[Starsector Mods][0.95.1a] Stardust Ventures ship pack v0.6.1

A ship pack centered around light, fast Midline ships that excel at long distance exploration missions. While they integrate well with any midline or high-tech fleet, the Stardust Ventures ships are designed to work best as a cohesive fleet.

Spoiler: click to expand

Ships

Carriers
                  
Cosmic Wind                                                 Solar Flare                                  Storm Seeker (Carrier)

Battlecruiser

                     Storm Bringer   

Combat Cruisers
           
Storm Herald                                  Vortex Hunter

Combat Destroyers
                   
Starlight Guard           Warp Diver                      Storm Seeker

Combat Frigates
                               
Storm Runner          Ion Skimmer             Comet Tail

Superfighter

Plasma Burst

Exploration Ships
                           
Horizon Chaser                Stargazer                                           Void Nomad

Logistics
                   
Sunbeam Rider                            Oort Traveler                              Oort Traveler (Armored)

Pirate Hulls
         
Starlight Raider                    Cosmic Horror

Spoiler: click to expand

Wings

Fighters
             
Meteorite        Stormwing

Bombers

Moonbreaker

Gunships

Stormlight

Spoiler: click to expand

Weapons

Proton Guns – Ballistic shell weapons that do Energy damage and EMP
                                                                                             
Light Proton Gun        Dual Proton Gun        Heavy Proton Gun        Proton Autocannon

Diana’s Darts, Arrows, and Spears – Fires out bursts of self-guided shells that home in on the targeted ship. Comes in Fragmentation, High Explosive, and Kinetic varieties for all three sizes. Currently only found on mercenary and Sindrian ships.
                                         
Diana’s Dart    Diana’s Arrow    Diana’s Spear

Fel Weapons (Free-Electron Lasers) – Pulse energy weapons with longer range than vanilla pulse lasers, lower damage, with a bit of EMP thrown in.
                                                                                                  
Fel Repeater       Fel Pulsar      Fel Cannon      Twin-linked Fel Repeater      Quad-linked Fel Repeater

Plasma casters – Good damage against both hull and armor with a fairly low OP and flux cost, the plasma casters only real drawback is their slow fire rate and mediocre ability to take down shields on their own.
                                                                   
Plasma Caster        Heavy Plasma Caster        Plasma Caster Array

Cloudburst missile launchers – Fires a guided missile that splits apart near the target into multiple warheads. These warheads explode into large clouds of charged energy. Effective both as area of effect defense against missiles and fighters and for finishing off damaged ships, the Cloudburst makes for a good multi-purpose combat missile.
                               
Single    Triple        Pod            Stormfront launcher

Lithobreaker Torpedo launchers – Fires a guided torpedo that releases a high powered kinetic shot at the target when in range. Useful in both mining and warfare.
              
Rack      Pod      Barrage

Pirate Weapon – The Walloper, two Thumpers strapped together for twice the fun! Makes for a really cheap large slot weapon, and can prove surprisingly effective in the right situations

Walloper

NOTE: This mod is still in development, so expect a good bit of change as things get tested, balanced, cleaned up, and generally tweaked.

Thanks to theDragn for help with campaign map movement modding and the Unofficial Discord folks in general for help with all of this!

• All ships in this pack are faster than most vanilla ships with considerably less hull, armor, and flux capacity to balance this. They are all solidly Midline, restricted to Front shields, and do not get things like teleportation or phase. All of them now have built in a Stardust Core Field hullmod to allow for somewhat less risky travel through hyperspace as well as better fleetwide agility on the campaign map. They also generally have better fuel efficiency and often hold more fuel and less cargo than similar vanilla vessels.
• This mod is designed to be balanced against vanilla ships, weapons, etc only. I’m not terribly concerned how well it mixes with other mods and factions, at least a this point.
• Currently this is a vanilla-integration content pack. All of the ships, weapons, etc that are added will show up as part of the normal vanilla factions. I’ve put some restrictions into place, but for the most part any faction that uses midline equipment can have them show up. You can also find them in the shops of most factions.
• This will probably be a faction at some point, but that’s a lot of extra work so no real timeline on that.

Any suggestions, issues, balancing notes, and whatnot much appreciated!

Looking ahead, I have a few plans. No real order on when I’m going to get to any given piece.

• Split the Stardust Ventures items out of the midline blueprint pack and move to its own.
• Custom ship systems for many of the hulls
• Integrate Ontheheavens’ Forge Production into a set of custom capital ships to really let you wander the our regions of the sector for long periods of time
• More exploration content
• Turn Stardust Ventures into an actual faction!

The Cosmic Wind now has its sister hull, the Vortex Hunter:

I’ve also added in a Pirate section which is what I’m using rejected designs for.

Right now I think I’m looking at 6 more ships planned for the pack.

A Battlecruiser, which will be the heaviest combat-focused ship this pack gets since it’s more of a swift strike set and not so much on heavy line combat.
An electronic warfare ship, either frigate or destroyer sized.
Another frigate/destroyer. Probably a missile boat of some sort. Size would be whichever isn’t used for the EW ship.
A capital sized Exploration/Flagship. Not a true dedicated combat ship, but strong enough to work as a flagship while still being focused on Exploration.
A capital sized Refinery/Forge ship based on OntheheavensForge Production hull mods.
A capital sized general logistics ship with a starborne city motif. Pondering trying to give it some slow commercial goods/farming/crew production as well. Would have large minimum crew requirements, but also fits the “stay out on the rim for extended periods of time” theme of the pack.

Thoughts? Anything I’m missing that you’d love to see in this pack?

And a WIP missile frigate, the Comet Tail:

This one normalizes some more of the stats across the ship pack and adds in some new ships. In addition to the Storm Bringer and Comet Tail, we have the Warp Diver (EWar Destroyer) and the Plasma Burst (basically a frigate classed fighter).
         

Plasma Burst wasn’t really part of my intended plans, but it just kind of came together. It’s kind of neat and can be fun to fly, but isn’t terribly powerful. Still, it can make a decent little escort ship and works pretty well for anti-fighter duty if you don’t have any fighters of your own.

I might hold off on the non-combat Capital Ships until I get to the hull mods they’ll need to be interesting.

So next release after this will probably be v0.2, which will move on to adding in some weapons to the pack.

I am going to hold off on the last few capital ships for now and move on to some of the other bits. So next up is weapons.

I may end up shifting the Storm Bringer’s design to one of the non-combat hulls at some point. I like it, but not really as a combat ship for this pack. It’ll probably end up being the city-ship.

On the whole, though, I’m pretty pleased with the balance I have so far. The ships feel pretty good, they don’t look terribly out of place compared to the vanilla art while still looking distinctive, and they are fun to use without feeling OP.

Also made the mod items less likely to collide with other mods by changing the prefix of all the tags.

I do apologize for that. I had just skimmed things in the thread and the license and had mistakenly assumed it was similar to many creative commons style licenses that I’d encountered in other areas where using stuff was fine as long as you didn’t claim it was yours or try to make money off of it. Good reminder to make sure I read things more carefully in the future and not make assumptions! Won’t happen again.

Added in two new weapons, the dual proton gun and the heavy proton gun. These are both basically mini-mjonirs. The dual is pretty long range point defense gun that is also good at disabling ships. The heavy is better vs ships, though still not great against strong armor. They seem to do well when paired with anti-armor weaponry.

They probably need more balance tuning, but so far they seem to work pretty well and have a nice distinctive look to them. I’ve added them to some of my ship variants. Mostly the smaller classes of ships.

Other than that I did some tweaks to the Ion Skimmer and Comet Tail. They’re getting a bit closer to how I think they’ll ultimately end up looking.

Redid the sprite for the Starlight Guard, which looks a bit beefier now and more like the tanky light destroyer that it is. Also did some light rebalancing of it.

           
       Old                             New
       
I’ve also added in a few more weapons. New pulse lasers this time.

Fel Weapons (Free-Electron Lasers)
                                          
Fel Repeater       Fel Pulsar      Fel Cannon 

Next up is the sprite re-work for the Warp Diver and Stargazer class ships as well as a new missile or two.