LAVs
What is its purpose? Long distance travel at very high speeds. In other words, strictly as a transport. Sure there can be a turret but the turret should only serve as a defensive tool to ward off attackers, not be the attack platform itself.

When is it needed? Very large open maps where the terrain is so vast that even the fastest scout will find it a hindrance to just rely on running on foot. That scout will likely just call in an LAV anyways because what kind of scout would want to waste half an hour running from point A to point B when an LAV can do the same in 5 minutes?

I've also said this before, will say this again, and will say this many more times even after vehicles are added to nova:
It's a huge mistake to try balancing infantry separate from vehicles. They will always be inseparable; whenever there are vehicles, infantry balance will be affected by them.

Take for example, the sentinel. Without LAVs and dropships to cart their fat asses around the map, they won't be able to maneuver easily, and won't be able to find vantage points. They also won't have to worry about much if they're slowly hobbling across open areas.
They'll be balanced around that.

Now, after they're balanced, throw in vehicles.
They'll now be able to reach where they could never reach before, move faster than they ever could (and be able to react as quickly as an assault can), and any of them that try hobbling across open areas with get run over, blown apart by an HAV, or both.

Their combat niche will be completely changed by vehicles, making any balance beforehand pointless.

CCP is committed to making this game, and making it as good as they can I can actually tell you that right now.

Hilmar can tell us it's Greenlit, until then it's CCP TM Vapourware :/

Also you sit here telling me about griping and unconstructive threads, in my constructive thread that immediately admits that it's a fruitless venture. Do you even read bro.

thoughts?

I'd like to address a few posts including yours but I'm far too tired. Will try to pick this back up tomorrow.

One of the stupidest things ever envisioned was making jeeps immune to small arms fire.

When the ADS were introduced, for over a year they racked up an AVERAGE K/D rating of 50/1. And people defended this, saying that was completely fair.

there is a vast gulf of difference between "Shouldn't need" and "should run faster."

And no, LAVs were not the best-balanced vehicle in the game. The equivalent of an Army Hummvee required anti-tank weapons to kill, and cost more than the power armor. Modern solution to a hummvee is "Riddle it with bullets." Answer to a DUST jeep should have been "riddle it with bullets," not "deploy heavy anti-vehicle countermeasures."

The fact that LAVs required the same weapons to be killed that an HAV required meant that there was no room for "escalation of force."

You just accepted that someone has to start the match with AV just to pop the jeeps, which invariably meant the teams were always ready to just punch the tanks in the face. Dropships and LAVs needing the same scale of firepower to kill as an HAV buggered the scaling and pacing of the game straight to hell.

It also robbed the HAV drivers of "Tank shock" value for their vehicles.

Scaling needs to be done right for new vehicles, in order to make the game more organic. A dune buggy with a gun should not take the same firepower as a hummvee, should not take the same firepower as a helicopter, should not require the same scale of firepower as a tank.

if there was scaling then the Forge Gun/rail gun might have had a chance to blast a hole clean through the dropship without doing massive damage unless they hit the engines, as both were intended to bounce shots off of a tank's glacis plate.

Honestly, if a nickel-iron solid slug flying at Mach Yes nails a heavy vehicle in a heavy plate, you have a massive transfer of kinetic force. If it hits a soft skinned vehicle it's going to go clean through, you'll just have to sponge the passenger out of the seat, but the ship will still fly!

Yeah, something like an LAV should be vulnerable to small arms. I'm not saying the damage needs to be 1:1 with suits - which would make it nearly impossible to survive - but the native resistance needs to be as low as possible while still allowing the vehicle some measure of survivability.

It seems we have very different ideas about the purpose of scouts.

To me, the whole point of running a scout it being low-profile. Both electronically, and visually. I would be willing to go half an hour on foot in a scout suit going from point A to point B if that meant getting there undetected, as opposed to tearing through in an LAV.
The speed scouts have is simply to aid in their stealth, not to bypass a vehicle. If you want speed in combat, throw some kincats on an assault.

Of course when the situation permits, dropship insertion can cut a good chunk of that time out if total stealth isn't the goal.
Speaking of which, I remember an idea a dev talked about before beta- a special infiltration type of dropship that can disguise itself as a friendly. Might be good to revisit that idea.

Honestly though, why would vehicle powered shields not be able to take most if not all of the bite away from small arms fire? If there is sidearm AV and personal deployable turrets, why would you need to be able to insta pop a jeep with your AR? Why can't you use an HMG that already tears them apart, or a single AV grenade, or a free LAV, or an RE, or a turret, or just don't stand out in the open? Why can't people aim at the exposed occupants?

Why exactly does a high tech vehicle have to explode to periodic pistol fire?

That brings me to my next point.

How big do you feel the ground map needs to be in order for vehicles to be of actual use?

For me that's 5km^2 but that was based on the original terrain size in Dust 514. However only a fraction of that terrain was ever used in Dust because of the redline.

I get that this is a pointless crusade, but I'm bored and feel like rambling about my personal love when it comes to DUST: DA WHIRLY GIGS

I get that current realities dictate the slow and steady approach, but if nothing else I would like to try to keep discussion going in favor of vehicles. Some want a more casual shooter experience that sees this layer of combat removed entirely, though I feel it ultimately brings nothing but good to the game and franchise if handled more seriously. Obviously we've been at this for a long time, but we were dealing with outdated assets and essentially (to my knowledge) foreign legacy code. Unless you're building Nova with the direct intent to port to PS4, then there is theoretically more leeway for player count and map size, but that's all theoretical.

Anyways.

All Vehicles: Capacitors

To be perfectly honest it's been so long since I've played EVE that I likely don't have a full grasp on how they work anymore. What I imagine is that active modules all use a certain amount of capacitor per second, and the vehicles capacitor dictates how much pool it has, how fast it regens, etc etc. This could apply to things like primary turrets being fired as well, not just modules.

Vehicle Lock: Lock any vehicle you call to squad only option and lock pilot position from all option

New Modules: Energy Vamps, Neutralizers, and Webifiers. Similar to their EVE counterparts, used to attack the capacitor of enemy vehicles and to slow them down / stop them entirely.

Assault Dropships: Automatically comes with a free MCRU and 6 passenger seats (counting 2 turrets. If a turret isn't fit, that space becomes a passenger space). Pilot no long has control of front gun. New second co pilot seat added. This gives direct control of the front gun to the co pilot, who can also cycle to either side gun at will. If another player is using a side gun, the co pilot will be given priority and that persons screen will revert to that of a passenger for the duration.

Heavy Assault Vehicles: Separate the main gun from the hull. The pilot can switch to it at will but the vehicle will come to a stop while aiming unless another is present to pilot.

Light Assault Vehicles: If a back turret isn't fit, the bed becomes a passenger slot. All passengers can fire light weapons and sidearms from within the vehicle. LAVs also have about 25% more armor / shields.

Infantry AV Options: Deployable turret installations. Energy neutralizers and webifiers, as well as webifier grenades / remote explosives. Sidearm AV options such as a single shot swarm launcher or 3 clip gun that shoots rounds that damage slightly but disrupt all capacitor regen for X seconds while slowing the vehicle cumulatively for each shot.

And no, LAVs were not the best-balanced vehicle in the game. The equivalent of an Army Hummvee required anti-tank weapons to kill, and cost more than the power armor. Modern solution to a hummvee is "Riddle it with bullets." Answer to a DUST jeep should have been "riddle it with bullets," not "deploy heavy anti-vehicle countermeasures."

Honestly though, why would vehicle powered shields not be able to take most if not all of the bite away from small arms fire? If there is sidearm AV and personal deployable turrets, why would you need to be able to insta pop a jeep with your AR? Why can't you use an HMG that already tears them apart, or a single AV grenade, or a free LAV, or an RE, or a turret, or just don't stand out in the open? Why can't people aim at the exposed occupants?

Why exactly does a high tech vehicle have to explode to periodic pistol fire?

The same question could be askdd of dropsuits. Why should they die to periodic pistol fire when they have high powered shields? Sentinels had as much shield HP as a methana. Same argument could be applied there.

And the answer is "scaling."

If all vehicles have the same damage scale then you can't balance them by role. You have to balance them by the same HP/speed slider we got with dropsuits.

I mean let's use the Bolt Pistol as an example. It's the DUST equivalent of the .50 AE Desert Eagle. .50 cal pistols would crack an engine block and disable a Jeep easy. Nailing a helicopter is more iffy, and doing more than scuffing the paint on a tank is laughable.

Scaling keeps things more dynamic. If you don't need to bust out the forges, or even swarms then HAVs might have a chance to reach targets without automatically coming under Forge Gun fire. If a Forge Gun is less useful for killing dropships than say a light weapon machinegun then you get a situation where you can scale vehicles to purpose.

But if all vehicles are the same scale what you get is me and one other guy with forge guns chilling in a central location with lots of cover waiting for your ADS so we can pump slug after slug into your ship to deny you the airspace because even if there's no tanks on the map, we still need the forge guns to get anywhere with enemy jeeps on the field.

And we'll not mention all of the swarmandos.

Vehicles should stay. Without them it would be just like any other shooter. I hate the small map COD type games. I love Dust for what it was and could have been.

CCP has already made it clear that vehicles are not likely to be available upon release because the first-person-shooter aspect of the game (the very core of it) NEEDS to be stable and enjoyable for everyone first

Oh, and who said anything about a rifle being able to take advantage of a weakspot?

If it's a weapon tagged to do full damage to that type of vehicle? Sure, weakspot.

If it's some chucklef**k with a scrambler pistol?

No weakspot for you.

Let's not be coy. CCP isn't taking this approach because it's what they have to do. It's because they refuse to invest in the DUST / NOVA team / project any further, keeping it a small side project that they will slowly pluck away at. Ultimately the reality is the same, but the reasoning is certainly different.