Ruanek wrote:
The main problem as I see it is that most people don't like the idea of separation because there's generally no reason not to do it. Not gaining experience but being much more powerful isn't really a reason not to do it.
First time quoting.. hopefully I did it right.
I'd actually be interested in seeing a ship separate.. I think that'd be pretty neat. I haven't really read much about the reasons for or against it... so sort of not up to date, but I guess I'll rhyme off a few things for why it might be fun, or how to make it even for using it / not using it.
First, it should have lower defensive value. Taking a big ship, splitting it into three ships... possibly makes them faster smaller ships, but ultimately I think they would be weaker defensively. Ideally, make it practical enough that in a one on one, this ship is unbelievably overpowered. In the game Dominion wars, I forget what it was called, but it was something strike I think, but anyways you could order your fleet to launch a timed attacked where they all held their fire and then unleashed everything. Or you could have fire at will, and they just constantly fired randomly. But anyways, make it that when this ship is split, it can do this alpha strike type thing, and all the fire power just targets so much of the enemy ship (all subsystems, engines, weapons,) that it destroys it easily enough. (I'm guessing the obvious argument for the ship is boost in offensive loss of defense?)
Single out one of the smaller ship, and give it a really powerful weapon, that for some reason can not be used when the ship is fully intact. Perhaps one, as stated earlier, as a deadly amount of torpedo bays that can just do massive damage. The bays are concealed when ship is intact, and if you launched them without separating, youd pretty much blow up the ship. The other two just have decent phasers that do above average damage.
So reasons for splitting, is when it is one vs one, this ship just wins it hands down, or maybe 1 vs 2, or 1 vs three, to even it out. Maybe its a good starbase killer?
So now for some reasons why you dont want to use this.
The ship itself without the separation has to be admirable. Since it is really three smaller ships, maybe it has super sensor arrays that can multi target the $41t out of enemy targets, and has 100% torpedo hit. But not when split, just a much larger number. So maybe 3/4 torpedos as a big ship, but collectively, the smaller ships could have 7-9? But make it usable, cause it has to be valuable both ways.
The little ships have a terrible defensive ability. Make them like sabers, they have a temporary ability after separation, say 30 seconds, of avoiding just about all firing shots when evading, enough time to get one strike in that does lots of damage, and then after that... yeah, make it like swatting flies.
Or, split the strength up. So lets say big ship is 100%. Small ship one, is actually medium ship, gets 50% of size and defense of big ship. Second ship gets 40%. Third ship gets 10%, but this is the one that is easy to kill, and when you lose it, going back to the big ship is no longer an option. And these three have much lower defensive values than they really should, but much higher offensive values. lets say it does 150% the damage of the big guy. Even the small ship, make it like a delta flyer. Small ship yes... but big teeth. Just easy to make it go boom.
Also, make it that there is a penalty for splitting. So everyone wants to split cause you get 150% or maybe 200% damage. But, you lose the small ship then your stuck. And the big ship has a low fire rate. So it does massive damage when it fires, but then it has to reload its big gun.. and it is slightly fast, but anyone could just pick it off. The middle ship... make this one a nice ship though. It has good rate of fire, good offensive, and decent defensive. Its like a one time wonder (splitting up the big ship), you definitely get to use the split to do huge damage... but without time to go back together... risk losing it.
Main thing, dont make the small ships equal. Make on have the big guns. One be the easy one to destroy. So then you could get fancy. You split the ship up from far away maybe, send in the ship with the big gun to do its damage, then retreat it, rejoin the ship, and use it to attack.
I dunno, but I'd be interested to know why people dont think this is a good idea. I think it would be awesome.
. A plan is great, but if you only have a plan and you keep expanding it rather than seeing what you can do with your skills in the first place, you may not get as far as you had hoped 
