Sacrificing weapon slots by installing docking clamps the ship can tow a cargo container. Obvious sacrifices to maneuverability and speed would be incurred until the container is release. and when separate from the ship may be stolen or destroy. releasing the contents into space.

+1

Add a certain mass to the mass of the ship whenever you put one of these on, say 2000kgs, and then add the mass of the additional cargo. It'd be nice if in the future we could destroy these when attached to a ship.

yea this is a great idea, make them really big visible things too, once you blast them the content though is toast

Sounds like EVN's cargo expansions :) I'd probably use them every once in a while.

Dev input?

look at the marauder its already got the capability to haul external cargo addons just needs to have them added and then fguring out how to handle a maud with more than the 2 containers already attached. do they trail behind swinging or are they in a rigid configuration.....

Swinging tails would require engine changes (unless I'm mistaken), so fixed cargo expansions would be more feasible.

The key word being 'more'. I don't know how easy it would be for the devs to just add things to an existing hull. From what I heard thus far, there are nontrivial things to be considered.

However, I am of the opinion that the benefit is sufficiently large to justify some work.

tl;dr: I still like this idea as much as when I first heard it being mentioned.

As I recall, this was the original idea for the Marauder, but there was some massive set back or bug, this would be a GREAT time foe some dev feed back or some one with a better memory than mine to step in.

hrmm, i wouldn't even try to add things to the hull, just have a new model for it with one or two containers etc, or just make them really big versions of the turrets that can be destroyed and dissapear when blown up.

This sounds cool, but apart from mining, I really don't see any value to having them. However, I'll grant that mining is a good enough reason.

What about CtC?

well if they go with adding cargo modules then we can have towed sensor arrays and then can tow and drop say turrets or other fun things.... Opens the doors to have a cargo of (torpedos) that can have the module dumped and act as a launcher for the torp. One more idea is to have the cargo modules with a mine in the cargo explode destroying the cargo, makes pirates work harder to get trader to comply vs just having them drop module and run leaving partial cargo to become worthless. and yes off thread but the autoloaders should be for mines in cargo and should require ship to be under normal power no turbo etc etc.

but as soon as u leave autonomous machines lying around in this game they stop being your friends.

I specified the Idea the way I did to provide the path of least resistance to implementation. If you have a standard small deformation added to the existing models to signify the container you can probably eliminate many headaches you would have trying to get the game to tow containers properly. Again, having the container spawn(as a destroyable object) when you release your clamp then despawn when you fire your clamp(when in range) again to claim and despawn it, seemed simple enough to implement.

Good idea Rhunteen, but I think there's more sence in creating new modifications of ships, because many ships can't hold more cargo due to they shape (example: vulture, valkyrie x-1, rev-C, etc.). Example of modified ship: Atlas without guns at all, but with extended cargo (+5-7 cargo units), more then elite variant.

Having things like cargo containers would give more on the fly variety. Trading maneuverability/top speed for cargo space should be easy to plug in if the devs have tied ship statistics in any logical way. Also, to be frank just adding more ships? How fascist and boring is that?

Put different sized cargo modules in different ports, like...

L-port Cargo Mod: +5cus
L-port Cargo Mod MKII: +7cus
L-port Cargo Mod MKIII: +10cus

S-port Cargo Mod: +3cus
S-port Cargo Mod MKII: +4cus
S-port Cargo Mod MKIII: +6cus

L-port Cargo Mod: +5cus (+5000kg)
L-port Cargo Mod MKII: +7cus (+7000kg)
L-port Cargo Mod MKIII: +10cus (+11000kg)

S-port Cargo Mod: +3cus (+3000kg)
S-port Cargo Mod MKII: +4cus (+4000kg)
S-port Cargo Mod MKIII: +6cus (+6000kg)

(there at least needs to be some deterrent to not haul around an XC loaded with one of these attached)

(there at least needs to be some deterrent to not haul around an XC loaded with one of these attached)

Are you really, really sure about that?

You are aware that XC's don't have addon ports, right?

What, are you people fucking HIGH? Subtract a fucking decimal place from each of those.

are they trying to say that adding an aditional 10 cu's of cargo space would add 11 metric tons to the ship?