I agree Pyro, re: the capital ship's looks. I think that's a beaut of a ship. Here she is for those of you that haven't seen it. http://www.guildsoftware.com/ven.capital.html

Amusingly enough, too, that particular ship looks a lot more like the manueverable sort Celebrim is such an effective advocate for.

Well, I think that a large ship that can OUTRUN its fighter pursuers is rather ridiculous, but since I'm in the minority, I'll be quiet... for now...

Im busy wondering wether the capital ships will be used exclusively by one nation.
This seems pretty stupid but I am the founder of the TFV and we are a multinational guild, I want to see a guild flagship that you can give a list of _allowed_ players that way the whole of the TFV will have access to it.
In short im looking for a highly configurable flagship.

Dibbler

ERrrrr... frigates and capital ships are the same thing? Why was I not informed?!!

I wonder... will each nation have their own different capital ship?

roguelazer:"Well, I think that a large ship that can OUTRUN its fighter pursuers is rather ridiculous..."

Did I say that? I thought I said:

"The only reason in game play to make them slower is that it is a good trade off for balancing large ships against small ships. (And in a game, thats a good reason.)...The only reason for ignoring [the speed advantage of large ships] is again to balance the ships against each other. But we can do that without taking all the gameplay and fun out of capital ships."

I'm not trying to reverse the normal axiom that big things are slower than small things. I'm merely suggesting that 'slower' doesn't have to mean 'so slow as to be unable to engage in tactical manuevers'. Realistically, maybe big ships _should_ outrun fighters, but as I've said many times before realism is not always a good basis for gameplay.

I really don't mean to pick on you. Its just that when someone opens up a responce to my post with lines containing all cap words and other strong language, I take it to mean that they think I'm an idiot and are willing to try to prove it.

Big ships, IMO, should hve a higher cruising speed than even the fstest fighter, yet a lower max turbo. That way attackers need to actively keep up with the ship, but the capital ship can still be attacked. I think 80 m/s would be about right, so long as the turning and maneuvering of the ship is suitably low for such behemoths.

And I think they should have 5 battery slots. So you can mix and match, say, one large with 4 fast charge to produce a battery combo with 1550 units and 245/sec charge. By the same token, it would need 5 engines, and even with 5 heavy engines its max speed should be around 150m/s- easily attainable by assailants, but still giving the capital ship a little more room.

Max turbo of 150 m/s? What are we thinking? Even if a ship boosted up and caught the capital ship, it would have little/no energy and would be a sitting duck (so to speak). I personally have no problem with the "Star Wars" mentality (that capital ships are relatively slow and fighters are fast). Remember that a capital ship has a humongous amount of mass to move around, and to do so takes fuel and power. If a capital ship is going to be faster than a fighter, it will have to expend so much energy in propulsion that weapon systems would be unusable.

A fighter is much "lighter" (mass-wise), and therefore can accelerate/stop with very little effort. I would think that a typical "capital ship" should have a top speed of 40 m/s with a battle speed of 60 m/s. Remember, a capital ship's strengths are NOT speed and agility, but firepower and fighter escort. If teamwork goes down the drain, the frigate should, as well. This isn't a single-player game. If some Serco frigate captain is dumb enough to fly into Itani territory without any escort, he'll probably lose his ship quickly.

SirCamps: I agree with your general reasoning because its not that far from mine, but maybe not with your numbers and not with your attempts apparantly to correct my thinking (which isn't that far from yours anyway).

Would you actually think about what I have written, get out a pocket calculator and so forth before claiming you understand?

Did I say anywhere I advocated a capital ship being faster than a fighter?

The max turbo of a frigate using my numbers could be 5000 m/s and it probably wouldn't matter. It would run out of energy well before it got there, and it would take the better part of a day to get up to that speed and the rest of the day to stop.

Yes, a capital ship is going to require an tremendous ammount of power to move itself about. That is precisely what I'm recommending: a combination of very low manueverability and very inefficient turbo costs. With those two combinations it hardly matters what the max speed of the frigate is, it will never reach it.

Take a ship like the Valk.

It accelerates under turbo to 65 m/s in under .5 second. It reaches 180 m/s in about 10 seconds (I need to time this). It comes full about in less than .2 second. With efficient engines and fast recharge batteries it can zoom under turbo essentially forever. Even with a faster engine it can still generally turbo full across a sector with only minimal toggling of the turbo and with average speeds > 160 m/s. When is the last time you ever say a Valk pilot crossing a sector at 65 m/s?

Does anything I have said suggest that I want a Frigate to even approach that kind of speed and manueverability?

I said a Frigate should have a manueverability rating about 4 steps lower than the least manueverable ship we have now. Think about that.

What I'm envisioning is a ship that accelerates under turbo to 65 m/s in 6-8 seconds, reaches 110 m/s in roughly a minute, and comes full about in 4-6 seconds. It depletes its full battery in under a minute of turboing and requires 40 seconds to recharge it (essentially it could only turbo for 3 of every 5 seconds). Imagine that the Frigate tries drag racing a Valk. In 10 seconds, the Valk has covered maybe 1500m. In 10 seconds, the Frigate has covered maybe 400m. Imagine a Valk strafes by the Frigate. By the time that the Frigate turns around, the Valk is now some 800 or more meters away from the Frigate. And yet for all that, the ship I'm envisioning is infinitely more manueverable (and would look infinitely more graceful and alive) than the stupid capital ships in Star Wars or the 5m/s ship that some people here are advocating.

And did I not say that I thought that 10 Valks could take down the Frigate I had described. Versus 10 Promy or Ragnaroks with Torps, the Frigate would not only go down, it would go down _hard_. So where am I destroying teamwork?

not really, it's possible to maintain a speed above 150 m/s with boosttapping (at least it was in 3.1, not sure but i think 3.2 is the same, haven't played it too much yet). Although, i do agree that 150m/s is way too fast for a capship, im more in favour of 80m/s - 100m/s

I like the idea of having capships simmilar to those in the film StarShip Troopers, they looked pretty cool, manouvered pretty well provided fighter support and surface bombing but were still big and clumsy enough to only just avoid a rouge asteroid. The turbo boost looked pretty cool to ;-)

That's the image I was getting in my head, asphyxia. The sluggish and clumsy capital ships of StarShip Troopers. They can dodge somewhat, and they move at a believable rate (very slow for something that big), but they would require fighter escorts for true defenses. Same idea with P-51 Mustangs escorting B-17 Flying Fortresses.

I don't understand why some of you want the capital ships to move so fast. We'd never be able to destroy 'em. It would also discourage teamplay by eliminating the need for fighter escorts. Realistically, yes, larger spaceships have more room for propellants and engines, and therefore they'd have a higher top speed (but slower acceleration). But this game isn't about 100% realism. It's supposed to be a balance of realism and fun. Having uber fast capital ships would not be fun to the attackers. Can you even imagine how long it would take to stop a 200 m/s capital ship?!! If you thought the Ragnarok's braking reliability was bad, you'll be in for a huge surprise.

Here's some of the stats I think the Frigates should have:

Top Speed: 40(If turboing 75)

Turn Speed: Very Slow

Fighter Bays: 6-10 Ships [2500 Armor] (Armed with 1 tach, 1 rail gun, and maybe 2 firings of heat seekers)

Turrets Mounted: 8-12 Min. Adv Turret Gats or those dev turrets (This ship should be very very powerful and since it can't go fast needs to have a lot of defense.)

Guns: 2 Gauss Cannons, 4 Tachs, 2 Gaviton Blaster, 5 Phased Blasters(The weapon 1 less than the tach, I think thats what it is called). This should make it so that you don't get in front of the frigate because if you do your going to be nailed with a lot of fire.

Rockets: 4 Sunflares, 2 Stingers, 2 Gemini

Mines: 2 L Mine ports(One on both sides of the ship on the back)

Energy: 5000 with a recharge rate of 175/s.(This ship will have a lot of fire power and will require lots of energy)

Armor: 50000+ Since avalons can do about 12000, 1-2 fighters could take out the frigate if they got a few good shots off. Plus people with rails could pound the frigate with a lot of them thus putting team work into play.

Death: AI Controlled drops 20 frigate widgets which sells 2500-5000 each.

Bounty: 5000+ It's a huge ship and the person to finish it off should get a nice reward. People who also attack it should get a reward but who knows how well that will work.

Avalons: 1 Frigate Avalon Launcher (2 Ammo) Has a lock ability to other frigates and goes 120m/s. (Thank you Arolte)

You missed avalons, StarFreeze. They should be armed with avalons, in case they encounter "other big ships".

=b

There you go Arolte...Credit for your suggestion.

How about lightning balls? :P

A capital ship being mobile is my strongest desire, but my secondary desire is that their armanment shows some justification for the existance of capital ships as capital ships.

To do this, I think that a careful distinction needs to be made between a Capital ships primary armanment (what it uses for fighting other capital ships), and its secondary armanment (what it uses for fighting off fighters). Capital ships ought to have VL weapon slots available to them which carries weapons which no mere fighter can hope to mount. In this example, the turret mounted beam cannon and the 20 torp Avalon racks are the Frigates VL weapons (its primary armanment), and the gatlings are its secondary armanment. Primary armanment should have advantages in range, velocity, damage, and efficiency that no mere fighter weapon should have. However, balancing against this the primary weapons should be by virtue of the sluggishness of the turrets in which they are mounted, its poor aiming ability, and the sluggishness of the ship in which they are mounted be difficult to employ against fighters. Woe be it to the fighter that stands still though!

Some examples with number pulled out of my head might be:

Avalon Torpedo Racks: Familiar Avalons but carries 20 in a rack.
Drone Racks: Anti-Capital Ship seeking weapon. Unmanueverable and can be shot down, but if its hits does 32,000 damage.
Ship's Laser: 5km range, 1000+ m/s, 2000 damage, 1/s, 150 energy
Heavy Disrupter: 3km range, 600 m/s, 3300 damage, 1/s, 120 energy
Heavy Gauss Cannon: 2.5km range, 500 m/s, 9600 damage, 1/2s, 300 energy, 40 ammo
HyperVelocity Cannon: 1.5km range, 250 m/s, 3000 damage, 1/s, 50 energy, prox 30m burst radius 60m
Appolyon Swarm Launcher: Fires 10 homing missiles at 130 m/s each. Each does 2200 damage.

And so forth.

I dont think frigates should have fighter bays, Frigates are just a bigger class of a Corvette capital ship, so they are more powerfull but still shouldn't have fighter bays, there should be carriers designed for that job.

Nihm. I don't see any particular reason why they should have a fighter bay.

Actually, I'd like the ability to turn any capital ship hull into a carrier by dropping primary weapons (see above post) for 2 fighter bays per weapon dropped. Viola, commando carriers, strike carriers, escort carriers, fast carriers, fleet carriers, etc.

Good Idea on the "Ship weapons" If the Frigates, Carriers, and other various Capital ships are going to be fun to fly we need specialized "Ship Weapons" that only capital class ships can carry, fire, etc. How fun would it be for you If you had to take out another Frigate with mere fighter weapons?
For fighters the Avalon is pushing it, and those only do 12k dmg...

Uhh... I just wanted to suggest that "XL" be used instead of "VL". Just because it sounds cooler. That's all.

=)

If you have an XXL person could you fit them in an XL slot?