Disposable Fighter/Drone Production (aka Hangars instead of Shipyards)

[Edymnion]

Okay, I've been playing a lot of Star Trek Online lately, and been having a lot of fun with my heavy escort carrier there.

Little background before I get into this idea for Starmade:
In STO, hangar pets are basically items you equip, and you have a hotbar button that lets you launch them. Depending on the hangar pet, you could launch anywhere between 2 and 4 of them at a time, with an upper limit on how many you can have active at once (generally 2 wings at any given time). As they get shot down, you can launch replacements as long as your launch command is off cooldown. When you're done with an area, you just leave because you don't really care about reclaiming your fighters (since you can just launch more).

While Starmade is a very different game, it did get me thinking. Starmade has a definite problem with fighters and drones in that they are persistent. If you're flying a carrier that launches 20 drones, thats 20 drones you have to either re-dock, or its 20 drones that get left cluttering up space and the database.

So what if we took a page from STO and made launching fighters/drones something that was TRULY disposable? Basically what I'm thinking is a modified shipyard that acts as a hangar. You build your drone, your fighter, whatever, save the blueprint. Load the blueprint into the hangar. As long as the hangar is empty, it starts slowly charging up like a weapon does until it produces the blueprinted ship (without spending physical blocks on it). The bigger the fighter/drone, the more energy (and time) it takes to replicate it. So each hangar (and you could have multiple hangars) could produce a single largish fighter every minute or two, or a fairly steady stream of micro-drones.

The ships produced are temporary. If you log out, they despawn. If you jump, they despawn. Maybe even if you don't give them an order for 5-10 minutes they despawn.

Basically, think of it as a cross between a shipyard and a mine layer. It would turn launching fighters into a weapon based model akin to laying a mine or launching a missile, and not a pure ship building based logic/rail system like we have now. Would use Shipyard rules for anchors and size restrictions, and combine it with launch rails. You put the computer on the hotbar like you would a weapon computer. Hit it, and it "fires" the fighter off and begins recharging to replicate a new fighter to reload the bay with.

Could have hangar based mining drones teleport their mats to the main ship's hold (by slaving storage to the hangar computer) instead of having to use the "mine into drone hold, dock, transfer from drone hold to carrier hold" stuff we have now. Means we could fire off dozens of mining drones, and then not worry about collision checks and everything else to recover them. Just let them mine out a sector, then we jump to a new one and redeploy. Or fly around with one set of drones and when we're full jump back to base without worrying about recovering them.

No recovery means not having dozens of AI trying to plot paths back to the carrier, it means not having potentially hundreds of collision checks as they jostle each other and the carrier trying to hit a pickup point, and it would allow carriers to be viable without constant trips back home to restock their hangars after every fight.

 

[jayman38]

So you're just leaving your fighter pilots to die while you warp safely away in the comfort of your command chair? You monster!

I like this a lot.

However, I'm concerned about the "economy" of it. In Starmade, the primary economy is blocks. Therefore, I propose an addition, to keep things under control: Even though hangers automatically build the fighters, those fighters should still require blocks to build. So as long as the mothership still has blocks in stowage, it can build new fighters, but it is limited, based on finite resources.

To reduce the "hit" of this counter-proposal, I also suggest some simple rules to soften the blow:
1. Hull and armor blocks can be automatically replaced by scrap blocks, at the cost of "spongier" fighters. This allows the mothership to replenish by "mining" abandoned stations as an emergency measure. Allow individual servers a config setting to turn this on or off.
2. When the fighters de-spawn, half their resources go straight back into the mothership's stowage, so you aren't losing everything when you abandon fighters (monster!). Allow individual servers a config setting to adjust the percentage.

Schine should complete the mechanic whereby ships can "transport" materials/blocks to friendly ships without dropping shields. (Assuming they have not already completed this mechanic.) This block-transfer mechanic will allow supply ships to feed motherships with fresh parts, to keep the hangers running.

 

[Edymnion]

What if it just ran completely off of scrap? I know I wouldn't mind if it just burned scrap, or even mesh/composite.

We get so freaking much of that crap anyway, it would be NICE to have something to burn it on.

 

[jstenholt]

I mean, I'm under the impression that we're going to get shipyards on ships eventually, schema has teased it a few times, and I'm assuming those shipyards will work with rails. So I'm not sure about making this its own thing while at some point we're probably getting a chamber that does this anyways.

 

[OfficialCoding]

Or schine could just fix carrier recall.

 

[Lone_Puppy]

I like this idea, and it sounds familiar to what people have wished for in the past with shipyards on ships.
Sounds like STO is leveraging the industrial replication, which is what they do to build shuttles, torpedoes, probes and anything else they need ship wide. Which makes sense, when you have the fabricator for block creation at an astronaut level.
For balance, the requirement for storage is definitely the way to go. After all, Starfleet requires Duterium in order to replicate stuff.

When the Hanger is concerned, I personally would rather a replacement for the existing shipyard mechanic. Something like this idea, but using the shipyard block with a drone production mode. The shipyard could still use the

What to do with these expendable products?
I recommend still recalling drones, but they could be treated in one or more of the following ways.

• recalled and docked to the mother-ship somewhere, the same way we do now. Any excess drones would either remain or fall into formation with the ship using the fleet mechanics. Let's not be wasteful. If drones are abandoned, they should have a despawn counter like overheated cores applied, so the database cleans them out. We need more automated and admin based database cleanup utils for servers.
• reabsorbed back into storage using harvester beams. Perhaps the fleet recall could also be used here, to position them correctly or dock them.
• despawned using a counter, so you have the opportunity to salvage or recall. Maybe the despawn could add the blocks to shop of the system owner. This would be as if the system owner had salvage teams clean the up. If there's no owner, maybe add the blocks to a local Trading Guild shop if they still exist or simply have the thing just despawn to just clean up. An idea that somebody else posted recently to have the despawns add to a pool of spawnable debris would be useful here.

 

[EricBlank]

This sounds like a great mechanic for fighter use, assuming we use blocks + moderate energy consumption + cooldown time to operate the hangars. Gotta keep them balanced.

I would suggest, to reduce the pain in the ass of getting launched drones and fighters to redock, that they only have to get in range of the mothership to hit it with the docking beam, regardless of what block theyre actually hitting, and are then telepprted either to the docking node theyre tied to, or deconstructed back into the motherships inventory to be recycled back into the hangars.

So once theyre within like 100m they autodock and you dont have to worry about collisions, even for fighters than arent launched from this "hangar" setup, which i would totally like to have by the way.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

While I'd expect capital ships to have some kind of factory elements on board, I don't think this idea is realistic for sub capitals and regular sized ships.

Here's an idea for non-capitals...

- Produce your fighters/drones using the methods currently available and dock them on board.
- When a fighter/drone is damaged but can still fly, recall it to your hangar.
- Instead of a shipyard, link an Astrotech computer to the rail that the drone/fighter is docked to.
- Connect a storage block and some Astrotech modules to the Astrotech computer.
- The Astrotech then repairs the docked ship at a rate determined by the size of your Astrotech module array and feeds off the parts in your attached storage.

- (Optional) Set up a logic switch to turn this system on or off. Otherwise, auto repair is also fine by me.
- (Optional) Use it for turret repair by linking the AT computer to a turret axis.
- (Optional) Use it for self-repair by linking the AT computer to your ship's core (or a build block for stations). For kicks and giggles, you can add a penalty like no shields, reduced thrust, or reduced power during self-repairs.

 

[EricBlank]

Im not so certain restrictions like that would be necessary. With a limit of one fighter/drone in play at a time per hangar, size of hangars determining size of drones deployed, and properly balanced energy consumption (as much as a solid block of weapons as large as that hangar in volume?) and time (15 sec+1sec per 5 mass units of the final drone/fighter) to build a replacement, ships of any scale should be relatively balanced in terms of fighters they can support from these manufacturing hangars. Smaller ships will be limited by their own reactor size and available volume and thus the max size and number of drones they can support.

A couple smart rules i can concieve of:
these hangar blocks should be pretty fragile, and stop working once 10% of the blocks in a group are destroyed. But it could just as well cease to function once you break the c shaped connections.
And there should be limits per player on the number and absolute mass/# blocks of spawned drones on the field at a time. Like a max of 20 active drones (so if drones in unloaded sectors dont despawn, theyre still not counted until theyre loaded again) totalling up to 400 mass or 100k or whatever blocks (whichever is reached first). Other drones queued up or launched beyond those caps would be either aborted or launched with shut down power and ai, requiring it reboot before joining the fight once one of the preexisting drones overheats. I think youd want to count starting mass of the drones, not final mass, because they are losing blocks during a fight but should still count towards the cap until overheating? But that could be exploited by intentionally leaving your enemies drones "dead in the water" without actually overheating them, preventing them from launching new drones, which is also bad.
Maybe drones should count towards a faction drone cap too? Like each members personal drones simultaneously count towards the factions caps, and a faction can support a minimum of 100 drones, so the founder and first four players can reach their personal drone caps, and then +5 drones for each subsequent player online at the time. So a faction with ten players online can field 125 drones at one time, which is enough for six people to reach their personal drone cap plus a few . Really the idea is to prevent going overboard with way too many entities in play, so these mobile factories cant choke clients and servers to death by flooding areas with hundreds of drones spawned out of nowhere. But the game then also needs to know who owns a hangar. We could say, a player needs to claim ownership of a hangar computer directly for it to function, drones spawned from that hangar can be controlled by them, even if the hangar is on a neutral entity. So my faction could have a supercarrier with me and all my friends claiming up to 20 hangars each built into it, and it will let us call drones from that carrier to assist us if that carrier is loaded and they can path to us without having to go into an unloaded sector. That would be cool.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

Now that we can spawn in a docked entity from a blueprint, directly on to a rail, do you think auto-stocking hanger bays are still needed?

I've been testing out a new transport/cruiser with enough space for 9 active fighters and up to 5 more in reserve. In just a few minutes, I can spawn in some fighters, fly one out of its individual hanger, move it to a pickup point, then jump the hierarchy to the next fighter while the previous one is docking to repeat the process until my hangar bay is full.