ASC Arsenal

Additional Ship Components SHIP WEAPONS

You've built all these beautiful ships – it's time to put them to use. This mod adds: Eight new hand-modeled, colorable ship weapons, available at any ship technician that sells Taiyo or Deimos parts (e.g. Taiyo Astroneering in Neon, Deimos Staryards in Phobos' orbit) and at the shipbuilder landing pad:

• Sunburst 70Hz Pulse Repeater - Taiyo Astroneering (Level 24)
• Salvo Mk IV Burst Cannon - Deimos Staryards (Level 26)
• Seiatsu Mk II Long-Range Suppressor - Taiyo Astroneering (Level 28)
• Ion Storm Mk I Scatter Projector - Deimos Staryards (Level 30)
• Hornet 8M Cluster - Deimos Staryards (Level 32)
• Hoshikiri 600MW Plasma Pulse Cannon - Taiyo Astroneering (Level 34)
• Maul 280kT Torpedo - Deimos Staryards (Level 36)
• Amata 12-Cell Array - Taiyo Astroneering (Level 38)

There are also nine new ships, built from vanilla parts (see notes below). These field the new arsenal and have been added to the enemy faction spawn lists (level-gated based on vanilla ships between levels 30 and 60), so you'll be flying against the new hardware as well as with it. The ships are boardable, so if you want to own one, hunt it down:

• DE-9/C Enforcer: An old military freighter design from the Colony War. Some version of it flies with every faction.
• DE-16 Ironclad: An old Deimos dropship still found throughout the settled systems, usually still armed for its original role.
• DE-7C Tomahawk: A Deimos/HopeTech co-development and a brutal close-quarters brawler. Take this one at range.
• HT-15A Tomahawk II: The HopeTech variant. A more potent engine layout pushed it into the 'shield-stripper' role.
• NG-7C Sentinel: Nova Galactic fielded this shortly after the Colony War. Built as a science vessel, so it usually comes lightly armed.
• NG-13HB Intruder: An old Nova Galactic light bomber, still carrying the Maul torpedo that was developed on this platform.
• NG-16/A Thunderbolt: A nimble A-class fighter that pilots love for punching above its weight.
• SE-14/F Spectre II: A Stroud design refitted for civilian use, still sporting the original Sunburst repeater layout.
• TY-9C/II Katsuragi: A Taiyo recon corvette, sometimes seen in Ecliptic and Crimson Fleet flight groups - who famously raided Taiyo field depots.

The weapons are designed around distinct roles on the battlefield rather than 'bigger numbers'. They are intended to enable specialized loadouts - heavily armed nimble A-class hulls, true close-range brawlers, dedicated missile craft, etc. - and to offer firing rhythms the base game doesn't have. They are balanced against their vanilla counterparts and are not intended to be overpowered, but rather to make ship combat more deliberate, more varied, and feel more rewarding. Oh, and you'd better start making use of that boost to break missile lock: Torpedo hits are no joke...

TL;DR: 8 new custom weapons, 9 new ships that field them - I hope they feel a little different, have fun blowing stuff up. The long version:

I felt that vanilla ship weapons converge mostly on a single behaviour. Damage type and effective range vary, and the numbers climb as the classes climb, but almost everything in the base game is fired the same way: hold the trigger - if possible on all weapon groups. How a weapon feels to use is very nearly a constant across the whole catalogue. ASC Arsenal treats that as its design axis and the following ideas shaped the weapons:

A-class Every added weapon is an A-class module, and that is one of the basic design decisions in the mod. Vanilla A-class weapons are weak. A late-game pilot who wants to keep flying something small and fast has neither the output to hurt a large ship nor any interesting choices to make about how to try, while the fragile shields of a light frame punish every second the attempt takes. Because nothing in the lineup exceeds the strongest vanilla options in its category, a pilot already flying a heavy hull gains options but nothing in raw DPS by switching – they have equal or even better available. A pilot who wants to stay nimble gains a full arsenal that can finish a fight. The intent is to make the light hull a viable late-game choice rather than a nostalgic one.

Cadence The eight weapons are spread deliberately across a spectrum of firing rhythms: At one end sits genuinely continuous pressure – the Amata swarm array barely stops at all, and the Sunburst runs a seventy-hertz strobe - denser than anything in the base game. In the middle sit weapons built around interruption, where a short chunk of fire is followed by an enforced silence long enough to matter. You'll need to line shots up and time them well. At the far end sit single committed strikes with long recoveries between them. Peak damage per second is a poor way to read this lineup: what matters is how much a weapon delivers in one cycle and how long the target has to recover before the next.

Specialisation Several of the added weapons do exactly one thing. The Sunburst strips shields and does nothing to hull, the Salvo caves in hull and does literally nothing to shields, etc. Fielded together they complement each other - fielded alone, either will reduce a target to a state it cannot finish. You trade flexibility for identity, and pairing decisions become real rather than cosmetic.

Delivery How the damage arrives matters as much as how much of it there is. A torpedo slow enough that incoming fire shoots it out of the void. Particles thrown in a fixed cone that spreads past the target within a few hundred metres. A ripple-launched swarm that pays out per submunition, so a partial hit is a partial result. A projector that must be targeted at distance while the pilot holds still and takes fire. The counterplay lives in the delivery just as much as in a damage figure - which is what makes these weapons, hopefully, feel as different to fly against as they are to fire.

Everything is a tradeoff Nothing in the lineup is strong without a stated cost – hardpoints, exposure time, projectile speed, range, or recovery interval.

IMPORTANT NOTES

Implementation Because they effectively mount without a class requirement, all added weapons are level-gated (see above) to not throw early game balance off. Their output was tuned against the strong mid-tier workhorses (PBO-175s) on hard difficulty – the widely-used particle and laser mounts – rather than the heaviest late-game hardware, so a ship built around top-tier vanilla particle loadouts will out-damage an ASC-Arsenal fitted ship on raw numbers. What the lineup offers in exchange is unrestricted mounting and a firing behaviour vanilla does not have, making for really fun and challenging fights.

Ships The ships are based on designs I built for the old "Starfield Fleet Expansion" mod, which is still on Creations but is no longer being updated. You don't need it for ASC Arsenal, however, as the ships are included here and self-contained. The difference is that the ships are now baked into cells, so they consume a tiny fraction of the reference handles the old versions did. They're also armed with the new arsenal and added to the enemy spawn lists (see above).

Spawning on enemies The mod statically overwrites the enemy faction spawn lists of the Crimson Fleet, the Ecliptic and House Va'ruun. I chose this rather than script injection, as that entailed limitations that would not allow for reliable spawning. If you run any other mod that alters these leveled lists after ASC Arsenal, the ships won't spawn – so keep it at the bottom of your load order if you want the new weapons pointed at you, too.

Achievement friendly An achievement-friendly version will be out as well, for anyone who wants to use the weapons in an achievement-friendly playthrough - or who just wants to support me on my way to HopeTech.

Compatibility Safe to add to an existing save. If you uninstall, please take the usual precautions: load a save where none of your own ships are using the added weapons, and ideally one where you aren't in or near combat with the mod's enemy ships.

Contact If you run into any problems, find bugs, or just want to share feedback, you can reach me on: • Reddit: u/wizzackr • Discord: wizzackr

Credits This mod exists because people were willing to answer questions I couldn't answer myself. I have to single out DownfallNemesis yet again, who somehow remains unfazed by the barrage of my questions - can't thank you enough! Thanks to Bethesda for the killer concept art and a design language that's fun to build on. To the other creators for the help along the way. To Crimson Flyboy, for all the ideas I've caught on stream over the years. And to everyone using my mods - I mean that.