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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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)