Dark Nova 5 and "The Fighter Issue"

In general, I'd go for 4 PD types.

Lasers. Long range, very low damage, highly accurate.
Cannons. Solid slugs. Low range, high damage. Accuracy depends highly on range.
Flak. Similar to cannons, but more costly in ordinance and more accurate. In theory could be AoE, but that doesn't work, unfortunately.
Missile. Highly accurate and high damage, medium range, huge ordinance cost. It'll shoot down those pesky fighters, but only for a little while.

A few more:
Machine Guns - similar to the autocannons in DN4
Spazers (for lack of a better name - I'm thinking of the Metroid weapon that saturates an area with energy beams ) - a cross between lasers and flak, it does less damage than flak but is more accurate, and has a longer range, though the accuracy and damage still decrease with range.
Electrified Hull - there was a shell that did that in DN4, it repelled boarders as well if I recall correctly... This one would have VERY short range (useful mainly against kamikazes) but do a LOT of damage. Recharge rate is up for grabs.
Active Shield - similar to the Expanding Sphere Generator from Star Fleet Battles or the Pulsar/Lightning Field from MOO, it creates a damaging field around the ship. It would not do as much damage as the Electrified Hull but it would have a longer range. Again, recharge rate is up for grabs.

Or you could go the MOO2/GGmod route and just have PD versions of many/all of the regular weapons - make the PD ones mountable on fighters and they double as fighter superiority weapons!

Yeah, that would be neat... have 2 categories of weapons, anti-ship and anti-fighter, but let the player install anti-ship weapons on a fighter (with a downscaling mount which reduces size/cost/damage/etc. by 5x or so) or install anti-fighter weapons on a ship (without a mount for regular point-defense, or with a "battery" mount which scales them UP by 5x or so for targeting bombers/scouts)...

You might wonder "why bother having 2 different weapon types anyway" - well, that's first of all to save the player having to keep checking a mount unless they want specialty heavy-PD ships or bombers, and secondly, I don't know if you intend to do it this way, but in Space Empires, fighter-based anti-fighter weapons are typically more effective per kT or per mineral cost than ship-based anti-ship weapons, so this way you can have a 30kT anti-ship cannon which does 20 damage and a 3kT anti-fighter cannon which does 5 damage, or whatever, and then the "bomber mount" anti-ship cannon would be 6kT and do 4 damage, while the "flak mount" anti-fighter cannon would be 15kT and do 25 damage

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The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious

I remember Star Frontiers! Do you remember another game from that same era called Gamma World? Post-apocolyptic sci-fi ftw =D

lol, Gamma World was a fun game. I wonder if someone could incorporate a Torc Grenade type weapon in SE ...

Could be imbalanced I suppose, what with it disintegrating everything in a set radius, lol.

umm, I was just thinking as pertains to your OP, what about smartbombs?

Smartbombs: high damage, very low range area of effect weapon with a high supply/ordinance usage

Just an idea but it seems like that would toast alot of fighters to me.

Unfortunately there is no "area of effect" of damage in SE5...

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The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious

Create a new weapon mount called "AA Mount"

1. Reduces their damage.
2. Can only target Drones, Fighters, Seeking weapons, Satellites.
3. Increase their rate of fire.
4. Reduce their weight.
5. Maybe and accuracy bonus?

Something similar to what ekolis did with Weapon Banks that are intended to target small targets.

With this option you don't have to create new items as it makes any direct fire weapon available.

SE5 Files hosted on Filefront (Patches, Mods, Races, etc)

Unfortunately, mounts cannot affect rate of fire or targeting types - you need separate weapons.

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The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious

One idea I had for a anti fighter/missile weapon was a repulsor weapon, not sure if it will work or not, but basically a weapon that pushes the fighter/missile out of it's firing range, thereby giving normal pd more than one chance to knock it out. Of course that means that the fighters would need short range weapons or else the repulsor weapon would need a fairly good range. As stated above, unsure if this is even possible or if I've just been smoking something, but throwing the idea out there for you.

Its good to see so many people that remember Gamma World.

Yes, PD repulsors are possible - heck, the Pirates & Nomads mod for SE4 had them!

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The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious

Putting me in the danger of sounding stupid ..
Dark Nova is/or will be a mod for SE5 ?

Juju, it was originally a mod for SE:IV but Bearclaw has since made a SE:V version. I've been playtesting it for him a bit but I'm not sure if its available for general download as I don't see it on se5.com or se.net's downloads section.

I can't find anything else wrong with it besides the points I had already outlined to you, Bearclaw. Perhaps something at the end of the tech tree maybe but I haven't gotten there yet.

Woooohooo .. then I will happily wait until release