I think this is overthought. Pick whatever looks better. (I prefer asymetry … but eh)
Add inluence/fake gravity/magic like from the ancient ICP.
Problems solved. Move on.
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Stumpy is fine, but a bit of flavor might be making them multi-story. Shortening by half gives you two ships one on top of the other essentially.
Magic inertial dampeners are not a problem. I’m certain everyone that has posted in this topic would agree.
The problem is which design works best for gameplay.
Whatever design works for gameplay can be made to look good - It shouldn’t be the other way around.
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Make capital ships point-and-click, open up a whole new type of gameplay and let the path algorithm soften turn rates…
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I think it’s harder to come up with a design that couldn’t work for most gameplay. We might as well fly giant cucumbers.
I don’t really see where the big influence of ship design is when it comes to gameplay … care to elaborate?
Fast turning long ships suffer from ‘Fly Swatter Syndrome’ in a few games. 
It’s more an issue of what gameplay you can get out of one design versus the other. If you want slashing attacks along the length of the carrier, obviously the long slender design is better for that. If you want to have an open hangar bay because of the way you’ve structured gameplay, then the blocky design is better for that. And so on. Simple gameplay can use any model, but gameplay with any depth at all leverages the subtleties of the game pieces, including their shapes.
I usually like sleek designs, but i found the stumpy to be so original.
I think the whole thing is pointless really. Pick by design.
Landing on something rotating will be near impossible.
So i don’t think it matters at all !
No matter where you place the hangar/runway
Landing on something moving will be out of the question it would have to move/rotate super slowly to be really possible and in very limited direction only for players to be able to land on.
You can try now actually. One player in corvette just spins the ship and in random direction + turns of power.
and the other tries to put his bottom on his hull i bet even on center rotation it would be rather challenging.
Now this was the Easy case he was just spinning in one direction not changing it.
Can you imagine he would maneuver randomly ?
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I can’t imagine that the carrier would ever be turning so fast as to make landings/takeoffs too awkward, and dampeners on the inside seem acceptable to me. I don’t have much preference, this is just to say that I don’t think the long design should be discounted.
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Well…we kinda “know” what carriers do. They carry strike craft to/from a combat area and also provide logistical support to them (fuel,ordnance). Carrier’s today have to bring aircraft within striking distance of their targets. The distance in our game would be dictated by the interceptor/bomber/corvette’s jump range. Is it the distance from the earth to the moon? Is it the distance from earth to mars? Yeah…we don’t know. As you’ve hinted, details on gameplay are frighteningly absent.
Pointless to discuss though? Not necessarily. I’m usually a fan of “form follows function.”
In that respect, the shape of carriers today is because aircraft need a certain velocity to get airborne. In space, you don’t necessarily need a long shape, unless you intend to launch them at high velocities or need that much distance to slow an approaching craft. While it may find some sort of desirable combat function, it ultimately isn’t necessary in space. Of course, we don’t know what the intent is. Is the ship fast launching? Does it have an arresting function for incoming craft?
How about the expendable nature of strike craft? In the real world, you would either have to fly in replacements, pick them up in port, or reassemble them from a shipping container. This has an economic cost to it. If the carrier just serves as a spawn point and replacement ships (at least interceptors) cost nothing, then continuous suicide runs become a viable tactic and are more efficient than returning. If, however, losses cause a real economic impact to the team then returning to the carrier and preserving the strike craft becomes more desirable. In turn, easy docking with the carrier also becomes desirable.
For the fly-swatter effect, if the capital ships are controlled by an RTS setup, then turn rates could easily be limited. I think something to dampen out relative velocities would still be welcome in this case though.
It might seem that I’m making your point for you now, and I mostly am as I tend to agree with it, but I’m going to diverge here a bit.
If form does really follow function, then perhaps we should actually consider this a vote for how we want carriers to function in the game. What kind of experience do we want it to be?
In Star Citizen, they have craft flying down the enclosed launch “tube” of the Bengal. No catapult and no real point to it other than the aesthetic feel of fast acceleration through a narrow corridor.
With a stubby carrier, I would opt for the Babylon 5 approach where the craft is just rotated and “dropped” through an open door. Of course, I don’t recall the return setup being shown, so it might turn into a crazy setup of scripted movements through the interior of the ship.
Anyway, I’ve rambled long enough. What kind of gameplay aesthetic would everyone else like to see?
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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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