I think there may be a short cut to making player controled cap ships not trident level but still formidable.

Perhaps this is a dumb question but couldn't there be a slower player flyable behemoth heavy that has the turrets some cargo space (30ish) and still has the two L ports. I don't know how hard this would be to make but it should be just a matter of tweeking the current behemoth heavy and making it player controled. I'm not sure how difficult this would be to do (The turrets being bots kinda scares me) but it would really be cool for the next nation war or for use when pirating well armed 'voys.

Possible workaround for the turrets is to make them a non changable weapon (some funky port or something) and non automatic just a weapon with an obcene auto aim range; itd have to handle really poorley so as not to make to too uber but.

Hopefully this will give sombody else a better idea.

the reason player controled cap ships aren't in game right now is two fold.

1. they need special "mooring" procedures to interact with stations that are still being developed and tested.

2. cap ships are so much heavier and bigger than fighters that they need a totaly different user interface (which i believ is curently under development, or at least is on the lost of planned developments)

however the heavy behemoth should be easily made into a player purchasable ship, but having 2 players on one behemoth may need changes to the ui (i don't know what exactly that would take)

Let's skew the topic to this: "Make Heavy behemoths player purchaseable AND allow other players to hop on"

#1, making it purchaseable would be easy. I don't know the actual stats but from what I've pirated under Miles, it seems to have 40 to 70cus at most with the two turrets on the top and bottom. It'd be a bit more expensive, seeing as they would be better weapons. Also, if the AI is firing the turrets, they should boost up the price yet again. The Behemoth Heavy should be the Moth of Grey Space; May not carry as much cargo as a Regular Behemoth but it sure as hell is going to dent alot of pirate ships.

#2, letting people hop on would have to take more work. There is no system in place yet that allows a player piloted ship to be boarded by other players. Before you scream HACs, players don't pilot those. Nor do players pilot Tridents. So making any player flown ship able to be joined by other players may take a while. It'd definitely take the introdutcion of a new system to do so (Especially on ships with no docks, you'd have to board instation and stay on the ship no matter what).

I'd like to see #2 alot. Especially when Teradons become available to be purchased.

Wait, how do they need "moorings"? The damn tridents spawn and end in stations now, don't they?

the tridents don't dock normaly (obviously) they curently use some form of moring system. i don't know all the details, but i think it involves them spawning in deep space and they do something when they reach a station (i've never payed attentionm to exactly what).

but the curent system doesn't handle all the problems that would arise form player run cap ships.

All I need to dock any currently flyable ship is to edge some plane of it into or close to the bay... I wonder if there's not some way, if a PITA way, to do the same with, say, the collision mesh of a Teradon.

you can technically dock a teradon or a trident, I think. Both noses will fit in the docking bay. But, it's pretty hokey, and you can't possibly launch (as seen in the amusing images I posted last week).

I agree that making the Heavy Behemoth user-playable and user-sharable would be the next step in the whole progress towards playable cap ships. Oddly, the design of the Atlas (even the old version, from years and years ago) was intended to include a turret on the top/rear, so the ship could be shared by two people. So, yeah, definitely part of the roadmap. Has been for a scary-long time.

Right now though, we need to tweak a few more bits of the UI to make the game more accessible to newbies (we're working on Mission Logs and a whole new sort of ship-data interface) so we can make a better tutorial. Then we can start to *market* the game, and then move on to cap ships and things.

In the meantime though, I'm doing my best to push us forward on making capital ship battles a reality. With or without playable cap ships, battles involving large numbers of vessels have always been.. problematic. Laggy? Often broken. So, we're trying to improve that, and that'll be another major milestone on the way to making the Big Expansive Nifty gameplay I think we all want.

I was part of a 2-on-2 Teradon battle tonight that was pretty cool looking. It kind of thrashed the poor test server though. Work in progress..

aww... you got pics, inc?? :O