How I imagine carriers:

jbox1

thekingofpotato could be done

Dumb

image https://i.imgur.com/j3MZYwZ.gif

image https://i.imgur.com/wXqG7Ln.gif

dream come true

jbox1

Dumb problem is, at that acceleration, I don’t care what you say, the pilot would probably be dead

the_guy545

jbox1 Perhaps just like Dumb's gif from Robotech, perhaps the ship could be launched from the deck using some sort of propulsion system, like a catapult or a rail system. From what I imagine, when the ship returns, it would land on the deck of the ship, sort of like today's modern aircraft carrier, and land on a certain pad, which proceeds to lower the ship into the hull of the carrier.
From there, you can look through interior view and look at the ships parked inside of the carrier...just like today's carriers. From there, there will be places where it can dock, perhaps like a docking block attached to the carrier and ship. If you want to let a ship leave the carrier, you go to interior view, select the desired ship, and then press perhaps an on-button, which will uncouple the ship, and then automatically guide itself (or perhaps manually if you want to) to the elevator, where it will rise outside of the hangar, and onto the flight deck.
From there, say give it a 3 second delay, and boom! The ship is launched with the aforementioned catapult or rail system. The size of the ship, as you guys discussed earlier, will depend on the size of the carrier and hangar bay.

DraconisTheWyvern

jbox1 not necessarily. The limitation of flight is mostly due to the G-force. In space the G-force you face is based on acceleration (if your perpendicular) and you don't have gravity adding onto the G-force faced by acceleration. It is a little more complicated as degrees can change the amount of G-forces. Also jets take off very quickly as well with aided propulsion with a electromagnetic or gas operated catapult.

Dumb

jbox1 nah....VF pilots have undergo special training(including bio-augmentation) to withstand high Gs without utterly snapping their necks
image https://i.imgur.com/CuxrCL0.gif

image https://i.imgur.com/FFxJgdt.gif
But......ofc theres exception
(see VF-21 vs ghost

)

ooouuuuuii

jbox1 I've been thinking about this and liked the way Avorion handled it.

So workshop and hangars are still a thing, but you need pilots in order to fly fighters. They can be bought in the crew tab (or they have their own bunks) and are more expensive than normal crew. It takes time for crew to go places, so fighters won't fly immediately when they are ordered to dispatch.

As for handling, fighters can't strafe or rotate in one spot, so they have to be moving forward in order to turn. They sacrifice turning speed for lack of drifting, but this can be improved with side thrusters. Fighters can be manually controlled or can be controlled via commands to attack, defend, etc.

For balancing purposes, I feel like fighters should have a battery instead of a reactor that can be filled up by power cells/plasma cells/Gatorade. This makes it that there won't be a giant cloud of fighters covering a ship because they need to recharge. What do you think?

Undated_Abyss

ooouuuuuii
Definitely think fighters should have limited ammunition so you cant just spam a crap ton of fighters without logistics to resupply and repair them.

Elethio

ooouuuuuii

This is a great discussion, loving the ideas here.

Fighters vs Drones
For a lot of reasons, drones make more sense for space combat, reaction speed, G-forces, expandability. But manned fighters are just cooler and more fun - So we need fighters with a crew (however there may be a place for drones with salvage and rescue below).

I totally agree fighter crew should come from the carrier ships, and I agree, pilots should be specific crew and more expensive than the average crew. However, Walt has crew diversity as a planned feature, so I think pilots could be added along with other types of specialized crew. I do think though that normal crew should be able to pilot fighters too, perhaps with lower efficiency or restricted to certain types of fighter cockpit or both.

Fighter cost
Should fighters creation be infinite or should there be a limit of some kind? I would love to have fighters either way but I think they would be best with some limits. Fighter creation could have a limited, either with directly with money - or with scrap.

Salvage and fighters
Salvage is another planned feature. As you can see the feature talks about hanger bays that launch drones to collect scrap (leftover ship parts from battles), this is then stored in 'holding areas' and eventually converted to cash at space stations. Hanger bays on carriers could switch to building 'scrap drones' during battle (or some fighters and some drones) which would retrieve the remains of destroyed ships and fighters and store them in 'holding areas' (ship sections like hangers, but just for storage). As well as a simple graphic to show roughly how full the storage is, a value could be shown for scrap parts on each ship, and when fighters are created, they could use up X amount of scrap (depending on the relative cost of ships). If there is no scrap left, then 'team money' could be deducted each time a fighter is built.

Enough crew?
With scrap giving you the ability to recycle enemies into new fighters, crew numbers becomes the new hard limit for fighter creation. Very often destroyed ships parts will have some surviving crew, if these parts are salvaged, as long as they are from friendly ships, you should be able to add rescued crews to your roster - thus increasing the numbers available for fighters too (if you allow crew as well as pilots to fly fighters that is). More importantly, if your pilots survive being shot-down, you could rescue them too with salvage drones (this may have a better chance at survival if you use heavier fighter cockpits with denser armour.

Swapping fighters mid-battle
The ideas I've read so far seem to revolve around selecting fighters when you construct your carrier. I agree that there should be some ready-made fighters, but I'd like to choose designs to build mid-battle depending on what happening. For this, it would be good to have a number of hanger 'slots' for each ship. These 'slots' would appear on the UI when a carrier is selected, and when pressed would open a list of available fighters/drones etc to build. This way depending on the number of hanger spaces you've created, you could have various combinations of fighters being built at once, and be able to change types on the fly.

Torpedoes
A slightly more unconventional use for hangers, but one I'd love to see. With the ability to create custom combinations for spawnable parts, I'd love to see a version of the hanger bay dedicated to Torpedoes.

Torpedo hangers would be limited to a single width slot, and need to be attached to its own launch door on the hull of the ship. However, torpedoes would launch at a faster speed than fighters. Similarly to fighters Torpedoes would be made-up of specific parts including some of the same ones, but crucially instead of pilots, they would install a basic guidance system instead - this should make Torpedoes much cheaper to build, not just in terms of the crew used but cheaper parts too. With this system, you could design various custom torpedo types, and then (as above) swap between which types of torpedo you build in each bay.

Even if we get only half of these features I'll be over the moon.

jbox1

DraconisTheWyvern It’d still kill you.

jbox1

Dumb I think someone compromised those missile’s guidance systems

DraconisTheWyvern

jbox1 flashy anime being flashy. Its rather ironic some gundam/mecha anime is very flashy while others are not particularly flashy which is strange since the gundam verse is a thing and inconsistent art styles to granted different studios/artist.

Dumb

the_guy545 launched from the deck using some sort of propulsion system, like a catapult or a rail system.

....actually,for almost all carriers in the marcross/robotech,theres only a robotic arm like that in Lafiel 's first vid which grabs the plane from its hanger/docking bay and toss it into the vacuum,then the arm detaches and the fighter leaves via its own propulsion system,the glowy spinny is merely guidance for the pilot to not launch their plane across several runways(?) as the dimension of these warships are pretty limited

Lafiel

bonus (censored)

Dibs

I really like potato's idea for drones. Should drones and fighters be seperate things, or would that over complicate it?

Lafiel

the_guy545

Dumb I was thinking more of like how that video Lafiel posted, with a rail system attached to the Ah up, and how those other ships were launched below the Yamato’s hull, only instead, they would be launched like a regular carrier, on a top flight deck.

lukeskywalker

you should make a boarding mod a lot of people want one

G4L4XY

lukeskywalker Not possible as of now. Many people have asked for a boarding mod before, but we'll have to wait until Walt adds it to the game.

lukeskywalker

like a harpoon that makes a hole n the ship and troops can zipline into the ship and take over the ship
also make troop a troop barraks so you can train troops but mabye for twice the cost to be troops

lukeskywalker

plus i really like the hanger idea its really cool keep up the good ideas 🙂

lukeskywalker

or ships that tranport troops