Thargold War: Fleet Carrier Fire Support

[Old_Man_Steve]

Here's an idea for update 15 or 16, however long the war is supposed to last.

Suggestion: Allow Fleet Carrier owners to participate in AX with their carrier by parking them in the CZ or station/planetary battlezone. This will give AX pilots the following advantages.

• Covering fire that actually does something (other than hopelessly bounce off the hulls of scouts like basketballs)
• Distracting fire on interceptors (especially the big hardy bois like the Hydra), thus allowing the players or NPCs to deal with the minor menaces or the swarms.
• The ability to swap out weapons/hardpoints/ships on demand without leaving the CZ. This also would allow for pilots to refresh their limpets or change ships depending on the enemy in the Area of Operations (AO), which can't be done at stations under attack.
• Mat drop-off so pilots don't have to fly to a safe station and dump off collected thargold parts.
• Lore/story enhancement: a heroic owner puts his expensive billion-dollar investment on the line to buy time for evacuation flights would make a good story on Galnet.
• Coordination for FC owners and others working on deliveries and evacuations. Imagine being able to fill up a FC with escape pods then having the FC take those pods to the rescue system, where you casually fly back and forth to the rescue ship for delivery.

Simulation guidelines

1. The carrier's weapons systems are automatically controlled- though if there's time before the next update, the devs can make something like a Battle Bridge for the carrier owner to manually target enemies in the AO. On this Battle Bridge the owner can launch repair and decon limpets at ships at will, though they should pay for a controller.
2. Only the weapons and any ships on the hull can be damaged by Thargold fire. Once all guns are offline, ship automatically retreats from AO and ship owner must manually initiate repairs. Repairs should eat through some of the owners' material ore and data storage (but no Grade 5s). Players should get the ability to donate their mats and ores to the FC.
3. Carrier should be at least 10k from the station or base to avoid crossfire and accidental enemy trigger. Only 2 carriers for planetary AOs and 4 for spacestation AOs and CZ.
4. The corrosive missiles should have no effect on the hull, but limited effect on the weapons array.
5. When FC is leaving the AO, alert message goes out. Any ship with 50m of FC gets knocked off course. Any thargold scout in range gets destroyed and any interceptor loses a heart but it's rare for them to get that close to stations anyway. NPCs should panic and say things like "NO! They can't leave" and "Air support! I need air support now!"
6. Pilots can still request module and ship delivery, though the time should be a minute slower. Hey, the Post Office delivers on rainy days- so should the delivery service. Sure the "rain" in this case is caustic missiles, but that's why we pay 10 million creds to get our Type 10 delivered.
7. FCs in battle would only appear in Open or private server, but not both at the same time. I'm not sure on how the "instancing" works but the fleet carrier should only appear in one instance to prevent shenanigans. Once the system status changes to Post-Thargold, the carrier appears in all instances.

Naturally, FC owners would be compensated for their works and the risks involved. Successfully winning a battle would earn powerplay merits if pledged to a power. And of course, FC owners would make a profit off any fuel/repair/refit/combat bond sales on their FC. (in later updates, FC owners that make 100 billion off battles should get the "War Profiteer" rank in Trader.)

As is custom when dealing with FC owners, pilots should already be aware their extra ships could wind up thousands of light-years away an hour later. This would make trust between owners and pilots an important part of the experience and astute FC owners would label their carriers with a trusted player faction like PDES.

Future implementation suggestions

• A 'tractor beam' module for FC owners to 'pin' interceptors in place for 5 minutes. The interceptor can still shoot and move on its axis, so it's not a total gamebreaker. But it would allow for coordinated strikes by AX pilots without worry of running into the dern thing. This would be manually controlled from the Battle Bridge
• As part of the Battle Bridge, FC owners can push a notification through the AX scanners of pilots called Priority target. Pilots that select that specific enemy will be alerted and receive an extra 5000cr for destroying it.
• A "carrier fighter bay" module that FC owners can launch up to 20 SLFs at a time. This will come in handy when fighting alone or in low-traffic systems. When there are more than 5 CMDRs around, this number would be reduced to 10 SLFs otherwise pilots will be bumping into them all the time. Why should the thargolds be the only one to benefit from mass numbers? However, rebuilding fighters is not a cheap activity so owners will have to decide when and where to employ their SLFs.
• An automated SFN module that releases every time the interceptors begin to charge theirs. This ability takes time to charge and can't be used for 4 minutes after first charge.
• A 'distress signal' open that sends a basic "I'm under attack" message in the System message with acceptance option. When pilots accept the call, they'll get the AO location on their location board.
• A 'battle cleaner' module which will send out limpets to collect mats from the AO within 3km of the FC. Space is dirty enough. We should clean up our mess during and after the battle.

 

[Tividar]

First FDev would need to figure out how to hang a Fleet Carrier inside an instance where it's not treated as the equivalent of a space station. Currently you can't have this sort of interaction because the Fleet Carrier isn't a ship - its a station object and you can only have one of those in an instance. I'd be thrilled to see FCs handled more like capital ships in CZs., but...

• We don't need another mechanic for driving of Fleet Carriers - targeting heat relays works just fine for Capital Ships, and Thargoids already target by heat signature.
• If your Fleet Carrier can damage Thargoids, turn-around is only fair. If the 'Goids successfully drive off your Fleet Carrier it should go through an Emergency Protocol (with reduced thresholds for commodities). The basic mechanic is already there, and it certainly should not include any engineering materials requirements.
• Caustic Damage is Thargoid hallmark. The longer you stay in an AXCZ, the greater your weekly upkeep. Release a Meta-Alloy or Guardian Carrier Module to materially reduce/eliminate it. While we're at it, the Fleet Carrier is going to need one of those Salvation-Designed Capital Class SDFN modules.
• No strong opinions on the number of FCs per instance, though game-scale would make more than one a bit silly.
• FC waking should not impact Ships (human or Thargoid) other than the normal kicking around you get when you're too close to the wake (e.g. no damage).
• No need to adjust ship and module delivery times. Either allow it or don't. A couple of minutes isn't going to make a difference.
• Not Touching the Future suggestions.

Keep in mind, the presence of even one capital class ship in a Thargoid CZ basically ruins that CZ as far as any pretense of balanced combat goes. I'm not sure that's really all that much of a problem: If you want challenging content, NHSS are your go-to. From a narrative/sandbox perspective, allowing Fleet Carriers to participate in CZs (AX, PP and BGS) would be a solid addition.

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