Suggestion: Railjack Utility Turret

[Desdemona-XI]

So, Ive been running railjacks up and down for a few weeks now, earth to veil and back again and I've noticed something tend to happen:

1 Engineers can end up with nothing to do for quite a while.

If railjacks are set up to be quite hardy, with a pilot that's good at avoiding unnecessary hits, there's can be entire missions where no repairs are required, and in a full squad usually the side turrets are manned by gunners, typically then an engineer either becomes a boarding party, or takes over for a gunner who is, but in some instances, that isnt the case, and crew opts to stay on board and deal with everything with their own turrets/artillery. which may or may not be something the engineer has purchased adequate intrinsics for, and there are occasions where all you have left to deal with is fighters and occasional base launched ramsleds, normally an engineer's job then is to man a turret or keep the forges running to supply the crew with ammo, but in some cases either crew hasnt been collecting resources or has been frugal with ammunition rendering forging either not workable or not needed.

 

2. Pilots or other crew members can punch navigation before resource gathering is begun let alone completed. as I hear tell there is a maximum time you can spend in a railjack mission looting materials but I havent exceeded that time yet. but conversely to the above point this can land the railjack in trouble as it also disables engineers if the railjack runs out of revolite or munitions because three missions in a row a crew member insists on punching navigation immediately. this also hampers anyone who's on that mission to collect resources. now in theory it should be as simple as talking to said person and asking them not to do that, but practically speaking that doesnt always work. and post-mission loot collecting is rather a dreary part of railjack.

 

And all that's just if only one person is a main spec engineer.

 

So, to address this I propose an aft Utility turret, perhaps set in the rear of the ship near the forges, a turret running on engineering skill with utility (non damage) QoL functions. Ive figured out a few I would like to see (as it should have at least three options for assembly (and yeah, m1-3 and all the bells and whistles i suppose, but the utility side of it maybe making that less significant. but I welcome feedback or additional ideas:

 

Firstly a vaccum-beam, akin to mag's greedy pull or Grendel's devour, just pulling in loose drops in a narrow-ish cone at moderate or long distances to speed up resource collection.

I would actually like this to be a standard alt-fire option on the utility turret,  just plain vaccum effect, loose drops only, because an automatic mining beam for the titanium asteroids and other loot dropping items feels excessive, but i do feel that something is needed here.

Because collecting resources is so mandatory for railjack it feels arbitrary to have to wait till the mission's entirely over or try persuade your pilot to grab some loot in the hopes it would be what you need, for this I would also appriciate if the utility turret identified resource drops in the Hud so you can aim for the ones you need at the time. and in this instance it gives a tactical tradeoff, one cant be manning the tactical turret for vaccuming while also working the forge, so it adds a few more options and maybe give crews with more than one certified engineer something to do.

 

Secondly I'd like a medi-ray option, to heal archwings, allied crew ships, or revive downed archwings.

currently reviving an archwing in railjack isnt really feasable, reviving in archwing is already problematic as the speeds vs the target make it difficult to not overshoot your ally. personally i think archwings should have an base increased bleedout time as well to compensate. but furthermore in railjack being in archwing and not moving such as when reviving typically ends with you as downed as the person you're reviving after a few crew ship missile hits. and there is no way for the railjack to collect or revive a downed archwing, so for the most part, in a railjack mission if you're in archwing, you will never be revived. and you get downed pretty easily from crew ship missiles.

 

Now yes, i can hear those of you pointing at Amesha, but bear in mind soon all our archwings are about to be broken into spare parts, and thats going to change things, amesha might not be a reliable option for railjack after that, and other archwings have other limitations to their defensive abilities, so a turret able to heal archwings and revive them within a reasonable range would also help players feel a bit less exposed and weak outside the railjack. to balance perhaps making the beam consume revolite on revives and have a slow standing heal rate or cost revolite per hp healed (we dont wanna be burning revolite on missed shots)  perhaps with a sort of lock-on akin to the slingshot for easier aiming on the small target that is an archwing.

 

Thirdly a targeting beam, effectively granting aim assist/increased effective range or increased damage and crit chance/status to an enemy marked with it.

why? well some players can be a bit laggy, or bad shots on the turrets, they could be used to beam turrets or high projectile speed turrets and struggle with target leading even with the reticle, and aim assisting them would be nice.

alternately targeting allowing turret fire to actually down a Crew ship would be pleasant as well, sometimes it seems excessive to waste a dome charge on a crewship thats already almost dead, and boarding it can be a bit redundant too. I vaugely recall downing a crew ship with a missile when i was starting railjack but since that hasnt happened since, I am forced to consider that someone probably boarded the railjack and the UI simply didnt show them as on board which it doesnt until they are driving. (something which should be fixxed as boarding parties do still get dome-charge shot out of crew ships whos reactors are already destroyed)

 

Fouthly a small sub-shield so you can reinforce the ship to take less (not zero) damage from a direction, akin to the vazarin block ability, perhaps also consuming materials or just having a relatively low overheat level so it can stand up to say a single missile barrage.

 

Sometimes you cannot just avoid damage and sometimes the pilot would rather take a missile barrage from a base and two crew ships to the face rather than lose a tenth of a second on racing his gunners to blow up a radiator.

 

Other ideas that occur to me include an RC Drone-fighter or hacking device to control one of the enemy's fighters, deployed with base AI or directly controlled via the turret seat, perhaps at the expense of a dome charge to deploy, so as to keep it from being too abusable, perhaps loaded with one of the turret guns mounted on it, so half the damage of the on-board turrets as they have two presented guns each, Id say pilot guns just because we already have two side turrets (i feel like this would be a little overreaching to implement and maybe overpowered or nearly pointless depending on the stats of the drone)

a stasis ray to lock an enemy ship up in place for the duration the beam is held on it/some kind of stasis harpoon to drag a crew ship closer but jam its weapons for easier artillery aim,

a mine layer set to not detonate for archwings or the railjack (but that seems too damaging)

 

Post your thoughts or any other ideas you'd like below!

[taiiat]

in short, a Turret that provides:

• limited l00t/Resource collection
• maybe a Mining Laser
• Support Beam to Heal/Revive Allies
• priority target Beam offering bonuses vs the Targeted Enemy
• unidirectional Ablative Shield

 

sure, go nuts.