Why are folks postulating these antics by carrier pilots? A carrier pilot who doesn’t facilitate pickups and dropoffs is going to be viewed as either inept or a troll. In either case, he’s going to be ignored or voted out of the position, whatever the game allows.
All a carrier pilot needs to do is cancel out any rotation, then drift. The carrier is a space station at that point. No muss, no fuss. If anything, IBS can have a single button function that puts a carrier into this drift mode.
This means that carriers are non-combatants because they need to sit still for periods of time. The ships that don’t need to worry about sitting still are the armored fortresses of cruisers and battleships.
As carriers could be viewed as movable space stations, they could actually BE movable space stations. Take a space station model, put in a special jump drive that just moves it from point A to point B and it always stays stationary relative to the local star. Now you can move around a big ol spawn point that retains all the characteristics of a space station - something that players would be familiar with. Limit the frequency of jumping so that the thing isn’t ping ponging around the system and you’ve got an interesting gameplay mechanic.
Other ships that have hangars would still retain the ability to pick up ships by drifting without rotation, keeping that experience in the game.
It’s just another way to think about mobile spawn points.
Yes but always looking in what direction is spinning and on which side are gates if there were no advertisement boards in front is annoying! at least for me.
cheers!
good point!
why not take example from RL carriers, so when jet fighter is going to land carrier is holding constant speed and direction.
pilot asks clearance for landing, if ship is in some kind of turn, pilot is ordered with go-around until ship takes steady direction and speed and proceed those information to jet pilot.
I was really hoping that the carrier would act as some sort of commander role, with a strategic map and actions, however this is probably out-of-scope.
It would be cool if the carrier commander could mark enemy ships and stuff like that, coordinating the attack, deciding spawn priorities, lauching mobile shield drones that could be controlled and moved to offer shield walls that can be used for cover and tactical situations.
The carrier could also have something like a shield bubble targeting apparatus, like a “gun” that automatically targets your chosen friendly fighter ship and creates a powerful shield-bubble around it. That way it could act as a countermeasure to 50 ships simultaneously shooting a single ship. Managing the spawn and repair energy, weapons energy and shield energy and balancing those depending on current circumstances could also make for some awesome gameplay.
Another cool thing would be if carriers were manned by a second or third team-member, this teammember could operate guntowers and missile bays and for example the already mentioned mobile shield walls.
Lots of cool things that would be probably more possible with a bigger budget.
I’m thoroughly enjoying this thread, so many cool ideas.
So, Longy or Stumpy, I can’t decide, good arguments for both.
I think the only way to know for sure, would be to play-test both options.
What if the carrier commander has the option to choose between the 2 carrier designs, Longy or Stumpy as a strategic choice, or preferred play-style, depending on the Battlescape location?
Play some ARMA 3 Invade and Annex. Helicopter pilots transport troops from base to the battlefield and back, plus perform heavy lifts of vehicles, supplies and so on. It’s one of the most sought roles in the game. Carrier pilots in IBS would do the same sorts of things.
An important twist would be that carriers should not be mobile spawn points, which would pretty much require them to sit somewhere and do nothing. So if there are mobile spawn points, a carrier would only transport them wherever they need to go, keep them supplied, etc.
Carriers then become an important lifeline, and their location, destruction and defense would all be critical to a team’s success.
If carriers must be mobile spawn points, then they could be flown somewhere by a pilot, then abandoned. The pilot would hop into whatever ship he cared to fly from the carrier’s complement. This is the Sunderer model in Planetside 2; just get the vehicle somewhere, deploy it, and go off to fight.
I don’t have any hard numbers to work with, but from what I recall the Carrier was originally mocked up as being the biggest of the capital ships. Let’s increase the width to 400m: the ship now only has to be rolling once every ten seconds. Add in a second axis, and even if the hangar is not offset from the second axis, we now only have to be moving around each axis once per 14 seconds. Let’s offset the hangar by another 400m to the side, bringing the effective distance to 564m, and now I only have to be revolving once every 20 seconds.
And that was for 227 kph movement perpendicular to the desired angle of approach (assuming craft fly into and out of the ship at right angles to the carrier) with a rotational factor not even being accounted for.
Of course, I was presenting a situation where small craft would be incapable of landing even with computer assistance as a way of demonstrating how I (and I assume most people here) are not asking for a scripted landing scene. The situation was intentionally absurd, not because I expect it to never happen (somebody, somewhere, and probably more often than will be desired, will spin up a carrier to such speeds for the reason of “because they can”) but because I wanted an example.
That being said, you want slow carriers, but then want them to shuttle goods, and reference helicopters in ARMA 3. Shuttling things back and forth in ARMA 3 is not a slow, show-up-and-sit-still for hours role. I’m not even sure you yourself understand what you want a carrier to do: you first say they just need to show up, negate movement, and drift. Then when asked how that could possibly be exciting, you come back and say they should shuttle things around, not act as a spawn point, and have a generally “active shuttle” role.
I’m cool with either design, really. Slow-moving “forward camps” that get delivered and left unmanned as a spawn point, or fast-moving “shuttles” that have insane warp speeds to get back and forth from spawn point to battle to spawn point to battle ad nauseum. But you have to pick one or the other.
Arma, Insurgency, Squad… These are games that benefit from team coordination and tactics and that is achieved perfectly well without some self appointed commander.
There will always be some players that zerg and having some tactician directing them isn’t going to change that.
If you look at the post I quoted myself from, you’ll see I suggested an overview with remote controlled drones - i think this would be far more practical from a gameplay perspective.
If carriers become point to point transports rather than mobile spawn points, that complicates things:
In Arma I&A, helis work because they are free and there are other vehicles available.
If carriers are necessary to get from spawn station to a battle around another planet in a reasonable time, then players need to be able to access carriers pretty easily rather than them being something that can only be acquired after a nontrivial amount of resource has been accumulated.
Sure. I&A works the way that it does for those reasons. Change the rules and the balance of the gameplay changes.
If they’re worried about losing all their carriers, add the equivalent of a HALO option. The normal way of doing that is to allow players to go wherever they want. On the I&A server I code for, the HALO is limited. You can only go to the current AO at a specific point and after a wait. The wait is determined by the distance to the AO and the number of players online. More players means a longer wait (to encourage use of any helicopters that players are flying).
Alternately, make the carriers durable so they can’t be lost. You can blow the crap out of them and ruin their ability to carry aircraft, but that can be repaired and restored. Mostly, you’re just reducing their effectiveness for a period of time.
There are all sorts of formulations that could be worked out, but any design discussion here is taking place in a vacuum; there isn’t any official gameplay to balance such a system against so it’s fairly pointless.
Now that would be pretty neat.
Natural selection had something similar and Combined arms for DCS there the commander is in control of NPCs and can if he decides to take rudimentary direct control of any unit(except player vehicles of course).
This does however is limited to certain kind of people. And not every wannabe commander was good at it
However it could make steeper learning curve…
Here is an example of the Conundrum in another game, X3: Terran Conflict:
This carrier has 10 hangars on its deck. It is also one of the fastest M7 class(Frigate) within the game, probably also in turning speed.
On first fighter launch I simply pitch up, which makes the ship collide with most of the fighters(green markers). On second fighter launch I pitch and strafe upwards, making it even harder for the fighters to evade. On third fighter launch I just show how silly rotating that fast looks like from a third perspective.
In X3, launched fighter velocity is aligned with carrier until they are out of their hangars, afterwards any further velocity alignment is gone. Finally, when a fighter is in a position to start the landing process(‘landing strip’), collisions with the carrier are simply disabled.
What abou some kind of “docking mode”, where the carrier can not move until the docking is complete. That, of course, could only happen when the ships are having a secure distance to the fight or when the fight is over. Maybe stuff like refuling or ammo exchange can be done without docking
That won’t change any current motion. You could set a target to remain motionless compared to, but I’d rather not have such a strange implement when a very old program had the “inertial drag” effects required to land more easily.
Carriers are probably the most difficult/expensive ships for us to produce so with the shipping game it’s highly unlikely we’ll have more than one. That being said we may patch in additional carriers in the future.
