“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.
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?
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.
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.
Ah ok so a catapult and deceleration zone.
I’m assuming small ships will be able to fly under an enemy capital’s shields and shoot the hull directly… I’m assuming this because it was in the ICP IIRC.
If this is the case and enemy ships won’t just crash into the shield, then carrier designers would take efforts to prevent the Anakin vs Droid Control Ship scenario, ie prevent enemies getting inside the hangars.
Real world HUDs exist to inform the pilot. In a game, they can easily damage gameplay.
In the real world, nuclear weapons in conventional warfare exist to eradicate enemies. In a game, they can easily damage gameplay.
Yes, high-functioning HUDs are the nuclear weapons of information gathering.
Yes there is no need for docking computer and i never used them cos landing is best part of flying for me, but some ppl do need them so i suggested that to not become selfish.
And runway will give epic feel as i said, i like epic feels and sights in games.
Nice example is in SQ42 and SC, huge hangar with many fighters in it and runway in the middle with doors on the end of it.
Also runway is neccesary if hangar is huge and there is one doors out of it, from safety reasons so if one pilot stumble his ship and crash it during landing/takeoff he wont damage other ships instead he will crash on runway and traffic control will close runway until runway is cleared (immersion).
Same thing is with large helichopters these days, from many airports they can’t takeoff/land on parking spot as they want, instead they need to taxing to runway. Saftey precautions!
Mate i love piloting as much as you.
And i too dont want simplistic solutions. (i am the type of person playing complex games DCS KSP and similar)
I am not saying autopilot there is difference between fully automated and some dampening system.
But i can also tell you nobody and i dare you to prove me wrong.
Nobody will be able to land more then one lucky time in the row if the object you are landing on is rotating in more then one axis. (even that would be complex if that axis happens to be in wrong spot.)
Let alone if it will change direction randomly.
Nobody.
Without any sort of translational help you just wont be able to land.
Carrier rotating in multiple axis is problem to land, so you’re right.
I was thinking from fighter pilot perspective and that carrier is very slow in maneuverability or that carrier have some kind of stabilization computer that will allow fighters to approach it normally.
But if carrier keeps spining in all directions with noticable speed that is big problem. And once you approach hangar gate and enter, carrier gravity will affect your ship being parallel and stable with carrier axis.
However i don’t know what kind of artificial gravity will be on those ships so that may determine many things.
AFAIK, there will not be any sort of artificial restrictions on rate of rotation. While it would take some time, it’s possible a carrier could roll fast enough to make landing impossible, even by computer.
assuming a lot of crew are on board carrier and once ship/fighter is landed there must be some kind of gravity that will tie them to the ground otherwise it is one giant rattler.
So it would be logic after fighter passes hangar gate on the way in that carrier gravity will affect fighter and giving him stability regarding to carrier axis so that leaves us with only problem which is approach the hangar gate, but i think we can handle that since carrier rotational speed is low while fighter is more maneuverable.
Except for all those well-regarded space games that have HUDs for exactly the reason you’d have a HUD. What you seem to want is to artificially deprive the player of such an obvious piece of functionality even though it makes no sense to do so, except for potential gameplay reasons which are tenuous at best.
Inside the carrier, the ships will be spun up along with the carrier. I am assuming we are going with “magical gravity generators” to negate the forces required to hold steady inside the carrier.
Those forces, however, should (will?) disappear outside the carrier. Imagine a carrier that has spent the time to accelerate their “roll” axis to one revolution per second. At a very reasonable carrier ship width of 40m, this means the door to the hangar is moving at ~63m/s or 227 kph tangential velocity…and is additionally rotating once per second. I don’t have the time right now to look up the formulas, but I have doubts about most ships having the ability to generate enough acceleration to keep up with such demands.
Such a situation would seem…unlikely to me, but it represents one of the more extreme possibilities. From what I remember of the ICP, landing in the Battleship was actually something of a nightmare because I could never remember where the openings were located, and the computer would randomly reorient the ship.
I suppose it depends on the intended design. If there is a desire for players to have to relay spotting information on enemies, I’m sure something could be devised as a reasonable broad scope counter intelligence. I personally don’t have an issue with immediate knowledge of the vessels in space: aside from the speed of light, nothing in the vacuum of a single system is so far away to be indistinguishable with another object visually. Atmospheres should interfere with such reliability, perhaps.
Thats why longy ships with recognizable shape is better solution in my opinion. I remember those stations in Elite driving me crazy looking for a mailslot/doors.
to find the entry to the coriolis stations was really easy once you have learned to look at there rotation axis.
in the first elite the entrance was always pointed to the planet.
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.
And so again I ask:
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!