With the latest changes in Trident usage (your passenger ships now take up your cargo space) we are faced with some issues.

Rumor has it that the captain of the Trident will be able to exit the ship and go to the station etc.
This will make the recent changes more acceptable because we can park a XC in all the stations and use them as loaders when you are there. VO will lose all the 'second accounts' we have setup for our passenger/loader though. No need for a loader if the pilot can jump out and do the same job.

I am not sure how we will exit the Trident, but if it's ship based, what if we are killed while outside the Trident? Will we be sent HOME, or back into the Trident? Pirates are known for attacking some ship in the NFZ and then flying around your Trident as the strike force shoots at them. It would be a bad thing if you were far away at the time. I'm sure the pirates would love it; kill the pilot and the Trident is a sitting duck.

Right now the Tridents have a good balance of armor and usage. I've had a single attacker come close to killing my Trident, but lost him while jumping to some sectors. That's fine. I've not needed shields; being able to get away and then repair. Tridents should never get to the point where a single player can kill them easily.

The Tridents biggest issue is that it ties up your account... You fly down to Edras, and then want to do something else, you have to take it back to M7 to park it..
With the ability to exit the Trident and go to a station, that would be solved IF the trident could be safe where you park it. I would like to see the Trident non-damageable when within 200m of a station... then you could leave it parked. After all, the NFZ should cover the un-occupied Tridents as well as the station.

I like the idea of shooting a guy while he's outside of his trident, then jacking his ship. Of course, said victim would be able to buy his ship back while the pirate could keep his ship until it blew up.

Well anybody from the dev team feel free to come down and correct me but my understanding is that if you are killed outside your trident it will remain stationary where you left it. If you log off it will also remain stationary, where you left it. That's why they're working on the 'persistency' system first before they implement this feature.

No, your trident will not be safe, and yes that is probably intended.

Also, as for your claim about a good balance of usage and armour, I don't think it could be any further from the truth. They are only popular with care-bears looking to avoid combat by any means necessary. That tends to suggest the balance is too defensive and not offensive enough or they would be more popular with other groups.

Here's a graph of current trident usage:



See, completely carebear-centric.

hey, mine get in fights all the time :p

I know spence, your label is "Jesus Christ", I may have changed the labels for funsies.

/me hands TRS a tissue

Should add another key colour with TRS, and then leave it be, because he doesn't play.

TRS! Build a Teradon! Chase these carebears around in their dents! OH, and I'm sure it will have standard weapons like all the other player ships, not the capitol class weapons...

What's the point of this thread besides another TGFT babbling about how they love how advantageous tridents have been to them and them alone up to now and how they don't think they need to change, and me reveling in the fact that they are going to change and finally present a use to the rest of us.

This seems like a game-mechanic-related discussion better suited to the Suggestions forum. I'm probably going to move it there soon.

But, that said, I do not intend to add any kind of magical defense barrier for un-helmed Tridents.

I will, however, consider adding a NFZ temp-KoS trigger for doing, say, 25k damage.. as an alternative to the normal requirement of having to kill someone. It does not make a lot of sense for a faction to have a defensive perimeter, and then say "oh, but it's fine for you to shoot this capship for a long period of time until it finally blows up, and then we'll get annoyed at you".

That doesn't make any sense incarnate, I assume you actually mean a faction hit for doing 25k damage rather than an NFZ temp-KoS trigger. Under the current system doing any damage to a trident in an NFZ will trigger tempKOS to an attacker.

To my best recollection Temp KOS is only triggered if someone is KILLED in the NFZ. Damaging someone just results in the warning, to stop the action. Not even the SF appears if you just shoot and hit but don't kill. But tell me if I'm wrong.

On your pie chart: I can do many charts with imaginary data. Pls put numbers next to it which show your calculation method of the percentages.

On carebears: If you think that all who doesn't stop to fight someone when attacked is a carebear, then you're in a serious mistake. Just think of it that maybe someone is doing things that is more important for him/her than that to stop shooting back at you/other pirates/griefers/"I don't know who else preferrign to PvP"/nationalists. I think yes, most of the traders take serious risk to take goods through dangerous territories.

To my best recollection Temp KOS is only triggered if someone is KILLED in the NFZ. Damaging someone just results in the warning, to stop the action. Not even the SF appears if you just shoot and hit but don't kill. But tell me if I'm wrong.

What he said.

Hence: What I said.

I got my own slice of a pie chart! MMMMMM... Orange!

As for the second accounts, they have always been a workaround, and Inc long ago agreed pilots should have a captain's launch or other way off the ship to dock & do business. If this is going to become the pilot/owner docking in a normal ship, then the docking capacity needs to be increased, and the total cu available increased too.

As for armor and shields, I still think we should try to get them shielded, just because EVERY NPC TRIDENT IS, and you know: this is a space game? where they have SHIELDS? It's embarrassing to have to run from a few pea-shooting bots. ever. Balance it so a few players can chainsaw or swarm your shield off, and reduce the physical armor to balance. The issue there if I understand it correctly is that for NPC's, shield max strength and recharge rate is defined by the character, not the ship.

Here's a crazy idea: what if at completion of a capital ship it becomes a server-side persistent NPC with a shield rating, but the owner can take the helm and authorize others to do so? If no-one is aboard the owner can issue remote navigation commands, and like any AI ship, it heads to where it is told to go.

OR: Make a shield generator "socket" that actually places a shielded "NPC" in your ship = Shield Upgrades!

[AND: Reactors, Computers, Sensors, Engines, and even Pylons should also be sockets on the various hull designs, each offering tradeoffs in advantages and weaknesses. (and for the record: I posted this idea long before Star Citizen came along)]

Ah, well in that case you are both wrong about how tempKOS functions.

So was it your intention for it to function this way? Because if you kill a player in a no-fire zone you get a permanent faction hit, not a temporary one, you get a temporary one if you so much as scratch them with a plasma HX.

I think that anybody attempting to make meaningful combat more difficult because they're trying to avoid it in a game centered around combat and conflict is a carebear. I don't always stop for combat, but i'm not going to tell you that I should be able to fly an invincible ship and impose a bunch of gameplay penalties on you just because you want to engage in it.

I was wondering when someone was gonna correct them.

I think Lisa's concern was more like how Westacular would trigger the temp kos to get the strike force after him, then lead them into shooting his victim. The strike force gets the kill and he takes no faction hit. I imagine a trident in an NFZ is a sitting duck for this technique.

I shouldn't have to correct them, especially the one with orange text. I'm sure he's just had a bad day or something. It's no surprise that the other one has no flying clue how tempKOS works, he's probably never even triggered it.

and correct me if I'm wrong: Temp KOS is triggered if the TARGET is damaged in the NFZ, right?
You may be outside the radius but if you shoot someone across that line, you're busted.

If the target is outside the NFZ and the attacker is inside, is it also triggered? I forget. I think yes.

I'm not 100% on the second proposition, but the first is true.

Also kierky, if you and ecka try really hard maybe you can come up with something more intelligent to say than "heh, trs doesn't play". It's a pretty stupid thing to say when you consider that whenever I want I can resubscribe on this account and you both look silly. Do you really both miss me that much? I think you both have little mancrushes.

I imagine a trident in an NFZ is a sitting duck for this technique.

Yep. This is why I usually avoid station sectors and NFZs. They're more dangerous than a grey space wormhole. The strike force can do a colossal amount of damage in a short period of time when you can't dodge and can barely go faster than 100m/s