Gazz wrote:No, you misunderstood.
Making a ship abandoned or a pilot eject is not the hard part.
It just wasn't really worth it because...
Why would it happen?
How often did you find it advantageous to abandon your own perfectly usable ship?
And then there would be a need for a whole host of mechanics for modeling crew/pilots, towing/recovering/salvaging ships, changing ownership of ships... none of which are needed without the "abandon ship" feature.
I would find it very useful if I was about to die.
There is no need for a whole host of mechanics. Only one very simple AI routine - pilot to a location. I will explain below.
Hardenberg wrote:
But back to the abandoned stuff, pilots ejecting only works up to a certain size of ship. Once you get to a few dozen crew members, "abandoning ship" is a pretty involved process. And to be quite honest, it this thing was a warship, it's highly probable that it will be either scuttled or booby-trapped to prevent capture.
Still, there has been a high demand for a boarding option, which I believe would need to use a similar mechanic of injecting a crew/pilot. In both cases, it requires that the crew and the ship are actual separate entities, which might complicate things programming-wise. The other question is, why would an AI entity abandon ship? In case of imminent destruction, the ship is unlikely to survive. In case of a functional ship, the crew is unlikely to leave. Since the player can't get stranded due to engine damage, neither can the AI.
There is no need to complicate anything - The AI would just be used to tow or autopilot to the nearest base to fix up the ship, it'd have no combat capabilities. Whereby it'd be replaced with crew.[
This means you have to defend it all the way in, giving you some challenge. In addition I was thinking about it and at such high damage most ships won't survive anyway as the remaining shots on the way will kill them. So it is unlikely a big ship would survive anyway, but make it a nice rare find when it does, whereas smaller ones will be more likely to avoid the last hits.
Back to your points if we are talking about realism. As I posted a 1 in 100 chance to capture a ship fits your assessment of the odds of it being salvagable. Floating space debris is much more likely than just having nothing there. You'll have to excuse my not having played the prototype if this is already how it works. On a large ship, if the crew are in the middle of a battle, and its sustained that much damage many are already dead anyway and an escape capsule or two would make perfect sense.
Changing ownerships of ships is the only thing that might be harder, but only if the ships are coded in a way they don't have faction variable. In this all that needs to happen is, if the ship is in the abandoned faction - if the player hits the ships with an AI drone/missile/pod whatever he gets basic control over it.
Heck make it full control if you want to make it even simpler. We don't need to complicate this idea.