What would be your MAIN mode of transportation? Poll

[Dorlas 21]

Well, I think that creating a system in huge organization where even people who can´t commit on scheldule and can play only a little can still be part of military could extremely benefit said organization, but from what I have seen, it seems those organization want the exact opposite in their ranks: Players who can commit both quite substantial time into "service" and can log in at the same time every day.

Of course, we are only in pre-Alpha and it may turn out that this system could lead to huge burnout in ranks of military (I have been part of WoW private RP server scene and I saw with my own eyes how people who were RP gamemasters (a.k.a. the people both creating events and providing technical backing for them like spawning mobs or acting as antagonist) burned out because what should have been their free time activity became sort of a second job.

Maybe we will end with military forces that will require this type of attendance only with officers and commanders, while crew members like pilots or technicians would be able to come in and leave at any time they want and rewarded based on the amount of time they spent in service. And at the same time, there would be ships made out of dedicated players that would be sent into more combat missions and unsafe zones, while those vessels with "casual" crews would orbit home planets and act as defense ships with only small crew most of the time.

 

This whole logistics thing actually really intrigues me. As Twerkomor said, huge ships need lots of crew and finding a way to make it work will be challenging. Unlike in real world, where you can have most of crew doing nothing, yet still be available to fight at any time, you don´t have that luxury in DU.

Let´s say HMS Queen Elizabeth is attacked. Alarm is sounded and all of its crew can participate in the fight.

Now let´s say DES (Dorlas Empire Ship, patent pending) Num Nums is attacked and its captain calls everyone on Discord to help. Well, it ain´t happening because I am in school, writing my thesis about beginnings of Magyar settlement in Slovakia.

Crew will be the biggest problem navies in DU will have to face and it is why, IMO, automatization will be a must for huge ships. Those Star Destroyers will need to be capable to fire from all guns even if only 5 crew members are present on board. Of course, nothing will ever beat the 1guy=1 gun system, but it is better than nothing. My bet is that we will see ship to ship combat with full crews only during the biggest and most important battles. And that is also why intelligence will become extremely important. Imagine if Terran Union launches surprise attack on the Empire, timed to the point where their battleships emerge from FTL over half of Imperial planets at the same time. Without information about their intentions, movement or at least simple knowledge that something is happening and it may be wise to be alerted, the war will be won before it even starts, because half of Empire´s fleet will go down without a fight.

 

And about physics and usage of huge ships in planet invasions and control: Many people want to build exact copies of Star Destroyers or BC-304s and let´s be honest, who doesn´t? But I think this is another thing that will be completely changed once the reality of the game hits and we will end up with strange mix of Galactica and Donnager.

Battlestars in BSG were unable to land on planets or operate in atmosphere (except when Adama jumped them into atmosphere, but that was Adama, the guy was maniac), because ship of that size and with that kind of armor would never lift itself off the ground. And the same will go for battleships in DU. Why waste space with engines and fuel for atmospheric flight or bother with aerodynamics, when you can build it in space and do whatever you want? You won´t be shooting fighters 100 meters above the ground with it anyway, so why even give it that possibility? You can always make smaller ships for atmosphere and let´s be honest, they will be better in that type of combat anyway.

And why Donnager? Well, imagine that you have huge battleship incapable of landing on planet, with huge crew and necessity to secure even whole systems. What is the best way to do it? You make the ship into a base. That´s what aircraft carriers in real world do, after all. So you need said battleship to carry fighters, landing craft, corvettes and so on. Those huge ships may be by themselves in star systems with no support from their home territory. They will need smaller ships to protect them and maybe go after enemies that are not significant enough for battleship to pursue. And what better way to take care of those ships than allowing said battleship to serve as their port?

 

This whole comment can be basically summed up by this: The players often have illusions how this game will work, but it may end up as something completely different.

With the exception of building the Death Star J.C. keeps talking about, that´s the one thing which we should definitely build no matter how stupid or unpractical it is, because we owe it to him.

[Anaximander 1813]

@Dorlas

Well, in EVE Online, in the alliance I was, we had ranks like "Reservist" for people who are not hardcores, but are in the military as well.

Reservists could gain access to many jobs, given they got the trtaining for it. So a reservist on a carrier, will of course not enjoy the same payment as a full-time pilot for example - or luxuries of course -. but they do got lots of jobs they can do - given they know how to do them and they got the neccessary training, as always.

So, one day you may be a gunner on a bomber, the other, a paratrooper, the other, an engineer doing repairs, the next, running inventory on the birds the carrier carries - essentially, checking if each bird has the ncessarry munitions and fuel on it, in-case of emergency.

I know of the guilds you speak of in WoW, sadly, I was a raid leader for 5 years on a hardcore guild up until Cataclysm - whichI called quits and gave up on that game. I also played games like Lineage II, where people who can live and breathe the game paly 24/7.

Those two games though had limited amounts of people on the whole server. Games like EVE Online, have a 22000 capacity per star system. If you were to bring everyone on the server in WoW, on Thunderbluff, you'd be banned - as Swifty from Warrior Tricks fame was, .

And DU aims to DWARF that number from EVE.

So yeah, while dedicated top guns are not easy to find - and good ones at that - reservists can easily be found abundant. And everyone needs a reservist.

 

 

But captains? Officers? Those are more or less, for lack of a better word, a second job - as some fleet commadnrs in EVE I know would put it. You need to know :

1) Intelligence - scouts reports on enemy movement
2) what kind of reserves you got as a backup
3) fleet tactics on your end as well as the enemy's
4) have an open schedule for some 8 hour long fleets - which are really really often.
5) more or less knowing who each enemy fleet commander is by name and by extension in DU, know what ship is a flagship of what person.

Of course, if the captain is not online, the X.O (Executive Officer) is the one to take the reigns - who also has the privilege of running this literaly second job.

Then you got a Tertiary Officer, who is there IN-CASE both the Captain and the X.O. are not online or are dead.

And after that, you also need a dedicated Navigator who knows how to fly the ship, cause it's not a cheap fighter, this Battleship costs money, so you don't want a bad pilot flying the ship, right?

And then, you also got this Flagship chain of command  in-case the flagship is destroyed and the fleet needs an acting commander on site to take the reins.

So, for every CAPITAL ship, you got at least 4 people who literally have to drop what they are doing and log in, who need to stay in touch with the game constantly, in order to run that mini fortress floating in space.

And, of course, with the benefit of running the battleship, you also get the benefit of being the SOLE PERSON TO BLAME for anything that goes bad during a fight.

i bet 99% of the people has checked off the checkbox "Battleship" by now.  

That's why I stick to my realistic view of a scout/stealth role for me. No responsibility, just fly around an asteroid belt, and find if there's anything fishy.

[CoreVamore 325]

 

23 hours ago, Lethys said:

Yeah because big guns are known to take down smaller fast ships with ease. 

I like the sarcasm

 

I must admit in theory it sounds good to put small ships weapons on a big ship, but if I was in a little ship approaching such a large ship, i would simply give it a wide berth greatly reducing the chance of small weapons hits as well as hopefully still being fast enough to avoid any large ship weapons.

 

We will see however what NQ eventually rolls out - we might all be wrong.

[MookMcMook 68]

3 hours ago, Lethys said:

Thing is though, as you've seen from various videos, there are orbits for ships. So that ship needs to constantly fly and can't just hover in space. 

As there are stats like atmospheric drag and gravity (see videos), a huge ship might not be able to land at all in a planet (or only once....) So you NEED small ships anyway to get down to the planet.

One of such ships ist a great feat and ist a logistical problem in it's own and surely ist a good addition to any army, but you will never ever be able to control all resources and tiles in a planet just because you have one of those. Alioth hast more than 50.000 tiles - gl patrolling that with a slow ship

Yeah the parameters are what is going to be very interesting concerning gravity and constructs and size. "Watch this space".

 

I've only seen the videos so have not had a full feel for planet size and ship speed and what is possible to accelerate concerning orbits, but a huge Star Destroyer hanging around some star systems is going to be a major guard or attack on any resources attempted to be transported off such a planet(s). Yup plenty of small constructs are going to be needed.

 

How are raw materials handled: Are they simple "inventory space slots per construct" without weight and volume physical properties? ie do we know how constructs handle how much they can haul? eg from dig sight to space?

[Anaximander 1813]

10 hours ago, CoreVamore said:

 

I like the sarcasm

 

I must admit in theory it sounds good to put small ships weapons on a big ship, but if I was in a little ship approaching such a large ship, i would simply give it a wide berth greatly reducing the chance of small weapons hits as well as hopefully still being fast enough to avoid any large ship weapons.

 

We will see however what NQ eventually rolls out - we might all be wrong.

Well, NQ has been clear on their vision. They want a math-based dynamic hit-chance mode.

More or less, if you go faster than the enemy's weapons angular tracking speed is, you reudce the chance to be hit and i f yo uget hit, yo utake less damage (cause the proejctile is bouncing / glancing off / grazing your ship, as you go faster than the bullet itself). And yes, that means, if you fly in a spiral, the enemy will have trouble hitting you.

And on top of that, NQ can easily create a virtual cone of fire for their math calculations. They already got Aerodynamic Profiles in the devdiaries, which are a base for Cross-Sections on ships. Cross-Section = your print on the base of a Cone of Fire.

So, a small ship, flying in spirals, has a very VERY small chance of being hit.  But... uh, yeah, if you get hit, cause it was not your lucky day, or if the person manning the ship is like, a Jedi, and they swivel the ship's around to match your motions, you may actually get shot quite easily, as the algorithm would interprete the firing ship's X,Y,Z spiral twist of the nose as evening out your movement at a distance. Talk about mad skills at that point, you got outclassed if that happens, which quite honestly, I don't got an issue with, if a person is THAT good at the game, they should murder any smaller ship with their insane levels of skills. Is there a chance of such a person doing that? Yes,. Will it be often? Not really.

 

It's just people think Star Wars when they think space combat, AKA, World War 2 but in space. Whichi s far from how real space combat would happen.

[Forodrim 55]

mid size Ship (~ Millennium Falcon) crammed with Exploration modules (whatever those will be in the final game), with a decent set of engines to give me better chance to avoid unfriendly ships. 

 

A big, empty ship might be funny in a "Red Dwarf" kind of gameplay, but I don't thing that will be viable in DU

[The Red Wake 6]

I want a cargo ship. Start off with slave one style and build up from there. End goal would be something like Han and Chewies cargo hauler from force awakens, probably with an atmosphere to space cargo shuttle, and I just want to go round hauling things for orgs, solo or with a few crew, but minimal crew, ala red dwarf