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Nomad Mothership?


VisNyliss

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So just had an idea but not entirely sure if it would be possible due to game mechanics, size limits, etc...

 

But a ship class that I would call the "Nomad Mothership." Basically more of a travelling space station that houses your entire org and all it's holdings. The Org's wealth goes back into improving the Nomad until it becomes this massive, impregnable behemoth of a supercarrier that never stops moving.

 

Or maybe it does stop moving. Find a nice spot to park it and set up a protective bubble and call that spot your home until you're done doing whatever you're there to do. Build a carrier bay into it to house smaller ships and transport people and goods to and from the Nomad.

 

It's the possibility of this kind of thing that really excites me about DU.

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I can only tell you that all my ship designs are modular based and could dock together if that was implemented

Not sure if we will see something like Merge Blocks for SE in DU. It MIGHT be possible, since they discussed the possibility of the Core Units (which determine the max size of the construct) being linked together (which theoretically allows for something with no size limit).

 

The advantage of modular pieces is that it can separate. The disadvantage is that it is very inefficient. You'll have a lot of mass dedicated to redundancies that will be necessary for the individual pieces to work as ships, but that would not be necessary if they didn't need to be separated.

 

A large nomad ship might be very very hard to move. There is a chance that there will be a "minimum thruster output" to move a structure based on mass, beyond the impact that mass has on acceleration. If not, a "nomad" ship could take a whole play session to accellerate to a fairly slow pace, and it could be sort-of "flung" into a particular direction by a script designed to slow it down at the right time to have the whole ship stop at the correct destination.

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Actually the space station we've seen in a few of the videos is able to move.

 

The space station is about 8 kilometers in size/length and it has a few "titanic" sized thrusters attached to it. Thats how JC described it.

 

The station was moving but it was at a "snail's pace".

 

So an independance day sized mothership is possible but it would be very inefficient.

I think you are better of with the colony set up. A couple of ships each with their own task moving in a swarm.

 

Getting this swarm or the mothership to land on a planet might be possible with the "athmospace" thrusters but it wouldnt make sense economically.

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I look forward to seeing if large ships are doable. In most games the larger a ship is, the heavier it is, thus the more power you need for the engines. But the power generators you build add to the mass. It is the issue we have now with liquid fuel rockets. Diminishing returns and the like. Although it might fit into the jump gate idea. If we need to build jump gates to get to other systems perhaps an organization can build a giant ship to house the people and resources needed to build one, then jump to the new system and build another. 

perhaps there will be a very expensive, very advanced anti gravity block that reduces a ship's mass so a larger build can move at a viable speed. 

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I look forward to seeing if large ships are doable. In most games the larger a ship is, the heavier it is, thus the more power you need for the engines. But the power generators you build add to the mass. It is the issue we have now with liquid fuel rockets. Diminishing returns and the like. Although it might fit into the jump gate idea. If we need to build jump gates to get to other systems perhaps an organization can build a giant ship to house the people and resources needed to build one, then jump to the new system and build another. 

 

perhaps there will be a very expensive, very advanced anti gravity block that reduces a ship's mass so a larger build can move at a viable speed. 

 

Assuming the ship doesn't ever need to deorbit it could be as heavy as possible within the game but acceleration would be negatively affected top speed should remain the same and with a ship that size moving it wouldn't be a regular occurrence.

 

How does ftl travel work in the game anyone know yet?

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doesn't the game background story talk about something that could help with this idea. those resource pockets in the story hold tons and tons of weight, and used gravitational compression and anti-gravity technology to reduce the weight of inventory. why wouldn't that tech be available for ships as well.

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How does ftl travel work in the game anyone know yet?

No clue!

 

I do know that in Space Engineers, the distance you could jump with a jump drive (and the ammount of charged energy spent to jump that distance) was based partly off of the mass of your ship; The more mass your ship had, the shorter your max jump distance and the more of your stored energy it takes to jump any distance.

 

I'm willing to bet that FTL and jumps will have something to do with mass, but too soon to guess. I'm willing to bet FTL will take a lot of power, ruling out very small ships for FTL travel, but there will likely be downsides to being very massive for FTL. Possibly it'll take longer to "accelerate" to jump (and to decelerate).

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So just had an idea but not entirely sure if it would be possible due to game mechanics, size limits, etc...

 

But a ship class that I would call the "Nomad Mothership." Basically more of a travelling space station that houses your entire org and all it's holdings. The Org's wealth goes back into improving the Nomad until it becomes this massive, impregnable behemoth of a supercarrier that never stops moving.

 

Or maybe it does stop moving. Find a nice spot to park it and set up a protective bubble and call that spot your home until you're done doing whatever you're there to do. Build a carrier bay into it to house smaller ships and transport people and goods to and from the Nomad.

 

It's the possibility of this kind of thing that really excites me about DU.

More like "Moving Space Station" ?  :D

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I look forward to seeing if large ships are doable. In most games the larger a ship is, the heavier it is, thus the more power you need for the engines. But the power generators you build add to the mass. It is the issue we have now with liquid fuel rockets. Diminishing returns and the like. Although it might fit into the jump gate idea. If we need to build jump gates to get to other systems perhaps an organization can build a giant ship to house the people and resources needed to build one, then jump to the new system and build another. 

 

perhaps there will be a very expensive, very advanced anti gravity block that reduces a ship's mass so a larger build can move at a viable speed. 

 

This concept art of an antigravity engine seems promising, though it is dated 29.05.2015. Found from Dual Universe Twitter feed. 

 

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CGMIX-WXEAALhPB.jpg:large

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  • 4 weeks later...

I imagine this will be possible, but the size of the ship would probably mean it would be incredibly slow or incredibly expensive to fuel.

"

...and incredibly vulnerable. It would take industrial or financial might to make such a ship and build the fleet to securely protect it. Not to mention the activities of such a vessel will be limited to deep space: no one struts in gold shoes through an alley at night. 

 

However, the idea might work on a smaller scale for a large mobile mining platform. To have mining, refining and production facilities on a vessel that can move to more lucrative or safer fields is quite tantalising. 

 

...if you have the security to protect it. In Eve we have a saying: 

 

"If you can't afford to lose it, don't fly it."

"

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This might be an effective vessel as a home base for a pirate organization. They could move from system to system, scavenging and stealing as they pass through.

 

You might not strut in gold shoes into an alley, but what if the alley struts its way to you? :)

 

I am not, nor will be a pirate, but I can see this working for them.

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I was thinking about the exact same concept: it shouldn't be impossible to achieve in the game, since Arkships in lore are basically the same - they are huge, moving habitats, though they are much more energy-efficient due to crew being into cryo hibernation sleep mode (minimized resources consumption) and due to the nanopacks (the science behind nanopacks has been inexplicably lost in the Arkship archives), as well as nano fields displacement tech. Lore Bible doesn't say anything about energy generators so far, but we should assume they were many orders of magnitude more powerful compared to the tech in posession of Alioth colonists in the beginning of their civilization rebuilding endeavor.


I see no reason why objects like this couldn't be possible to developed and constructed in DU. I mean, 100-300 crewed ship in space, packed with some food, water, life support, habitation, resources and equipped with nuclear fusion/cold fusion/antimatter generator, along with some defense systems doesn't seem like a big fuss in a science-fiction realm of DU.

Since all Arkship passengers-DU avatars retain their nano packs (they just can't manufacture new units), they all can store an impressive amount of resources on them with by reducing their size and mass. This makes additional required storage space in such motherships much lower, than it would be without nanopacks.

So even assuming that Arkship passengers have much less sophisticated technology than Arkship's enginners they still should be able to gradually construct a miniature version of fully functional mothership.


Whether the server tech will allow is different story though, but I'm no expert in the field and the game is under development.

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In theory we won't even get to orbit for the first few months of the game. I have the nifty idea of a balloon type ship that moves about the planet. Over time as tech advances additional layers and tech get added on, so eventually it becomes a giant space station with the old wooden airship hull inside somewhere.,

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In theory we won't even get to orbit for the first few months of the game. I have the nifty idea of a balloon type ship that moves about the planet. Over time as tech advances additional layers and tech get added on, so eventually it becomes a giant space station with the old wooden airship hull inside somewhere.,

 

I think the several month figure was for reaching other solar systems. If I recall, JC mentioned in one of the interviews that to create a basic ship would only take a few days of work, so even if that is a fairly optimistic estimation I can't see it taking more than a week or two for the first ships to reach orbit.

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In theory we won't even get to orbit for the first few months of the game. I have the nifty idea of a balloon type ship that moves about the planet. Over time as tech advances additional layers and tech get added on, so eventually it becomes a giant space station with the old wooden airship hull inside somewhere.,

I think you severely estimate the determination of some orgs, getting an outpost on another planet first is going to be important (imagine, only your org on the planet, with plenty of time to get some space superiority)

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