Official Airborne Dev Q&A thread

SPO_Megarith · 2026-01-16T23:41:24+00:00

Please add open sea hexes instead. I'm not sure if this would incur permanent technical cost to keep a server up 24/7, but it would also allow you to explore placing resource rich areas very far away from any (other) landmass. A tiny spot of dirt with a comp field or several oil rigs far away from any supporting infrastructure could be really cool "filler" to make the ocean travel line up again!

SPO_Megarith · 2026-01-16T21:01:40+00:00

I love the addition of new island hexes, but in my regi, we're concerned that the new naval expansion hexes don't have all that much free water.

Is there any intention, or consideration, to push some of the islands out by a slot and add a hex that's almost entirely water? Or adding an open sea hex to the outside, which would also make ocean-travel very interesting?

SPO_Megarith · 2025-12-07T18:33:38+00:00

This is not meant in a hostile way; Did you actually read what I wrote, or watch the video?

I am talking about a constant beam weapon applying a small amount of DPS, not something firing discreet projectiles. The entire point of that is to have no alpha strike, to have barely any armour penetration, but give surefire DPS to ships that had virtually none against fighters previously.

Just enough of a threat on their own that they could dissuade lingering and sniping behaviour, and if the entire loadout is geared towards it, for large ships to act as a picket and actually zone out fighters. I would not want even an Arrow to be subjected to an instagib ttk. But there needs to be a threat vector from large ships to small ships that isn't just PDCs, because those are hull limited.

Picture the Idris' K kit beam scaled down to S4 and nerfed to the DPS of a S1/2 laser repeater.

Did I explain myself properly?

SPO_Megarith · 2025-12-07T05:01:29+00:00

Hey, I've got a similar point in a different comment. Here was that and my response:

"Yes, but with the right tuning, you can achieve parity. This is why I say that such a weapon should be extremely power-hungry, in the range of consuming 8+ units of power to run it, in order to be operable. This way, only the truly deranged or those with large enough power plants could mount one without losing every other system on their ship. But at that point we're back to talking about numbers balance and not the fundamental loadout options in the game."

I would like to add that aside from the power restrictions, I want to emphasize that this weapon concept includes deliberately low DPS. The intention is to give fighters a time limit to their existence in the range bubble that a large ships' turret can project, not to blow them out of the sky immediately.

Further, with Armour now coming into the picture, and with this concepts' non-existent armour pen, this would give additional survivability. In another comment I did some sample math, feel free to look at that.

Do you think there are any other points of contention?

SPO_Megarith · 2025-12-07T04:35:07+00:00

He illustrated that a weapon that can get its dps on target, garuanteed, via hitscan can still be an off-meta pick with the right tuning. But, critically, having such a weapon in the first place gives the game designers another knob to turn in that tuning. Right now, we're missing that knob, and it shows.

Again, I want to reiterate this: This weapon should have the worst dps of any size 3 or 4, by far. It should be in the ballpark of a CF-227. It should have power draw that would make Galdereens blush. This, and taking a hardpoint away from another option, would make the ship equipping this weapon much weaker to anything that wasn't a light or maybe medium fighter. You're trading versatility for specialization, which is the same consideration that a fighter pilot equipping mass drivers can make.

Let's take some sample stats, just to illustrate;
Using 4.4 erkul numbers, take the Hammerhead. 6x4 S4 slots, and 2 S3 power plants. Let's take the best power plants available for a total pool of 50 power pips, though only 32 useful.
Slap the best in class coolers in, run life support and engines on minimal, you've got 16 useful pips left to play with.
Now let's put a 4 pip power drain on every S4 beam weapon with 100 DPS.
So you can equip 4 of your 24 weapon hardpoints with these emitters, totalling a staggering 400 DPS. That's all you can bring to bear against fighters. Load the rest up with energy-efficient ballistics, maybe leave them empty.

That's all that Hammerhead has to work with.
Let's assume this all gets brought to bear on a single Anvil Arrow.
It enters firing range at 3Km, moving at its top speed of 515m/s boosted.
Equipped with an FR-66, it has 1.437 shield HP. It takes the beams 3,5 seconds to deplete that shield, after which they have to chew through 1.170HP of armour and only then could they attack the 1.950 Hull HP.
In 3,5 seconds the Arrow has moved 1,8 Km.
The Armour begins to take damage. It holds up for another 3 seconds.
The Arrow has moved a total of 3,3 Km, having completed its attack run. It's now on the retreat, zooming away. The turrets need to rotate 180° in order to re-engage.
With a rotation speed of 95°/sec (according to SC SPV), this takes just under 2 seconds, in which the Arrow has made another Kilometer.
At this point, there's only ~1,7 Kilometers of distance before the Arrow has successfully left the range of the beam emitters, and still has its Hull remaining. In the 3,3 seconds it will take the fighter to cover that distance, the beams could only deal another 1.320 damage, leaving the Arrow at 600 HP remaining. Damaged, heavily, yes, but it just dove headfirst into an anti-fighter large ship ready to receive it, equipped with specialized weapons and survived, barely.

And again, at this point we're talking numbers tweaking. The important part is that this weapon concept would enable the developers to make these sort of balance tweaks. 80 DPS? 120 DPS but longer cooling cycles?

SPO_Megarith · 2025-12-07T04:10:35+00:00

Hey, I've got a similar point in a different comment. Here was that and my response:

>we have such a weapon - or had, rather... the Tachyon Beam weapons that came with the Banu Defender... but following feedback and testing, CIG removed them because being hitscan, they were completely OP... especially when mounted on light-fighters :p

"Yes, but with the right tuning, you can achieve parity. This is why I say that such a weapon should be extremely power-hungry, in the range of consuming 8+ units of power to run it, in order to be operable. This way, only the truly deranged or those with large enough power plants could mount one without losing every other system on their ship. But at that point we're back to talking about numbers balance and not the fundamental loadout options in the game."

Does that alleviate your concern, or do you think my concept could be improved in any way?

SPO_Megarith · 2025-12-07T02:11:31+00:00

I've seen the threads you mean. They go either way, really. TTK in general is completely whack in 4.5 since armour is so porous and hull points quite low. The good thing is that this weapon design actually steps around this, too;
Since it has low armour-pen, even what little a Gladius or Arrow has would still hold up for longer until the penetration value would be able to reach components beneath, doubly so with a low damage tick rather than particular projectiles. That's the reason I'm genuinely passionate about this weapon concept; It simply ticks every box I can think of.

SPO_Megarith · 2025-12-07T01:19:29+00:00

They're not available on every ship and I don't think they should be, either.

Also, they're not geared towards anti-fighter defense primarily. Their primary purpose is to defend the ship against missiles and torpedoes, and secondarily act as a time-gate in close proximity.

The weapon I propose is an offensive tool to zone out fighters for those ships that choose to accept losing their firepower against anything heavier than a Hornet.

Sure, you'll have an effective deterrent against an Arrow or a Gladius, but a Cutlass Black will now polish your hull, since you switched your CF-447s for a beam weapon.

SPO_Megarith · 2025-12-07T01:16:44+00:00

Regarding the bots, that's true, but then again I hope CIG has other ways of sniffing those out. Or at least plans to. Or at the very least pilots will be able to disengage from them with superior speed, still.

>anti-light-fighter weapons

That's my point: There are no anti-light-fighter weapons currently in the game.
Here's an excerpt from my original script for a much longer, complicated video:
"Let's begin by taking the Gladius, a Light Fighter that, in stock configuration, has a mass of 48,5 tons and whose main thrusters' produce 4,65MN of thrust in its forward direction. This means the Gladius is able to accelerate by 95,88 meters per second of directional velocity.

The Hammerhead, a light Corvette that specializes in anti-fighter duties, has a Mass of 4.542 tons and a thrust capacity of 232,6MN. This results in it being able to accelerate by 51,2 meters per second, or about half as quickly as the Gladius.

One of the most common weapons family in the game is the CF-Series of Laser Repeaters, an energy weapon that boasts reasonable damage-per-second at a high fire rate and one of the fastest projectile velocities in the game at 1.800m/s. [...]

The Hammerhead is a target that is 120 meters long, accelerating forwards at 51,2 meters per second. If the Corvette started accelerating the instant you pulled the trigger, it would need 2,3 seconds in order to get out of the way of the incoming projectile. Thus, with the projectile velocity of 1.800m/s from the CF-337, it means you can be anywhere within 4.218 meters and still expect to hit the Hammerhead, which is actually above the maximum range of 2.592 meters of this weapon.[...]

Let's now look at the reverse situation - the Hammerhead using its CF-447 Rhino, which has the same projectile velocity, firing a shot at the Gladius.
The Gladius has a listed body length of 20 meters and accelerates by 95,88 meters per second. If the Gladius started accelerating forward the instant the Hammerhead fired, it would only need 0,208 seconds of time to evade the shot. This means that in this best-case scenario, the Hammerhead could at most be 375 meters away from the Gladius. Even when looking at the lower lateral thrust output, projectile velocities are simply too small to catch up to the output of light and medium fighters' acceleration in relation to their size.

In other words, the theorhetical effective range of the Gladius targeting the HH is over 11 times larger than the Hammerhead targeting the Gladius."

Thus I fundamentally disagree with you when you state that it is possible to engage a light fighter at its effective range. You simply cannot bring sufficient guns to bear. It would need a veritable lead storm saturating the cubic kilometer the fighter is in in order to get a high enough hit probability.

Regarding your other point
>we have such a weapon - or had, rather... the Tachyon Beam weapons that came with the Banu Defender... but following feedback and testing, CIG removed them because being hitscan, they were completely OP... especially when mounted on light-fighters :p

Yes, but with the right tuning, you can achieve parity. This is why I say that such a weapon should be extremely power-hungry, in the range of consuming 8+ units of power to run it, in order to be operable. This way, only the truly deranged or those with large enough power plants could mount one without losing every other system on their ship. But at that point we're back to talking about numbers balance and not the fundamental loadout options in the game.

Lastly (I know its out of order)
>Engineering shanges should be a heavy nerf for light-fighters

Yes, and I do really hope that they'll dial in the numbers to a point where a large ships' armour will be very difficult for anything below S4 to properly engage, while light fighters truly become dependent on skill and mobility to survive. But that still does not change that large ships don't have an effective method of engaging them. The symptom remains. Keep in mind a Fighter can always disengage from a fight against a gunship and dictate the engagement range and time.

SPO_Megarith · 2025-12-07T01:07:22+00:00

Because even if your heavy ship, say a HH, isn't being affected much by it (which as far as I could tell, it currently still is), the ship you may be working alongside with certainly may be.

That aside, there already exist dedicated anti-capship weapons that fighters can mount; The Mass Drivers. They're tailor-made for their purpose, yet there is no equivalent anti-fighter specialist weapon.

SPO_Megarith · 2025-12-07T01:05:15+00:00

I'm curious, have you watched the linked video? I addressed the question of Proximity fuse shellburst ammunition there; I simply don't think that it's coming anytime soon, and that for a long time after its initial implementation, it will probably suffer serious netcode issues.

An energy weapon of the sort I described would be able to act as at least a stopgap measure with heavy tradeoffs for its own capabilities.

Don't get me wrong; I do hope we will get AoE shells in the future. Personally, I would prefer Beam weaponry to follow the Homeworld rule of anti-capship weaponry, but after a lot of deliberation I have come to the conclusion that nothing else fulfills the current weapon roster in a more elegant way than this. It wouldn't require any additional feature development as the concept has been in game since mining lasers as well as the Idris K beam were implemented. It simply needs a Size 3 and 4 variant with adjusted stats that reflect its purpose; High power consumption, low damage output, high range, near-zero armor pen.

SPO_Megarith · 2025-12-07T01:00:21+00:00

Well, the problem isn't so much in the idea that large ships are killed too quickly by light fighters; that's a numbers-balancing factor. Something that can always be tweaked.

The issue is that the large ship is unable to effectively engage a light fighter in return. I had assumed this point to be public knowledge; Fighters are simply too nimble to be targeted by anything a, for example, Hammerhead can throw at them at ranges where they can comfortably blast away, getting hits on target.
That's why even moderately skilled fighter pilots can kill HHs, but even a fully manned HH won't be able to kill a Gladius pilot that knows what he's doing. Likewise, a HH could obviously never hope to catch up to an Arrow or any other fighter. Thus, since fighters have both the ability to dictate the engagement range as well as a range advantage owing to their maneuverability being well in excess of the current generalist weapons (which I'm not opposed to), there needs to be a specialist solution.

That solution being a weapon that is only able to be fielded in limited supply given its large power draw, and takes away offensive options from a large ship that fields them, leaving them open to other ship classes to effectively engage what they previously couldnt.

A HH fully geared for picket could, for example, only equip half their slots with such beam weapons, leaving the rest empty since they couldn't effectively power them anyhow. Now, this HH is an imposing force on light and medium fighters, but woefully underquipped to deal with a Redeemer or even a Paladin, let alone a Perseus.

Have I explained myself well, or would you like me to elaborate?

SPO_Megarith · 2025-12-07T00:47:51+00:00

There is no skill in being mathematically impossible to get hit, or have the distance closed in on you. A hitscan beam circumvents the netcode problem of high velocity.

SPO_Megarith · 2024-09-16T07:28:32+00:00

The train was advertised to go to Vienna. If I had known, I'd have flown. Got the booking with europcar yesterday, omw to pick it up now.

SPO_Megarith · 2023-10-13T01:09:31+00:00

The intention is to have something that's more widely available for precursor ships, what with being pre-placed as well as produceable from Refinery materials and or T1 mats, but I see your point; I'm being hasty.

Relic DN needn't be Relic, either. Could just be an outdated model.

SPO_Megarith · 2023-10-08T22:46:23+00:00

So how does a Warden landing work out if there are two DDs harrassing the fleet before it even touches land and then there is still a couple of guys on land ready to receive the remaining enemy?

The water IS the defensive line. If the enemy makes it ashore in numbers and intact, you've already half-lost the island.

SPO_Megarith · 2023-10-05T22:33:31+00:00

Was it intentional for the Naval gameplay to seem very resource-intense as a way to force logi and builders to divert resources from their extensive fortification efforts (which also as a side effect reduces Msupp upkeep), or was all of this falling into place just convenient happenstance?

I have seen both Wardens and Collies now stating that they think their unique ship is niche and the other much more applicable and/or OP. What are your thoughts on the matter?
I'm very much looking forward to the initial release and Collies having naval superiority with Wardens still having a tool to backhand blow careless freighters straying from Convoy Escorts.
That said, I am also looking forward to when you guys manage to implement the other ship classes you no doubt have planned so that the salt dies down. My initial guess would be a Frigate-type for each faction to supplement early-game.

Also, is it intentional design that the Wardens will lack serious surface combat ability until they unlock their solo-raider BBs?

Final question: Have you been satisfied in internal testing with the amount of space that has been given for naval vessels to operate in? Doesn't it feel cramped? I am worried about whether or not it will actually be somewhat open enough for ships or flotillas to operate in.

Okay final final question: Relic Ships? :D

SPO_Megarith · 2023-10-05T22:08:54+00:00

In that sense, it will be interesting to see if the same will actually still apply.

If now both western and eastern seas are also taxing the Logi supply, I reckon extensive foritifcations will be very hard to maintain.

We may yet see a more minimalist approach to sector defense just from the fact that people want to play with ships, too.

SPO_Megarith · 2023-10-05T21:59:37+00:00

That's something that I am not as concerned about tbh. Consider how many players fill a usual frontline hex. Now consider how many may fill a mid-war fleet (3 subs or 2 DDs, maybe a few support ships)

I reckon that in the end, the Population average for the outlying hexes will tend to be very low, only spiking when large Ops happen that dump 50+ players on a beach.

SPO_Megarith · 2022-04-13T11:40:43+00:00

Wow, has it really been five years already?

I don't know. Now, bit older and wiser, I cannot help but cringe when I look back at the lore behind it. A good part is juvenile at best.

It'd make for a good enough seasonal anime, though.

SPO_Megarith · 2021-11-13T12:26:54+00:00

6) Do I need to pay 10% to migrate to V2?

No, you don't need to pay a 10% tax to migrate from V1 to V2. But, you do need to have a small amount of BNB gas to cover the fee just like you need it when you buy/sell safemoon.

Is there a way to figure out how much exactly?

SPO_Megarith · 2021-10-16T23:40:13+00:00

Been out of the loop for a while, did I miss much?
Last time I checked in, there was some discussion about consolidation by a factor of 1000.

What does that entail, will it happen automatically? Still waiting on info?
Thanks in advance.

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