Fleets cost FP to operate

[Nosajimiki]

This then opens up abuse of factions feeding themselves alts to pump their fleet capacities.

Sorry, I think you misunderstood me there. I did not mean that each player should have a private stash of automatic faction points, or anything of that nature they get just for logging in. I meant that ships should have an upkeep paid for by things you do while online. If this upkeep is a fuel you have to mine for or cash you have to earn through trade or other TBD sources, then each player would have to provide the upkeep for his own fleet by playing, but if he fails to upkeep his fleets, it does does not affect other players in the faction. In this manner, there is no advantage to alting to exploit upkeep because it would be easier to just log in as your main account, and mine/trade under that name so all your upkeep resources are in one place.

That said, larger factions could share resources to make a large fleet more viable or a lone wolf could spend more time farming resources to maintain a faction sized fleet by himself if he were so determined. So, in this scenario, fleet size becomes a soft cap that must be weighed against how much you want to invest in maintenance rather than a hard cap determined by things such as limiting fleets by exact size or number per player.

That said, there should be a server config setting to hard limit fleet sizes for performance reasons, but that is a kinda separate topic.

 

[NaStral]

This then opens up abuse of factions feeding themselves alts to pump their fleet capacities.

If it did such calculations based on the player's SMD name then it would be harder to cheese it, though unfortunately not impossible. A max cap per player, per faction and server wide that would prevent fleeting of additional ships anywhere might be useful in controlling that. Ideally you would only hit these config set hard caps in extreme circumstances as some kind of game related mechanic would keep it from ever getting to that point most of the time.