Panther Clipper MK suggestions and hopes.

Unpopular opinion:
If it's under 1200t, I'll buy it for Arx just to support that decision. I don't want power creep. For example, Python was a frequently used ship until Corsair got released. Now, why would anyone still fly a Python? Same when Mandalay got released. It replaced many Anacondas, Asp Explorers, Dolphins and Diamondback Explorers.

Power creep is just "number go up = brain make happy chemical". It's a temporary hype boost and only diminishes ship variety among players. It hurts the game in the long term. Especially when those Arx ships become available for credits.

Python Mk II is a great sidegrade to FDL. Pure upgrade on paper, but actually has drawbacks in combat. Well done on that one.
Type-8 fills a niche role, is therefore not overused and is actually comfortable to fly. Well done on that, too.

If players need a 2000t cargo ship because a game's feature is obnoxious without it, the issue is not in the ships' capacity, it's in the feature. For colonization purposes, they should just allow fleet carriers to launch 50 limpets and transfer their 25k of cargo to a station over ~40min.

A 2000t cargo ship will be a combat balancing nightmare. Instead of that cargo, you could put in several Shield Cell Banks and A-grade shielded AFMs to become too boring to deal with. A Cutter is plenty annoying as it is. Especially when fitted with a Fighter Bay.

If they do end up giving us a 1400+t cargo ship, I sincerely hope to not see every trader flying one. I don't care how they balance it, I just want it to be balanced.
"If it's under 1200t, I'll buy it for Arx just to support that decision. I don't want power creep." > wholly agree, and as the released specs bridge that haulage range, I'll likewise buy on Arx. Let's keep supporting and feeding back to FDev. They seem to be listening.

Likewise on the "2000t capacity as combat balance nightmare". The Clipper needs to be tricky enough to take on, especially when eng'd, without having to re-write the combat mechanics. FDev have options here, eg being creative on haulage escort missions to encourage wing work in Vanguards. Applicable in the Bubble as on the frontier of colonised space.
 
Shame they have killed the t9, panther clipper should be slower
And should be 1400t capacity

Please allow us to engineer cargo racks, 5 to 20% more capacity at the cost of weight

I could even see they clipper was made planet landing only, to keep t9 in with a reason to exist
That wouldnt really make any sense. Landing on things with gravity is way harder than microgravity. If you could do planetary then being unable to land at a space station would be just a blatant nerf.

Also keep in mind the Asp Explorer was also pretty much killed by the Mandalay but with so many years passing, its realistic for a new ship with new tech to come out.

Im upset they are screwing with the potential for realism with the interiors. Optimized cargo racks? What does that mean? Is a normal cargo rack really somehow that ineffecient? How? Why? Its 330X how is that a thing?
 
I'm not sure what to think about the special cargo racks. It kinda feels like they had the specs laid out, and the capacity was set at 1046t. Then they saw the feedback and rather invented new magic cargo racks than giving the ship another size 8 slot.
 
Is the word "miniaturization" in the calculus for storage capacity (magic or handwavium)? I've always wondered how volume vs weight/mass are considered in ED cargo concepts.
Have a great day
 
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I can speak for my self on this point. I've played every Elite version since 1985 (on my commodore 64) and for immersion being able to walk around the ships would bring great pleasure to the game. Games like X4 Foundations, Starfield, and the carriers in No man's sky, to name just three, are terrific games BECAUSE you can walk around and experience the interiors of the ship.

Elite dangerous gained a lot of gaming value when odyssey came out and we could get out of our SRV's and walk the planets, enter and walk around the stations, walk around the carrier. So of course there are plenty of players who would love to walk around their individual ships........ as long as they aren't just empty shells with no window and nothing to do.

I'd love to see them as a personalized space where friends can get out of their own seats and explore / experience the ship while I continue flying us to our destination. Let there be a terminal where they can access the Galaxy and system maps and check in on their own sector and colonization projects, etc. while they act as passengers on your ship.

I have over a dozen friends who used to play ED and haven't for several years. Whenever I mention the newest changes they always ask "can you walk around in your ship yet?" when the answer is no they say "pass".
Yep, and with well thought out strategy for out-of-the-pilot-chair gameplay, with the way ED progressing atm, it could be THE space sim game, if interactive and meaningful ship interiors were added.

Each ship make and model would need consideration of course. Small ships would understandably by pretty spartan. With a hefty ship like the Clipper, plenty of options. I like the suggestions youre making, eg accessing colony projects etc. Great ideas.
 
Yep, and with well thought out strategy for out-of-the-pilot-chair gameplay, with the way ED progressing atm, it could be THE space sim game, if interactive and meaningful ship interiors were added.

Each ship make and model would need consideration of course. Small ships would understandably by pretty spartan. With a hefty ship like the Clipper, plenty of options. I like the suggestions youre making, eg accessing colony projects etc. Great ideas.
As much as I'd love interiors, I doubt we'll ever see them. So many ships would require external adjustments to make that function, and then you haven't even started on any interiors. The big ships in the game are really massive. I've built ships of a similar size in Starfield, and there is a lot of internal space to fill. Starfield does it by using prefab hab modules, not individual ships with unique interiors. There are by now mods with ships with fully customized interiors, but the ones I've seen so far would fit medium pads in ED. And that's still a lot of interior space.
 
Shame they have killed the t9, panther clipper should be slower
And should be 1400t capacity

Please allow us to engineer cargo racks, 5 to 20% more capacity at the cost of weight

I could even see they clipper was made planet landing only, to keep t9 in with a reason to exist
T9 will still have the niche of long-distance hauler, at least for now. Thanks to the smaller FSD it can jump further on the same amount of fuel.
 
T9 will still have the niche of long-distance hauler, at least for now. Thanks to the smaller FSD it can jump further on the same amount of fuel.
I've already reconfigured mine in anticipation. It's now only got 663t, but FSD booster and fighter bay. My Cutter stays in 752t short range hauling configuration until I actually have the Panther by Christmas this year.
 
Optimized cargo racks? What does that mean?
A Universal Module Slot has to be capable of being used for anything - wiring capable of handling a Shield Generator, more wiring to be able to handle a Shield Cell Bank, hardened mounting points to accept hull reinforcements, potentially open hull ports to handle fuel scooping, and probably other stuff I'm not thinking about.

The special racks need to be able to hold fuel, or cargo. Nowhere near the power draw of a shield, so you don't have to account for high capacity wiring, just the minimum needed for whatever automated moving to get to and from the cargo hatch. Ditto extra fuel, you just need to be able to pump it to the main tank. All the space you don't need to waste to be able to accomadte everything, is space you can use on more cargo.
 
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Something I've really missed from the old PC game "wing commander" is rear gunner turrets. I do think for these larger ships we need an optional internal military slot size 4 or five that can take a gunnery turret. Leave your co-pilot (or autopilot) to fly the ship and go to the gunner's chair on a rear, top or bottom blister. Gimballed guns on a blister should out-perform automated turrets. Potentially a lot of fun on these beached whale ships . Anyone agree?
 
Something I've really missed from the old PC game "wing commander" is rear gunner turrets. I do think for these larger ships we need an optional internal military slot size 4 or five that can take a gunnery turret. Leave your co-pilot (or autopilot) to fly the ship and go to the gunner's chair on a rear, top or bottom blister. Gimballed guns on a blister should out-perform automated turrets. Potentially a lot of fun on these beached whale ships . Anyone agree?
You can already use turrets as gunner in multicrew, and they can also fire behind the ship.
 
on the subject of walking around ships .... other than a viewing platform, I'm not sure what you could achieve. I mean, potentially you could have to go to the astrometrics desk to do the plotting / jumping. Maybe you have to go down in the innards to actually run the AFMU. Maybe you literally have to walk to the hanger to get in the scarab or the fighter. (that would cause a lot of cursing in the middle of a fight haha). HOWEVER, I do think there should be a size-appropriate bunk room in the ship where you collect and view your trophies and mementos of the various things you've achieved. Sort of thing in Zero Horizon - knicknacks and posters, trophies and awards. Maybe some you get automatically for longest / furthest / biggest / rarest / (as per your records in the codex) maybe some cost a small amount of ARX. Maybe some are granted by virtue of specific mission rewards. Like Ram Tah's Guardian missions. Or thargoid missions. Or missions you do for rank, say. I'm sure folks could come up with a dozen suggestions for things that should get trinkets - eg the "rares" - you could have a hutton mug on your nightstand. A box of cigars on the shelf. An alien companion (i forget the technical term) . At the moment the only thing like this I can think of is that you can buy a thargoid bobble with a thargoid heart as a memento of a kill. I do think this area would be worth expanding as a rewards scheme.
 
Im upset they are screwing with the potential for realism with the interiors. Optimized cargo racks? What does that mean? Is a normal cargo rack really somehow that ineffecient? How? Why? Its 330X how is that a thing?
The scales of ships have never made any sense, and interiors would certainly expose that if there was any actual detail shown of the optional compartments. But that's a problem which goes way back before the Panther Clipper, all the way back to - at best - Horizons 2.0 and the SRV, and arguably back to the introduction in the pre-release Betas of medium and large ships which were considerably larger externally than the small ships but didn't have that much more mass or payload.

Yes, a normal cargo rack is somehow that inefficient, and even the optimised one is still incredibly inefficient.

A cargo pod is roughly 2m by 1m by 1m, so if you pack them into rectangles and leave a cargo pod's gap between each row so that you can access any individual cargo pod without needing to move any other cargo pods, you need 4 cubic metres per cargo pod (not even the most optimal way to achieve that goal, but good enough to demonstrate the problem). So a size 7 internal can hold 192t using the optimised racks, so needs 768 cubic metres (or 512 cubic metres for the normal really inefficient ones)

A size 7 optional internal can hold 2 SLFs in "ready to launch" state (and 30 more in some sort of "needs assembly" state). So the smallest it can be in terms of volume is big enough to hold 2 Taipans [1] - which have a bounding box volume of 610 cubic metres each, so that's 1220 cubic metres just for the hangar for the ready-to-launch ships, assuming no need for extra space for moving them to the launch/retrieval platform, and that the other 30 are gravitationally compacted into neutronium when not in use so don't require any space.

In other words, the size 7 optional is already - making some very generous assumptions about the size of the SLF internal, and still allowing more space for the cargo than it really needs - about twice as big as it needs to be to store the "optimised" cargo racks. If you resort to non-magic explanations for how the 30 standby SLFs are stored, it probably has to be about 10-20 times as big as it needs to be for the cargo.

You get a similar issue on the small side with the size 2 internal - which can hold a SRV or a mere four cargo pods.

But even if you ignore comparisons to what else you might fit in that space, it's also the case that a size 7 internal is really small. If we're allocating 768 cubic metres for the cargo pods in the optimised form to allow very fast swapping in and out of any individual pod at the cost of pure efficiency, that can be held within a bounding box roughly 10m by 8m by 8m. That's a bit smaller than a Sidewinder (14m x 21m x 8m). Now compare the size of a Sidewinder and a Type-9 (117m x 115m x 33m). Let's just say that when they gave the Type-9 an extra size 8 optional some years back to make it competitive with the Cutter, they didn't have to worry too much about whether there was any space to fit it...

You've been able to ignore this discrepancy between the various external and (implied) internal scales entirely until now precisely because we don't have ship interiors that would rub your face in it [2] and because people are generally pretty instinctively bad at visually converting between "bigger length" and "cubically bigger volume" without actual reference points. It's possible that there is an implementation of ship interiors (one, for example, which doesn't allow you access to any optional internals, or anything else which might give you a clue that the ship was 99% empty space) which would let you continue to ignore it. But the scales have never matched up sensibly from day 1. The Type-9 is about 50 times bigger by volume than the Cobra III - but even with the bonus size 8 it got later, only carries about 12 times the internal cargo. All the medium and large ships have huge amounts of unaccounted-for internal space. The Type-9 should carry maybe 3000t of cargo if it was doing so merely as inefficiently as the Cobra III does. A pile of cargo pods the same size as a Type-9 would contain enough cargo to build an entire Coriolis station in Colonisation with plenty to spare.


[1] Really we should be making these hangar spaces large enough to hold any SLF without remodelling them, so they need to be as wide as the widest (XG-7, 19.8m), as long as the longest (XG-9, 15.3m), and as tall as the tallest (XG-7, 17.2m). Round those measurements up to the next whole metre so that it isn't literally scraping the ceiling and that means a SLF hangar bay must be at least 20x16x18m, so a size 7 internal with two of them must be at least 20x32x18m, or 11520 cubic metres, or a full 2880 cargo pods in an inefficient quick access storage pattern ... before we even start counting where the 30 spare SLFs are going to go. That's already 22 times bigger than the cargo capacity of an actual standard size 7 rack, and still 15 times bigger than the Panther's "super-efficient" racks.

[2] In the same way that we'd clearly had artificial gravity from the beginning in terms of how things were drawn, but it was only with the release of Odyssey that people suddenly went "hey, magnetic boots wouldn't work like that, would they?" because they could actually see the allegedly zero-G spaces close-up.
 
Lots of maths about cargo pods.
A non-zero amount of space in each cargo module will include both racks to keep them organzide, but also mechanisms to automatically track and/or load/unload every cargo pod, since you can jettison specific pieces of cargo on a whim. Also whatever conveyor mechanism going to/from the cargo hatch.
 
A non-zero amount of space in each cargo module will include both racks to keep them organzide, but also mechanisms to automatically track and/or load/unload every cargo pod, since you can jettison specific pieces of cargo on a whim. Also whatever conveyor mechanism going to/from the cargo hatch.
Yes. I've already in the calculation (somewhat generously) allocated as much space for that machinery as is directly used for the cargo pods themselves, while (somewhat dubiously) not allocating any such equivalent space for the SLFs.

And obviously, no-one does the maths. I certainly don't care that my SLF hangar and cargo bays clearly don't take up the same internal volume on my Krait, because I'm having too much fun flying it and having the SLF pilot help take out the pirates after said cargo. But that's a state of affairs which is only sustainable if we don't get to actually see those spaces from the inside. If even the idea that cargo racks might not already be the most efficient possible packing is enough to cause extended forum complaints...
 
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