The Glade 4.0

Sweet!

Loading up the Hangar thingy now. Soon.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I approve!

I have a couple more questions since I haven't done a great job keeping up to date.

Dogfighting alpha: will allow you to fly ships in your hanger, does this include multi person ships like the constellation? Can you have buddies crew it for you?

SWACS: I read something about there being two types of sensor information, positional and informational. What's the story and if one has a SWACS ship (or crew station) how does one share that detail with a squad mate(s)?

I'm in with an Origin 325a

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Nuit Wingbane (ex Ranger, Bristlebane)

The understanding is you will fly the ship(s) you've plegded and the ability to join and crew other peoples ships will be forthcoming if not immediately available on Dog Day One

Sent from my GT-P3113 using Tapatalk

And /bonk tenuous

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Is there anywhere that it explains what the different systems do and what their relative merits are? For example, I notice my 325a has a different shield system than the 300i, but is there anywhere that it tells me what the actual difference is?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The ship brochures (linked to the Origin 300 series brochure) describe the differences in some general terms. The 325a shield you mention is probably a beefier shield than the other models.

Some of the weapons can be viewed in the Voyager Direct store on the site, where they're given vague "Whitley's Guide" ratings in stars, and size stats for each weapon.

In the hangar, the computer console displays stats (as bar graphs) for some of the weapons, such as damage, power draw, and refire rate, IIRC. Not sure if one of the wiki pages has gone and tried to break those down to analyze them and make them reference-able out-of-game.

Overall, it's partly a matter of still being in the process of populating equipment and stat tables, and then they're probably a bit shy to keep things super-up-to-date since it's all highly in flux subject to balancing, yet.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

So far, they are just numbers that mean nothing. I expect to get destroyed by the dogfight hornet monsters when the first alpha hits.

I expect to get destroyed a lot, until I figure things out, but that's ok. I don't think it has much to do with Hornets though.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

How many ships can you have? I mean, do you have a garage where you can choose which ship to take out? Or do you just have one ship?

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There is no upper limit. The hangar already supports multiple ships, and is that garage.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Ooh, nice. We hit the expanded cap ship play stretch goal, and the new $28 mil goal is pretty sweet: an alternative to the Aurora (along with a new ship manufacturer in-fiction) at the same price point. If/when that gets hit, the Consolidated Outland Mustang will be available for Aurora pledgers to swap out their pledge for. The Outland Mustang is planned to offer more power and engine options at the cost of lacking the hardpoint variety and cargo capacity of the Aurora.

Pretty slick.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

It is sweet, and I really like the idea of giving day one and beyond people a choice. However I think I like the " Swiss army ship" philosophy behind the aurora.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

From WingMan's Hangar today... the Asteroid Hangar will be as big as the deluxe hangar, so when it gets added... I'll have one! Yay!

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Train kept a rollin', all night long, train kept a rollin', all night long

27 Million, Banu merchantman unlocked.

29 Million, new stretch goal announced:

Enhanced Mission Design for Squadron 42 – The team at Foundry 42 has big plans for Squadron 42, and we’re going to provide extra funding to make it a true spiritual successor to Wing Commander! Squadron 42 can go above and beyond anything you’ve seen before. From opening with an epic battle instead of a training patrol to missions that seamlessly combine boarding and space combat, we aim to put you right into the action! Additional funding will let the team realize this, with enhanced mission design and more resources and animations to enhance fidelity.

That 29 million stretch goal is sexy. If we put boarding and a little capital ship combat into the campaign, that means we don't have to focus the persistent universe on it, right?

Dammit, they'll be offering Banu freighters as pledge ships. Time to go check my bank account just in case it looks appealing (meaning the specs) but doesn't supplant one of my other ships...

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Huh?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

There are loud forum elements that are all about the cap ships, and everybody and their brother wants/expects to be hijacking Bengal carriers, etc. I'd rather have dogfighting starfighters in space. I don't mind cap ship combat existing, but it seems like the kind of thing that would better "fit" in scripted missions than in a freeform multiplayer fight.

Playing engineering crew in a single player scripted mission? Fun! Point me to the scripted broken things, and let me bang my wrench on something to fix it and save the day! Playing engineering crew in a generic multiplayer fight? Not fun. The damage comes in too fast to run around and fix when you have players organizing and focus firing, and all those cool scripted scenes turn into "stand here and bang your wrench on this same thing for twenty minutes."

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I sort of agree and sort of disagree, I think capital ships ought to be present and meaningful in the game, but by the same token I don't think that ought to be the focus. Same thing with boarding. These should be secondary things.. but secondary means secondary, not marginalized. I think the best way to do this is that in PVP, things like damage control are best automated, and the players should focus on flying and shooting.

It also depends a little what you mean by "capital ship". I don't think things like corvettes or even destroyers are capital ships. Capital ships are things like battlecruisers, carriers, and similar REALLY big ships, and they sshould focus on fighting other really big ships. Fighters should mainly fight other fighters. There can be some crossovers (point defense/"SAMs" on one side, torpedoes on the other) but it should take a LOT of fighters to kill a capship. Simialrly, it sohuld be relatively easy to get out of the capships threat envelope if one is in a fighter. We aren't trying to play Harpoon here!

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Yeah, secondary things, exactly. I don't want to see a Corvette or larger in every multiplayer fight. I'd probably be a little dubious about seeing them in one out of every five or maybe even one in ten.

So when you see people start demanding more pledgeable Idrises be sold, and you start doing the math...

I wonder where other people draw the line. Or assume they're just blinded by "I didn't get one" and not looking at the big picture. (I'll be honest, I have some sympathy there -- I was (and am) more than a little cheesed off that when the Idris M's were initially up for grabs, their checkout system gave me false hope that I'd get one and I missed it by that little...)

As far as the definition of capital ship -- I realize that real world navies have certain definitions for classes of ship and whatnot, but the traditional parlance of space games is rather different. Part of that comes down to gameplay (capital ships are generally anything that requires (or is intended to require -- early games had some bad AI blind spots that let you sit there for 45 minutes or so with lasers if you could take out all the fighters) bombing runs with torpedoes in Chris Roberts' prior works. Another part comes down to the Star Wars legacy, probably -- Star Destroyers are the biggest things around, and they're "only" destroyers.

Chris has used the term "capital ship" plenty when describing the gameplay of Corvettes -- clearly, in his mind, Corvettes are the most accessible entry rung of capital ship style gameplay. Arguments could probably be made that some of the stretch goals have made it likely that the Constellation and/or Retaliator might blur a *little* into some of those lines, since they both sport multiple turrets and at least one of them will offer CIC options. At the same time, the Corvette is definitely a bridge in ship class, as it will utilize capital ship gameplay but has been said to be the largest ship that can land on a planet (and thus not require being manned 24/7).

What I'm expecting is that Corvettes are largely meant to be anti-fighter screening ships that can be equipped to mount one or two weapons suitable to bring to bear against other capital ships. Wolfpacks of Idrises, coupled with a few dedicated torpedo bombers, will be the way to go after larger capital ships until you have one under your command, then it really does become about the destroyers and up slugging it out with each other, while corvettes in tandem with your own fighter escort to work to screen bombers and fighters.

But I hope that's, like, 1% of fights, not 20% of them.

The campaign's a different beast -- you're in the military. They HAVE a multitude of these ships, and you're specifically attached to a carrier, yourself. Capital ships should be present in many more of your missions than in PU fights -- say 60% (with other missions being scouting, recon, skirmishes, etc.) having one or more cap ships present on at least one side. Then, you can make maybe 2-4 missions in the course of a career battles that take place when you weren't on shift as a pilot, but get drafted into duty as things are falling apart around you, repelling boarders and/or trying to help the engineering crews patch things up when you happened to be nearby.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I feel like 1% is probably too infrequent, but 20% is definitely too often. I think 5-10% of fights ought to be a good ratio for larger combat ships appearing, with the higher ratios being in more contested areas. Personally, I do want to have one of the battlecruisers which was a strech goal, but there hasn't been much detail on, and I don't want to be kept out becuase of some arbitrary limit on large ships. That said, I am OK with limiting their numbers very strictly for things like the Idris, before launch.

As to the term capital ship, it really doesn't have a strict real-world definition; it just means a navy's largest and most important warships. In WWI that was battleships and battlecruises, in WWIOI, carriers and battleships. Today it obviously still includes carriers, but it also can include cruisers, which are rare anymore. Kirov class ships for example, and although smaller in size, Ticonderogas too by virtue of their firepower. Making this even more confusing is the fact that "destroyers" are now essentially a catch all for all surface combatants; the Zumwalts will out-displace the Ticonderogas by about 5,000 tons. This makes a 21st century "destroyer" comparable to a WWII Baltimore class heavy cruiser, well in excess of the Washington/London treaty cruiser size limits. It's not actually THAT much smaller than HMS Dreadnought! Also frequently not thought of in this way, are SSBNs. By size and power and importance they are "capital ships" but people normally don't associate the term with submarines. Not only does capital ship not have a strict meaning, but a lot of the past terminology for classifying surface combatants has become very muddled indeed, as role rather than size has become the criteria.

In Sci fi, my thing with terms like "capital ship" is that when applied overly broadly, I often don't know what the author means. A Corvette I know is a small escort ship; a carrier is supposed to be quite large, as is a battlecruiser. When all of these get lumped together as "anything bigger than a fighter" I find it difficult to understand what the differences between them are.

In EVE, a capital ship means anything larger than a battleship (battleships being the largest subcapitals). In Star Wars, the small "destroyers" are so huge in absolute terms that they can easily still be capital ships. Other sources use the term like Roberts does. This isn't a bad thing, I dust find it harder to understand what the author is talking about when they use very broad terms.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

My worry revolves around the Bengal carrier. They have said there will only be one in the universe, and it is capturable but what happens when it is found and a bunch of guys get together and destroy it? That would suck but someone is going to try it. I just hope that it is staffed with some pretty hotshot pilots and crew who are going to make a mess of any inbound forces.

The number of Bengals available to be captured in the PU has vacillated between 1 and like 6 over time. But yeah, destruction of one is something that will be interesting to see how it's handled.

My guess is that it won't ever completely break apart, but rather, will go derelict and become a monumental salvaging project.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

It'll be a shame not to be able to see it in all its glory.