Carrier Conundrum

No.

If you want to follow “form follows function” then you first decide what the function should be. Not set up a poll of which form to use and let people think it will translate back into function … that really messed up backwards … would be an interesting way to design a (probably bad) game … but still traditionally backwards.

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I feel a stumpy design doesn’t fit the carrier ‘archetype’. In our world carriers of any kind are (almost?) always long rather than stumpy.

Simply putting the hangars in the middle of the ship, close to the center of rotation, would result in just as little mashing as in stumpy ships.

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There are some interesting shapes in the bottom left ‘stumpy’ ship that I’d like to see fleshed out more. I am so used to seeing the usual “Flying Nimitz” ships that a different approach would be a nice change. The way it wraps around the core runway with an asymmetrical command centre and launch tube is an interesting idea.

I highlighted the shapes to help it stand out more

I guess my answer would be a hybrid of both.

Also…GAAAAAARRRYYYYYYYYY

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I agree.

Let me rephrase myself. Don’t hit the vote button. Express the function that you would like to see in the game.

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Sure. And that’s the problem. We can guess at the operational requirements for carriers and fighters, but we are talking about a space game here. Air, sea and land all have their unique way of battling things out. And surface and subsurface warfare is different again.

[quote=“thelazyjaguar, post:30, topic:5202”]
Is the ship fast launching? Does it have an arresting function for incoming craft?[/quote]

Accelerate the carrier to warp transition velocity and let the fighters go. They can immediately go to warp and get where they’re going. The carrier can stay well clear of the fight. Recovery is ticklish, but the carrier could slow down a bit so that the returning fighters can maintain a larger velocity cushion for maneuvering.

This said, I don’t know if the game can handle interaction at those velocities.

We’re getting firmly into the realm of gameplay design now. Fighters are just a resource. There is a factory that creates them (and stores them), and the carrier can carry them. Each fighter it launches reduces the number that it carries. Each fighter it recovers increases the number that it carries. Damaged fighters are automatically repaired at some rate on a first-come-first-served basis.

Play with that to your heart’s content. Does the carrier pilot have to deploy the carrier in order to allow players to spawn into its fighters? Does the carrier pilot launch fighters or do the players launch their own? Is there some kind of collaboration involved, such as the carrier pilot getting the carrier up to fighter launch velocity, with the fighter pilots choosing their time of launch? Can the carrier design be messed with in terms of numbers of fighters carried, volume of resources available to repair and/or rearm, numbers of simultaneous spawning players, numbers of hangars, numbers of simultaneous service operations, speed of service operations, etc?

Can the factory that creates fighters do the same things as a carrier, except that it’s stationary and somewhere safe in friendly space on a planet or moon surface? So if your carriers are all destroyed (or off to war) and you need to defend your fighter factory, do players just spawn up there and defend it directly?

As far as the ship aesthetic is concerned, I described a simple system in a companion thread where a carrier was a long structure with a spine (or spines) that contained fighter bays. That could be taken to the point of having a cruciform cross-section, with essentially a set of ‘fighter magazines’ side-by-side-by-side, etc. Pop one fighter out and the next one slots into the bay. Rapid fire release the fighters. When a magazine is empty, that bay no longer releases fighters.

Release is to the ‘side’ of the ship. With the carrier near warp transition speed, the fighter just turns 90 degrees and goes to warp.

Returning fighters are placed at the back of the magazine, to be repaired and rearmed. If there are healthy fighters in front of it, the pilot can transfer to the lead fighter and launch in it. Meanwhile, the magazine services the fighters that it contains in order from first to last.

You could even animate the process of a magazine being loaded into a carrier. Suppose a carrier has space for 20 magazines. Some might not be loaded, giving it a broken spine look. The simplest solution is to always have all magazines in place (fixed geometry). The next simplest is to run the carrier through a structure that puts the magazines in while that part of the ship is hidden (modular geometry).

And then you can play with that forever, with different magazine types and so on. A bomber magazine. A fighter magazine. Magazines with all the characteristics that I assigned to the carrier as a whole. Transferring magazines between carriers. And so on.

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I voted longy because carriers just have to be long and I believe the original vision was best. It just looks much more impressive and it also helps separate them from the other ship classes visually. Since you can’t really judge how big objects in space are by looking at them, this becomes even more important. Is it a bomber, or is it a far away carrier? It should be obvious, from looking at the ships once, which function they serve. Big ships are also expected to be slow, so I see no issue here.
If they move too fast all hell is supposed to break loose.

Science fiction also has to be somewhat relatable in my opinion, things have to be recognisable to some degree, If thats not the case they just become weird gizmo thingies in space.
Wasn’t that also part of the appeal of Battlescape? The cockpits have buttons, wires and tubes for that reason.

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I’m thinking of an alternate solution, one that has nothing to do at all with carrier shape/spin rate. So let me spit that out there and see what you think…

When in close proximity of a carrier, how about an autopilot function on the docking/launching ships that keeps them on the same xz plane as the carrier? This effectively keeps the carrier static relative to the docking/launching ship, alleviating, if not eliminating, any rotational movement by the carrier. The autopilot won’t dock the ship, but it will make it ‘level’.

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Yes … similar to the ICP … right … ?

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I’ve never had a computer that could play it, unfortunately. :’(

That’s the inertial Sphere of Influence described earlier. When a small craft enters the SoI (exact distance probably needing gameplay tweaking) the onboard computers begin to compensate for the movements of the larger ship. If the carrier is rotating at 20 degrees per second, the small craft automatically begins to circle the carrier at 20 degrees per second.

It’s not even a particularly advanced concept: missiles already calculate intercept trajectories, and I think everyone is aware of the capabilities of autonomous drones.

I think everyone who has commented “it won’t be that hard” has either never attempted to land a small craft in a small hole moving in any direction (doubly so if the revolutions are producing a roll relative to you and not just a translation) or had too much practice and forget this game has to target an audience who has never played before. Don’t forget to consider that you must match the speed of revolution, which means faster linear speeds further away and slowing down as you come in, as well as speed of translation (which will vary based on how far from the axis of revolution the hangar opening is, as well as how fast the ship itself is moving), and finally any accelerations in both rolling and translation axes, which may additionally vary as the carrier pilot maneuvers.

Much of this is “easily” overcome with practice, and the rest by having verbal comms, but neither of those are inclusive in the idea of a game that can be picked up for short periods of time and left feeling satisfied. Since the devs have stated they want players to be able to get into the action, fight, and be able to be done within half an hour or so (and, I assume, they want players to have fun doing so) most of the “tedious” mechanics should have some sort of assist to make picking up the controller enjoyable. There are games I never played twice (looking at you, Counter Strike) because the skill floor and skill ceiling were both far too high for me to feel like I was having fun at any point I was playing.

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Hang on, in a forum for a game that has always been touted as high on skill requirement with a community that is about as anti-dumbing-down-for-mass-market as you can get, you’re saying CS, one of the most popular and well received games in the history of PC gaming, was too hard?

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I feel the shape won’t make a difference as if it were a real ship, the major forces acting on the ship and people inside would be the acceleration in the direction of movement. It also means you can simulate gravity without rotation and rely on acceleration via the engine, ie. How gravity is simulated in The Expanse novels.

Also, if you rely on rotation for simulated gravity then come combat it will be the smaller value compared to quick manoeuvres at large G.

So without having any idea exactly how they’re going to work, here’s my idea based on the stated problems and just some basic real-world stuff:

If the problem is flyswatting incoming ships, put the hangar entrances near the centre of the body on a long, thin carrier. They will move less, and incoming fighters will know exactly where to go. They won’t have to remember fore from aft, they just aim at the centre of mass.

Put the exits at the ends of the carrier. Then when you’re inside the carrier there’s a clear flow of traffic from the centre towards the ends. Also, fighters inside can be covered by the magic dampeners as they fly out the end, and once they’re there, they will be completely clear of the body of the carrier.

Also maybe on the entry doors you could have a dampener to slow down incoming fighters so they can enter at speed without smashing into the hangar walls, so it’s kind of like the space version of arresting cables.

If you have a short, stubby carrier then no matter where you put the doors, sometimes they’ll be moving fast, and it’ll be harder to figure out where the doors are, since there won’t be any obvious at-a-glance indication of which side you’re looking at.

There is a difference between unrealistic dumbing down for the masses (airplanes in space being an example) and realistic flight assist that helps compensate landing on a vessel controlled by another human. Nothing about my suggestion requires a suspension of belief or suspension of physics: we already have many such systems in place in our current world with current technology.

I’m not advocating somehow boosting small craft performance to enable this effect: the flight assist would simply work within the constraints of the capabilities of the craft to negate as much of the unwanted acceleration as possible. Fighters using such a system will be able to compensate for far more than a corvette, because they have better acceleration values.

And yes, I intensely hate CS. I am gawdawful at twitchy FPS with single-shot kill mechanics in place, and with no skill based MM it is nothing but an unpleasant experience for me because the average player is FAR better than I am. CS has a high skill floor in online play to not be utterly useless. As such, I played it once for several hours and never picked it up again.

Something tells me that having a perfectly reasonable inertial reference for landing small craft will have no/little impact on reducing the skill cap, while simultaneously reducing the skill floor in a relatively meaningless but potentially incredibly frustrating aspect of the game.

TL;DR: Skill ceiling remains untouched, skill floor for a complex but big picture “meaningless” action drops. Not understanding how it could be put in a bad light.

one more thought:
Ships can only dock while the carrier is in landing mode. This means it will not change direction or change speed. If manovering, landing is not allowed. (maybe hangardoors are shut and red light glow)

Mmm, I don’t particularly like that concept. After all, two objects with the same velocity and acceleration are, relative to one another, stationary. It seems to me that limiting landing to periods of non-acceleration is arbitrarily limiting, and also begins to ask what about objects in a stable orbit? Decaying orbit? Free fall? Other than gameplay reasons (I can’t think of many, with none of them being particularly valuable), there is no reason to implement such a feature.

I voted for long because I found the long ship look better and the stubby concept doesn’t evoke much to me so far.

That said, the carrier needs to:

  • have an easily recognisable shape, so a player can instantly identify it as a carrier (instead of a cruiser, destroyer or even corvette or station - distances may be hard to judge)
  • look like something players can identify as “carrier”, so it has to either respect SciFi conventions or have features that distinctively scream Carrier! at first glance
  • look good

Traditionally, carriers are long and flat, probably due to resemblance of RL aircraft carriers, so people will recognise them as such. In addition, other capital ships are generally thicker and shorter to better show sturdiness and firepower, so the shapes are easy to identify. Inversely, long and thin instinctively shows that this ship isn’t meant to take too much heavy fire, as a support vessel.
As such, long is the safe bet.
This doesn’t prevent you for going stubby, but you may have to go further to make it distinctive and “carrier-looking”. One solution would be to have big fat hangar bays bulging out of it, contrasting with the more regular “sturdy tombstone” shapes of the other capital ships.

As for what is more realistic, our ships already have magical god-knows-how-many-g inertia compensators, armour/shields and fuel-less drives, so I wouldn’t pay too much attention to that for simply determining the shape itself. Having coherent justifications will be more important later, possibly once you work on the details of the models, but it can be made to fit the general shape.

Also, I guess it is too late for tower-shape capital ships? Now that the Expanse finally gave the general public an iconic image of vertical ships (as God and Heinlein intended), we can start using them in SF (while still having it stand out at the moment).
But I guess at this point of the design, it would require too much resources and time to backtrack on that decision.

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ok, my last and final agrument for the long carrier:

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It’s not like you need a runway to launch a fighter and a longer ship is just a easier target.Really a carrier in space could just be like a sphere, able to launch and land fighters in any direction without really needing to turn the ship anywhere. The same for it’s defensive armament. Death ‘spheres’ have so many advantages, so long as you don’t need aerodynamics.

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Oh I completely agree regarding realistic flight assist. You are aware though that BS is twitch FPS?

That is an assumption I shared until a few days ago when this discussion started and I gave it some thought.
What’s the gameplay going to be for the player operating the carrier?

If they generally need to stay out of combat, what will they spend their time doing that is fun for the player? Perhaps they have some remote sensor drones that they can launch and control from a map view…

If there is no engaging non-combat gameplay for carrier pilots, then they need to be able to dive into battles and should be designed accordingly.

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