Affordable Carriers For All - Hammerhead Class

[shadragon]

I love the idea of carriers, but the multi-billion price tag and ongoing maintenance costs are too much for a casual gamer like myself to support.

I scaled back the idea of a carrier to what I would like to see as bare minimum. One small, one medium and one large landing pad with internal storage for one ship on each. Has outfitting / reload / refuel and that's it. 300 LY jump range, no frills. I see this as a movable player support vessel to enable deep space exploration and mining. Not really for squadrons or multi-player. It's designed for the lone wolf player who just wants to do their own thing. Cheap and cheerful.

The curved area at the bow is bridge, living quarters, etc. center section is for ship bays and storage. Stern is engines and fuel.

Jumped into Blender to create the following concept diagrams. Only textures I added were for the pads. The rest is up to your imagination. If this fails to get into the game, I blame TJ.

 

[Rubbernuke]

Although I'm neutral on the concept, the 'front' could have the bridge view coming to FCs.

 

[ebbrell]

Makes sense if the existing carriers had continued to be squardon assets only.
There are far to many carriers already, there are never any slots to jump too..

Adding another cheaper class would compound the issue and make things worse

 

[Rubbernuke]

Makes sense if the existing carriers had continued to be squardon assets only.
There are far to many carriers already, there are never any slots to jump too..

Adding another cheaper class would compound the issue and make things worse

I do wonder though how many would downgrade though if given the chance.

 

[ebbrell]

If running costs were a lot less, I can expect many people would switch

 

[Cmdr. Numa]

I do wonder though how many would downgrade though if given the chance.

I'd just get both. My current carrier is an indispensable tool for moving large amounts of freight large distances. But for just run of the mill roaming I could do with a smaller one just bringing a few ships instead of the entire fleet.

 

[Rubbernuke]

In that case if they did make FCs more popular it would give FD more of a shove to make parking easier / less cluttered.

 

[Riverside]

Any size ship can land on a large pad, potentially a minimally sized carrier could have only a single large pad to be able to service any ship.

In general I like the idea.

 

[Lugh]

I love the idea of carriers, but the multi-billion price tag and ongoing maintenance costs are too much for a casual gamer like myself to support.

as a casual gamer I got a FC in about 2weeks. (its even easier now with the credit bloat) as for the upkeep a single trip in a type 9 can cover over 2 weeks of inactivity and about a week of activity. This means if you want to be running the servaces you just need to find the time to do ~52 trips in a type 9 over an entire year. That is the definition of casual.


when blitzing runs I can generally get a round trip done in just under 8 minutes but lets round it to 15 as it is unreasonable to keep the 8 minute pace up for 52 runs casually. it only requires 13 hours a year, or a little over 1h a month to keep a carrier running on upkeep.

Now lets look at getting a carrier again i will focus just on the same trading numbers, this is not the fastest way to make credits but it is some of the least effort and requires the least amount of in game knowledge to pull off. it takes 79.5 hours to get a FC and upgrade it (only about 56 to get the carrier) this means if you only played for 1h a day you would get it in under 3 months. put in 2hrs a day on the weekends and you're looking at just over 2 months.

While carriers have a big number attached to them its really not all that much when you break it down again these figures are using a low effort form of generating credits rather than the fastest possible.

since getting my carrier I have done 0 grinding for it. rather anytime I end a session with more than 500m credits I put the overflow into the carrier and don't even think about it past that.


I would much rather see the teams make another actual ship and add it than work on this. Particularly considering players will expect it to have an interior now that FC are getting them. The other problem I see with these is having them spammed all over taking up space for standard carriers. I don't think the game is set up in a way to allow these to not show up for others and only for the owner meaning they would have to develop and maintain that system as well if they didn't want it to impact the regular ones.

 

[shadragon]

Makes sense if the existing carriers had continued to be squardon assets only.
There are far to many carriers already, there are never any slots to jump too..

Adding another cheaper class would compound the issue and make things worse

No reason to have these mini-carriers on the system map at all if it's only for one player.

 

[Brrokk]

I love the idea of carriers, but the multi-billion price tag and ongoing maintenance costs are too much for a casual gamer like myself to support.

I scaled back the idea of a carrier to what I would like to see as bare minimum. One small, one medium and one large landing pad with internal storage for one ship on each. Has outfitting / reload / refuel and that's it. 300 LY jump range, no frills. I see this as a movable player support vessel to enable deep space exploration and mining. Not really for squadrons or multi-player. It's designed for the lone wolf player who just wants to do their own thing. Cheap and cheerful.

The curved area at the bow is bridge, living quarters, etc. center section is for ship bays and storage. Stern is engines and fuel.

Jumped into Blender to create the following concept diagrams. Only textures I added were for the pads. The rest is up to your imagination. If this fails to get into the game, I blame TJ.

View attachment 285236

View attachment 285237

View attachment 285238

I wouldn't want one unless it had commodity storage and market too.

The maintenance costs for the present carriers are insignificant. This week, every T9 load I take to the CG pays my maintenance for two weeks.

 

[metatheurgist]

If running costs were a lot less, I can expect many people would switch

A handful of massacre missions every week that you can do in one hour will more than pay the upkeep. You'd have enough left over you build up the CR to buy a second carrier. I dunno how they can make the game even easier.

 

[varonica]

I wouldn't want one unless it had commodity storage and market too.

The maintenance costs for the present carriers are insignificant. This week, every T9 load I take to the CG pays my maintenance for two weeks.

The only point in me getting one would be to get rid of my market, cargo capacity is of course useful, but if the smaller carrier used far less Tritium to jump then I could manage with a smaller cargo capacity, I would prefer more ship docking capacity than 3 so I could keep say one of my T9's for mining and another empty for carrying cargo, it would be annoying having to take out all the refineries and etc to make cargo space the then put it back for mining, not that I do a lot of that of course. Docking for 10 ships would do me, and maybe pay extra for more.

 

[Chaparral]

I would support this if they did not show up on a system map except for the owner/squad.

 

[GraphicEqualizer]

I've definitely been hankering for a smaller exploration class carrier, 1/4 the size, capacity, cost and tritium/upkeep costs... and frequently harp on about it in comments like this one LOL
FDev would be mad to pass up on the extra Arx customisation opportunities - and even had some "Support Ship" models made that were not used when carriers launched. I would gladly pay real money to pimp my own Orville / Enterprise D exploration carrier - not so much on my current bloated carrier which is for most of us just underutilised for solo players.

 

[varonica]

I would support this if they did not show up on a system map except for the owner/squad.

Oh that would be a requirement for me also, what's the point of having a personal Fleet Carrier if everyone knows where you are? And no squads, that's the big boys drawcard!

 

[GraphicEqualizer]

Here's an example of the Support Ships they did not use - I'd happily snag that as my exploration carrier

Fleet Carrier Support ship - why?

OP: The trailer suggests that the support ship is nothing more than a visual thing. And it's likely that is what it will be. There's nothing to suggest it will move nor be piloted. Players will likely dock and unload at the carrier and the 'support ship' will be nearby as eye candy to support...

forums.frontier.co.uk

 

[varonica]

Changed when they became personal Fleet Carriers, a big pity because I was really looking forward to the exploration support ship following me around!

 

[Jmanis]

Current FCs as individual assets are overpriced anyway, propped up by unbalanced cash cows... contextualised by every other day a thread going up saying "Gee ships are too cheap" (says nobody who doesn't farm these cash cows).

As got mentioned before, if FCs were squadron assets, it could make more sense, though then you're left trying to resolve the difference between the two

 

[gorankar]

I do wonder though how many would downgrade though if given the chance.

I regularly use every bit of cargo space I have in my FC, (2K tons of Trit for fuel reserves, and the rest cargo), so I likely would not down grade. However, if I was using it like a mobile garage, I likely would. It would depend on the range in the end.
A smaller non persistent carrier would not be a bad thing I think.