Limit Theory Forums

Also see: Carriers , Capital ships - Carriers and mobile bases?

In your tech demo 5 you showed off the ship landing... on stuff.
This could actually be used as a feature.

A real carrier would have internal docking space for ships.
That means the ability to switch ships, transfer cargo... the whole nine yards.


But what if you just landed outside on a ship, like on a huge freighter that you are escorting?
You wouldn't have to deal with any autopilot antics because you move with the ship.

"Landed" escort fighters would be much harder to detect, increasing the chances of suckering a pirate into attacking the freighter... so you could collect the bounty. Alternatively you could fly in the open, doing your best to look menacing.
And the other way around... you'd have to be more careful about what you attack.

If the ship does some sort of hyper jump dealy, that only large ships are equipped for, you jump along with it.
It won't do as a military carrier but it would be highly convenient for a "starting out" player who managed to acquire one or two fighters as escorts.

Really hoping for this simply because LOCUST SHIPS

Yes, all good ideas! I'm very excited about this feature, it just feels very cool to interact with the world in this way. Indeed, it would make escorting a breeze...you just land on the ship you're escorting, and wait around for an ambush! This could lead to some pretty cool mechanics!

Am very interested to explore these possibilities

That's no moon that's a small freighter with 200 escort ships

Quantimo wrote:That's no moon that's a small freighter with 200 escort ships

when you flew into the carrier and landed. it appeared that there was no guidance or layout. if you for instance told the npcs to dock and hang tight how will will they position themselves? also will ship cargo/repair/crew transfers ect be handled via a drop down menus as shown on the planet trade interaction demos?

I'm hoping you can have a external landing then stack many small ships on each other and shoot while landed.

Building a ship with infinite firepower, bypassing all the intentional limitations of the ship designer? I'm not sure this is such a great idea. =P

Dadalos wrote:when you flew into the carrier and landed. it appeared that there was no guidance or layout. if you for instance told the npcs to dock and hang tight how will will they position themselves? also will ship cargo/repair/crew transfers ect be handled via a drop down menus as shown on the planet trade interaction demos?

It's just a tech demo to show that landing works in principle. Of course there is no UI support. There may not even be a cargo bay / cargo management in these ships, yet.

JoshParnell wrote:Indeed, it would make escorting a breeze...you just land on the ship you're escorting, and wait around for an ambush! This could lead to some pretty cool mechanics!

As a side benefit, there's a lot less collision / avoidance to calculate if one ship moves instead of 5 or 20 ships.

I do hope you make it so that if some one tries to land forty cruisers on some frigate or something, there would be some serious breaking for all involved.

If you force the other ship to "land" on you, you could move a derelict ship to a space station. In other words towing.

The "landed" ship would have to affect the mass of the total for the thrust calculations so you could technically tow a huge carrier with a frigate
but it's acceleration and max speed would be something like 1m/h

Quantimo wrote:If you force the other ship to "land" on you, you could move a derelict ship to a space station. In other words towing.

The "landed" ship would have to affect the mass of the total for the thrust calculations so you could technically tow a huge carrier with a frigate
but it's acceleration and max speed would be something like 1m/h

Oh wow, very interesting, I had not thought of this as a towing mechanism, but if I couple the motion of the attached ship to the attachee (shouldn't be too hard)..we could get towing for free!!

Very interesting... :O

When ship have landed, will their turrets still track enemies and shoot at them?
Eg, would it be possible to create a deathstar by having 1000 ships land on an asteroid and let them shoot at enemies? Would their trusters still work so the asteroid would get towed?

(sorry for necro, but I figured this was better than to make a new topic)