When items are dropped from a trident they should drop consistently in the same position relative to the ship. Additional items dropped should follow a consistent pattern based off of the first drop. It is annoying to take the effort to line up a convenient drop in front of a dock only to have the drop materialize from the other side of the ship.

Or at least tighten it up a bit. The drop range out the back of a Trident is huge. I've had cargo end up in asteroids to the side of my ship before where nobody could get them.

Interesting. I'm not sure how that's implemented right now. It may be something that worked well for fighter-scale ships, that doesn't translate very well to larger objects. We'll look into it.

If the ship is exploding, it choosing a random location 0-9 meters outside the ship's radius.

If the cargo is manually jettisoned, it chooses a random location 0-9 meters outside the ship's radius in a 50 degree cone behind the ship.

Is "behind the ship" a singular point, or any portion of the backfacing portion of the ship?

Maybe tightening up the angle of the cone would make it a bit more convenient to jettison cargo to another player. Maybe the trident could be given an even smaller cone. This seems like it would be a simple parameter change.

The trident does not currently have a different drop cone from any other ship. So there would be implementation time to add that (otherwise we'd have to change the cone for all ships, fighters included, which might not be desirable). I'm not saying it's necessarily a huge deal, but we're a little overloaded for the next couple of weeks.

Most of my suggestions are not meant as needing immediate attention, but simply areas that I think would give the game more polish or user friendliness. This is not a priority imo.

Yeah, understood, I was just addressing it being a "simple parameter change", which it is not. If it were, I would change it.

What purpose does randomizing the drop location out the back of ships even serve? Why not pull an ion-storm-exit-type fix out and just stop randomizing it?

I think the intent is probably to make sure that dropping multiple stacks of items spreads the items out, so that the stacks are able to be targeted and collected individually.

Rather than trying to develop a custom Trident-only cone, perhaps the algorithm could simply take the ship's radius into consideration when setting the cone's angle?

Or just ditch the cone and use a cylinder instead, with a fixed radius.

I think each time someone drops cargo its location should be determined democratically via votes cast by whatever players are online at that time. This is the only reasonable method for determining how cargo should drop out of the back of our ships. Political parties would be divided into the Cone party, the Fixed party, and the could-we-possibly-make-more-of-an-issue-about-a-non-issue-thereby-distracting-the-devs-from-more-important-things party.

;)

This is an issue. The drop cone out the back of the Trident is so huge, there's a very good chance your cargo will end up inside an asteroid or station part.

Then turbo into dat roid or station to get it back!

Yeah that works for tiny fighters when you lag from on the other side of the planet. Not so much with a Trident.

It probably wouldn't matter so much if there were a way to fix the problem.