From the uber to the unique.....ship ideas.

[Capt. Murphy]

There have been another spate of debates re uber vs balance recently prompted by a particular member and his particularly high spec'd contribution to the collection of OXP ships.

It got me thinking about what I like to see in OXP ships other than pretty shapes and interesting modelling, and also what would make me want to fly an OXP ship.

The answer is unique selling points, normally done by scripting. Prime examples are Thargoid's Vortex with it's high efficiency Military Grade Fuel Injection system, multibay, self repair etc and the Caddy again with self-repair.

I've got a couple of ideas myself, but realistically don't know if or when I'd ever get round to them (particularly as I've never modelled anything in my life), so would like to throw them open to the Coomunity.

1) A ship of moderate overall stats (cobra comparable) but designed to be a true all rounder in that the same ship can be reconfigured (probably only when docked) to be either a low cargo, high pylon fighting machine, or a high cargo, low pylon hauler, or something in between. Would use scripting mechanism's similar to Thargoids multibay and hypercargo.

2) A ship that can change shape in flight (think transformers), using a variety of subents and framecallback managed animation to manage the transformation. This could be coupled with a change of configuration such as that suggested above.

[Zireael]

Wow, I like both ideas, although I don't think if they're doable. The reconfigurable ship (see 1) was certainly mentioned earlier...

[Thargoid]

It is, but only if you "cheat" like I did in the Vortex. Both the multi-bay and the multi-pylon functionalities there were by script, and that can be used to change the configuration. But both the base number of pylons and the cargo capacity are fixed for a given ship in shipdata.plist (the cargo bay extension aside), which I guess is what you mean. You just need to get clever and allow their re-use...

[Potential Debris]

Do a forum search for "Orthoptera". I have no idea if it would work in-game or not, but the concept is certainly unique as far as I can see.

Basically, it's a missile ship. No lasers, or nerfed lasers, crap maneuverability but LOADS of missile slots. The idea being that you can load up racks and racks of strange and interesting OXP pylon-mounted gear and use that as your primary defence.

[Dragonfire]

Basically a remote controlled missile-carrying drone? Not a bad idea....

[Potential Debris]

No, not a drone, a ship. A ship with poor maneuverability, no lasers, but 40+ missile slots. It would be challenging, to say the least, but it would be worth doing just to see if there are any commanders out there who can make it work.

[Mauiby de Fug]

Maximum number of missiles for a player ship is 16, and 32 for an NPC...

[Kaks]

Of course the numbers refer to missile bays, so - in theory - you could have 4 banks of missiles which will accomodate 4*16 = 64 missiles, etc... - anything above 8 missile bays seems to involve a bit too much micromanagement for my tastes, but I've no doubt that if you build it, they will come....

[Mauiby de Fug]

Oh, that's true...

It doesn't sound like a ship that suits my playing style (I'm a laser person myself, and rarely use missiles), but it would be an interesting thing to have around!

[CommonSenseOTB]

Oh, that's true...

It doesn't sound like a ship that suits my playing style (I'm a laser person myself, and rarely use missiles), but it would be an interesting thing to have around!

It sounds like a special missions combat ship that GalCop might use. Perhaps as part of some kind of mission?

[Thargoid]

Sounds like a mangled up Vortex or Maelstrom to me.