Well, I already outlined the idea somewhere else, but here's my suggestion on handwaving the whole docking shebang.
First of all, a blast from the past, the Taiidan Flagship:
The blue glowy bits were the actual hangars for smaller crafts. They consist of little more than a slight hull indentation covered by a glowy blue forcefield style texture. My idea is to implement an actual "Hangar Module", which is more or less a flat rectangle slightly protruding from the Hull. Please excuse my utter lack of painting or 3D-modeling skills, but it's late and I have a jolly rotten head cold.
Basically, we have a rectangular box which can be set into any part of the hull large enough to fit it, representing out hangar bay. The glow needs to be bright enough to prevent one from looking inside, but not quite "engine wash" level. To be honest, size and shape are variable, and need only to roughly fit the size of the docked craft, which should be much smaller than the mothership in the first place.
Docking and launching would be merely routing the craft to and from this window, having them appear/disappear at a certain distance from the actual hull to prevent collisions. One might consider adding a tractor beam effect for docking, to represent the mothership assisting the landing.
A second idea would be external docking clamps, in which case the carried ship's model would simply be glued to the outside of an existing craft. This is of course only feasible for craft who carry very small numbers of ships, like a pair of fighters or a single captain's yacht.
Post
Mon Dec 10, 2012 6:16 pm
#31
Re: Capital ships - Carriers and mobile bases?
Last edited by Hardenberg on Mon Dec 10, 2012 6:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Hardenberg was my name
And Terra was my nation
Deep space is my dwelling place
The stars my destination
And Terra was my nation
Deep space is my dwelling place
The stars my destination