Weapon Mounts, Armor, and Other Gameplay Mechanics

[Mountain_Puncher]

I was just recently playing X Rebirth. When equipping a ship, a slider is utilized to "fill up" the mounts with the designated weapon. X4 is going to have a choice in weapons again. I then recalled the impulse ray emitter and how, to me, it is a very lackluster option.

I was thinking that perhaps ships could have the XL, L ,M ect. mounts and weapons could be classed as those sizes as well. The game mechanic I was considering is that if one were to install a smaller class weapon into a larger slot that the larger slot be able to house more than one weapon. Say for instance, 8 impulse ray emitters could be installed in 1 turret with the XL mount designation. It could be graphically represented by just giving the turret 8 barrels. I don't know how balanced that is but I thought it may be interesting to consider.

Another topic of thought was armor. Normally once shields are down, a ship's hp is quickly reduced and destroyed. Further, light weapons mounted on fighters could eventually destroy a ship of any size.

I was thinking that perhaps another mechanic could be to equip armor or just have hulls with innate damage reduction. An XL hull, for instance, could reduce s class weapon damage by 100%. Or conversely have the weapon's base damage be multiplied by a factor corresponding to hull class. Regardless of adopting any damage multipliers, I feel that the hp of ships needs to be adjusted upwards.

A third topic I wished to address is fuel, or ship stamina. I felt it somewhat tedious to have ships in X Rebirth needing fuel so often and the logistics of it while "more immersive" turned out to be not fun for myself. I think a decent solution would be to have a degrading stamina bar for ships, that over time reduce the ability of the ship to perform. Mainly, weapon energy generation.

I propose that a stamina bar be given to represent the whole gambit of crew morale, munitions, fuel, and whatever else be given to ships. When the bar has completely depleted, which should be a rather lengthy period of time, the ship could suffer slight penalties to regeneration, as in 20% or so. It would be enough to make it conducive to dock ships every once in a while without forcing tedium on the player.

I envision with no jump drive that a player while amass a large fleet at a bottleneck and maintain a kill zone. This mechanic could allow a player to conduct such an activity, but have to home base the ships and they would eventually return to base automatically when this bar depleted. Although the mechanic could have a setting to manually control at what point a player will allow a ship to return to dock.

I could go on and on, albeit this already is too much to discuss in one bite. Though I'd like to mention turrets shooting their own hull and stations getting aggro when an overzealous turret misses its mark.

tl:dr
1.Can we put more little guns in big turrets?
2. Could we have ships that don't go boom so fast? Also, can we have weapons that don't just apply their dps to anything?
3. Can we get rid of fuel and indefatigable floating armadas without making more tedium?