Very much this!
I like having my fleet and outfitting with me. It's my personal carrier, other can land, refuel and rearm, but other than that, it doesn't offer anything else to anyone else. For me, it's home.
Time to make Fleet Carriers Squadron's only..
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I like having my fleet and outfitting with me. It's my personal carrier, other can land, refuel and rearm, but other than that, it doesn't offer anything else to anyone else. For me, it's home.
Take 'mining expansion' missions (agri station, faction in expansion mode) where you have to obtain bertrandite, coltan, indite, gallite - all of these can be bought instead of mined. (38-50m reward per mission, a bit less if you choose g5 mats, less the cost of goods) Each one usually requires 600-1200 units.
I sometimes wing up with 1-2 other commanders, but usually solo it. If you wing up, you both get the reward for half the effort. In a wing of 4 it's really really fast. (With 4 I'd leave one cmdr at the station, snapping up more missions as they become available.)
Move the carrier to a large extraction station selling the minerals, and load 'er up. Most of the missions earn 30m plus net, so if you manage to find 20 missions, that's 600 million in the bank for each commander. You just have to set a buy price on the carrier at one station and selling prices at the other - hopefully more or less equal unless you're trying to tax your wingmates ;-)
That's one way, and I've made billions doing that. I have about 14 of those missions in my transactions tab right now, and they have a 6 day expiry so I'll get to them when I can wing up or put in the time myself. I like to do a set of missions then do combat, shoot some scavs, explore, scan some exobio in between.
An alternative is to use Inara to find goods selling way below market (hint: infrastructure failure.) Park your carrier next to the station and load up, then find another station paying top price. If you can get other commanders to help, using the carrier marketplace as an intermediate, so much the better.
Even if you have all the modules fitted, most carriers can hold 15,000 tons. Buy Palladium at 46k and sell for 71k and that's 375 million profit every trip, and the arbitrage seems to be constant. If not Palladium, gold and silver work too. Use an unshielded T9 or Cutter with 784 tons of space (I use a supercruise assist and docking module in case the movie/youtube/streamer on my second screen happens to get interesting at the wrong moment.)
Basically I enjoy hauling a lot more than mining - it's very chill, and I only push the faction to expansion every 3 weeks or so, which is about the time when I feel like doing some hauling anyway.
Fill the hold with AGRONOMIC TREATMENT at around 2500cr/t then dump it at 30k/T
LOL crazy
If I never earn another credit they can't evict me from my carrier until I'm at least 120 yrs old...
Nope.
I love having a fleet carrier as a solo player. I'm out in the black with my entire fleet of ships. It's great having a carrier around to swap ships when I feel like it, have a base of operations to handle any repairs and livery changes I wanna make on the fly. It is my mobile home in the stars. I grinded my butthole off during the gold rush last year and have enough credits to keep it alive for 20+ years. Leave me and my home alone.
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Really it seems like OP's problem isn't "too many people have fleet carrier" so much as "my home system has too many carriers in it and no way to filter them out of the system map".
Now that's a cause I can get behind! Where is the donation basket?
More filtering in general would be great. Like... whenever I'm in a busy system, I have to turn fleet carriers off in the filter to clear the list.
Whenever I go back home, I have to turn them back on to find my carrier.
Ideally I'd want them split up into "my carrier", "dockable carriers" and "other carriers". I can't think of a single situation where I'd want to be made aware of or visit a carrier that I can't dock at.
To unclutter the UI and because it would be less of a change to ask for, I'd just be happy if 'hide carriers' in the nav panel continued to show my own, whether the toggle was on or off. It shows in bright yellow so it's not like the UI is unaware it's the player's carrier.
Why do we need to hide carriers? Because there are lots of them. If there was only 1 (mine) there wouldn't even have to be a hide carriers option.
For faction support I like to know whose carriers are in a system so I can gauge opposition, but that's not going to be one brimmed full of carriers like Colonia or an engineers system. An 'all' filter would cover that eventuality (like you I usually have it set to all & only hide carriers when they interfere with finding what I want on a cluttered nav panel).
There should be smaller (1/4 the size, capacity, cost and fuel upkeep) for exploration-class carriers for individual commanders (and these not shown as icons in the system map - but can still be listed via the POI list on the left panel IF they are set to be dockable by friends or all commanders). I would trade in my overblown and underused carrier in a second for something smaller and lower cost to maintain and move around in my explorations and varied gameplay style.
This would immediately get rid of a lot of the overblown fleet carriers from the maps as people migrate to using something more sensible. Fleet carriers are an overkill for most people not working with a group/squad for a specific bubble related task or CG. If enough players moved to the smaller more sensible exploration carriers, then make the current fleet carriers for squadron only (as they were originally intended).
This would immediately get rid of a lot of the overblown fleet carriers from the maps as people migrate to using something more sensible. Fleet carriers are an overkill for most people not working with a group/squad for a specific bubble related task or CG. If enough players moved to the smaller more sensible exploration carriers, then make the current fleet carriers for squadron only (as they were originally intended).
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I've wanted this since carriers were released. I can't think of a single scenario where I'd want to hide my own carrier and, on the flip side, I almost never want to see other carriers.
The fleet carriers as the are now should have been for squadrons or, better yet, for minor factions. The reason why the aren't is probably because Fdev couldn't figure how they should be controlled and how to transfer that controll. And while I do think the fleet carriers are fantastic, the aren't "personal" fleet carriers; They're K-marts in space.
I'm not going to read through the entire 8 page discussion at this point, so sorry if someone already mentioned this but I feel like a lot of people would be happy if you had a filter to hide carriers from the system map. Much as I don't like the idea of Fleet Carriers and feel like they've broken a lot of things and doesn't really fit in with the Elite Dangerous that I knew before, I accept that they're here to stay. That being said, just being able to hide them off the system maps would make navigating them so much less frustrating. I think if they weren't bloating up half the maps in the bubble, they probably wouldn't annoy me so much.
Problem is they are persistent in the game world for everyone and that's a major feature. I guess they could have an option to hide your fleet carrier and have one spot you could always park if you have that flag set. That's about the only way I see that working.
No.
Locking carriers behind squadrons would imply a certain number of CMDRs in the squadron before a fleet carrier could be purchased. And the carrier would´ve likely become inactive/decomissioned if the member count went below a certain threshold. The only workaround for solo players would´ve been to buy 20/50/X alt accounts to fill the roster. Not to mention the nightmare of managing each account. But that ship has long sailed.
I´d personally prefer a squadron-owned carrier for just one reason. I want there to be some sort of activity while I am offline. Part of what makes Elite a living world is logging into the game and realising that the planets and stars around me have "moved" while I was offline. Imagine logging into the game to find your squadron´s carrier in a new system, or better yet in the middle of nowhere. Although I don´t quite understand why I have to mine void opals now, but if that´s my only ticket back to the Bubble...
I´d personally prefer a squadron-owned carrier for just one reason. I want there to be some sort of activity while I am offline. Part of what makes Elite a living world is logging into the game and realising that the planets and stars around me have "moved" while I was offline. Imagine logging into the game to find your squadron´s carrier in a new system, or better yet in the middle of nowhere. Although I don´t quite understand why I have to mine void opals now, but if that´s my only ticket back to the Bubble...
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