Hmm... why we don't have ship towing?

Shiro Akai

Shiro Akai
This occured to me while answering to other topic.

Theory:
Bubble only ship docks to FC for whatever reason. FC decides to relocate far, far away. Bubble ship on the next day realizes he's in the middle of nowhere, many thousand LY from the nearest port. Fcis gone. No fuel scoop.

Solution:
  • self destruct (which with current mechanics will port you to FC)
  • call Fuel Rats and ask for escort home.

And then it hit me - ship towing. New module - TOW - be it simple cable or fancy energy harness, whatever. If you can tether another ship to yours and tow it I'm good. Few conditions:
  • you must be bigger than ship on tow
  • higher fuel consumption
  • lower jump range due to extra mass (even halved)

So 3rd solution to above scenario - call tow service.
 

CMDR DragonHorn

CMDR DragonHorn
How do you imagine towing in supercruise as ship doesn't actually fly there?... Or towing ship along with FSD jump? Aside from that, towing in regular space would have less than zero utility, because you can't get anywhere, really.
 

Vandaahl

Vandaahl
And getting towed to the somewhere not your destination and be left as food for a Hydra?
Fuel transfer limpets do make sense...
 

Shiro Akai

Shiro Akai
Florenus said:
How does towing cable work in hyperspace?
Click to expand...


CMDR DragonHorn said:
How do you imagine towing in supercruise as ship doesn't actually fly there?... Or towing ship along with FSD jump? Aside from that, towing in regular space would have less than zero utility, because you can't get anywhere, really.
Click to expand...

Replying with a question: how does our ship Hyperspace? I get it it's like this: FSD makes its magic and punches us through space/witch space. Towing cable would make it just bigger ship (one physical object consisting of 2 connected ships). So if FSD can make one ship go into SC or Hyperspace, with tweaking/installing bigger drive could in theory pproduce enough field/power to cover both ships.

Equally you could connect to towing ship in other way, not by tow neccessairly. It's technical. So in the end if one ship is capable of SC and hyperjump I don't see the reason why conjoined ships couldn't execute it as well.

That way you could theoretically move your own ships between systems. Towing your own ship with you from Bubble to Colonia anyone?
 

Florenus

Florenus
Shiro Akai said:
Replying with a question: how does our ship Hyperspace? I get it it's like this: FSD makes its magic and punches us through space/witch space. Towing cable would make it just bigger ship (one physical object consisting of 2 connected ships). So if FSD can make one ship go into SC or Hyperspace, with tweaking/installing bigger drive could in theory pproduce enough field/power to cover both ships.

Equally you could connect to towing ship in other way, not by tow neccessairly. It's technical. So in the end if one ship is capable of SC and hyperjump I don't see the reason why conjoined ships couldn't execute it as well.

That way you could theoretically move your own ships between systems. Towing your own ship with you from Bubble to Colonia anyone?
Click to expand...
Well, Carrier seems to be your towing service.
 

Shiro Akai

Shiro Akai
Yeah, exactly the same I was thinking when i was replying to other thread. Just came to me we don't need 5B ship (+fuel costs) just to tow stranded CMDR. It could be done faster and cheaper with tow module. Plus we could get some variety in gameplay.
 

Florenus

Florenus
Vasious said:
Like the Frame Shift Drive Interdictor Tether
Click to expand...
I don't think so, because FSD Interdictor simply targets your FSD and emits energy stream that makes it stop working, effectively dropping target ship to normal space.
It's not a teather. It's sort of energy weapon.
 

Vasious

Vasious
Florenus said:
I don't think so, because FSD Interdictor simply targets your FSD and emits energy stream that makes it stop working, effectively dropping target ship to normal space.
It's not a teather. It's sort of energy weapon.
Click to expand...

The why does it say "Tether attached", tether the two ships together to travel at the same speed and direction and appear of be actually yanking the target ship out of Super cruise.

As if the tether is an extension of the space warping of the FSD, linking the fields of both ships with one pulling against the other.

So why couldn't, if both ships are in Super cruise, have the FSD link both ships fields and when the lead one jumps the other is pulled through into witch space with it.
 

Misty_Dark

Misty_Dark
I totally like this idea, and been thinking around this could work, but it is not easy...once you start to think how this would fit in the rest of the game play options we have.

Like a FSD field expansion module, that would allow us to use super cruise and do FSD jumps with a ship in tow. and best solution I could think about for the towing part is a towing cable combined witth a towing thrusters, think limpts that are thrusters that can attach to the other ship. the larger the ship, you want to tow, the more towinng thrusters you need to attach. So now we can "move" the towing ship in normal space too and get away with having a towing cable that pull the ship alon,g but once you want to stop, the towing thrusters would do that for us, as the alternative is to physically attach the two ships together. how would that look like?


But sadly many of these cool options does not fit well with the current game design, where we waste lots of resources by blowing ships up left, right and center...
So without any changes to the blowing stuff up all the time, towing would be nothing more than a cool gimmick.

Lets start with conflict zones, if we wanted to incorporate towing in this, then simply disabling (not destroying) enemy ship is enough, you need to disable enemy ships and the ship needs to be towed to your "side", so the goal is to disable enough of the enemy fleet so that they no longer have any reserves left and when that happpens you have won the fight. And i tis not only towing your enemies ships that is useful, towing back your own ships, could put them back into your reserves again after a some "repair" time. So this would mean that we got a few more professions in conlfict zones, we have what we have ttoday, take out enemy ships, but then we have the profession of towing those disable ships, and of course, taking out enemies tow ships is got way to slow them down, so a 3rd profession to escort and defend your tow ships is needed.
War bonds would be based on ships you disable, towed (either by towing yourself or defending a tow to destination). So double pay if you disable and protect the tow.

This is one way we could incorporate towing in conflict zones. to some, this sounds like it would be heaven, and others would think this to be a nightmare....



Pirate hunting, here we can think of find pirate, disable pirate, and either you tow the pirate or request a tow, that you pay for.
Just disabling a pirate gives some bounty, and if the pirate ship is towed and delivered to the authorities, you get a second payout.


Then we now can find abandoned ships to salvage and tow to be scrapped/repaired.

We could have new missions where we can take on towing/salvage missions
And if you find yourself in a ship that is disabled, you can request a tow from either other players or by NPC's

But for everyone that likes to see ships blow up into spectacular explosions would be very disappointed by these sort of changes. It would however be an interesting thing to see how it would affect seal clubbing, as they no longer can blow up other players, only disable them, and do what? sit around for security to arrive? they are not interesting in trying to tow those players to an anarchy system to be sold as "slaves" or whatever..



So what seems like a pretty simple idea quickly spans out to either change many of the mechanism we are used to, or would be mostly a cool gimmick, usable by a few. How many are actually constantly running with both a repair limpets and fuel limpets? I know some players do, but most are not.so for most players, these are just cool gimmicks that can be used... but not really worth it for most of the time. And I fear that just adding towing/salvage to the game would be just the same. And the alternative is quite scary to, changing core fundamental gameplay can turn bad really fast to for many players, but on the other hand, if it actually makes things better, and more engaging/interresting then it coudl be a great uplift to the game... and now I start to think about Fleet Carriers and think about what they could have been, and what we got... so how much cool I think this would be, I fear that what we would get, would be nowhere to close to what it needs to be to be justified change.
 

metatheurgist

metatheurgist
I think, there would have been interesting avenues of ship builds and gameplay, if from the start the FSD punches a hole in space and any ship can fly through before it closes. But too late for that now.
 

VR Jay Le Chardon

VR Jay Le Chardon
In lore, the FSD Interdictor establishes an energy tether between the two ships and does then an emergency FSD drop out (hence the tumbling) to bring the two ships into the same pocket of normal space & Guardian Ship Launched Fighters are held together by magic energy tethers:
latest

Flying in supercruise "uses the ship's Frame Shift Drive to compress space in front of the ship and expand it behind the ship, essentially moving space around that ship. This negates any time dilation, as the ship is always travelling less than the speed of light relative to its "frame" of compressed space." which reads like a warp bubble as defined in an Alcubiere drive.

Could such a bubble be created around two ships with a tether between them?

Hard to say for certain as the lore only says:
Hyperspace
Click to expand...
, colloquially known as Witch-space, is a higher-dimensional region through which ships can travel between star systems at superluminal speeds. Only ships fitted with a hyperdrive are able to initiate hyperspace jumps on their own. In the 34th century, the most prevalent hyperdrive design in use among human civilisation is the Frame Shift Drive (FSD).

Hyperspace jumps rely on the properties of quantum mechanics. Before a jump can be made, the destination must be selected, and a sufficient amount of Hydrogen Fuel or Tritium must be injected into the FSD. The type and quantity of fuel required depends on the ship's mass, the distance to the destination, and the specifications of the ship's FSD. Although hyperspace travel using the FSD is brief, straightforward, and generally safe, hyperdictions by Thargoid vessels have presented a growing hazard in recent years.
Click to expand...

And as such doesn't give much detail on how it works, specifically how it enters that "higher-dimensional region" - so to theory craft the ability to tow ships through Supercruise it seems fairly easy, make a bigger warp bubble and use a Guardian Fighter style of tether to hold them together, but getting the pair through hyperspace? There is enough pieces in the lore already that could be cobbled together to "make it plausible" or "workable" but it definitely needs more handwavium than supercruise towing would.

You'd need to address things such as how would the energy tether affect the portal into Witch-space? Assuming the tether didn't destabilize the portal into Witch-space, would that sort of tether work in Witch-space or is that energy incompatible with that dimension? Could you open a portal into Witch-space through which you'd be able to push a FSD warp style "envelope"? Could it be as simple as towing the other ship in your contrails as you enter the Hyperspace conduit and breaking the tether as you enter it and letting the towed ship drift through your hyperspace conduit behind you? If so, when you hyperspace out from one jump you arrive in the new star system in supercruise usually facing a star, now you have a drifting fast moving ship without an active FSD:
  • Would it be slung in slowspace and you have to find it as a signal source?
  • Would you arrive in slowspace and wait for the towed ship to arrive?
  • Given the drop from Supercruise to slow space in an interdiction causes the ship to tumble, and the towed ship gets slung from witch space to slowspace, effectively crashing through the supercruise plane, would the towed ship be tumbling, needing towed / nudged to stabilise it?
The theoretical physics of the games universe suggest that it would be possible, but it would require some game design issues to consider, some of which are simple tweaks to values, like if you tow a 500t ship, you are asking your FSD to make a hyperspace conduit for your ship plus 500t, which is less than the payload of a cutter or T9, so use one of them unladen and you'd be in normal specs for a laden jump. But what happens if you want to tow a 2000t ship like a corvette? Given jump range (linearly or exponentially?) decreases with mass, and fuel usage increases exponentially with distance jumped, there would be some sort of complex interplay between fuel used, available range, and mass of towed ship. I don't know the equations for any of the hyperspace jump calculations, let alone being able to refactor them into each other.

Going back to what happens to the towed ship after a hyperjump, does it just obediently willow you through witchspace on a tether like walking a dog? Or does it drop into slow space in a tumble like interdiction? If its the latter, and given the towed ship has no power of its own, how do you stabilise it? If you nudge it like tugs nudge big ships around harbours, it will damage the towed ship every time you nudge it, and eventually, its hull will be 0% - boom! So is this stabilisation something you'd do with (yet another) specialised limpets - very like the Tycho Manufacturing Accelerator Tugs from "the salvaging of the Nauvoo" in the expanse? These tugs bore an uncanny resemblance to limpets in elite:
1000

And they could then be used like this:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oFwPdtaUSs


So that would be a module that would need to be added and a mechanism in the games software to control those limpets and make them work like the tugs in that video?

If you pull it this way and that with tethers on your ship like taglines on that's another mechanic and module set - need the tether module, need the anchor points on the ship to aim for etc... Is this tethering to stabilise the ship something you'd be able too do on your own or would you need a few wingmen to make it work?

In supercruise would you need two ships to tow to get effective control of the towed ship?

I could go on for even longer than I already have on this topic, but I'm already aware this is a wall of text.
 

ZakNaZul

ZakNaZul
Shiro Akai said:
This occured to me while answering to other topic.

Theory:
Bubble only ship docks to FC for whatever reason. FC decides to relocate far, far away. Bubble ship on the next day realizes he's in the middle of nowhere, many thousand LY from the nearest port. Fcis gone. No fuel scoop.

Solution:
  • self destruct (which with current mechanics will port you to FC)
  • call Fuel Rats and ask for escort home.

And then it hit me - ship towing. New module - TOW - be it simple cable or fancy energy harness, whatever. If you can tether another ship to yours and tow it I'm good. Few conditions:
  • you must be bigger than ship on tow
  • higher fuel consumption
  • lower jump range due to extra mass (even halved)

So 3rd solution to above scenario - call tow service.
Click to expand...
So to tow someone in space you need bigger ship because ... Someone do not know physics apparently.. seems legit.
 

MarkyH

M
Shiro Akai said:
This occured to me while answering to other topic.

Theory:
Bubble only ship docks to FC for whatever reason. FC decides to relocate far, far away. Bubble ship on the next day realizes he's in the middle of nowhere, many thousand LY from the nearest port. Fcis gone. No fuel scoop.

Solution:
  • self destruct (which with current mechanics will port you to FC)
  • call Fuel Rats and ask for escort home.

And then it hit me - ship towing. New module - TOW - be it simple cable or fancy energy harness, whatever. If you can tether another ship to yours and tow it I'm good. Few conditions:
  • you must be bigger than ship on tow
  • higher fuel consumption
  • lower jump range due to extra mass (even halved)

So 3rd solution to above scenario - call tow service.
Click to expand...

I don't want "space caravaners" blocking up space stations taking the whole 10 mins to doc and negotiate the toast rack, no thanks.
 
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