I spent several hours this evening tweaking the engines on the capships (and flying them around, on the test server). They should now be much more controllable by the NPC AI, which would be a good thing for Border Skirmish and other areas that use them. Particularly, they seem to recover very quickly from major physics impulses, so the whole "spinning HAC drifting off into space" thing should be less prevalent.

Please let me know of any changes in capship behaviour you see as a result of this. In BS, for instance, they might behave a bit differently, as they're able to maintain intended distances with much greater accuracy. Etc. Feedback welcome.

Awesome! Is this another stepping stone towards player owned cappies? :)

Also, could you post/link pics to what the hud or the third person view look like when you fly a capital ship?

Well, the HUD looks exactly the same as a fighter. It's not very exciting. The 3rd-person view does show you the outside of the capship, as you'd expect. I could post some links I guess, I'll try to remember to take some screenshots. I was testing/flying them manually mostly to see how they flew at all.. if a ship is remotely flyable by a person, the NPC AI can usually do a pretty decent job with it. They were practically unpilotable before.

Anyway, yes, it is a stepping stone to player-owned capships. One of the challenges is getting them to navigate well, and also not be such a burden on the server side. For the latter problem, keeping them away from one another is good (ie, firing distance, but not colliding.. reduces collision-detection/response overhead on the server). So, you'll probably see more capship-formation stuff in the near future.. getting them to move in groups without clumping up together too much; optimizing their firing patterns without running into one another, and so on.

I actually tried manually-docking a Trident today in a normal docking bay. It doesn't work :(. Waylon actually designed the trident to be able to fit the nose in a traditional docking bay, and it does fit, but not enough to give you a docking prompt.

UPDATE: I also just changed increased the hit-damage and firing delay on the standard capital-ship cannon by 1/3. By "standard" I mean the giant blue gauss that you see from the HAC. The individual shots will now hit harder (up to 6000 damage), but will fire less often. This should improve framerate situations in BS and other intensive battles.

If you park your Trident so the top (the part with the viewport) is touching the dock, it should work. It doesn't fit that way in every station, though.

I would like to see a trident with its nose stuck in a station. That would be interesting.

I think that would be a parking violation. I can see the station marshal now, sticking a ticket under the upper turret, or calling in a Constellation to have it towed.