Forums » Suggestions
Capital ship hybrid occupant count increase
Although it makes sense that the occupant count on Capital ships is limited to mirror the number of available turret slots, there are some applications where it makes sense and is not game breaking to allow more occupants to ride along in a ship.
I often bring new players that I recruit from my local area to the Starship defense event as crew members aboard the various ships in the Spectre fleet. There have been various occasions where a fully crewed ship with an empty hangar bay prevented pilots out on combat runs from docking, rearming and reloading.
I like the immersion of having crew members aboard the ship assigned specific roles as they would be aboard an actual spacecraft of that scale, examples being weapon systems officers, radar systems officers, and landing signals officers.
I intend to continue writing plugins for the game, and some concept plugins that I've envisioned are aimed at crew members aboard ships. The ranking and structures in my guild designate some pilots as crew members and others as Wing members as a part of our role play.
I'm not suggesting that Capital ships have unlimited slots, but rather that crew and hanger slots are counted separately. Ideally the game would have some function to differentiate the amount of maximum hangar occupants based on the volume of their ships and the available volume left in the hangar. If that is too much to ask and too difficult to implement, then I would request that ships like the Goliath have three crew slots and three hangar slots rather than just three slots total, and ships like the Trident have four crew slots and four hangar slots.
Thank you for taking the time and effort to keep this game up and running smoothly for us, I love this game and I intend to pay and play until I die. I'm grateful for previous suggestions you've accepted and implemented.
Sincerely,
Ultionis
I often bring new players that I recruit from my local area to the Starship defense event as crew members aboard the various ships in the Spectre fleet. There have been various occasions where a fully crewed ship with an empty hangar bay prevented pilots out on combat runs from docking, rearming and reloading.
I like the immersion of having crew members aboard the ship assigned specific roles as they would be aboard an actual spacecraft of that scale, examples being weapon systems officers, radar systems officers, and landing signals officers.
I intend to continue writing plugins for the game, and some concept plugins that I've envisioned are aimed at crew members aboard ships. The ranking and structures in my guild designate some pilots as crew members and others as Wing members as a part of our role play.
I'm not suggesting that Capital ships have unlimited slots, but rather that crew and hanger slots are counted separately. Ideally the game would have some function to differentiate the amount of maximum hangar occupants based on the volume of their ships and the available volume left in the hangar. If that is too much to ask and too difficult to implement, then I would request that ships like the Goliath have three crew slots and three hangar slots rather than just three slots total, and ships like the Trident have four crew slots and four hangar slots.
Thank you for taking the time and effort to keep this game up and running smoothly for us, I love this game and I intend to pay and play until I die. I'm grateful for previous suggestions you've accepted and implemented.
Sincerely,
Ultionis
+1
So.. the first question here: Are you okay with these passengers having to board at a station, instead of being able to dock?
We already have issues with capships and "behemoth stuffing" and so on. This is going to result in a long-planned rework of capship hangar space computation relative to ship size, but we've just let things "keep going" for the moment, as we've had higher-priority issues to address.
But, at the same time, I'm not inclined to make the "magical capship TARDIS" problem worse.
Mandating that your passengers embark from a station would circumvent this problem, to some extent. But, those passengers would also have no way to DISembark until you dock to a station again, which could require some patience on the part of the passengers.
Also, in general I'd like to support the kind of role-play you have going. I've written about such concepts in old RFCs (that one mentioning a hypothetical CO / XO role breakdown). I just don't want to make the capship-packing trade exploits any worse than they already are.
We already have issues with capships and "behemoth stuffing" and so on. This is going to result in a long-planned rework of capship hangar space computation relative to ship size, but we've just let things "keep going" for the moment, as we've had higher-priority issues to address.
But, at the same time, I'm not inclined to make the "magical capship TARDIS" problem worse.
Mandating that your passengers embark from a station would circumvent this problem, to some extent. But, those passengers would also have no way to DISembark until you dock to a station again, which could require some patience on the part of the passengers.
Also, in general I'd like to support the kind of role-play you have going. I've written about such concepts in old RFCs (that one mentioning a hypothetical CO / XO role breakdown). I just don't want to make the capship-packing trade exploits any worse than they already are.
Yes, I'm specifically referencing having three crew members "walk" aboard at a capital station on a Goliath for instance, while leaving the available hangar space for pilots who fly in separate, without any "stuffing" type possibility. If passengers aboard standard behemoths or atlases (who walked on at a station) could disembark from the smaller ship "on foot" from within the capital ship's hangar into the capital "bridge" that would be an added bonus.
This added "transfer" feature would allow a fully crewed behemoth to deposit a full crew into a Goliath, or pick them up and ferry them, ship less, somewhere else, which I find cool
In response to your CO XO concept, as a guild implementation, not a game feature;
We in the Spectres have decided that our rank structure, while not standard to any real world progression, was best formulated by segregating wing, crew, and ship commanders into the main three layers.
Our enlisted ranks are single seat pilots.
Our non commissioned officers are squadron leaders, wing leaders and crew aboard ships.
Our commissioned officers are those in command of their own ships.
Essentially receiving a ship from the guild constitutes a council conferred commission, and being made an officer of the crews is a non commissioned rank, but an officer nonetheless.
For instance, we have a Warrant Officer, FoxTactic, who, for all intents and purposes short of direct piloting, is the XO of my Goliath while I directly pilot my Trident. Her rank is Warrant Officer, her role is WSO, Weapons Systems Officer, (Gunny or Wizzo informally) and she is in charge of the RSO and LSO if present aboard my Goliath, the Mercy.
We in the Spectres have decided that our rank structure, while not standard to any real world progression, was best formulated by segregating wing, crew, and ship commanders into the main three layers.
Our enlisted ranks are single seat pilots.
Our non commissioned officers are squadron leaders, wing leaders and crew aboard ships.
Our commissioned officers are those in command of their own ships.
Essentially receiving a ship from the guild constitutes a council conferred commission, and being made an officer of the crews is a non commissioned rank, but an officer nonetheless.
For instance, we have a Warrant Officer, FoxTactic, who, for all intents and purposes short of direct piloting, is the XO of my Goliath while I directly pilot my Trident. Her rank is Warrant Officer, her role is WSO, Weapons Systems Officer, (Gunny or Wizzo informally) and she is in charge of the RSO and LSO if present aboard my Goliath, the Mercy.
To be clear, I am in no way asking for the cargo space or the hangar capacity to be increased or affected, I just don't want to have gunners that boarded at a station preclude docking by other pilots in an empty cap ship hangar, or have pilots docked in a hangar preclude "gunners" from walking aboard. That's the gist of my suggestion as a baseline
Yes, I get it. We'll take a look. There are a few different layered systems at work here, from different eras of capship development, and we have to get a full picture of how they all interact to see where we stand.
I'm only here because "magical capship TARDIS" should be nerfed and that means no more magically stuffing extra ships in!
Incarnate said:
Mandating that your passengers embark from a station would circumvent this problem, to some extent. But, those passengers would also have no way to DISembark until you dock to a station again, which could require some patience on the part of the passengers.
Why not just let passengers use `/explode` to return to their home station if they don't want to wait for the ship to reach its destination? Or maybe a new command should be added for this situation. I recommend `/airlock`. Afterall, exploding in the halls of a capship could get messy.
Mandating that your passengers embark from a station would circumvent this problem, to some extent. But, those passengers would also have no way to DISembark until you dock to a station again, which could require some patience on the part of the passengers.
Why not just let passengers use `/explode` to return to their home station if they don't want to wait for the ship to reach its destination? Or maybe a new command should be added for this situation. I recommend `/airlock`. Afterall, exploding in the halls of a capship could get messy.
/airlock <player> command could also have factional repurcussions since you just murdered someone.
Also killing a capship loaded with gunners could credit the shooter with a kill count for each onboard. Give the hunters of capships another incentive for thier style of gameplay.
Agree with Spidey about removing overstuffing, as long as we got the unload at any station option (capship loaded with cargo only, no small ships) discussed before without needing a capship dock (capship is just exposed while unloading).
Also killing a capship loaded with gunners could credit the shooter with a kill count for each onboard. Give the hunters of capships another incentive for thier style of gameplay.
Agree with Spidey about removing overstuffing, as long as we got the unload at any station option (capship loaded with cargo only, no small ships) discussed before without needing a capship dock (capship is just exposed while unloading).
this could be cool cos we could finally man all the turrets while still having a pilot as well.