Hopefully permissions can be fairly open. From wide open, to friends only, squadron only, owner only etc. This is of course dependent on how the slots are handled. Whether or not the ships disappear at cmdr log off, and/or the FC owner can boot ships, so that the carrier is not just stuck with a bunch of griefer abandoned throw away sidewinders sitting on it's pads, is somewhat important to the conversation.
I suspect that it will be rather difficult to grief a fleet carrier by occupying all of the available landing pads, even with a boot function.
First, for ships that players are not currently using, the game (in its current form) will make them invisible and free up the station landing pad that they are on. This makes some sense for starports that have a shipyard (and by extension space to store a player's ships), but less so for fleet carriers which are smaller and have landing pads that are exposed to the exterior of the ship. While there is an argument for fleet carriers not having enough space to store the personal fleets of an entire squadron, there is also an argument for some of the more popular stations (such as Jameson Memorial) not having
anywhere near enough space to store the personal fleets of a fraction of the entire playerbase. As such, I do not believe that FDev will give fleet carriers a limited
total ship capacity and will instead go with a more limited
per player ship capacity that reflects the smaller size of a fleet carrier compared to a starport. I suspect that the per player ship capacity will be about 15 ships (one for each landing pad plus the ship the player is flying), and may or may not take the landing pad size of the ship into account when contributing to the limit (e.g. up to 8 large ships, 12 medium ships, and 16 small ships with the available spots for the smaller ships being shared with the ships that are larger than them).
The other thing to consider is the way that instancing currently works, with any interaction with a player's ship needing to be registered by said player's game client. This becomes rather obvious when a player disconnects during combat and their ship is unable to be damaged by any means before disappearing. The damage is not registered by the disconnected player's client and is therefore not dealt to the player's ship. Additionally, the physical appearances of players' ships are not actually distributed from a central server but rather from the players' clients. In order for the ship's information to become available to other players, the game client must communicate the ship's type, location, cosmetics, modules, module stats, and so on. If a player disconnects, the game client is no longer able to send that data and the ship will disappear. This means that the current system does not support player ships remaining visible on the landing pads of a fleet carrier after the players log off. Given the amount of server work required to allow this to happen and the current focus on bugfixes and minor additions to the game, I highly doubt player ships will be capable of occupying pads when the owner logs out.
The first point makes griefing a fleet carrier with a single account impossible. A player would not be able to buy 16 sidewinders and then transfer them all to a fleet carrier that they just landed at to fill up all of the pads and prevent anyone else from using it. Conversely, the second point would prevent players from filling up all 16 pads on a single account before logging off, but would not prevent a player from spending a few hundred dollars to buy a very basic PC to permanently run a throwaway account that fills all 16 pads. Together these two points make it so that in order to permanently occupy all of the landing pads on a fleet carrier, 16 throwaway accounts (~10 USD each if you only buy the base game on sale) each running on a basic PC setup (~600 USD each, conservatively) would be required. The best case scenario is that around 10,000 USD would be required to permanently occupy all of the landing pads on a fleet carrier.
And do you know what the best part is? Even if some player decided to spend 10 grand to screw you over and block all of the landing pads on your fleet carrier, it likely won't actually do anything. That's right, you can probably just use the block function to get around that by blocking all 16 accounts and getting into a different instance where all of the pads are available. Huzzah!
