Pilot Archive

"Can't launch the Y-8 if you have both a yatch and a regular POB ships due to "You can't launch another ship with an interior, you have to clean out one ship first" "

LOL! kinda ironic since you can't even drop anything on the Y-8

Tomo, I see the following main issues that need to be addressed with the Y-8 (ignoring bugs):

1. Its two turrets are not enough to give the vessel adequate "firing arc" coverage.


2. The Y-8 should be able to remain stationary infront of the asteroid to mine, it shouldn't have to move. However, due to the speed the small chunksfly away at, its exceptionaly hard to capture more than one chunk without having to go off chasing rocks.


3. The Y-8 should be able to mine quicker and more efficiently than a fighter


4. The bridge layout (x2 operations consoles at the front / pilot seat in the middle) is not ifficient and makes piloting the vessel exceptionaly hard

They are the issues and there are several things that can be done to fix them and here's a few of the ideas mentioned here so far:

Issue 1
Either move the two turrets to either side of the vessel, allowing a larger coverage or add a couple more turrets. Adding turrets would be the ideal solution as it would allow a Y-8 to hold several tractor beams which in theory would increase the chance of gaining a larger yield from each chunk.

Issue 2
Give the Y-8 a special class of tractor beam. The tractor beam would be stronger and would effectively stop any chunk dead in its tracks with one shot, and then drag it to the ship with a second.

Issue 3
One of the ideas that sounded cool was to allow the Y-8 to drag in the large chunks and then put it through some kind of processing function inside the ship. The processing function would then decide how much is collected rather than when the large chunk is split

An alternative would be the Y-8 gains a more powerful mining laser that when used on an asteroid doesnt generate large chunks like a usual mining laser, but instead generates several medium chunks which can then be tractored.

Issue 4
This is the easiest of solutions ... make one of the operations chairs at the front of the bridge the pilot's station and make the captain's chair a second operations chair. This way it allows for a more "dynamic" positioning of crew. A captain of the ship would not want to be physicaly piloting the vessel ... the captain would want to direct the action instead. However, to direct the captain would need to be able to zoom out to see the outside of the ship which is why making it an operations chair is perfect while also making the ship easier to fly for the pilot since the main bulk of the bridge isnt obscuring the view.

I just got my Y-8 and was able to launch it and take a tour before the servers went down for their 4AM thing.

Everything written in this thread is all well and good, but I REALLY want to hear it from the lips of the guy who designed this ship - what were you thinking when you were working on this? I would really like to hear HOW this ship was intended to be used!

Message Edited by StressLess on 05-07-2005 04:15 AM

Allowing droid programs would be a nice bugfix for this ship...

It's a slow beast, and I really want to use my Engine Overload program to get it moving at a decent speed. Also, Reactor Overload may be necessary to power any new guns that will need to be added.

Another thing you can do is to place/move the guns to the tips of the ship, and form a special turret pod. This should allow the gun to rotate 360 degrees, but also let it fire at an angle below 0 degrees (the pod should give it a little clearance.

Also, can we have an option to make the ship invisible when we are piloting? I wasn't able to see much at all when flying mine. Even tried my standard options of not showing the cockpit frame... no luck.

You all have valid points and I agree with you about where the turrets are just plain suck. what I WOULD like to know is why on the earth is there 2 op chairs.....it doesnt take that many people to run droid commands. if the op chair is empty the pilot should have the ablity to use droid commands on a pob from the pilots seat, instead of switching chairs.

I don't have any problems using droid commands in mine. I'm able to install a flight computer and run commands from either console without any issues

There is definatly some good ideas here to make the ship better at mining. More turents, better firing arcs, stonger tractor beams, turents with both a tractor beam and lasers, all great ideas. but do you guys really think they are gonna go back and change the design? I truely doubt it. How long did it take them just to fix the plasma alarm bug on the original multiplayer ships? The easyest fix would be to let the tractor beams pull in the big chunks. Then you could use the front firing laser to break of chunks, then have the 2 turents equiped with tractor beams to pull them in. Just hope you never get attacked! Imagine trying to manuvor that thing in a fight with only a mining laser to defend yourself! lol!! Just my 2 cents.

I think they might actually do somethng to fix the Y-8, because a lot of the possible "fixes" are quite basic, like swapping the pilot chair for one of the ops chairs so you can actually see what you are shooting at and where you are flying! Just putting a "tractor beam only" weapon slot in the fixed forward gun position should work as a fast fix too - no extra graphics needed, and the pilot would then have a view, a mining laser, and a tracotr beam - voila! an interim fix. I could even forgive them the 1 item thing, well at least for a little while

The other aspect is that the ground CU has created such a level of bad feelings out there, if they can't get the only POB ship in the RoTW expnsion right they are going to cost themselves customers they can ill afford to lose just now. I don't know about you, but I bought this expansion for this ship, because ground combat is so completely broken at the moment it's no fun. I took one look at the screenshots of the Y-8, decided I loved the windows, and preordered. Perhaps silly, but hey it's me And it's not as if I am going to take my dancer/padawan to Kashykk to get killed by a different coloured rabbit just at the moment. The ground game is, quite honestly, still very broken still for so many professions that in my view they need to try to keep space mostly working - and space is still a key to keeping this "Star Wars".

Fixing the Y-8 should in my view be a priority - a basic fix should not take long, particularly compared with the massive amount of work they still have to do on the ground game to finish all those things that really should have been done before releasing the CU, Things like non-conversion of existing bioclothing, completely flawed conversion of CL of pre-CU armoured bio-pets, over-spawing wild spawns, bugged out CL system that makes your missions randomly spawn grey critters that would still kill you but for no xp, so you have to dump the missions and trapse back to town to start over, broken pets for creature handler, etc etc - sound all too familiar? So I did what any civilised bothan CL 1 artisan should do - I fled to the stars to have fun until they fix the ground game. So come on Dev's, don't leave the Y-8 broken! I actually enjoy space mining (ok I'm wierd) but it would be much more immersive if I could actually use the ship that is theroetically meant to be a mining ship!

How about if they made it so the mining ship could tractor in medium chunks (that would yield the same amount of resources as all of the smalls).

This would make it more efficient, and able to probably do the job without having to move.

I'd agree that this thing is a beast.

Here's what I'd recommend:

A. Make the ship more independent of having multiple players to use it. Most times, people aren't going to grab their friends to go mining. The pilot should be in command of more functions (like operations).

B. Give each turret 2 weapon hardpoints. One for the Mining weapon, the other for the tractor beam.

C. Give the Y-8 an advantage that the fighters won't have. For example, holding 34K of asteroid is great but, I don't find it sufficient for mining benefits it a big slow slug. Maybe give the Y-8 a multiplier for mining (like instead of 1.0x, make it 1.2 times the regular rate of mining retrieval).

Unfortunately with the way that it's made, a single player would have to move the ship into position and then hop out and into one of the turrets. I find this acceptable as long as the work can be done from one of the turrets.