrust divided by the size of the ship, and something similar applies for turning rates. Removing the life support and habitation modules makes the ships faster, because they're now smaller. Beyond that, as Osito mentioned, the number of habitation modules impacts the boarding defense of your vessel, and removing the module limits your ability to affect this; boarding modules and troop bays also impact boarding defense, but boarding modules are large and must still have their pods in order to contribute to boarding defense, and you have to be carrying troops in order for a troop bay to contribute to boarding defense. I can see an argument for an 'auto-add enough life support and habitation modules' or for combining life support and habitation modules into a single module under the current mechanics, but not for simply deleting the two module types and pretending that it changes nothing.

Besides that, I can't really say that I care whether one habitation module supports five guys or five thousand. I can say that a ship with 10 habitation modules has about double the crew of a ship with only 5 habitation modules, and I don't see that there's a particular advantage to adding a crew requirement to each module, as that would only change the optimization from 'I need X habitation modules per Y size' to 'I need X habitation modules per Y crew', which decouples the ship size limit from all the ship components while adding another item to track in ship design. It also means that I cannot say that I need 3 habitation modules to build a size-300 ship before I decide what I'm putting on it, because I don't know what the crew cost will work out to (unless crew cost = component size, but then there's absolutely no point to having a crew cost because it's listing the same limit twice). Complicating the design process is not necessarily the same as making the game better.
feygan
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RE: Life Support

Post by feygan »

The problem is that while they do add to boarding defence, and other factors (I would not really count ship speed etc as these are just side effects of having more lumps of metal on a ship). The do nothing else for a whole lot of space and bother in the design phase. If I take out every single life support and hab module in a lucky missile strike it does one thing only, reduces boarding defence.

From an rp standpoint they are redundant as no crew could survive for more than a day or so with spacesuits. From a mechanic standpoint they are also redundant as the total space taken up by life support & hab is a lot compared to just chucking on a boarding pod etc for a better defence figure.

If a crew mechanic could be implemented then life support & hab will make a great addition as it opens up a whole new line of weaponry designed to just kill crew, thus making easy pickings for pirates etc with fully intact ships.
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Osito
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RE: Life Support

Post by Osito »

ORIGINAL: feygan

From an rp standpoint they are redundant as no crew could survive for more than a day or so with spacesuits.

They could if they were carrying a portable fuel reactor, a portable ultradense hydrogen fuel cell, and a liquid oxygen supply canister ;-)

Edit: oh and I forgot to mention they would also need a waste disposal system, otherwise they really wouldn't want to last more or a day or two. In space, no one can hear you scream.
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