General Type-7 Hardpoints: How To Improve Them

AMX-008 GaZowmn

AMX-008 GaZowmn
The Type-7 is in an odd spot for a large ship, in more ways than one, but today I want to discuss it's hard points. For those interested, I previously commented on how to help the Type-7 and other ships in its predicament (wide & long enough to fit into a smaller landing pad, but to tall to fit in the inner dock) to dock at outposts and locations without large landing pads:

General - "Outer" Docking In Medium Landing Pads For Type-7 & Other "Compact" Ships

My proposal to solve the problem of ships like the Type-7, which can fit in the area of the medium landing pad, but don't fit inside the dock due to their height, is to allow them to only dock externally, or rather not being given permission to enter the inner dock. The game already has some...
forums.frontier.co.uk forums.frontier.co.uk

Back on topic, as we know this "large" ship only has 4 small hardpoints, which limit its usefulness for some tasks that require at least a medium hardpoint (ex: core mining). But before discussing how could that happen I need to point out the situation of the ships 4 hard points... and what seems like a 5th hardpoint at the bottom that wasn't implemented for some reason:


Now, while simply requesting for that 5th hardpoint to be added would still be better than nothing, and quite frankly that might be the simplest & most realistic outcome for this situation, but I really want to discuss how this ship could have one medium hardpoint (more would be better, but one step at the time.

The "best" outcome would be adding the medium hardpoint without removing the small hardpoints, and for that purpose i would suggest taking the top small hardpoint and relocating it into the unused bottom slot, and in turn change the bottom slot into a medium hardpoint.

If for balancing reasons this wasn't viable, my second idea would be removing the bottom small hardpoint, which by it's own seems oddly placed to the side like that next to the unused slot, and put a medium hardpoint between the two small slots.

Going a bit crazy, and if Frontier is feeling a bit generous, they could combine the two previous ideas and remove the top & bottom small hardpoints and replace both of them with medium hardpoints, again, the lower one being placed in the space between the 2 small slots.

Considering that the Keelback, which can be seen as an upgraded Type-6, already has such hardpoint setup, I don't think it would be too far fetched for the Type-7 to go with a similar setup, specially given its status as a large ship compared to its medium-sized sisters (Type-6 & Keelback).

Lastly, I just want to add that while it was tempting to simply request for the Type-7 to just get 4 or 5 medium hardpoints, I think it still needs to be consistent with the other ships, in this case referring to the Type-9 (given that we know nothing of the Type-8) and allowing the later to remain the better/improved version of the Lakon large ship. For context, the Type-9 has 3 medium hardpoints and 2 small hardpoints, so from my PoV the the Type-7 should have room for improvement as long as it doesn't match or exceeds what the Type-9 has.

Following the same train of thought, that's why I also feel that giving the Type-7 two medium hardpoints & reducing the number of small hardpoints to 2 do would make sense: since a retcon could easily say that the upgraded Type-6, the Keelback, took note of the hardpoints of the next ship in the line, the Type-7, when looking for ways to better arm a cargo ship.

Anyway, that's what I have for now. If you have other ideas on how something like this could happen, please comment below.
 

here_it_comes

here_it_comes
Make it a Medium with the best cargo capacity of any Mediums, and give it a Medium hardpoint at the loss of some Smalls. Problem solved.

T7 looks awesome, wish it wasn't a turd.
 

HRDiagram

HRDiagram
WARNING: Unpopular opinion

Please don't!

The Type-7 is perfect in its imperfect state! It's a medium ship that only fits large hangar: that's the true big-boned ship!

And the fifth -ghost- hardpoint!

It's a whole Enginering failure that for some reason made it to the production line, and I love it exactly for that!

I love my Type-7

:)
 

Lugh

Lugh
Only thing that would help the type 7 is to make it less tall so that it can fit on medium pads.

T7 should be medium and so should the orca. Then maybe there would be a reason not to always fly a python.
 

AMX-008 GaZowmn

AMX-008 GaZowmn
In the other thread I linked in my original post, I talked about the situation of the Type-7 and medium landing pads, and the real problem as pointed out is that the ship is too tall to fit in the inner dock, BUT my solution was to allow it to only dock "externally", or simply put, do not allow it to enter the inner dock and by extent do not give it access to the 3 services that need you to move the ship into the internal dock: livery, outfitting and shipyard.

Services like buying commodities, mission board, cartographics, etc, as well as refueling, restocking ammo and repairs don't require you to go down the elevator and enter the inner dock, so those should be available for a Type-7 on a medium landing pad (and other ships in similar situation).

Essentially, the game already has the distinction of what services could and couldn't be available for this "outer docking" option.
 

here_it_comes

here_it_comes
AMX-008 GaZowmn said:
In the other thread I linked in my original post, I talked about the situation of the Type-7 and medium landing pads, and the real problem as pointed out is that the ship is too tall to fit in the inner dock, BUT my solution was to allow it to only dock "externally", or simply put, do not allow it to enter the inner dock and by extent do not give it access to the 3 services that need you to move the ship into the internal dock: livery, outfitting and shipyard.
Click to expand...

In other words, the T7 was so poorly designed that we should entertain introducing an entirely new layer of mechanics for docking just to polish the T7 turd.

FD should revisit the T7's model, but FD revisits nothing.
 

Kissamies

Kissamies
This applies only to me, but my problem is the lack of medium hardpoint. I use it as a mining ship and 3 Mining Lances is fine for my purposes. However, I use Subsurface Missiles on the 4th and a small hardpoint has too little ammo. So from my point of view, converting that one to medium would fix my problem. A 5th small hardpoint could also help, and add some flexibility.

Then there is also the pad problem. I would totally make it a cargo ship if it fit the medium pad. I would no longer care about the hardpoints at all.
 

AMX-008 GaZowmn

AMX-008 GaZowmn
Kissamies said:
This applies only to me, but my problem is the lack of medium hardpoint. I use it as a mining ship and 3 Mining Lances is fine for my purposes. However, I use Subsurface Missiles on the 4th and a small hardpoint has too little ammo. So from my point of view, converting that one to medium would fix my problem. A 5th small hardpoint could also help, and add some flexibility.

Then there is also the pad problem. I would totally make it a cargo ship if it fit the medium pad. I would no longer care about the hardpoints at all.
Click to expand...
I think that the Type-7 could have 5 hardpoints and/or medium hardpoints as long as the combination of this is not better than what the Type-9 has (3 medium & 2 small, 5 total). Either giving it 1 medium hardpoints and 4 small ones or 2 medium & 2 small, would be the best options IMHO.

As for the landing pad size, like I pointed out the middle ground option would be to allow the ship to dock "externally" or not being permission to enter the internal dock, which translates in having access to most services with the exception of livery, outfitting & shipyard, which do require to move the ship into the internal dock.
 

Rubbernuke

Rubbernuke
The T-7 had a hardpoint removed, bring it back. Also, revert back to the first overbuff so its faster and jumps further.

The T-7 needs to be medium really, so something can provide some form of rival to the Python.
 

AMX-008 GaZowmn

AMX-008 GaZowmn
Rubbernuke said:
The T-7 had a hardpoint removed, bring it back. Also, revert back to the first overbuff so its faster and jumps further.

The T-7 needs to be medium really, so something can provide some form of rival to the Python.
Click to expand...
It can't be medium due to its height, which prevents it from fitting inside the internal dock of a medium landing pad, which is why I said that given that the game already differentiates between the services available to ships simply docked outside and those moved into the inner dock, to allow ships that fit in the landing pad (but not in the inner dock) to use the services available outside (commodities, mission board, cartographics, refusing, restocking, etc.), but not allow them to use the inner dock only services (livery, outfitting and shipyard).
 

Rubbernuke

Rubbernuke
AMX-008 GaZowmn said:
It can't be medium due to its height, which prevents it from fitting inside the internal dock of a medium landing pad, which is why I said that given that the game already differentiates between the services available to ships simply docked outside and those moved into the inner dock, to allow ships that fit in the landing pad (but not in the inner dock) to use the services available outside (commodities, mission board, cartographics, refusing, restocking, etc.), but not allow them to use the inner dock only services (livery, outfitting and shipyard).
Click to expand...
I know, its something stupid like a meter too tall- but I like your idea.
 

Lugh

Lugh
AMX-008 GaZowmn said:
It can't be medium due to its height, which prevents it from fitting inside the internal dock of a medium landing pad, which is why I said that given that the game already differentiates between the services available to ships simply docked outside and those moved into the inner dock, to allow ships that fit in the landing pad (but not in the inner dock) to use the services available outside (commodities, mission board, cartographics, refusing, restocking, etc.), but not allow them to use the inner dock only services (livery, outfitting and shipyard).
Click to expand...

problem is that the type 7 isn't the only ship that falls into this situation and not all of those ships need the buff of being able to trade and do missions at a medium pad. all the services you listed that can be done without entering the bay are the ones that need to be kept separate to prevent a significant increase to bigger is better. It would shift the ballance hard away from a lot of medium ships.

You also have the UX of why can med ship x do this but not med ship y and can I do it in med ship z?

It would be better to just alter the model a little so that it fits. Its not as easy as it sounds as just scaling has unintended effects a lot of the time but it would be cleaner than allowing external only docking.
 

AMX-008 GaZowmn

AMX-008 GaZowmn
Lugh said:
problem is that the type 7 isn't the only ship that falls into this situation and not all of those ships need the buff of being able to trade and do missions at a medium pad. all the services you listed that can be done without entering the bay are the ones that need to be kept separate to prevent a significant increase to bigger is better. It would shift the ballance hard away from a lot of medium ships.

You also have the UX of why can med ship x do this but not med ship y and can I do it in med ship z?

It would be better to just alter the model a little so that it fits. Its not as easy as it sounds as just scaling has unintended effects a lot of the time but it would be cleaner than allowing external only docking.
Click to expand...

Actually, and contrary to my initial assumption, IT IS THE ONLY SHIP in this situation:

According to this blog entry, the size of a medium landing pad is 150x90m, and its height should be just north of 22.8m, height of the tallest medium size ship, the Federal Assault Ship, though the author does notes that this height doesn't include landing gear (this may be relevant later on):

Elite: Dangerous Blog | Why is a Type-7 Transporter not able to use a medium pad?

Elite: Dangerous Blog - News and events from the Elite Dangerous galaxy - I’m glad you asked! The landing pads in Elite dangerous come in three flavours.
www.elite-dangerous-blog.co.uk www.elite-dangerous-blog.co.uk

What this this mean for the 9 large ships in the game?

Two of them are too long to fit:

Anaconda - 155m > 150m
Federal Corvette - 167.8m > 150m

Three of them are too wide to fit:

Imperial Clipper - 103.7m > 90m
Type-9 - 115.3m > 90m
Type-10 - 118.4m > 90m

Two others are both too long and wide to fit:

Beluga Liner - Length 209.1m > 150m; Width 131.6m > 90m
Imperial Cutter - Length 192.6m > 150m; Width 111.1m > 90m

This leaves two ships, the Type-7 which is long (81.6m) & wide (51.6m) enough, but too tall at 25.4m > 22.8m and the Orca that is... just the right size for a medium landing pad?

The Orca's dimensions are 130.4 long, 50.8m wide and 22.7m tall, the later which means that it is actually slightly shorter than the Federal Assault Ship (22.8m), tallest medium size ship.

Why the Orca is not a medium size ship? I'm not sure. Best guess is that the maybe while the Orca is normally shorter than the Federal Assault Ship, once their landing gears are deployed the roles are reversed. That being said, I can't quite tell from the images available on the wikia, and at least the Orca's landing gear doesn't seem significantly larger than the Federal Assault Ship's.

Any theories on why the Orca is not a medium size ship?

Anyway, this means that the Type-7 is actually the only ship that could make use of an external docking option, given that it fits nicely in the landing pad, but is too tall for the internal dock. As for the Orca, unless I'm missing something here, I don't see a reason why it can't simply be reclassified as a medium size ship at this point.
 

Lugh

Lugh
Being the only one just makes that option all the more strange and would be an outlier adding to Q/A going forward.
 

CMDR Corlas

CMDR Corlas
I love my T-7.

It very much needs the second small hardpoint on the bottom enabled so we can use it.

It would also be very nice if the small hardpoint on top was upgraded to a medium.
 

[VR] Bulbulunufus

[VR] Bulbulunufus
Don't people use the T7 as a meme PvP ship? Extra hard point might be overpowered!

I enjoy the T7 as it is, it's fun to fly and throw around. The haters only make me like it more... if it was "fixed" it might feel less cool to like :)

Perhaps we need a new engineer that performs slight mods to ships. For the T7 all I suppose they'd have to do is modify the landing gear so that after landing, the ship "sits down" a metre lower on it's gear and fits into a bay. Either that or they have a really big saw... but yes, the external docking only, no outfit, option also makes total sense.
 

AMX-008 GaZowmn

AMX-008 GaZowmn
The plot thickens: so I was looking through an old blog entry with the ship blueprints, but with additional descriptions, which included the Type-7 and its "sealed" hardpoint on the bottom, when by curiosity I also checked a few other ships and saw this:


The Hauler ALSO has a "sealed" hardpoint...

I kind of get it when ships like both Eagles only have one utility slot, despite being no "obstruction" for a second one on the symmetrically opposite point to also have one and allow options such as the point defense turret to provide better coverage, since they seem something actually strapped on the exterior of the ship rather than something popping from inside the ship:


I would still like the option to have it so I can go with the aforementioned 2 point defense turret configuration if I wanted to, or other countermeasures, specially for a shieldless eagle, and the same applies to the Hauler & Type-7 hardpoints: even if they were just one more small slot, I would still prefer to have the option than none, which is what we are getting at this time. The Hauler in particular seems odd since this sealed slot actually makes for the argument that the Hauler is worst than even a Sidewinder for combat or some other tasks due to having just one small slot compared to the Sidewinder's two.

Doing combat in a Hauler sounds like a bad idea, but having a second slot to bring at least one energy and one ballistic weapon, like the Sidewinder, would go make it more feasible. And even if we discard the idea of taking a cargo box into combat, having second slot would allow me to equip to sets of mine launchers, so I can alternate them in those cases I can't evade the interdiction. Or for bringing a mining laser and some means of defense I decide to mien the hard way. I know the are not the optimal ways to do these, but I would at least like the option to do so (and for the record, I do like using the Hauler).

But above all, what puzzles me the most is that the way these ships are designed makes it seem that they were supposed to get these options when first designed and they retracted also minute on them. And in both cases, I don't think that giving them these extra slots would have suddenly turned any of these ships, the eagles included, into something balance breaking.

Also, saying that maybe it was due to energy issues doesn't seem to be a good argument given we also have ships like the Vulture whose large hardpoints makes it difficult to balance its energy requirements.

Bottomline is, while I still want the Type-7 to get fit in middle landing pads (even if it can't enter the inner dock and its related services) and would love for it to have one or two medium hardpoints, I think that at the very least these 4 ships should have the above mentioned sealed/missing hardpoints/utility slots available. Sure, maybe not everyone has need for all of them them, but I would at least like the choice to use them or not... and that would have seen to be the original intent when they were first designed.
 
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