As said - this is the expectation I got and get from movies and other games;
Playing Starsonata for a few years 'torpedoes' now look to me just like you explained. But I still remember when I got my first 'torpedo' type weapon and tried it out and thought "What *Ü>% is that???".

One major problem with torpedoes is that at long range they become so easy to dodge, even a dread can do it if they're any good.

How about changing them so that instead of losing their tracking, they just get slower and slower as they near the end of their lifespan? That way they're still fairly easy to dodge, but they at least have a chance of hitting their target.

How about stealthed torpedoes that can't be seen or tracked... they just go KABLOOOOY all over your nice pretty shiny new hull.

How about torpedoes that seem to run out of energy and go quiet for a bit of time and then come back to life and go KABLOOOOY all over your pretty shinny new hull.

How about torpedoes that don't even hit your hull, instead they use a nuclear bomb to pump a laser head that blows a big fat hole in shiny new hull.

How about, for a better term, 'dung' torpedoes that plop huge amounts of thick gooey crap all over your ship requiring you to dock and wash it off in order to see and use your radar again.

How about torpedoes that use all of the weapons available in SS including the pest guns.

And then there are the advanced torpedoes that use inertia dampeners that can change direction ultra fast and are able to fly up the stove pipe of any SD in SS.

And don't forget the EGG THROWER ... it finds Jeff's house and plasters it with all of the 'A Dozen Eggs' that pollute SS.

yeah we had a server CRASH

To be honest, I never much saw the difference between Torps and Thorax besides maybe the arming time and the fact that Torps generally sucks and Thorax don't.

Reducing arming times across the board for Torps is 1 general move which would help a lot, as Enk said, the longer the arming time the more difficult it is to use from a moving platform and Thorax already hold that honor.

I also like your idea of giving Torps at least SOME tracking in their final stage. If you do indeed plan to increase their range then the tracking + range combo will definitely give them a decent niche.

Zebra Hoove Torps are, as already said, a good example of how a Torp should be stat wise. The thing has horrible DPE but makes up for it with amazing DPS (highlighted for snipers), decent range and not being huge. Would be best to continue to follow this trend as, again, Thorax seem to be the ones that are meant to be short range high DPE/DPS.

Don't forget to balance weapons around difficulty of use, Torps tend to be pretty smart weapons until their third stage, fix that along with some other minor changes and you have a viable weapon type.

Another thought I just had was that magcannons are great at kiting, but terrible at chasing down fast things at long range. Maybe torpedoes, with their acceleration and very high top speed, could be optimized around chasing down fleeing targets at long range.

I'm thinking something like reduce their initial speed and reduce their rate of acceleration, but increase the acceleration time and increase their top speed to something really high. That would make them bad for kiting, bad for close-medium range, but great for chasing things down. Combine that with the idea for increasing their damage with their range and it starts to get a bit interesting.

Could you play around with Lion Quick Snap and Zebra Hooves Torpedoe a bit? Those are two viable prototypes for how other torpedoes could work. I wouldn't like to see either of them changed very much, either. (Midas Touch is also a nice example, working as a torpedo due to low arming time, but it's very uncommon).

In rebalancing other torpedoes, they don't all have to go the same way. Why don't you choose some (like Dark Fist, I would think) to turn into the high speed long range weapon you are describing (presumably high damage per hit, lowish DPE), and make others mimic Lion Quick Snap (effective within 1k range, mid damage, high DPE).

I'm a bit lost in your reasoning again though. Based on using torpedoes, my understanding is that after the arming phase, their speed is set to some value that doesn't depend on the velocity during the arming phase. If that's true, then you need to rethink your concept because the slower a projectile's speed, the more range it gets when kiting. The extremes of this rule would be (1) a zero-speed mine that has effectively infinite kiting range; and (2) an infinite-speed laser that receives no bonus range for kiting purposes.

Anyway, above all I would recommend that you bifurcate the torpedo class based roughly on the two working models we have (ZHT and LQS).

enkelin is spot on.

Primal Zebra Hooves Torpedoes are used by many snipers and should not have a huge change to them or it might be bad.

Primal Lion Quick Snaps are amazing, and so are Lion Quick Snaps, and just to say it straight out: Titan Torpedo+ on a T21 sniper is hilarious.

Titan Torps were pretty cool looking things back then, now they are useless.

They were huge and funny to see but there are also small torps, so maybe big/medium/small sized torpedoes are an option?