5 million is not out of the range. I would buy fewer of them at 5mil, but that might be a good point.

Yea, I mean, why not raise it according to like 5th percentile of the population. This way, money might mean something after all. Buying a Trident, for now, should be a long term money goal. I for one would think a crap load of traders and miners would go back to work, and we'd see a lot more expensive cargo laying around from previous owners who got messed p by pirates.

So, 5th percentile is actually like 8-10million, just estimating.

I would like to see veteran players who want a cap, be able to get one. By veteran, I mean someone that has played the game awhile, is capable of actually controlling a cap by hand, and has a fair idea what to do with a cap.

Your idea of 8 - 10 mill, is still not out of the question. But I'm noticing that the price is creeping upward. It will come to the point, that it isn't an issue of being able to afford a cap, but rather, not being able to afford losing even one. If I take a 5, 8, or 10mil write off, I'm going to be hurt. For traders, we are talking about a ship that cost exponentially more than the cargo they are hauling. If you bring the trident into this price range, you are pushing the other caps into an even higher price range. There are already concerns about the level requirements being too high, and if the price goes through the roof, level requirements will become a non issue. Somewhere in here is a reasonable balance.

Actually I was hoping that the whole cappie business would not require that much cash (say from 800k for the smallest -> 4 mil for the biggest). But then require different materials (mostly ores) and then a certain amount of time to build one (I'd say 30mins -1 hour for the smaller Cappies and going all the way to 24h for the Big ones).

Then you have a reasonnable money sink, and reasonnable difficulty to getting caps making 'em that much more precious.

When a capship is launched, it should warp into the NFZ. The owner could then take a smaller ship from the station out to their cap and dock. Likewise, loading/unloading cargo to/from the station should be done by ferrying the cargo back and forth.

Like someone else said, with a 200cu moth, a 320cu cap isn't worth so much. Maybe more like 1000 and 5000 for Tridents and Connies.

Once the storage requirements for ships are determined (ie how much space a moth takes up), a docked ship should take up that much space regardless of any cargo it may or may not have.

As a general note to all, we can not really proceed with this plan until we nailed down at least sections one and two, being as those two section represent the minimal functionality of a cap. Thus far, we are still mostly discussing section one.

Zed1985: Your ideas have merit. Many people have wanted samoflang to play a part in cap construction. Perhaps you should be more specific, so we can better decide if we like your ideas, or what we may want to alter.

Kragmier: Your idea could not be implemented until at least stage three, and that may be a good idea to add to stage three. But I would like to get stages one and two cleaned up first. As to the cargo space, I would prefer that at least initially, the caps be underpowered, while we explore their operation. We can always make them better later.

I was specifically targeting 2.1 and 2.3 with the docking and ferrying of personnel and cargo. There should be no magic teleporting of goods or people to and from the ship, but you still need a way to move the people and cargo. Having huge docking bays doesn't scale very well, and we already have enough magic IMO.

I am still undecided on levels and price. Perhaps the price of all ships should be more dependent on manufacturing capacity and availability of materials. If it only holds 320cu, I wouldn't be very inclined to pay more than 100k or so. Except, of course, for the first one or two simply for the sake of buying one. At 1000cu I might pay a couple million for one.

Kragmier: In section two, the cap would mostly work like any normal ship. You would load it with cargo prior to launching from the station, and unload it while docked in the station. Special exceptions had to be made for actually docking and launching the cap, because it's size makes conventional docking methods impractical. It isn't until section three, that the captain can actually leave the bridge, and not until section four, that the captain can leave the cap. At about section four, your ideas could start to come into play.

You said: "Except, of course, for the first one or two simply for the sake of buying one".

I believe this is a good place to start. Make the caps available for inspection and testing, so we can iron out the kinks in live play. It will be much easier to judge how much they should cost, etc... after we actually get our greedy little hands on one.

I'm really not all that interested in a broken capship implementation just so we can get them now. Guides and Devs can already fly them. If it's going to be half-assed anyway, just flip the switch.

You quoted me so far out of context it's not even funny. The point was that at 320cu, a trident is absolutely worthless as a cargo vessel. It is pathetically slow compared to a moth, yet would only hold %60 more cargo. Even at the price of a moth, it would hardly be worthwhile. If it is going to be worth millions, it better be able to pull it's own weight.

@TRS:

Erm, I don't really care what materials are required. I'd imagine tons of Ferric and Carbonic to make the steel hull, Loads of Xith to make the armor plating. Samo? No I don't agree Samo is waste from Capships, so maybe the engineers use Lanthanic and VanAzek to extract the heavy radioactive components to make Samo? Maybe Samo is what drives the internal nuclear reactors? Then I guess you'd either have to provide Samo or some other materials.

Really I don't know if I were one of the devs and had to come up with quasi-random numbers for ships I'd be something like this:

Trident

450 000 credits; 30 minutes (real time) contruction time

1000 Ferric Ore (350 if premium)
1500 Carbonic Ore (500 if premium)
600 Xith (200 if premium)
{
200 VanAzek
or 150 Lanthanic
or 60 Heliocene
or 55 Pentric
or 2 Samo
(or any combination of these, so it could be 1 samo and 30 Heliocene for example) (must be premium)
}

So yeah something like that. The more common materials can be bought at mining stations for example, but with the new economy coming up I think that buying that much material should bring the cost up to at least the discussed million or so (if not up the numbers).

That way the player that has the money and is willing to spend it can get his ship faster (he still needs the rarer materials), but ends up paying 2-3 times more.

And the Joe-I-play-7hour-a-week can also get his ship by mining sporadically, stocking the ores and then one day paying the 450 000 or so credits and getting his little shiny new Trident.

Oh an only a few stations should be able to build those cappies, so that people do end up having to transport some of the ores.

For the other ships anyone can really come up with random numbers like I did. All we need is to find a baseline (something attainable by the average player in a reasonable time) then go from that. Maybe the Teradon should end up being 4 times harder to get and the HAC 6 times.

Or maybe the Teradon must have 40 pentric for the great balls of doom?

Or maybe if you bring some components (say a pilot safety harness, or auto defense systems) then your bill will drop slightly or construction time accelerate a bit?

So then you could stock up on the required components and ores and in case of a crisis where you loose your trident but your home is in desperate need of help you can have one built in 10 minutes instead of 30? But that forces you to spend 1-2 hours flying around the universe getting the components?

I imagine stuff like that because I can see it benefiting the economy of the game, I would be willing to pay say a million or two to a trader for him just do do the deliveries of the components to me (I pay the mats + his paycheck 2 mil), so that my ship can be buil in 10 minutes.

Or maybe I can pay a miner 600k for the materials, that way I end up saving about 100k by not buying the mats from the stations, and get premium mats which can give a slight bonus too (say a premium mat Cappie has 2-3% more HP or weighs 2-5% less or maybe both?). Again that would help the economy.

Kragmier: I don't really want caps to be worth it on the first try. I would rather we start on the conservative side, and progressively add improvements till they are worth it. I would much rather hear that caps are not worth it yet, than hear that so and so is making billions an hour from his new cap, or so and so is ripping up border patrol. This is not a plan to get it perfect in one shot. This is a plan to get the ball rolling. As this thread already demonstrates, even the most minimal functionality is by no means well defined. If I can get even a handful of the player base to nail down the specs on just the first two sections alone, I will consider this plan a success.

Zed1985: I really like a lot of your ideas. How about we start with a high price, and then add a later section to get significant discounts by the kinds of methods that you are proposing here. I don't think you should be able to buy the ore at stations, but many of your other ideas could be built on. Requiring certain ores, and even ship components, could end up leading into crafting aspects, mission requirements, etc...
Keep the ideas coming.

I think that some of the complexities Zed points out are the reasons why Cap-ships aren't readily avialable yet. It's more than mechanics... it's how to implement them into the economy, etc. If that isn't done smoothly, alot of people will no doubt be upset. Cap-ship implementation seems like the sort of thing that would go hand in hand with the new economy and faction, so while we're brainstorming ideas, why not keep what information we know about those two plans in mind.

I'm not really taking my own advice here, but I did have an idea about player run stations awhile back that I'll just translate to Cappies. Basically, there are all sorts of different ways someone could get their hands on one. Running missions, PK's, money, ore, licenses... I thought it'd be neat if the requirements for purchasing Cap-ships were determined by which nation you're buying from. Perhaps a Serco pilot could reach the rank of Commander with enough BP runs, and earn his first TPG Frigate, to go on and fight fiercer battles. Money wouldn't even be an issue; every 500 kills earns a ship, let's say.

Someone gunning for a Trident in UIT space would probably use plain cash, or get a discount if they supply the ore.

Itani would of course collect smurfs, in order to smurf a Smurf-ship.

Yea, I like that idea Mynt. But I would suggest something in-between your's and Zed's ideas.

Lke Serco would lean towards combat, UIT Materials, and Itani I guess would be in-between those two.

@Krag, seriously, you are right about the c.u., but the trident isn't just useful in that regard. If say it was carrying stuff, it could go on a escort mission as well.

I think it would be cool if you could lead your own escort mission to anywhere you choose. All you would need to do is input your destination to the station computer, and gather a group of PC's and maybe like a max # of NPC's (just to be fair). You could set it up where the # of player characters, divides up a total of experience (and NPC's are accounted for as well, but not worth as much. So if you go alone, with no escorts, the reward of XP will be bigger, and so will the profit from transporting goods. Essentially it would be like a trading mission, but you get combat XP as well because you are probably going to encounter resistance. Obviously Procurement would still yieldthe greatest rewards.

We could go in all kinds of directions from here. It really is going to be awesome with the new economy system in even its initial stages.

It would be really cool if they could be implemented, even in the small way we have all been talking about, that would not be excessive in abuse possibilities.

BTW 'd like to see capships with a limited number of supplies for repairs and weapon reloads, which is viewable before you take it, and if it's a player controlled capship, that player needs some kind of permission if supplies start to get low, and they want only the best pilots taking the supplies.

I've been here for about a month now and I have something like 10/14/11/9/6 (I spend a lot of my time on) so I think any cap ship should be 12/12/12 or higher. If you work REALLY hard you can get that in a few months undoubtedly. Or I might have no idea what I'm talking about.

This might have easily already been said but if it has I'm repeating it.

When we do get fully functional capships and tridents we should make them available in Corvus.

I'm thinking maybe POS Corvus for all the capships and then just increase the price by 150%. So tridents would be 1 500 000, and so on. I THINK this would be reasonable but if others disagree please tell.

Oh and tee. The main reason I'd think capships would be used is for big mining events so the miners can repair, drop their cargo, and then return, or so pirates can have a semi perm. base, trading will be better, etc. and lot's of battles but that will be mainly between caps.

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