Incarnate: Carrying ships as cargo.. was this a bug or by design?

By design. IMO, no ship the size of a Trident would waste space on specialized "hangar bays", there would be a desire for flexibility of space (think "Firefly").

In general, I like flexibility and trade-offs, like carrying cargo vs ships and so on.

Of course, I wasn't 100% on the existing numbers at all.. they had been thrown together a long time ago, and I fully expected we'd go through a period of tweaking them. But I like the multi-use-cargo-space concept in general, and preferred to implement this with the numbers we had, and then optimize things from there with player feedback.

Incarnate, judging by your answer to Kierky's question I think there there may have been some confusion. Kierky was asking if the ability to load ships as a commodity in the cargo hold of any ship with enough space was intentional, not whether ships docked with a trident taking up cargo space was intentional. Could you please clarify?

By design. IMO, no ship the size of a Trident would waste space on specialized "hangar bays", there would be a desire for flexibility of space (think "Firefly").

Can I just point out that Serenity had 2 dedicated shuttle docks... Inara lived in one, Wash flew the other frequently. Not the same as a hanger bay, but...

Also, Serenity never docked a ship in its cargo bay. Just sayin'.

Faille.

Kierky was asking if the ability to load ships as a commodity in the cargo hold of any ship with enough space was intentional, not whether ships docked with a trident taking up cargo space was intentional.

Actually I was asking both from the ambiguity of the question. Though I sort of knew the answer to the latter, I was more interested in the former question, as draugath points out.

Kierky said:
I actually agree with TRS.

You'd agree with me more often if you weren't so busy being wrong all the time!

Anyway can we just seriously think about this. Having 4 docking ports that don't distinguish between ships is absurd, it always has been regardless of whether or not there is a trade-off with cargo.

Similarly, to suggest that a trident should be able to carry 600cu + 4x 200cu even 600 + 2x200cu is absurd, always has been absurd, thank god those days are over.

The trade off is fair to everyone, owners to whom it now matters how you deck out your trident for the upcoming task and attackers who don't have to deal with the level of absurdity of 4x behemoth xc's and their cargo getting a free ride in the invinci-dent.

Kierky was asking if the ability to load ships as a commodity in the cargo hold of any ship with enough space was intentional, not whether ships docked with a trident taking up cargo space was intentional. Could you please clarify?

I was not aware that this update would allow the trade of ships as commodities. I've asked Ray to check into any problematic ramifications of that.

Also, Serenity never docked a ship in its cargo bay. Just sayin'.

Yes and no. The land-speeder thing was docked in the cargo bay. The shuttles attach to the outside and aren't really within the hull at all. But my point was to illustrate the notion of a flexible, general-use space for shipping all sorts of stuff (in Serenity's case, live cattle or trade goods or whatever). The Firefly universe was not all about docking ships into other ships in space.. ours is, so I don't consider the difference to diverge from my point (nor do I really want to get into a pedantic debate about a TV show.. I figured people would just "get" what I meant by the reference).

quick everyone load up XCs with ships before they change it!

The ability to move ships within other ships for ones own uses is really useful though and it's frankly long overdue as a feature. I speak for everyone when I ask.. can we keep it PLEASSSEEE?

<quote>"I thought it kind of went without saying that no ship's "external size" in CU was going to be smaller than its internal storage capacity in CU of the most-storage-capable ship in that class. We aren't making TARDIS ships here.

The EC-104 has a cargo capacity of 26cu. Obviously I'm not going to make it, or any other identically-sized variant, only take up 18cu. Similarly, the Tunguska Marauder has 60cu of storage, it isn't going to magically "take up" 54."</quote>

I agree with you Inc. I really didn't check all the variants when calculating the cu sizes. All my "cube" calculations were based on the known lengths and the estimated widths. Definitely the mentioned 2 models should take up at least as much cargo space as their internal space, prefereably 10-15 cu more.

But your comparison with aircraft carriers is a bit problematic for me. There all the crafts have folding wings, so they take up less space than their operational "footprint", but to be honest, the "shouldn't stack ships one another so treat them as a cube" concenpt seems for me the most acceptable approach. In fact on carriers they can store aircraft as close to each other as possible as long as the system remains maintainable. They have space for tractors to pull the ships out of the parking space to elevators. But they don't put the aircraft "head-to-tail" next to each other, so they probably also apply the cube approximation.

"The shuttles attach to the outside and aren't really within the hull at all."

Just for the record, they fit halfway into nooks along the sides. So they aren't really "inside", but they aren't entirely "outside" either.

Anyway, I agree with flexible docking/cargo spaces.

Also, the "land speeder" thing was the equivalent of a quad bike (which replaced it after they destroyed the "mule" storming Nichka's space station). Hardly counts as a ship.

But anyway, ships as cargo is cool, and 6(+) light fighters on a TTM is even cooler.

Faille.

The Trident is quite a bit bigger than Serenity (a bit over 200m long vs this: http://www.merzo.net/10ppm.htm), but we get the idea.

The main complaint I had about this was the size of Ragnaroks and Centaurs vs Behemoths. The bag-of-holding crap with 4 XCs in a Trident definitely had to be fixed, so yay for fixing that. However, without shields, having a repair ship along is basically mandatory since you can't dock for repairs anywhere except Latos. Rags and 'Taurs are the best ship for the job with two large ports and heavy armor to survive a point-blank BioCom mine in the event of an ambush.

The ability to move ships within other ships for ones own uses is really useful though and it's frankly long overdue as a feature. I speak for everyone when I ask.. can we keep it PLEASSSEEE?

I understand that, and we'll aim to keep it. Right now my focus is mostly damage control assessment of all the crap that Ray decided to do as programmatic implementation side-effects of my asking for a captain to be able to dock/undock from his capship (which.. we haven't even released yet).

Like, you know, a potential black market of ship usability that doesn't require licenses. I'm not against black markets, I love black markets; but I like them to actually be designed and not sprung on me as some programmatic side-effect that is never mentioned to me.

Aw cut Ray some slack, Inc. It might be unintended but it sure makes things interesting, which is in the end all we really want.

Black markets and begging aside, watching draugath float off spinning into space out of control with no engine was priceless. :)

Hehe, Rays response to me calling the "docked ships using cargo space" a "bug"...

Me: So Ray, did you fix that "ships docked to a TTM using cargo space" bug yet?
Ray: Whats buggy about it?
Me: It sucks is whats buggy about it!
Ray: I think that bug might be in your head

Made me laugh... I do wish I could have seen drau drifting off into the black too though.

Faille.

Since it first was suggested to have user-owned capships i was ranting that a Moth must take at least 400cu ... and the smallest ones can't drop below 50cu.

It makes all sense to have, on a given docking bay, a choice between 4 moths or 16 centurions/vults. Or any mix up.

but what makes NO SENSE is that Docking Bay is related, dynamically, to storage bay.

Instead, it must be a design choice: Either a large cargo bay, resulting in a minimal docking bay (1moth/4vults), or sacrifice cargo storage and have a full fighter wing aboard, up to 16 smalls. That naturally leads to 2 main trident variants on roles, as "freighter" and "carrier".

100cu seems perfectly fine for the smaller ships. Why would you be able to fit an EC into a TungTaur?

Also, don't forget that 1cu !/= 1 cubic metre.
From the wiki: To relate this density to real world materials: in the game, 1 cu of water is 100 kg, given that water is 1000 kg/m³ that means a "cu" is 0.1 m³ (excluding the mass of the container, of course).

Therefore, just because a ships volume calculates x cubic metres doesn't mean it should occupy x cu. It should be roughly 10x the cubic metres in cu. However, we could prolly assume there is some folding wing type of compacting going on...

Faille.

Says who, Alloh? I mean, seriously, who are you to tell me what I can and cannot put in MY ship's docking bay? This is not Bureaucracy Online.