I like big things. In real life, Cruisers are far from the biggest ships ever made, meaning that the Capships hav a lot more size potential.

Now, an update that is just “Another class of giant, dumb NPCs for Deneb skirmishes” is just boring. What if we replaced Latos M-7 with a larger station. A station large enough to dock and launch a ship much larger than an HAC. What if, with this new station, player supercaps become existent.

Now, for the Battleships themselves, they would be much larger than an HAC, and much more powerful. I was thinking of 3 varieties: One with an extra turret slot for the Secro, one with slightly more shield for Itiani, and one with a slightly larger hold for UIT.

This would make pirate run ins more interesting, and would lead to some fun battles deep in Greyspace.

Something to consider.

How would it make pirate run ins more interesting? How would a much larger ship that is currently in the game enhance gameplay? There are still four capital ships larger than a trident that players can't own/control yet... wouldn't it make sense to enable access to those first rather than just make some ginormous megalith that dwarfs all of them?

Have you ever been in a battle with player-owned capships?

Fine. What if we allow the megastation in Latos, allowing HACs, Constellations, what not. Then after a while, the battleship is released?

I actually want increasingly large ships, as well. They're referenced in the backstory, and I think they could add an element of awe and granduer to the universe.

But, I also think there are a lot of other things that are more important in the near-term, and that the game would need to be modified in some ways to make extremely large ships feasible. I've flown HACs many times, since we first made them, and it's uhh.. "challenging". The situational awareness is pretty rough, and spaces can get small pretty fast.

As Greenwall says, there isn't a whole lot of point to such a ship, in the game, as of yet. If it did become playable, it would have to be an insanely difficult endgame prospect. Because it's logistically problematic for "everyone" to have a super-uber-gigantic capship, the way a great many people have Tridents today.

The fundamental fact that our game is based around vessels that you actually fly around, and our universe contains actual objects and content (like asteroid belts and things), means that scale has to be a consideration in design. Certain other space games, that have extremely large ships, usually don't have much to "run into", because they're also more point-and-click types of titles.

Basically, you start to get situations like the scenes in Empire, with Star Destroyers interacting with asteroid fields. That might even sound "great", but we don't really have.. a good way to handle that yet. There are some technical things we would need to improve, and new gameplay that would need to be created.

Even the actual size of wormhole areas would become problematic.. it'd start to get into "well, you can fly this giant uber-cap, but it has its own super jump drive thingie, so you don't have to use (and block up) wormholes, and you have to stay 10km away from everything, and you can only go to like 5 places". Which is.. not ideal.

I mean, it would not be fun to jump through a wormhole, just to smash into some guy's kilometer-long capital ship on the other side.

So, this is something that I would like to see, but it would require a lot of work to do in way that doesn't harm or break other stuff (or cause more problems), and there are other areas of development that would improve the overall "game" much more, with the same (or smaller) investment of development time.

I think it's also something that may become more relevant with an Expanded Galaxy.

While yes, we totally don’t need 13km long space umbrellas of Death like what certain other space-based MMORPGs have, we could get to the point where warfare takes place in a contested layer of the universe, with two massive guilds using massive flagships in empty sectors, battling over sovereignty.

A solution to the critiques of this idea might be simple.

Make a conquerable capship!

1. Make a couple sectors (perhaps in the unknown area!) that contain a conquerable giant cap ship
2. Conq cap ships are keyed with the owner the only one who can pilot it and give out user/docking keys to others.
3. keys expire over time

Now you have an awesome, over the top, BATTLE SHIP and you as the Dev can closely control how many are in the game. You also can control availability and opportunity by making the keys expire.

No manufacturing needed, so no need to put all that together. No way they "over saturate" the universe. Opportunity for all well organized guilds to have a chance at one.

Yeah, I don't have a problem with the notion of a conquerable capship. I've been considering versions of that for a long time as well. It would at least limited the number of them, although there would still need to be robust locational / usage parameters to keep people from playing "keep away" from the rest of the userbase, and spacing them or whatever.

A key expiration system would be "gamed" pretty easily by players, I think. But, there's probably some model in there that could work.

Although, understand this is still not a near-term goal, a lot of work would be involved (like, say, making the asset in the first place, which has some technical / engine side challenges, at a certain level of detail).

The conquerable capship thing sounds interesting.

As for the asset, why not just use a HAC or Capella, maybe scaled to fit through the opening of the current capitol launch bays? It would require a powercell with a much higher grid for all the turrets. I'm not sure how useful it would be in combat, but it might be fun to mess with.

A key expiration system is too easily gamed, but having it break down and cease functioning after say, a week or a month would be hard to circumvent. That is easily explained away as it being a captured ship that you don't have the ability to fully maintain.

This idea is still growing on me... breaking down and ceasing to function is a good solution as well. Also another idea is to associate a cap ship with the conq stations. You take the station, you get to use the ship. As to the battery problem, it could all be unchangeable anyway... weapons and battery come equipped and cannot be removed.

I'm not sure how making the weapons built in and unchangeable would work from a dev-time standpoint.