I think Jex should let the forum moderators do the policing of the forum, and keep his nose out.

Anyway, so what is the time frame on this?

"When you're old enough, kid."

Assuming everything else falls into place well (which hasn't been happening lately), maybe by summer. But I've been making "by summer!" and "by fall!" and "next year!" claims about all sorts of things for awhile, and then they haven't happened. That said, we have a lot of different pieces of development which are coordinating together to several common goals.. player-owned and player-used capships being one of them.

Technically speaking, we could drop in player-owned capships like.. this weekend. But it would suck.

Yeah, maybe a little suck would be just what the novelty ftw ordered. Seriously, how bad could some player owned Tridents be? Ya'll grew bold enough to try flattening a valk... this seems like the next logical step.

would it really suck?

i can think of half a dozen use for cap ship use, just now:

- support ship for mass trading operation
- support ship for mass mining operation
- flying base for inter-guild war
- invasion force event (run it through enemy territory!)
- noob protector (damn that'd be kick ass!)
- bs training target

technically speaking, i would drop in my credit card like.. this weekend.

on a less cynical note, would moth heavy be doable this week-end? coz that would make more sense than a cappy for now and would bring some level of multi-player ship (2-3 perhaps?).

Personally, i'm mostly asking this because Im getting a little impatiant! Maybe even a varient (moth Mk 2!) of something would be a nice little thing until the big changes are done.

Great attitude muterman. It'll really get you far.

As for when, the unofficial slogan is Soon™

I think the control interface is the thing holding the capships back. You won't be able to control them like you pilot your ships, I seem to recall that there was going to be a "Homeworld 2"-like interface for them. Which seems appropriate.

upper case, you forgot a specific use for the cap ships:
- money sink for rich guilds stupid enough to buy one (I can envision the capship dying pitifully as soon as it's spotted and its location relayed to everyone in VO, who grabs their spamrags and hunts it mercilessly.)

And Gods know that the LAST thing this game needs is a money sink.

Gee moldyman, thanks for the quality contribution to the discussion, it'll get you far!

Well, he's right, muterman. Questions like 'when' are rather pointless.

Not really, tosh. It's people asking when and actually getting dev responses that makes VO kick ass. When was the last time you heard an official statement on cap ships? Until the trac thing gets going this is the way to keep the players updated.

It does not really increase the speed at which the developers work. It just increases our awareness of what they do. We think nothing's happening because we can't see it, but that does not necessarily mean that that is correct. Shadows on a cave wall...

Same old things need to happen before player owned capships, we need:

-a place to repair/dock
-a method for piloting it
-a way to switch pilots from one player to another
-to figure out what happens when the owner logs off, do they stay or disappear?
-a way to control your turrets, or select what target you want your turrets to autofire at.
-(and my personal suggestion) a form of insurance to cover a portion of the loss if a capship is destroyed, assuming they're going to be very expensive.

But all these have been brought up before and the devs are aware that they need to come first (except maybe the insurance thing). So all we can really do is wait more.

However, when/if this game has pilotable caps and CONTENT(I give it 2 or 3 more years), my social life will dissolve completely. Sign me up for the lifetime sub.

None of those apply to the trident, Ghost. And it's dockable by carefully wedging the nose into a current station bay. Since a Trident is a small critter, I see no reason not to do the usual 'ship vanishes with pilot' on log off. We would need to at least know ahead of time what the consequences for being docked with one at the owner's log off are.

But basically, if they can drop Tridents into the game this weekend... they should do it, at least for a bit. No matter how hard they are to fly, dock, interface with or defend... it would help more than it would hurt. Hell, I might start playing again... though now that Lecter is gone I'd have to start leveling from scratch so I could buy one =P

the question is,

when we do finally get posession of cappies...

will they fly faster than standard ships, or slower?

Tosh: As is always said, what makes VO special is the dev-player interaction. I just think we should support that interaction...

My biggest priority, right now, is getting our next 6 months or so of milestones redefined (the whole Deliverator thing kinda put them on hold, and things now need to be re-prioritized) and getting the Trac system fully filled out with what's coming. Then I can make that all public, and it will be more obvious to everyone what we're doing, and in what order.

It isn't impossible to make Tridents available, like Lector says. But for this week, I need to stay focused on getting the Trac system filled out with longer-term design. Kourier is going to be live very soon (probably next week) and I need to get some of the design in place for the next-generation work. As soon as I have some time, I'll look at the prospect of pilotable tridents. There are some problems.. like how to give the pilot control (they're too big to launch, and there's no mechanism for taking the "helm" of a capship after docking). But I'll talk to ray about it. For now though.. Michael and Andy are getting Kourier ready for actual use, Ray is fixing some bugs, and I have design/Trac stuff to finish.. so everyone can see what's happening.

what about a stasis pod that transports you automatically to a cap ship sector?

watch the stars go by while waiting to get to the cap ship a sector away, then that specific ship/pod autodocks you and gives you the controls.

or,

make cappie specific stations with bigger docks. like the main nation stations (eventually corvus too)

hehe, sounds somewhat erotic....

Right. Neither of those are trivial. Which is part of why there aren't currently playable capships. We're getting there, we keep adding stuff with that in mind (didn't we just add the ability to repair and rearm a few weeks ago?). We just can't guarantee it right away.