pocket carriers (could revolutionize the way we play the game)

[Devil Doge]

i was reading the studio report and saw the picture of the new hornet and it got me all tingly. i know what i want in my fleet. i'm picking up a Polaris and the new hornet. but it got me thinking...

I've been sick with the flu for the last week or so and World of Warships has been my go to game in that time, and seeing new info about SC put an idea in my head.

remember when the endeavor sale went up? and everyone was buying them because they wanted their own pocket carriers. personally i was thinking about using an endeavor and ditching all the pods and turning it into a war ship with a small hangar.

the Carrack i think is the smallest ship with an internal fighter bay but we haven't even seen it yet

then they showed the idris during the SQ42 preview and all i could think about is how many people would slam thier ship into someones frigate that costs as much as a used honda accord.

the javelin has a better hangar system from what i could tell but we dont truely know how much of a hassle it will be to land in a javelin because we haven't seen it done yet. not to mention both the idris and the javelin cost a fortune and require a small org just to use them.

so with the Polaris likely being featured at citcon LA, i'm kind of worried. because:

1: hangars take up a lot of room and its not that big of a ship.

2: I've seen people slam into the ground just trying to take off and explode (that might end up crippling your own ship)

3: if you keep a fighter in your only hangar bay then you have to resort to using the docking collars to get things in and out of your ship (which really aren't big enough for some ship parts)

then it suddenly clicked in my head. they should make catapult fighters a thing. i'm not talking about aircraft carrier catapults that throw F/A-18s into the air. i'm talking about WW2 aircraft catapults that launched FULL sized fighters and recon planes from ships that normally couldn't hold one inside. these were VERY widely used by all nations that had a competitive navy and there are hundreds of ships that used them. we kind of still use them to this day if you count the helicopters that land on corvettes in the navy.

(2 recon planes on a cruiser)

these aircraft landed in the water near the ship and then a crane pulled them out of the water

i have a few ideas of how this would logistically work..

the main difference between planes and spaceships is vertical thrust, since a hornet can just press up and go up you don't need anything to accelerate the craft. but what you do need is something to lock it in place (i imagine something like this coming up and fixing itself to the landing gear of the ship

and the best part is, if there was some sort of crane that came out on the ship then once the crane operator made contact the ship could be switched to the local physics grid so it could be part while the ship moves.

this would work for pretty much any multi-crew ship in the game. they were so versatile that nations could upgrade pretty much any existing ship to carry fighters...

(below is the USS New Mexico BB-40, this warship was laid down in 1917. this ship was built before they even tested the catapult system; under is a photo of the first real catapult fighter launched to protect convoys from attacking german planes, this hurricane was fitted on to an existing cargo ship during the battle of the atlantic.)

they could literally put these things on anything big enough for the rails, but lets get back to how this comes to play in star citizen..

all ships (even the beloved connie) that have the ability to hold a smaller ship inside will require some complex landing sequence, otherwise collisions will happen and people will get salty (thats why they havent put the p52 merlin with the connie yet in game). my proposal to save everyone grief is to automate the process. if you get close enough to the crane on the ship and press the landing button, it will automatically pull you to an open space. making so easy we could do it drunk (and prolly will).

this also solves the 'i have so many ships but i can only use one at a time so all the others just collect dust. CIG could make them go literally anywhere in the ship and even use existing capitol ship hardpoints like the turrets on the javelin

the carrack (based on concept art) was almost made for this! it has easy access to the top deck. you could still keep the pieces in the hanger of you can use it to land an Argo to restock the ship, but you'd never have to worry about going into a bad part of town when you have your personal hornet escort ready to deploy at a moments notice.

now this is for size scale..

this is an I-400 submarine. its one of 3 subs in its class and is the only known instance of a submarine that could launch aircraft. it is 122 meters long and the carrack is 123 meters long so i thought it was a good comparison. oh and it could launch 3 regular size fighters...

if this is done in star citizen you could almost stack hornets inside of larger ships hangars..

tldr: we need the ability to have fighters to protect our ships so i had the idea to use the ww2 catapult fighter system.

 

[Accented]

That will obsoletify all ships bigger than a corvette, so nope, not a good idea.

 

[Devil Doge]

That will obsoletify all ships bigger than a corvette, so nope, not a good idea.

it wouldnt make them obsolete. remember bigger ships have bigger guns, and carrying 1 full sized fighter to defend yourself wouldnt do shit against the idriss rail gun. think back to history class. a Nuremberg class cruiser didnt beat the British fleet even with the fighter it had. that being said its not that big of a change, and there are a lot of people that just see a big ship and instantly want it. im guessing that your goal in game is to just get a ship with a hanger then? but you would need other people to crew it if you wanted to get anything done. if anything, all it does is save fuel because the fighter wont need to burn its engines and you can take one into deep space to explore without getting completely fucked by some pirate in a cutlas. trust me, an idris is still an idris, and a javalin is still a javalin, and they still have a much bigger payload than the smaller counterpart. not to mention an internal hangar bay for rearming missles and storing larger bombers and drop ships. where as a catapult fighter would likely need to fly somewhere else to rearm certain things.

tldr: an idris will still fuck you even if you have a hornet strapped to your carrack.

 

[Accented]

it wouldnt make them obsolete. remember bigger ships have bigger guns, and carrying 1 full sized fighter to defend yourself wouldnt do shit against the idriss rail gun. think back to history class. a Nuremberg class cruiser didnt beat the British fleet even with the fighter it had. that being said its not that big of a change, and there are a lot of people that just see a big ship and instantly want it. im guessing that your goal in game is to just get a ship with a hanger then? but you would need other people to crew it if you wanted to get anything done. if anything, all it does is save fuel because the fighter wont need to burn its engines and you can take one into deep space to explore without getting completely fucked by some pirate in a cutlas. trust me, an idris is still an idris, and a javalin is still a javalin, and they still have a much bigger payload than the smaller counterpart. not to mention an internal hangar bay for rearming missles and storing larger bombers and drop ships. where as a catapult fighter would likely need to fly somewhere else to rearm certain things.

tldr: an idris will still fuck you even if you have a hornet strapped to your carrack.

Here's my reasoning:

Quote from U.S. Naval War College research professor Chris Weuve regarding Battlestar Galactica

But in space, you don't need that doorway between the sea and the sky, because your "fighter" is operating in the same medium as the mothership. You don't need a flight deck. You just need a hatch, or maybe just a clamp that attaches the fighter to the hull if you don't mind leaving it outside. You don't need the big engines or the big elevated flight deck. And hence it doesn't make nearly so much sense to put all of your eggs in one basket. There might still be some efficiencies in grouping them together, but the fighters are probably more analogous to helicopters rather than F-18s. Almost every ship in the U.S. Navy carries a helicopter, or at least could temporarily.

There will be no reason to have carriers anymore. The only reason that we actually do have carriers in-game is because a carrier is just so much more fun than a swarm of smaller "pocket carrier" ships.

Additionally, about how an Idris can still kill you, that is why I said any ship larger than a corvette. A corvette should have a railgun, or other weapon effective against capitals.

 

[Devil Doge]

"A corvette is a small warship. It is traditionally the smallest class of vessel considered to be a proper (or "rated") warship. The warship class above the corvette is that of the frigate, while the class below was historically that of the sloop-of-war. The modern types of ship below a corvette are coastal patrol craft and fast attack craft. In modern terms, a corvette is typically between 500 tons and 2,000 tons"-wikipedia

i think you are missing the point.. this game isnt a hardcore simulation of reality, if it was then the bigger ship with the biggest gun would always win.

but the point is fun. without fun, star citizen will die. and for a tiny org that doesnt have 10,000 members, getting any form of carrier is a waste of time and resources. but its fun to launch ships from other ships especially with things like the hull E, you can either have one of your friends follow you around in a fighter, doing every repetitive jump that you make, or you can attatch that fighter to the ship until shit hits the fan and everyone switches to combat mode where the pilot takes off to intercept.

i really fail to see how something like this has any real impact on larger capitol ships that already have hangars.. a corvette is likely going to bu used as more of a flak battery to repel smaller ships and i highly doubt that would ever go 1v1 with anything bigger than it.

think of this not as a test squadron member where we could realistically operate anything we want, but as anyone playing the game. i know when i go out into the verse im likely going to have about 7 people with me, enough to just run a polaris. theres no way in hell we could ever run an idris unless we got people from test to help.

i mean, by your definition the carrack already broke the game. it is a pocket carrier, it can hold atleast one fighter (possibly more below but they havent released that info yet). same with the endeavor, it can hold 2 medium/4 small sized ships which technically makes it worse than the single fighter on a polaris.

in reality its just a different way of storing the ships, instead of an internal bay, its latch onto the side, its like using a docking collar but you can fly while its attatched

 

[Black Sunder]

People that want pocket carriers have Imperial Star Destroyer syndrome. They think every capital ship should have lots of fighters to send into battle forgetting completely how large fighters in the game are and how large the ships that hold them are along with what facilities are needed to maintain them internally.

The best pocket carrier you're going to have is the Caterpillar launching Dragonflies at a target or perhaps on the outside chance a Hull E with external fighter racks.

 

[Devil Doge]

People that want pocket carriers have Imperial Star Destroyer syndrome. They think every capital ship should have lots of fighters to send into battle forgetting completely how large fighters in the game are and how large the ships that hold them are along with what facilities are needed to maintain them internally.

The best pocket carrier you're going to have is the Caterpillar launching Dragonflies at a target or perhaps on the outside chance a Hull E with external fighter racks.

well i mean the point wasnt to cover ships completely with fighters, the point was that people always ask if a new ship can hold actual fighters if they see a hangar in a concept ship. and adding an entire ship to your own ship would have real drawbacks: unbalancing the ship, extra mass, burns fuel faster.

but the name of the game is versatility. star citizen is a sandbox in the way that what you do is really up to you. so having different configurations of ships to play different roles in a multi-crew setting is a huge selling point in the game.

i prolly used the wrong word in the title of this post. heres more information on the types of roles they took up, and they could pretty much complete the same tasks in game
http://www.pacificaviationmuseum.org/pearl-harbor-blog/u-s-scoutobservation-floatplanes-in-world-war-ii

 

[Blind Owl]

Ships!
They are made to fly.
Beer!
Is made to drink.
So say we Owl.