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Star Citizen Devs – Ares Inferno & Non-Fighters Are Capital Ships What?!

Welcome to some more Star Citizen, Spectrum the CI and Star Citizen Forums are ablaze with many a question and devs frantically answering them, so today i want to take a look at a range of topics, Ballistic Gatlings, weapon capactiors, ai moving around the ground on planets, is the connie now a capital ship?! How big is crusader and some bits that you can get involved with too.

Ares Inferno’s rate of fire

There are a lot of people worried about the ballistic changes in Star Citizen with ships like the yet to be released Ares Inferno… it has a large but single S7 ballistic Gatling as it’s only armament… and people want to be able to BRTTTTTT… spray and pray… without it instantly running out of ammo.

So the ammo capacity, rate of fire and sound is all needed to bring this weapon together.

YogiKatt from CIG talked about it:

Our theoretical max fire rate is 1800. We do not really need to reach that though as there is not really a damage performance difference of using a high RPM vs half the RPM with twice the damage once you got beyond a certain threshold.

Whether it does brrrrrt or not is not really related to the actual fire rate but rather how it is supported by audio and vfx.

The ammo count is not decided yet. We’ll cross that bridge once it becomes flight ready and its balance process starts but You can expect that… It will have a good amount of ammo to threaten or damage parts of capital ships as that is the role that was defined for it.

We do know the Ares Ion lost a shield in it’s theory balance during this 3.14 cycle… but it again will be tweaked with balance so that it’s working within it’s planned role. It might have a more powerful shield capacitor or more powerful powerplants feeding it or a multitude of other things. 

Question about planet nav mesh – What’s stopping CIG from making a tool to make a nav mesh to cover a planet or is that what they are doing? So nav meshes will allow AI to move around the surface of a planet and structures.

Figwig from CIG was talking about this:

Hey! I’m not on AI and don’t know much about our Nav meshes, but I can guarantee we won’t be doing navmeshes for the whole planet at once, for the same reason as we don’t do this for the planet render or phys meshes. Our planets are huge, like many thousands of square km huge. One of our phys engineers told me recently that even a 40x40km area of our terrain all loaded in at once would take up in the ballpark of 800GB of RAM. Think about this for a whole planet. Instead, we generate the render/phys meshes from some fixed data/seeds on demand for the planets, and I imagine the navmeshes will do the same. Hope this helps!

(Tho the numbers talked about here are more for examples than accuracy)

Is the Connie considered a Capital Ship now?

Cloud Imperiums YogiKatt put out a message:

I gladly clarify this one:

3.14 was very focused on getting the baseline for fighters right and as such we internally created performance classifications for all fighters or fighter-class ships. Any other ship that did not fit those fighter categories we simply put into another “bucket” … so all ships with the general idea of not being able to offset their velocity and direction vectors fast enough to hold up in a turn fight with a dedicated fighter. And that clearly is and should not be the case for a ship with the size of a Connie.

Anyways, back then I just labelled that other bucket “capital ship”. It’s technically wrong, but another name was not really needed either so we went on and between us devs in the combat team it somewhat stuck. We could have also called it “non-fighters”, “slow movers”, “large ships” or “trucks and above”. That’s pretty much all there is to it.

As a side note: when I use oddly sounding terminology do not interpret too much into it. As gameplay developers we e.g. do not use “CF-337 Panther Repeater” as a name … we use the dev name “KLWE_LaserRepeater_S3” instead because in the context of our daily work it’s much faster and more descriptive. We leave the actual ingame names of ship categories, etc. to the lore team.

Hope that all makes sense … pitchforks down? 

Elsewhere Yogi went onto explain some weapon capacitor information:

Cloud Imperium have updated the Constellation Phonix Emerald to be a better shade or color of emerald.

How wide is the Crusader gas giant?

Divi answering here – it’s diameter is 14900km + 1200km of atmosphere

CitizenCon this year is a virtual event on the 9th of October.

So as there is no physical presence CI want to have the community get involved with a video contest, with these videos being shown between the presentations and reveals throughout the day.

We’re asking you for well-produced and entertaining in-fiction videos to play between dev panels at CitizenCon 2951. So, send us your creations for the opportunity to reach and entertain the entire Star Citizen community in one fell swoop. Your in-fiction video may promote your player organization, an NPC group, an in-game product, your community-driven event, or whatever else you can think of that would be a fun in-fiction addition to the show. The commercials can be serious or funny. You can even send in comedy skits or short machinimas; whatever you like as long as you’re bringing the Community Booth spirit to CitizenCon 2951. Just bear in mind there are some important criteria to consider, so read the rules carefully.

They mustn’t be longer than 45 seconds.

The number of submissions is limited to one per participant

CI will be giving away Tumbril Nova Tanks with LTI to the clips they like / use.

The CIG jury will judge your videos on

  • Quality
  • Lore adherence
  • Entertainment level

Cloud Imperium is also looking for questions for a Star Citizen Live That Vehicle Life – Alpha 3.14 that will be well LIVE on Friday 23rd July at 3pm on the SC Twitch.

Topics for this week’s show will be limited exclusively to vehicle team-specific 3.14 changes currently available for testing on the PTU:

  • Power Management v2 (Capacitor Gameplay)
  • Missile Operator Mode
  • Missiles Guidance and Control Rework
  • Radar, Scanning and Ping
  • Overall Vehicle Balance

There are some good questions already:

Will ballistics weapons get reloads, since the ballistic ammo counts have been adjusted to be so low.

Why weapon ranges so low?

In the future Can we change our ship capacitors?

Get involved with that and upvote questions that you like the look of while you at it… it makes them more likely to be answered!

Boom, that’s it for today’s look at what Devs have been talking about and what’s going on with Spectrum.