New ship: Panther Clipper
- Thread starter Rubbernuke
- Start date
well it might as well have been me personally. I've been wrong before. And I don't care even a littleSorry mate, the English "you" as singular and plural made the confusion. It was not on you singular, but you plural (as "the forum").
EDIT
English people, you really should bring back "thou" and "ye"
They don't know they're born today!!!well it might as well have been me personally. I've been wrong before. And I don't care even a little
O7
I understand you, I was just joking.
If they had made a large ship, then they would have had to stuff it with a lot of regular class 8 compartments. But there are people who think that this can make the ship unkillable. It's very strange, but I won't argue with them, since for PVE almost all ships are unkillable, and in the case of PVP, the wing will always take apart any ship with torpedoes and other things.
Last night around midnight eastern time I was at Shirarta Dezhra and checked the stations traffic log, all ships in game were around 100-300 ships, the Mandalay was at 1900ish and the Panther was almost 2200 at that time! On launch day, that's awesome.
Ugh... Pretty sure there was a (widely regarded as quite disgusting) movie about this
It's Panther Clippers all the way down!
I would rather design a long Panther by keeping the 4 nacelles, but having them spaced slightly further out and the nose and rear of the ship extending further past them.Thank you Michael, this clearly shows what I was trying to explain: this Panther Clipper is not "oh it's so big, no mail-slot will be big enough" nonsense - just a bit chubbier Type-9. The true size monster is Beluga.
Here's what Panther Clipper should have been - or can be if they plan to build PC III
Oh no problems, I was just illustrating how much the ship can be bigger, and still fit into the existing mail-slot and pad limitations.
On a longer version the rear engine slides could also be flipped, so that the gear moves further back when deploxed instead of forward like it does now.
Very similar pitch, PC2 has better yaw, Cutter has (much) better roll. Cutter drifts more though.
The Panther rolls really slowly, but it flys so nicely otherwise I can live with the lazy roll.
The nearest Trailblazer ship to me has been picked clean, nothing on the shelves lol.
Whatever complaints you have on how the Panther flies, please be sure you have thrusters 8A dirty drag G5. This ship needs it.
(and distro 7A engine focused G5 can't hurt)
(and distro 7A engine focused G5 can't hurt)
You mean the centipede
That's more credit than I would give them. Ship after next seems more on brand.
Panther Clipper does not care for puny short ranges. It is strong and mighty and has more fuel than the Middle East and Baltic combined.
Frontier are quite conservative (to be fair, the toxicity around the game several years ago was appalling so I am not surprised they are times a little timid) and so for them, a few thousand tons is a headache from a gameplay and systems perspective; for us, sometimes that's just Tuesday.
Frontier has some interesting design limits to work around; if one thinks about it a bit.
- they could have designed PC with say 4x size 8 cargo modules, 3 size 7. This would be trivial to make strong enough that it would be virtually impervious to any form of damage, including station guns, I don't even mean with heals-for-feels, so that makes policing difficult.
- Then there's the mass. Class 8, A rated thrusters, have a max mass of 5040 tons, so a ship that might be 2300t hull and module mass, leaves ~3k ton cargo. However it's not that simple, as any gravitational mass (eg planet) over 1g, would prevent the ship landing. This just creates more of the existing situation where some ships can fit thrusters so small, they aren't technically able to land on higher g planets, and Frontier has to do some widgery-pokery in the engine to override that situation. It would or could get to the point the ship basically can't take off because it's mass exceeds the ability for the thrusters to move it, haha.
- Large ship might require larger modules; they don't go above class 8 so Frontier would have to add an entire new tier of modules, which they've never done (anything new has always been in an existing tier). Size 9A thrusters would go for over 300 million and have a mass exceeding 320 tons!
This is why I was hopeful that PC would hit around 1500t or so (we've seen that number a lot, as I think it represents a sort of agreed level of 'good'); it would have worked out fine, well within module capability and probably reduced a lot of this talk about an even bigger ship (which exists because of expectation not being met by the developer; expectation they kinda leant in on). I genuinely believe this is about as big as Frontier will want to go, before, effectively, needing to go to carrier class options or be faced with very real engine limitations that require poking at code they almost certainly don't want to go near.
People might be all about big physically, but that really is just a justification for "more cargo". If the PC had offered a bit more cargo, there would still be the same calls (always is) but I think from much fewer people.
I think expecting something 'even bigger' now is probably cope. Never say never, but I suspect the odds of a larger PC is basically fast approaching zero. Frontier has to make (dramatic) changes to code to do so.
Last edited:
They just need to change the stats and the ship design a bit. The Type-9 Heavy and the Type-10 Defender are similar with a couple of design changes. The cockpit of the Type-10 is identical to the Type-9. Fdev could do the same with a PC Mk II variant. Fdev wants to sell more ships so it's less work to make a variant which re-uses parts than an entirely new ship.
Last edited: