I'm pleased to report this month was incredibly successful. A ton of new tech was introduced which has opened the floodgates for combat related content.

New Weapons Tech

Work was done to refactor and improve weapons, which overall has made them a lot easier to work with and more versatile.

Damage Dropoff

Initially I was going to go with a standard lerp method for calculating damage over distance for beams and projectiles. Then I remembered Godot has a very powerful Curve object. After a bit of work, I have support for any kind of damage interpolation over distance I could ever want.

Spinup Weapons

I ripped up how the game handles bursting and fire rate logic. The way it worked before was I had two stats: fire rate and post burst delay, which controlled shots in between bursts and then the time after it. This was somewhat confusing and wasn't applied consistently across burst and non burst weapons . I inverted this behavior,  so now all weapons are essentially burst fire weapons under the hood, with fire rate controlling time between bursts and an intra-burst fire rate to control multiple shots in a burst.

Projectile weapons also now have an internal burst counter which counts up whenever the weapon completes a burst, a spindown timer to reset the counter over time after a period of not firing, and a max burst counter. As the weapon fires more bursts the weapon spins up, and the fire rate is multiplied by a spinup curve. In effect this allows me to finely control how fast weapons spin up.

Of course I did the sensible thing and immediately added in two flavors of chaingun to test the concept.

Multi Beams

Beam weapons can now have multiple emitters. Works about the way you'd expect. Added the large beam weapon Blinker.

AoE Weapons

I added in projectiles that will linger in the air and do damage to all fighters and ships that it touches over a given radius. The damage will be spread across all armor panels on a ship, making them more effective against fighters on average than ships. The results weren't as good as I'd hoped but at least the tech is now there for future iteration.

Added the Resonant Caster which fires clouds of ionized particles.

Multi Plate Shields

Ships now have support for multiple plate shields, located in arbitrary locations around the ship.

Abilities

Just like weapons, there have been a lot of refactors to make them more consistent and easier to work with in the future. I added in a new abilities to test the new systems:

• Overwhelming firepower: All miniguns spin up much faster, shoot faster, and do more damage
• Optical tuning: Doubles the range and heat of beam weapons
• Reserve fighters: Doubles the amount of fighters deployed at once
• Plate Restoration: Instantly brings all plate shields to max health

Hullmods and Perks

I was able to almost double the amount from 15 to roughly 30. Some notable examples:

• Critical: Very similar to another beloved perk from that other game, but with my own spin on it. Grants a huge boost to speed, vent rate, and ability recharge rate. However, heat capacity is cut in half and if the ship overloads it loses a whopping 25% of its health. In essence this will make ships very powerful for skirmishing, but heavily penalize getting into extended brawls. Naturally, it's a Kleptocracy flavored hullmod.
• Explosive Decompression: Losing an armor section will cause it to explode and fire projectiles in the direction of the enemy.
• Ultraheavy Actuators: Allows fixed artillery to turn, removing one of the main drawbacks of using them.
• Calibration: All weapons below 800 range will have their range extended by 30%.

I also added in lots of new icons for additional hullmods, though not all of them could make it in this update.

Improved Perk Tech

Alongside the new hullmods I added the ability for perks to use additional logic to discriminate which objects they should modify. For example I can now modify only weapons below a certain range, which the Calibration perk uses to figure out which weapons meet the range requirement. This gives me an immense degree of control over programming in new perks down the road using a very simple shared interface.

Ship Engines

Made engines on ships look a little bit better