Using a carrier/flagship rather than a station.

[Amos.37]

Are any factions, or ambitious players, planning on making a large carrier/flagship to operate as a mobile base for their faction?

Will the game even be able to handle a ship that large? Current largest ship being the Centurio at 115m long. I'm imagining a carrier large enough to be a mobile base being close to double that size at least, if you want to store a decent number of fighters within it, and to have room for manufacturing equipment.

Also, on that note, does anyone know if processing/manufacturing equipment is limited to stations? Or can they be fitted into larger ships as well?
A decent mobile base would need to have refining/processing equipment on-board.

I don't imagine this kind of ship to be involved directly in combat, more to simply work as a staging and maintenance site for a faction. Defence would be focused on counter boarding, not ship to ship combat. That's what the fighters are for after all.

 

[damoran]

The bigger your ships get the more problems I suspect there will be for the game to provide a smooth gaming experience. It's sort of the ever-present paradox of these types of games. The more people in one place with bigger ships, more debris, more projectiles just keeps rising until the game becomes unplayable...unless restricted somehow.

I expect they will have a hard cap on number of parts you're able to reach but I think also the mechanics of the ships themselves makes extremely large ships impractical for most players. Will large factions test these limits, absolutely. And I would imagine we see factions with these "flagships" just to flaunt the resources at their disposal. Only time will tell what sort of effect these will have on the servers. I suspect we will inevitably see some battles where these large factions will duke it out with their capital ships which will become spectacles and draw players in purely as a novelty. That being said, something tells me the developers will have to find creative ways of discouraging practices that negatively effect server performance. Possibly things like:

A diminishing effect on thrust as more mass is added to the ship - in other words as you get bigger and bigger the slower it moves.

Structural integrity limit - as the ship gets larger the frame is less capable of dealing with the stresses while thrust is being applied and tears apart your ship as you move.

Not enough room for fuel - the more and more thrusters needed to move an extremely large ship may require so much fuel that the ship becomes a floating fuel tanker. A few lucky shots could spell certain doom.

 

[Unlucky]

Will the game even be able to handle a ship that large? Current largest ship being the Centurio at 115m long. I'm imagining a carrier large enough to be a mobile base being close to double that size at least, if you want to store a decent number of fighters within it, and to have room for manufacturing equipment.

I believe the last communication we had regarding ship size was that they simply haven't tried creating a large capital ship yet, so they don't know what effect it will have on server stability. I would hope that the capability to support large space ships/battles would be a priority, since that would separate Starbase from other similar titles that have struggled with that concept.

Also, on that note, does anyone know if processing/manufacturing equipment is limited to stations? Or can they be fitted into larger ships as well?
A decent mobile base would need to have refining/processing equipment on-board.

From the FAQ:
Can you build equipment to refine materials on a ship?
VilleFB (5/29/19): You need room for those machines but yeah. You should be able to install most if not all crafting related things inside your ship

LauriFB (5/31/19): Most likely a large ship can carry refinery equipment, but the energy requirement is the problem

 

[Atreties]

It has been stated multiple times that, at the very beginning of EA, there will not be player-faction (guild) created stations.

With that in mind, it seems to me that ALL significant groups during this era will be running out of one or more large ships to refine things like fuel, metals, full smaller ships, etc.

 

[Amos.37]

It has been stated multiple times that, at the very beginning of EA, there will not be player-faction (guild) created stations.

With that in mind, it seems to me that ALL significant groups during this era will be running out of one or more large ships to refine things like fuel, metals, full smaller ships, etc.

This could very well make carriers more common, at least until player stations become possible. But then I'm also not expecting any giant capital class ships early on, due to game engine limitations, available resources and because giant ships don't seem like they'd be all that practical really. They'd be awesome and I want to see them, but not practical.
We could see the use of mobile refiners and large resource gathering operations, proto-carriers if you will...

 

[Burnside]

Use station parts to bulk out large designs and frame hangar bays, small parts get used on capitals for turrets, subsystems like docking arms, and crew consoles. My own best guess.