Kinetic Cannons Reborn

I've been talking about KI cannons getting an update for a while now, but so far have only discussed the real changes cursorily on Discord without going into many details. Part of the reason behind that would be that I wasn't completely sure of the details to begin with :P

I have a lot of notes on the matter and I don't imagine quite everything in those notes will become reality, but my most recent thoughts on the topic are looking quite likely, so I thought I'd share those here.

The main changes are two-fold:

• First of all, every KI cannon hit on a target will blast some matter off the target. So it'll fly off and land on the ground nearby, somewhat offsetting the matter costs of heavy cannon use assuming you can get it (note the tractor beam synergy).
• KI cannon critical hits will be treated differently: Instead of dealing double damage, they hit a second part based on impact rules (equal chance for all parts), both damaging it and (assuming it survives) cause it to fly off the target, also landing nearby. Remember that this works both ways, meaning enemies using KI cannons could be a little scarier, and it just so happens we have that new one to be added in Beta 11 ;). That said, it's only on critical hits, so we'll have to see that those values are like in practice--the overall effect might not be that significant? Crit% values could be updated as well since they have a different meaning here, and other categories of weapons/cannons could potentially get more unique critical effects as well.

I haven't yet decided whether we'll actually need to do the heat generation reduction that was discussed earlier--it'll depend on how the other mechanics pan out, as those are more important to get right first.

Today over on the blog I posted the first in what will be a series of articles on the Beta 11 design overhaul, starting with the storage changes which we've talked about here (and on stream) before. All the same stuff included in the current prerelease, so don't expect any surprises, just going over the mechanics and decision-making for the general public :)

Next up is propulsion and overweight-related updates (which we've also covered before), and after that I'll be doing a third blog post on damage types, especially this kinetic stuff. That one will have to wait until I've actually implemented it, though, and right now X4 development is paused at a different point for the moment, where I'm adding a new type of Hauler dispatch.

Not sure if/what will come after the third in that series--haven't planned that far yet. Also much of the Beta 11 work wouldn't be categorized under "overhaul" anyway, since a lot of it will also be new.