- a Shield Controller to transfer shield capacity between front/rear shields with the appropriate key presses? Even a Shield Equaliser that keeps front and rear the same (whether with a key press or automatically) could come in handy. Or both?
- an Energy Transfer Module to move energy back and forth between the shields and the energy banks? This may seem silly at first sight, but I like the idea of pressing a key to deplete the energy banks and keep my shields up. That way, my expensively acquired Naval Energy Unit doesn't get shot off...
You'll gather that I'm keen on having as many widgets to bolt onto my ship as possible!
Energy management features would indeed be interesting, though I don't know how difficult it would be to implement - I suppose you could draw on some of the functionality of the ECM.
It's been mentioned before, but I do like the idea of the laser cooling booster which draws heavily on your shields and/or energy reserves. This would definitely be the kind of thing you'd use at your own risk (flicking on the ECM at low power could be lethal), but it would be just the ticket for those aggressive pilots out there who like to take a gamble against the odds.
Maybe the basic effect could be implemented by fiddling around with the laser properties themselves. I tried fitting an aft plasma cannon the other day, and even before it overheated it seemed to draw much more power from the energy banks than a conventional laser.
What I have in mind is some kind of interceptor ship which would have such a system built in; the downside being that it can't be fitted with additional energy units or shield boosters.
Note to self: The initial tone of a thread is crucial to getting a considered hearing on requests for new equipment upgrades...
quite.
But I AM interested.
One question I have for Aegidian is:
Could it be made possible to have a piece of EQ that generates an subentity outside the ship?
Could be fun for externally visible widgets, such as duraloy docking bumpers, coolingfins or even the Qbomb and missilepylons.
Would require a manually adding positiondata for every shiptype though. (like the viewing pos.)
Given that Oolite is such a magnificent beast and that Giles is the sexiest man in the programming world (at least in my humble opinion), how about the following widget:
Transfer energy at say, twice the current shield recharge rate until they were equal? So the depleted shield would increase by 3x the current recharge rate, while the better one would drop at 1x? That certainly works for me.
If the player had to hold a key down to do it, that would mean a bit more complexity for combat - one might have to stop equalising the shields to use ECM or injectors, for example.
