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Message Edited by Ice-Cold on 05-25-2004 10:00 PM

Allright, a few things I have to add. First off, I do want to see capitol ships in the game 'cause I like the idea of a ship manned by lots and lots of people. I do not, however, believe that they should only be obtainable through faction points. Blocking out the neutral segment of the game's community would be a bad bad thing. Rather, they should be craftable in some form or fashion by a master shipwright. Now I know a lot of you would be like, "But then everyone could craft a Super Star Destroyer and people would just grind them out!". This too would be a bad thing, but to prevent this from happening I have a few ideas.

First off I think it would be kind of silly to have a full sized Super Star Destroyer given to players. I know many of you have visions of commanding one of these behemoth craft, but when you think about the relative size, power, and required resources to run one it would take the entire game's subscription basis, game wide all servers combined, to pilot just one or maybe two of these. There is no way 25 or 50 people could run one. Now other capitol ships could be implimented on a smaller scale, lighter battle frigates and what not that still excell in power over the larger ships. I could envision a 25 man ship with a 15 laser turret battery and 10 torpedo banks easily, but not something with 400 turrets and 6 fleets of Tie Fighters docked inside.

As far as crafting one of these undoubtedly large craft, it would of course take a whole lot of resources. Additionally I believe it would be a good idea to make the schematics for the various parts of the craft quest based or loot based and therefor harder to obtain. I know that you people must be getting tired of all these quest based missions what with the Corvette quest and Death Watch quest, but it honestly does keep people from grinding out sets of Mandalorian armor or huge star cruisers. This way it would make the capitol ships rare things that would be almost impossible for a single player to make by themselves. If these are meant to be piloted together, then I believe that they should be created with the aid of other people as well. I can envision 25+ players working on seperate bits of the quest and scraping together the parts for a capitol ship easily. This would be a good excercise for the potential crew as well, for it would teach them teamwork and the divisions of labor. Making the ships PA only...I dunno about that. Of course there would be few non-PA groups large enough to successfully make and command a capitol ship, but it's still fesiable. I guess the best course of action would be to treat it like a big floating house, you can set permissions on it so that it's open to the public meaning that anyone can become a part of the crew, open to groups, open to PA, open to faction members, etc. Faction ships should exist for both the Rebels and Imperials, but I'm sure a few mercenary ships could be thrown in as well.

Of course the ships would be very powerful but they would be balanced by the amount of people needed to man one. On ever class of capitol ship there should be a skeletal crew that determines the bare minimum needed to operate it, something like 5 people or maybe 10 for the bigger ones. This number could be adjusted, but I don't want to see capitol ships floating around unmanned because there are only 5 PAs with 20 people on at any given time. A capitol ship with just its skeletal crew would only have a few turrets activated and could fly around, but with a full compliment it would gain bonuses to operation, perhaps speed and menuverability but that would be a tad difficult to impliment. Most certinaly having 10 extra people manning the guns would make it more powerful as well, so there really wouldn't be a concern with balance right there.

The ships should be large indeed, a few hundred meters long perhaps for the big ones, and have plenty of space inside. Like the Y-1300, you could walk around and decorate the ship any way you choose. However, there would be more rooms such as living quarters, mess hall, engineering, bridge, gun battery, and perhaps hangers for the larger ships. I could see some of the largest ships having enough space to dock maybe 5-10 fighters that players could board and engage the enemy with. Smaller ships might have space for a ship or two, but that would be about it. To prevent people from just summoning their fighter ships wantonly whenever they're on a capitol ship it might be a good idea to make ships unsummonable while you're riding one of the ships. This would present some flaws, however, since players could forseeably become stranded on a capitol ship because they can't leave on their personal craft. To prevent this I'm thinking a player could take a "shuttle" for a small fee. Any self respecting capitol ship keeps around at least one scout/transport craft, and using it would transport the player to the nearest planet, again for a fee possibly affected by their distance from the planet. This would prevent players from becoming stuck on ships never to free themselves. Only ships in the hanger could be freely launched at any time.

Also you could add a few docking stations on the ship that other smaller craft could connect with. The ships docked would still be vulnerable to attack but wouldn't count toward the maximum number of ships that could be put in the hanger. Players on the docking ship could get out onto the capitol ship and move around and once they were on the capitol ship could store their craft if they choose to. While docked engineers on the ships or perhaps servicedriods could perhapsprovide some repairsto the ship and maybe even change out parts. Oh, another idea is that capitol ships would have an option to hire NPCsas secondary crewman. These wouldn't go towards theskeleton crew number, but would be kind of like buffs for the ship. You could hire engineers to constantly repair the ship, gunners to automatically man the turrets (of course the accuracy would bemuch lower than a human), soon and so forth.

I don't see capitol ships coming for a long time, though, the devs still need to work out all the kinks with other multi-person vehicles before attempting something as grand as this. In the meantime, slap on an Imperial bumper sticker onto your Y-1300 and go cruisin' in your 'Star Destroyer' while wreaking havoc upon the rebel scum

for the most part i agree with you however i dont know about questing to get the schem cus then you wouldn't be able to get it again and then when it eventually blows up you wount be able to get a new one, maybe they could make it so you have to craft several of the peices that you need and thoughs schems drop at dif places.

i completely disagree w/ your idea of not being able to leave whenever ( it would just be annoying)

also i think capital ships should be pvp only, there needs to be more bonuses to being on a faction, this could be one

also sairnath, why wouldn't we still fly fighters, capital ships would be like bases not to mention rare if done right.. anyway you would need to fly fighters to protect/attack one... i def dont think these things shoulod be common

Message Edited by Spiike_Spiegel on 05-27-2004 06:35 PM

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this is a rediculous idea, for a few reasons

1. its not as simple as saying "it should be like this". if you have had any experience in game programing you would know that the devs are severely limited due to immense coding requirements of such tasks.

2. all we need is 30 player capitol ships surrounding spacestation waiting to gank every opposing faction member as they spawn.

3. capitol ships are just WAY too big for any player or group of players to own/maintain/operate