It'd also really contribute to the 4x elements of the game. Possibly a universe update feature?
I view space stations as what *should be* area of denial hardpoints for locking down parts of sectors. But that isn't entirely possible without this feature.
With this feature it becomes necessary to try to take out the station that controls one or two fleets in order to truly take the sector, or part of the sector. As it stands you just kinda... nimbly-bimbly in there, set up a base then either take the sector with more FP, or just nuke the station. Which is hardly a defensive hardpoint.
[doublepost=1525374589,1525373223][/doublepost]So. I went back through and read all the discussion. Two things.
This would also make for a neat "carrier" function if shipyards (or maybe a limited function drone factory) got added to ships as well. Right now, RP carriers are way underpowered because of the actual internal volume or deck space you need to sacrifice, but if a single 50x50x30m hanger could output 4-5 reinforcement fighters during the course of a fight... then we'd start to see some serious ship/fleet diversity.
First, as I was saying earlier in the discord, any spawn feature based on just modified blueprint spawn should have a "build timer". I agree that the really weird individual block build of the stations is silly and buggy. But the timer needs to be there for this fleet spawn to mitigate spam.
Second. I think it should be a function of the logistics chamber coupled with at least some sort of a ship-yard setup. I totally agree, it should just be a straight "take the resources from the ship storage" and "spawn it.". But I think that there should be some sort of spawn zone or spawn point in relation to the station or carrier. This would not only give players finer control over where they're spat out, but would also allow for the system to still sorta make sense.
Like, you need a logistics chamber and a shipyard somewhere on your ship/base. The shipyard size determines the maxi size of ships that can be spawned. The logstics chamber lets the ship have a shipyard. Then you have some sort of a drone spawn location on the ship/station. I'm thinking the sorta boxy-system from the old turrets. The ships 100%
should never spawn docked to the ship. I think there should just be a boxy system for determining the spawn location. Like, set down some modules inside the ship to define the spawn location, if your modules are killed then you lose your spawn capability. If your shipyard is killed you lose your spawn capability. If your logistics chamber is killed, you lose your spawn capability. And the ships 'return' to somewhere in the large spawn box to be disassembled, as well as spawn at it.
Also, for the ships specifically, the logistics chamber could have an option that allows you to spawn ships larger than your shipyard, as well as one that makes your spawn zone larger.
Spawning fleets would be a strong factor in making stations more robust at repelling attacks. Imagine attacking a mining base and suddenly its patrol fleet is called back from the nearby belt and you have a player-designed destroyer and several frigates all over you in addition to the base guns. Could be painful; would definitely catch new, would-be pirates and trolls by surprise the first time and make everyone think twice about station attacks against offline opponents because a very small station could be basing an absolutely huge patrol fleet ("hey - let's take over this mineral-rich system. blast the outpost!" ...two, 500+ meter, heavily turreted cruisers appear).
Another thought I had while reading this relates to how the more fiddly mechanics of the stations being hardpoints would work.
At first I thought "Maybe there should be an antenna requirement that determines your patrol range." But deicded that might be overly restrictive. Also, the case might be moot with NPCs. But if NPCs are more expensive I'm thinking that AI could have this limitation in the future to make it a cheaper, yet harder-to-use alternative to NPCs.
My new thought now though is that you would need an antenna on any dedicated drone carriers or stations to determine the max number of drones it can command.
Obviously the drones would be limited by on board resources, but I think it might be another thing to think about for carriers so that they can't spam too many fighters. Also, this would retain carriers as a highly-specialized ship, but still make them full of interesting choices and weakspots while being smaller. (hopefully).
