Since ships are now cargo in a trident, and we will soon be able to exit the trident, I see another problem.

I could lurk around and wait for a pilot to leave the trident, then drop some cargo on it so he/she can't get back in. Yuck yuck yuck!

We used to have 4 free tardis docking slots, which have been removed, and I understand why you wanted them gone. Maybe there needs to be just one, even if it's reserved for the current pilot. Having it may solve some issues.

-1 to magically spawning ships into a trident.

One way to resolve the scenario csgno1 came up with is to just not allow Tridents to pick up cargo if they don't have somebody on-board who is authorized to pilot them.

<Espionage> actually you could do a neat piracy deal
<Espionage> edras b-11, sit trident
<Espionage> sit at edras h-15
<Espionage> if you [phaserlight] up getting a target from pelatus, you can /explode and then respawn and grab a greyhound out of dent at b-11
<Espionage> you can even park in empty sector so your trident is safe
<Espionage> and your warp out is instant to intercept them at next location.

-1 to magically spawning inside your trident, rats already have the advantage remember..

Having a capship, and being able to launch there but not spawn there strikes me as kind of dumb, especially as we expand the galaxy. (It's also not any more "magical" than anything else about spawning).

I've never been that concerned by /explode abuse, because it's pretty trivial to fix when we want, but I hope to add some more legitimate means of long-range travel before I do so.

But, there is merit to mitigating further issues related to using capships for this purpose. For instance, if you were "homed" at a capship, then perhaps you might only be re-spawned there if you died from another party, and any "suicide" would send you back to your last homed station.

There would not be an infinite number of EC-89s in capships. Only what you brought with you.

We can make non-piloted capships not pick up cargo, but we might also just allow captains to remotely jettison cargo, in case they come back with an Behemoth and forgot they only allowed room for a Warthog. Remote-jettisoning might be more complex though.

How about make '/gunner leave' send you back to your previously-homed station? That way even if there's no ships for you to undock with, you can still ride along as a gunner.

Yeah I get that its no less magical than re-spawning in the first place, but logistics is an important factor in the game. Currently when you kill someone in a sector they are gone from the sector. With this change we're adding the potential for you to have to maybe kill them 6 times in light vessels and once in a trident before you can get them out of one sector.

I've always said tridents should give you staying power, but i meant physical fortitude and tactical defensibly not multiple re-spawns. If you make a mistake and blow up you should be outta there and if it happens that you were out of our capship leaving it vulnerable that's just the way it went down.

Just kill them once in the trident in the first place. The Sercorgy ought to be able to ignore one dude in a fighter while tearing up his Trident.

It's not so much about what the Sercorgy can handle, it's more just the mechanics and how people are going to regularly use them and whether or not thats good or it strikes most people as silly or annoying.

Ever had to deal with the army of westacular alts defending a conq station? you kill one and his next alt logs in at the same place to continue defending. This sounds remarkably similar.

I think leaving your trident alone while someone has a key that allows him to load cargo is akin to giving a friend the keys to your house while you're on holiday. If you come home and found that they stuffed your house so full of junk that you can't open the door anymore, there is no "gameplay problem", the problem is that you picked the wrong friends.

Note that this does not cripple the dent permanently: since the "friend" needs to dock to put cargo on, and undock to leave, there will always be room for the ship he left in (I don't know what happends to a docked ship when the pilot logs off, so that might be an issue, but that is a very specific issue that can be solved very specifically). If your "friend" goes through the bother of filling up your dent using a fighter sized ship, you will have to go through the bother of reclaiming the dent in a similar ship. You might want to change the locks on your dent after that :-).

If a player staying logged on just for the sake of barricading your dent is a problem, a much easier solution would be to force undock on revoking the key. That can already be done remotely, and it makes some degree of RP sense (much more than a remote jettison switch, in my opinion). The undocking of the (ex-)"friend" will always make room for the owner to dock.

Of course, this still requires some remote trident information, like where your dent is and who is docked, but that doesn't seem so strange to provide. See http://new.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/9052903 for some real world inspiration :-)

PS Also, I agree that an unmanned trident should be a sitting duck. NFZ protection should be handled through faction penalties and (possibly beefed up) station guards and strike forces, not through magick. Finally, if an owner decides to leave his trident and travel/home halfway across the universe, and finds out that he can't get back in time to defend his trident if needed and/or is ambushed on his way back, well, that's what insurance and (in the future) capital system capship docks are for, no?

[Note also that some of the above problems would also be solved by having a zero cu passenger shuttle (http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/28190), and add some interesting tradeoffs if you make that shuttle incapable of jumping]

Wow, lots of good discussion on this topic. For the most part.

Maybe a Pilot Shuttle is in order... only purchasable by capship pilots, and on the Capships themselves. Short range, no power cell, just a batt that will take them 2000m. No weapons. Slow, like 100m/s.

The biggest issue with Capships and stations is that the NFZ is not enforced. Hitting a target in the NFZ triggers Temp-KOS. that should stick with the attacker at least 15 min no matter what happens after that... why would a faction forgive someone quicker than that.

The next problem is that someone that is Temp-KOS around a station can use the strike force to shoot anyone they want, an exploit of the game mechanics if there ever was one. Two possible solutions are to either make the strike force only damage someone that has Temp-KOS(like pizza says below), OR BETTTER YET, give the strike force enough teeth to kill the person with Temp-KOS quickly. Increase the speed and agility of the strike force.

If this issue was resolved, I could park dent near a station, and have 15 min to get it out of there if someone was after it.

I also agree that player tridents ARE killable by a single player, thus the reason I've been against shields on them. The jumping to empty sectors is the ONLY way a trident can be taken out of Latos M7. Without that being a way to escape, who would leave the docks? You can't pull into a station sector and be protected by the NFZ... not the way it is now.

"make the strike force only damage someone that has Temp-KOS"

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you meant "make them smarter about whether they open fire", and not "make their shots magically not damage friendlies". A simple ray-trace would be sufficient, holding fire if direct line-of-sight to the target's predicted position is unavailable or if a friendly is within the weapon's range along the ray. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would be fairly low-impact from a CPU usage standpoint, and would largely resolve the problem.

That's something that probably ought to be applied to the AI in general, not just the strike force.

vanatteveldt best post so far, you want safety? park it in the garage.