player capships in their 'npc form' wont pick up drops they pass over.. they could have a more meaningful part of mining or other activities if they did.. such as following a miner who is auto jettisoning, or gathering up larger quantities of ore in general. as it stands, we truly sacrifice half our available space to carry a mining ship, so while thats a tiny bonus, the time involved and complictions of using the capship to mine really dont justify its use for the sake of painfully slowly toting along 2 extra bhm2s worth of ore.

let uncontrolled capships pick up items.

shove 3/4 xc and a bhm2 in it and you can mine 760/960 ore I dont see a problem

could do that yep. could also have my capship mining and picking up my drops simultaniously. its not a problem its just added features. id still have 760 at the end of the day without jumping through hoops.

I do see one practical problem with this. After a while of botting, or looting convoys, a sector becomes horridly clogged with junk cargo. It might get kinda infeasible once the cargo density increases beyond a certain point.

Maybe a better solution would be a 'get cargo' command. You target a piece of cargo, send the command, and it flies over and tries to pick it up, ignoring the other cargo.

yea i never really even thought about being able to command the ship to go after the loot, thats next level and sure that would be awesome too. but even if i could put the capship on one side and me on the other and have it follow into it.. id be thrilled. its just a matter of the ship being able to come in contact with a drop.. and it going into the hold. not necessarily a fancy command or it intelligently gathering it up.

the thing is, im new to capships in general.. and since the changes at christmas day, you can no longer dock third parties on full ships for reps or turret use in open space. wanting my ship to be versatile, its pretty well necessary to keep it near empty in order to do "everything" i can do without reconfiguring my ship every 10 minutes.. which requires a flight to a station capable of handling my ship.

so i find myself flying it around with one ship on board, or perhaps two, then i can dock friends for repping and turrets, mine, etc.. all seamlessly without constant travel and reconfiguration. (even to the point of putting a udv repship inside a bhm2 to save any drop of space, and repping at stations by offloading it)

stuffing a bunch of cargo ships into it is perfectly great if thats all you do with your ship. being able to change gears at a moments notice would be a welcome thing for me. you *must* have available space for others to use your ship in any way in the current state of the game, lots of people may not have noticed that change. while there are many topics in this speech, they are all part of the overall big picture in making better use of all the goliaths features.

-1

there's already too much magic associated with cap ships (overstuffing, no delay in using the insurance mission, etc.)

How is this exactly "magic" when they can already follow a whole bunch of commands?

+1 this absolutely should happen.. it’s a no brainer.

+1
We need a thing like this