i think that a cap ship should be diffrent to a normal ship. i think that you should buy a licence to use it like you do to be a bounty hunter so you dont need to spend days getting your levels up.

i also think that to get it you can make it eg get 50 ore and deliver it to the station then get some outher stuff, so people with little money can get one, of corse if you have lots of cash then you can still buy one.

also if you are flying though space and suddenly you get attacked but you escape with half of the ship ok you should be able to detatch the parts that are damaged so you will get 100% back how ever if it was a part of the ship that carrys cargo then you may lose some of the cargo you are carrying of if its the engings you may not be able to turbo so when you get to a station you can buy back the missing parts.

also i think that for the cruiser you should be able to carry ships inside so you can stop your ship and take a small ship like a warthog to fly about then dock again with the cruiser, but you can not buy ships form the cap ship only from a station (of course each ship will add to the weight of the ship).

I'm not so sure about your first two points. It sounds as if you are suggesting that one should be able to get a cap ship even if they have no money or experience by jumping through a few hoops, but that they could avoid the hoops by spending a lot of money.

Let's now make it EXACTLY like Soviet Russia and make it so that you also have to wait 4-6 years to get the ship from the government.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with having things be like Soviet Russia - I just don't think it was a wise suggestion from a game-play and business standpoint. Many former communists would agree.

Seriously though, I think that cap ships should be relatively rare and precious. Otherwise space will be full of them and people will fly nothing else. Also, what's the fun in having one if everyone has one. Why bother? New players who obtain them quickly will not be skilled enough to pilot them and will lose them just as quickly. Wealthy players will have several, as will all their alts and friends.

Looking at it from a business model, why pay to play a game for any significant length of time when the goals are so easily attained?

Your third suggestion is new and interesting. Probably not plausible any time soon, but interesting. I'm not sure that getting 100% back makes sense, since you would be missing a portion of your ship. If you did get 100% back after detaching, then subsequent hits should logically do proportionately more damage than before.

The ship-within-a-ship idea has been around for awhile. The idea that the pilot of the cruiser would leave the helm and fly the smaller ship is new to me. It creates some questions about what happens to the unmanned ship.

[Edited for niceness? At least fix my spelling of "detach" next time.]

I think cap ships should be relatively comon. That's not to say that everyone should be able to buy several HACs. But rather that any player willing to put in a fair bit of effort can get a small cap ship.

I think the bigest limiting factor for use of larger cap ships should be the need for supporting players. so just because you can buy a HAC at combat level 11 for 2million credits (relativly modest requirnments) doesn't mean you should. I mean you're going to need gunners, escort pilots, a helmsmin, somone to help corrdinate your gunners and fighter screens, etc. now some of those roles could be filled by AIs or one single player, but it'll still be a lot of effort for one player to run something that large.

i expect, only guilds will have the resorces to operate the higher-end cap ships just by virtue of their size.

now as for smaller cap ships, i'd expect the most common transport ships to be very large (posably the size of the Trident) however most combat ships will be smaller fighters because most lone players wouln't want to entrust criticle positions to the AI.

obviously there will be a fairly large number of corvets or other small cap ships that can be operated by a small number of players (posably even a lone player). But i don't see that as a problem as there will always be a strong demand for good fighter pilots to serve as escorts for larger ships.

I agree with the need for supporting players. That alone may be limiting enough.

I used to play those online WWII flight simulator games. Some pilots were excellent bomber pilots, and I would happily be a turret gunner for them whenever they asked because I knew we'd deliver to our target with a good chance of survival. Other pilots tended to get me killed - a real time waster. So perhaps a capship would be only a moderate hassle to obtain, but you might have a hard time crewing it.

I still think caps should be harder to get than the initial suggestion implies, but I may have overstated the "rare" part.

Capships should be rare enough that it should be a welcome PRIVILEGE just to man a turret on your guild's cappy in a event battle. There should be hype when a capship comes through, and if that hype is what Guild wants it to be, everyone will want their own capship. But if you make it possible for everyone to get their capship, it'll just die out and saying "OMG, I want a CAPPY!!!" will be synonomous with n00bs.

I definitely want a capship, but it'll be better for the game if it isn't easy for the average player to get one. In my suggestions (lemme plug it in once again! http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/12949 ), I said that you have to maintain doing missions with your capship or a more hard-working individual would get it. This will make it so it requires intense commitment to get a capship, and anyone who flies one through will get the respect that a cappy captain should get.

In Soviet Russia, Ship Caps you!

I love this country!

SHIP != ship