There are lots of T7's lying around nowadays...
Panther Clipper with Magical Cargo Racks?
- Thread starter psyantologist
- Start date
If it needs those special racks to fulfill its main role, hauling cargo, then its internals are too small to begin with.
I see no reason not to just give it four normal class 8 slots - with it's relatively small PD to feed the hardpoints, nobody is going to turn it into a combat beast just by stuffing class 8 SCBs into it - it will be a meme build. Not meta.
I fail to see what makes these new cargo racks "magical". Has it been conclusively demonstrated that the capacities for standard cargo racks are rigorously based on the maximum physically possible packing for their size? Because if not, then accusations of "magic" are nothing more than saltiness.
Yeah, even four class 9 slots (with only Cargo Racks available in that size) wouldn't break anything. "Too much cargo space breaks the game" keeps getting claimed in comments under Panther videos, but when prodded at it, nobody can actually make an argument about how that would break the game - especially with Fleet Carriers already around and in use, for years and years. It's ridiculous and unimaginative of a defence that doesn't hold water.
But, yeah, phasing in those special modules for other ships to make them more viable (hello, Type-7) might be the idea. Similar to Military Slots, indeed. I still think it's a bad move to do it on the Panther while it obviously has certain modules, just looking at it from the outside - it's a huge waste of creative energy to create something this neat-looking and then screw up the game logic under the hood.
Even with four class 9 cargo racks on the Panther, the other typical cargo haulers could then have their capacity increased with the magic racks - nobody would mind that - instead of doing it the other way around and betraying the aesthetics of the new ship in this weird way of giving it 4 racks with 4 different sizes while they are obviously the same size and it making no sense why only half of them would be able to fit a magical cargo rack.
That's not how salt works. You seem to have already forgotten how my original point went. Or you didn't read it. Just for you: It makes the designers of the normal cargo racks look like fools if you can suddenly pack 50% more into the same space. Also, it betrays the entire concept of modularity, being only able able to fit them into specific slots on specific ships. That is the exact opposite of "modular" - you know, the concept that every ships in E
is based on? Are you even playing the game?That is a good explanation about why the special racks are better - but it is exactly the point I made in the first post: It makes the designers of the normal racks look like fools. That's just terrible design. And lazy. Also, it makes no sense why the new pattern would only fit into certain slots on a single kind of ship.
That's not how salt works. You seem to have already forgotten how my original point went. Or you didn't read it. Just for you: It makes the designers of the normal cargo racks look like fools if you can suddenly pack 50% more into the same space. Also, it betrays the entire concept of modularity, being only able able to fit them into specific slots on specific ships. That is the exact opposite of "modular" - you know, the concept that every ships in E
Unless someone actually runs the numbers, I'm not sure on what basis one can declare that a 50% increase makes the designers of the original cargo racks look foolish. None of us have access to detailed breakdowns on what the volumes of cargo racks are actually used for.
As for the modularity, that ship left the docking bay years ago as far as I'm concerned, when it was decided that only certain ships can fit luxury cabins and also when military compartments were introduced. It's clear to me that modularity is not an absolute property of module outfitting.
I suppose the issue is simply that if a cargo rack of a given size is capable of carrying a given amount of stuff, it seems unlikely it could be modified to carry 50% more.
It's not like, say, an engine, where a 20 year old engine might weigh 150kg and make 100hp whereas a new engine might weigh less and make a lot more power due to better design.
You'd think that a civilisation capable of flinging spaceships through hyperspace would have already figured out how to build shelves optimally, and it's unlikely there'd be any sudden breakthrough that'd allow shelves to store 50% more stuff.
FWIW, I've always made my assumptions related to module sizes in ED based on water.
1t of water = 1m³ which means 1 tonne requires an area 1m x 1m x 1m.
Technically, this is a slightly flawed assumption because we know the cargo canisters in ED are roughly the size of an oil drum and contain 1t of stuff.
Also, the whole thing with cargo canisters is a can of worms.
We have uniform canisters that contain 1t of tea, 1t of weapons, 1t of gold etc.
That, in itself, seems a bit... unlikely.
At one end of the scale, you'd probably need to squash up less dense items, such as tea, to get 1t into a canister while 1t of gold is only around 50cm x 50cm x 50cm so I guess they just pack it in space-bubblewrap and drop it into the canister.
But I digress.
If you use the weight/volume of water as a benchmark for the size of racks in ED, it does all work out pretty well, with even passenger cabins of a given class being of a plausible size for the number of people they carry.
Magic.
Main thing is, lots of slots means lots of opportunity for people to fill them with GSBs/HRPs/MRPs/SCBs and do things the dev's might not want.
Seems like it would have been a lot simpler to just give the PC2 a couple of C9 slots (with 9E cargo racks having a capacity of 512t) and then give it a selection of slots similar to what something like the T9 or Cutter has (without the C8 slots).
Meh! Whatev's.
It hardly makes them look like fools. Was Ford a fool for his hand cranked car engine? They were designed to hold stuff not be hyper optimized.
There are also many reasons one could justify only fitting in the new ships. For example removing most of the structure between the canisters would make the whole assembly very weak which would require much stronger structure around the outside. Hence the new ship might need reinforced hull in that area to withstand the stresses.
Above all it's just a game and the devs can do what they wish.
On the basis that I wanted double the 736 tons that my T9 can carry.
My expectation was that we'd get the 4x Size 8s, but that there would be maybe a Size 7 for a shield, a Size 6, maybe a Size 5, a Size 2 and 1. Really tilt the field towards the large slots, and balance by reducing the number of smaller slots.Main thing is, lots of slots means lots of opportunity for people to fill them with GSBs/HRPs/MRPs/SCBs and do things the dev's might not want.
Seems like it would have been a lot simpler to just give the PC2 a couple of C9 slots (with 9E cargo racks having a capacity of 512t) and then give it a selection of slots similar to what something like the T9 or Cutter has (without the C8 slots).
Meh! Whatev's.
As it is, it matches the slots for the Type 10, Beluga and Cutter, has 1 less than the Corvette and Anaconda, and 1 more than the T9. There is some balance applied by the new special slots, but it's an odd middle-ground, which might only make sense when we see what other ships we have in store for the year.
Importantly, Fleet Carriers delete Metadata of things that touch them, so you can't FC thousands of soontils.
Not just videos.
Even here, those, like me, who suggested that the PCII capacity could have been considerably larger (even without special racks!) are criticised for suggesting such as it would break the balance, or unwritten lore of the game.
Yes, but for whatever reason (and I can think of several, and they are very weak) many players appear to be perfectly excited that a truly massive ship has been pre-nerfed to preserve an intangible.
Not always...
I can load my FC with mission cargo sold into Secure Storage, and buy from it to sell in a normal market and it will be laundered to appear legal.
If I pirate and steal cargo, and repeat the above, it will always retain the stolen tag.
Of course, we shouldn't mention how magic FCs have always been, they will jump 500 LY for a given amount of Tritium (even if the cargo space is full) regardless if the hangars just contain a sidewinder, or 100 T-9 min-max ships each fully loaded - where that mass appears to be entirely discounted...
We don't know that it is the same space, and it's easier to handwave that it isn't [1].
The size 7/8 special internals on the Panther can fit 50% extra cargo, but they also can't fit a whole bunch of other things that a standard internal can.
Conversely you can't fit the enhanced-capacity cargo racks to any standard internal space.
It's quite possible that the special internals aren't really "optional internals" in the sense we know them - though they're shown that way so Frontier don't have to write a whole new bit of outfitting interface just to release a single ship - but a way of saying "in addition to its generous optional internals, the Panther Clipper has an additional dedicated cargo hold of 384t, convertible to hold 192t of hyperspace fuel in the Panther Tanker variant"
[1] The Elite series has always required either:
1) A willingness not to think very hard at all about how any of this stuff works
2) An enjoyment of coming up with weird handwaves to make it work
If you think about how it doesn't work and don't want to make the effort to pretend it does anyway, there are hundreds of these things all over Elite Dangerous and over the previous games in the series and if it hadn't been this one which crossed the line for you it would have been another.
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
Indeed.
One way of looking at it would be that an empty slot is not actually empty but is fitted with a structural support that provides the structure that any same size module that can fit in the slot would otherwise be required to provide - in the case of cargo racks, fuel scoops, AFMU, etc., this neither adds nor subtracts mass (so the module and the structural support that would otherwise be fitted are the same mass) - and that fitting a module of a smaller size necessitates the installation of a structural support to adapt the small module to the larger slot (as the smaller module would not fill the available volume, nor provide adequate structural support).
"Break the game" is a bit much. There's not enough finely-tuned game balance in Elite Dangerous to worry about that.
But there are a bunch of implications to having anything much larger than the current Panther Clipper design which Frontier might not have wanted to bother with.
1) The larger the cargo space a ship has, the greater the gap between its laden and unladen range. So it becomes harder to stop it either being painfully slow with cargo, or faster than the Mandalay without. Piling on additional hull mass helps (and they have done with the PC) but putting too much of that on then has implications for its thruster performance, what happens when it rams another ship, etc.
2) The size 8E thrusters have a mass limit of around 3300T (and same with 8D engineered with dirty drives). So a ship with a total mass higher than that in "normal" configurations (you can exceed it on the Cutter, but only by doing some very bizarre stuff) probably needs size 9 thrusters, and Frontier might not have wanted to introduce an entire new size class of module (with possible knock-on effects elsewhere) for one ship.
3) Game balance is broken, sure, but a 5000t Panther Clipper would allow use of the "bulk flood" undermining method at a rate of around 6000 control points per hour. That's a specific type of breach of game balance - it makes undermining of systems in Powerplay feasible - which would be very unpopular even with people who don't care about hauling at all.
4) The Fleet Carrier doesn't have the same problem (the Fleet Carrier stomped all over a whole bunch of balance issues on its introduction, but not this one, and they weren't generally ones anyone cared about) because the balance issues with large cargo capacities aren't about storage, but about throughput: you still have to load and unload the Fleet Carrier, which means twice as many supercruise trips (though shorter ones) and twice as many dock/undock cycles, which means that it's only marginally faster than flying the cargo in whatever you're using to load/unload the carrier in many cases.
(The FC obviously wins out when it comes to larger distances - nothing can come anywhere near close to competing with it once you get to the 1000 LY+ range, which does mean that Frontier can't easily introduce any long-range hauling tasks)
5) All balance is relative. If there's a ship which can haul 5000t (so maybe 25000t/hour on short hop routes or carrier loading/unloading), guess what the next cargo-hauling-based activity is going to be balanced around CMDRs being able to do in terms of its tonnage requirements. If we'd had a 5000t Panther Clipper released a year ago instead of the Type-8, all colonisation tonnages would be about 5x their current value on the assumption that everyone was going to be using the Panther Clipper to do them. So a much bigger PC makes it a lot quicker to do all the existing hauling (wing trade mission in a single trip? don't mind if I do!) ... but just means that the next hauling task to be introduced will be balanced around its existence, and anyone flying anything else whatsoever can't do a thing about it. Increasing cargo capacities is just a vicious cycle with increasing cargo hauling requirements which we can't as players actually win.
I have an impression most of us players are to tied by "common 21st century sense" of what is possible and what not. What's so magical with the same size of cargo rack having 50% more of cargo space? I can give simple explanation: 4D Cargo Rack or in other words a cargo rack that uses 4th dimension to expand space for cargo or a cargo rack that is using space compression technology to increase cargo space inside of it. We have ships capable of surfing on the surface of the stars scooping fuel in the process, opening wormholes to accommodate Faster Than Light travel and also modifying space to allow supercruise travel while inside of system and also capable of sustaining pilot life inside ship (SRV too) on planets with G force counted in tens of Gs... so what's so magical with cargo racks having 50% more space that volume would suggest?
Personally I wouldn't be surprised to see modified/engineered Hauler capable of carrying hundreds of tons with all that tech that already is available in game.
I recall there were some reviews made by top scientists and engineers about StarTrek comm device claiming it is too small to perform functions showed in TV series... and now we have smartphones... which apparently will be replaced soon by other comm device more convenient to use once present companies milk enough money out of customers to financially justify introduction of new technology.
There is also another very interesting hypothesis made by some scientist that our own universe is actually interior of black hole and the reason for that is simple- singularity point while mathematically possible is not possible in real life so when it comes close to that space inside of black hole is being stretched (expanded) continuously to prevent singularity from happening. In other words from outside black hole diameter might be small but inside we might have what we see now- expanding and accelerating galaxies and when we look far enough we might actually look at event horizon from inside or maybe at things that are beyond it (since light can enter but cannot leave).
Personally I wouldn't be surprised to see modified/engineered Hauler capable of carrying hundreds of tons with all that tech that already is available in game.
I recall there were some reviews made by top scientists and engineers about StarTrek comm device claiming it is too small to perform functions showed in TV series... and now we have smartphones... which apparently will be replaced soon by other comm device more convenient to use once present companies milk enough money out of customers to financially justify introduction of new technology.
There is also another very interesting hypothesis made by some scientist that our own universe is actually interior of black hole and the reason for that is simple- singularity point while mathematically possible is not possible in real life so when it comes close to that space inside of black hole is being stretched (expanded) continuously to prevent singularity from happening. In other words from outside black hole diameter might be small but inside we might have what we see now- expanding and accelerating galaxies and when we look far enough we might actually look at event horizon from inside or maybe at things that are beyond it (since light can enter but cannot leave).
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