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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Obviously carriers should be flat and wide like a pancake so as to harken back to the ancient times when primitive atmospheric aircraft landed on flat land bases and used the friction of the ground to slow down.
The benefit of doing this in space is that you get twice the surface area, because you can land things on the top and the bottom sides of the ship.
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Girls should decide in this kind of poll, hehehe!
I voted for longy, i think longy gives option for larger hangar with runway in the middle and fighters alongside it while stumpy can provide two or more smaller hangars separated on two floors.
One huge hangar with many fighters in it gives epic feel and that is enough reason for me to go for it.
Space is all about epic sights!
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Hello,
I would prefer a bit more detail on the carriers to be fleshed out a bit as several others have already stated. I think there are some interesting designs in the stumpy and a good chance to do something unique. Seeing as how this vote is going to happen anyway I would like to vote for stumpy but I think the one @selbie pointed out is neat looking.
The carrier design should have no requirement to look like a traditional carrier.
That’s what the HUD is for.
Spheres are the obvious way to build combat spaceships, but too many people can’t get their heads around that. Anyway, IBS has an art style that they’ve already gone with, and spheres would be jarringly incompatible with it. Maybe cubes. Borg cubes.
The HUD is a crutch that exists to move space combat into the realm of the possible for a bunch of kids sitting at computers. It should never be used to eliminate doubt. Doubt is what you want in a combat game. Knowing with certainty that things are true about your opponent is the first step to creating banal and repetitive gameplay.
And don’t anybody go all ballistic on this idea and come up with absurd assertions about making all ships look identical, yet have completely different capabilities. The point is to introduce enough doubt that players are inspired to approach problems in different ways, depending on how that individual deals with doubt. Some will have a tendency to charge in. Some will want to take time to get better information. Some will grow fearful and back off. In a large multiplayer game, you’ll get a mix of responses, and a team that doesn’t work together may well fracture as they decide to go their separate ways, sure that their approach to dealing with the incomplete information is the best way.
I thing longer looks cooler. Simple as that for me really!
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It’s far more enjoyable to me, though. If the game is anything like the ICP and the limited time I spent in early pre-alpha, I will take the time to learn it because it was difficult, but still slightly forgiving. No, I couldn’t shoot down the best one vs one, but I could still hold my own, and missiles will hopefully provide a low skill ceiling/low skill floor sort of combat. I think most of us agree that we don’t want missiles to be the monstrosities they were in ICP.
I agree. Still ships siloutte should be unique enough. Extra Credits has a video on that… Someone else also allready mentioned this.
A much mor important factor than “rotational forces”…
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Spaceship design or size should not be the determining factor in whether something is a capital ship or a fighter. I would expect your ‘long range sensors’ can tell the mass of the craft or the energy output/consumption before you even see it. All that should be hidden from the HUD is what kind of meaness it’s packing. Lasers vs nukes will change the play once you commit. You could possibly easily take down a bigger ship if they can’t counter your offensive power.
I think this is pretty much what it boils down to.
Without any sort of help from the game, i really doubt anyone could land. No matter the shape of the carrier.
That is what i meant by saying it being pointless. (sorry for my lousy English)
“Everyone” does long carriers. This does mean that a brand new player has a better chance of recognizing the silhouette of the long carrier as such, but this is also a branding opportunity to not do that. I vote you make them stumpy and use lighting (light emitter placement) to make the carrier visually distinct and recognizable by its silhouette at an unknown distance.
Beyond that, the bottom stumpy carrier and the top long carrier look the best.
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Uh no autopilots please, we play space and flight games so we can piloting ships, landing is most amuzing and challenging part of flying, at least for me and more challenge means more fun.
I don’t like one button games, however if there would be option to remove or disable autopilot than ok i don’t want to be selfish.
I like game mehanics that involve physics and player skills.
Elite has docking computer that’s optional and that is good solution.
Once again longy carriers with huge hangar and runway with ships alongside it would give epic feel and sight…powerfull!
Cheers!
Elite’s stations are static. There is no need for an autopilot.
Why do you want a runway?
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Elite’s stations also, as far as I remember, have a sphere of influence as well. You stop having to correct for rotation when you’re close enough. The Infinity Combat Prototype had the same principle for the spawn hangars, to stop you crashing into the side of the ship when you spawned.
I’m pretty sure the elimination of doubt is exactly why we have HUDs. If you can see it, it is more than realistic that your ship will be able to visually identify it and display that information on screen.
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I’m going to have to agree with you regarding HUDs. Despite JB’s hatred of removing doubt, there are multiple systems in place in the real world (IFF being a primary one) to tell your allies who you are, what you are, and where you are.
Allies will always want to know exactly what allies are where, and will always be attempting to deduce the exact same knowledge of the enemy. The enemy in turn does everything they can to either mask their presence (near impossible in space) or mimic something they aren’t (very much possible in space).
Given that heat signatures are nearly impossible to hide in the vacuum of space, a ship is not likely to be concerned about emissions during flight. This means all allies can have information as up-to-date as information travels: for discussion purposes, I will be assuming all communications are instantaneous. I cannot imagine communication delays being implemented into the game, so this seems like a reasonable assumption. Given that communications can be encrypted and the communications are instantaneous, there is no reason other than “gameplay” for an ally to not know every detail of every other ally’s ship, should they so desire, and as long as the other ship has not gone dark (waiting in ambush on the surface of a planet, perhaps).
Given that this information can be provided by something other than visual confirmation, it would actually make sense for every ship to be as close as possible in terms of profile. The more similar each vessel is, the greater the confusion enemy detection systems would have. If you have two ships, one being a half-scale model of the second, and place them at a distance where each is the same size to a third observer, there is no way to differentiate what is what without having to rely on an “active” system (using a laser beam to ping the distance, for example).
That all being said, it really does come down to “gameplay” as to how accurate the HUD values become.
I don’t recall anybody asking for an autopilot, but I certainly hope any system has, at a minimum, on/off options.
I’m not sure that I agree with the phrase “runway” per se, but having a tunnel for generating initial velocity is actually not a bad concept. The faster small craft are moving upon departing the carrier, the faster they arrive at distant targets, and the less time the enemy has to muster a response. I believe I mentioned it earlier, where the carrier could essentially “fire” bombers or torpedo boats at enemy capitals/installations, instead of the small craft relying only on their own engines.
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