Capital ships

[Neils Iyssada]

So I was talking with some people about how 1600 meters are small for capital ships, especially some sci-fi references like Homeworld ships that are lengthy or flat, and truly massive.
My old thread about design size is a nice start to understand the problem.

I'll add some picture to make the problem more visible, but for example the Pride of Hiigara is supposed to be a massive mothership 2-3km tall. But once I reduced it down to 1600m, it feels tiny.



So here's the idea : add another spacecraft class, Capital or Titan or Mothership

This class would have bigger size limits (5km seems like a good max) and accordingly bigger file size limit.
It would be limited by an adaptive hard-cap (1 for each empire, 1 per 20 officers, 1 per something ?) to avoid spamming these beasts.
They would maybe replace cities if enough volume was allocated to commodities / ships production.
They would have some malus / limitations, like not being able to land on planets or high maintenance cost.

So if I summarize :

Features

• Bigger physical and file size limits
  
• Spacecraft manufacture
  
• [Commodities production]
  
• [Could maybe be "replaced" by another design after some long cooldown, for making it easy to improve the interior for example]
  
• Badass
  

Benefits

• Huuuuge ships
  
• Can produce ships
  
• [Can produce commodities]
  
• Can make good warships or nice motherships, strategy choice
  
• More server-friendly as it would theorically be worth several warships / cities
  

Limitations

• Some kind of hard cap limit to avoid spam
  
• - like 1 per empire or 1 per x number of officers
  
• Hard limit coupled with a high maintenance cost (money + parts + special ressources)
  
• Highest FTL signature
  
• Some longer warp cooldowns
  
• No planetary landing
  
• [Too big to use any wormhole except intergalactic ones ?]
  
• Would need a volume allocation ratio limit, to avoid huge glass cannons
  

Basically I see this class number limits like Dreadnoughts in Mass Effect universe : due to the enormous destruction power of these ships, Council races can't have more than a said number of Dreadnoughts, numbers that are defined by the race's efforts regarding council space and politics. Except here we don't have a central faction to govern us, but such ships need to be heavily limited.

It's not a well-matured idea, but I wanted to put it down before I forget and move on. I'm open to comments to improve this idea, be it restrictions or features.

[Greydog]

Right now the only real metric we have for a battleship is the volume in weapon mods you place behind the weapon. Driving the age old Hazeron metrics of "the biggest ship with the biggest gun" which leads to the one tactic of "park and shoot". Beyond that everything else is pretty much moot.

Until the focus moves from fitting as many mods you can into a box, to weapon and/or ship tiers, then I only see ship classes as role play with no real application.

For example, the Dragoon I am building I am calling a "Light Corvette" knowing that it is really only a small (60m) ship that will become obsolete the moment an empire can build bigger ships.

[Neils Iyssada]

Right now the only real metric we have for a battleship is the volume in weapon mods you place behind the weapon. Driving the age old Hazeron metrics of "the biggest ship with the biggest gun" which leads to the one tactic of "park and shoot". Beyond that everything else is pretty much moot.

Until the focus moves from fitting as many mods you can into a box, to weapon and/or ship tiers, then I only see ship classes as role play with no real application.

For example, the Dragoon I am building I am calling a "Light Corvette" knowing that it is really only a small (60m) ship that will become obsolete the moment an empire can build bigger ships.

Yeah I understand. I would classify it as a Corvette too, as for me it's anything between 45 (ground max) and 100 meters long.

What about the other aspects of Capital tho, like ship production ?

[Greydog]

Yeah, I'd love to see factory ships be a thing, or construction barges that can be parked and used as a shipyard to build that station rather than needing to tow it.

Your idea is not a bad one, I like it actually. But until more depth is added to ship functionality, I'm afraid these things are just something to dream about.

Haxus just reduced file size, I don't see where physical size couldn't be increased so long as one is judicial in it's construction.

[Rockinsince87]

Yes I support the mobile shipyard/mothership idea and generally classifcations of ship. It makes sense to have production facilites since we are very much multi-galaxy now. 

I would also really like to see the sensor and target acquisition overhaul per. That would further support role based ship designs. 
https://www.hazeron.com/mybb/showthread.php?tid=2689

With the above link suggestions I made, classifications would not fit under hard limits of volume or size but fall under the role your empires comes up with. If Hazeron were to go the size clasification route it would still work out fine.

[AnrDaemon]

Until there's clearly defined goals for shipbuilding, any size restriction is arbitrary, and a bigger ship will always be better.