Well if you didn't know every station has a cap ship now. The spawn at randome times when a dev is online. They go from the nations capital (Serco Capital=Sol II, UIT Capital=Dau and Itani Capital= Itan) to Sedina B8. Its anounced on chan 100 and stays in its home sector for 10 mins before begining the journey to B8. Since it takes awhile to travel to Sedina B8 usually they arrive in the following order: UIT, Serco then Itani.
You can dock while the ship is moving if you're a good pilot, but if u run into the cap ship you could die.

So what do you think of the new capital ships?
List your comments below :)
JB

Really awesome. Thank Devs. I can't wait to see what comes next

Its a little sad though (and I know this is the umpteenth time this has been brought up) that as soon as the Cap ships appear in B8, All of their turrets are obliterated by the 5-10 pilots there. Hell, I took them all out myself once, in a single run, with a rag.

They just need to be a bit more... well... fearsome.

I wonder if cap ships could have damage affected by standing instead of nation.

At the moment damage is zero if opponents are both of good standing of the same nation. Maybe the cap ship turrets should be unable to be harmed by those who have good standing with the nation of the capital ship.

I dunno. This may break other stuff.

I agree with Shape, in that the cap ships are rather easily disabled. I managed to kill 9 turrets, using an SVG Vulture, one Axia posi and one Sunflare, before 2 really good pilots in a prom and a rag (I think) knocked me down. Well, it is just sitting there.

So, lets take a look at it from a tactical standpoint.

These ships, from the looks of it, were never designed with being a dreadnought in mind. What the design indicates is more of an aircraft carrier. However, the current tactical deployment of the carrier is flawed, in that, as pointed out, it's way too easy to knock out it's turrets, then kill the ship, since it just sits there.

It shouldn't simply jump into b-8 and drop it's payload of fighters and then sit still. As a carrier it should stop only long enough to launch it's fighter compliment, say about 10 seconds, then start moving again. Let's say, start orbiting the worm hole at 2500K out. Just at the edge of radar range from the wormhole, but still visual. The turrets would be more effective, because pilots attacking a moving cap ship, while dodging turret fire and fighters, are going to roll in and out of the window of more turrets, more often. Dive bombing turrets with rockets will become much harder. With what I've seen so far, our current cap ships could be programmed to do what I described above.

Docking with a moving cap ship would become a practiced art. I've only done it a few times, but found it challenging, and very doable. With practice I think everyone could get good at it.

Let's also try and remember guys, we are basically beta testing these cap ships. The Dev's have done a hell of a job getting them this far. Positive input of doable ideas will get them further, and faster.

Cheers!
~GW

________________________________________
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders.
Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

I think it's clear that the cap ship release we see now is far from done, so we shouldn't overanalyze the current behavior. Some obvious things that it doesn't do now that will make it more fearsome:

1) have unmanned turrets fire back by AI
2) keep moving
3) have escort bots
4) launch missiles

Right now, it's great that we can dock, get repaired, ride it like a bus, man the turrets, and launch. And don't forget the explosion... it's beautiful.

regarding 1.

It has AI controlled turrets. But they only fire at targets which are hated by the ships nation. (Which is a real problem for the UIT cap -.-)

create a temporary KOS for anyone who hits the cap ship with weapon fire similar to the one you get now for damaging someone inside a station no-fire zone. apply the same limits to it (must do X amount of damage from a ram, cant dock while KOS, leave the sector and return will reset it) but it is only triggered if you hit the cap-ship itself. all the turrets will then regard you as KOS.
perhaps alter it so that explosion damage the capital ship takes under a certain amount does not trigger the temp KOS, that way you can still use rockets to kill people close to the cap ship as long as your aim is good enough to hit the person not the ship behind them, making sure that the cap ship isnt taking the majority of the blast. :)

Its a step in the right direction IMO anyhow. a better step would be a total rework of how the faction/reputation/standing is done, (i've been working on a post about that but its not ready yet)

From what I have seen, it would be a lot harder to clean off all the turrets if they were actually manned. So lets get these ships loaded up with a full compliment of gunners and then see how easy it is to kill the big guy.

/me points >> http://vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/9963?page=2#114402 <<

I think that these battleships need some kind of new weapons that are ridiculously powerfull so we can pee our pants when we see them fire off. I think maybe the turrets should do the same damage, but they should have higher velocity maybe.. A secondary railgun or missile launcher on the turret modules would be really nice so we can take out the dive bombers from a distance.

The whole three-cap-ships-flying-to-Sedina B8 scenario is just a test case to see what happens, make sure everything works technically, and have some fun with it. I didn't really want the ships to just sit there at their destination but I didn't spend any time trying to fix that either. (Strangely, on our test server they do sometimes patrol around the sector randomly.)

I was fighting/defending with the Serco and Itani ships in B-8 yesterday and man was it fun. At the moment, it’s a free for all, with nothing to gain loose other than a bit of fun, but you can see how things will progress! It was really cool boosting out to try and stop an attacking rag, dog fighting with escorts, then returning to the cap ship to repair for another flight!

Good shit devs!

The cap ships are fun indeed! But as said above they need to be seriously harder to destroy to be as big a challenge as they look.

i think the bigest problem is that there just aren't enoug people manning the ships, heck i've seen ships com in completely empty i don't know if there is a solution to this other than attract mor players tro vendetta, but some form of ai controle for the turets that are unmaned would help.

i would definately agree that AI controlled turrets is a step in the right direction. also it would be cool if other nation players were not allowed to dock until the ships are player controlled. mostly because i see them as military vessels at the moment and doubt any military commander would let another nation dock and man a turret. if you are an itani or uit with good serco standing then you will have to suffer with just being an escort to our cap ship..... maybe allow POS players dock and man a turret. that sounds fair.

double the turret armor, kick the turret velocity up by 50%. Its now fearsome. And yeah, make the turrets attack anything that is hated by hte nation or fires/rams it.

I agree if we could get the cap ships fully maned we would have a better fight. The real problem is that we don't know when its going to spawn.

I suggested an "Ultimate Cap ship/Nation battle" here:

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/9994

JB

It might also help defending the capital ship if you could reload your ammunition.

The one probelm I see with the KOS idea is friendly fire accidents. I don't know.

Someone got the Serco cap ship slowly spinning and it was great fun shooting at it from a UIT turret. It was only in range as the fore and aft rotated by. Cap ship vs Cap ship is going to be a lot of fun!

I had a heck of a time figuring out which turret to jump in to be in the right place. It's hard to quickly compute left and right in space. As far as that goes, shouldn't it be fore, aft, port and starboard? Anyway...

Instead of the store purchase layout a graphical representation of the ship would be nice. So would a hot key to switch to an open turret. Probably not as big a deal with more people docking in the ship.