Discovery Gaming Community

It occurred to me that Carriers are really just sub par battleships, an RP platform, and an easy blue message, the main issue being that there usually aren't enough players to fill up the docking bays, which can be scarce at times, to make efficient use of the carrier role.

So I thought to myself, why not change the way these work?

First of all, remove any heavy and primary turret slots from carriers. If you wanna kill battleships, use a battleship. Leave only enough secondaries for flak cover and an adequate anti-snub shield. I know it sounds preposterous that you can't pretend to be a battleship anymore in your carrier, but hear me out on this one. Then, give a thruster of some kind to Carriers so they can slightly outrun battleships so they don't take it up the butt too hard. I'm not talking too much, just 100 thrust speed will do just fine.

Secondly, make docking modules be sold on Guard system bases. It's a pain in the bum to get your hands on one.

Thirdly, here's the good part, create special NPC carrier pets, similar to say STO or SoaSE. These would occupy the unused Heavy Carrier Bays, and would take little to no cargo space to equip, reason being that the special ammo should take up a fair amount of cargo space.
Using the NPC carrier bays would be simple. Equip the "<Faction> NPC Docking Module", purchase your choice of Fighter or Gunship ammo, undock, and for example type something like "/lflaunch" to launch a light fighter. The ship that is launched will depend on your ID/Docking Module. Launching a fighter will take a certain amount of energy as well.
There should be a cooldown in-between launches that varies from ship class to ship class, such as 2 minutes for a VHF or 5 for a gunboat. If this is possible in Freelancer, then Carriers may possibly play their correct role without having to nag people to get online. Of course, if you prefer humans in your carrier, then just use regular docking modules. Pretty simple.

It would be even cooler if you could control the fighters, such as targeting an enemy and typing "/petattack" or something for your carrier pets to concentrate fire on that enemy.

As a side note: The faction specific NPC docking modules should have a technerf. NPCs should be somewhat comparable to the beefed up NPCs.

I'll likely elaborate more on this later if need be, I'm quite tired and under the weather a bit.

I very much like this idea
Maybe make launching a ship a bit more risky for when under fire, like make the shields go down (like when you jettison cargo) and maybe have it so you can call a ship back, and give them a time limit, like say 5-10 minutes depending on what ship it is (that why you don't run into a carrier with a massive swarm of ships.)
You can make them all go into formation with you when they aren't doing anything.
And making carriers faster but weaker is good as well. Some people were saying, give them more hull...why not more shield batterys/nano bots? And make it so they can sell them and when a player buys some it takes them from you. Giving them ONLY secondarys would be good, so they can't kill anything big (they aren't supposed to anyway.)

I like this idea too, but I think ships like Geb should have different launch time because of lore.

problem with carriers being practical is in coding of the fighter-"ammo". It's been discussed before, and the verdict basically was that encoding them would take a lot of server resources, not to mention making them lag the server depending on how many are active at a time.

There have been ways to try to resolve these issues, which the server Lane Hackers can tell you better than I can. There are other mods who've done this "successfully", but the "unstable" infrastructure of the current server disallows such.

EDIT: As for making docking modules sold in static-bases? Frankly, I'd be up for it, provided you:
1.) change that ALL ships with Docking Module Slots only have 1 of such
2.) "civilian" sold docking modules can only carry 1 fighter-class / 1 freighter-class Player ship (coding limits via cargo limit)
3.) POB docking modules can carry up to 5 fighter-class / 1 transport-class Player vessels (again, coding limits via cargo limit)

http://discoverygc.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=105717
Check out this thread it makes similar points