On a simmilar note, one thing that would be cool is if carriers and supercarriers launched squadrons as opposed to a single fighter/fighter bomber. I'm pretty sure a carrier could caryy more than just a handful of the buggers.
As far as I am aware, a fully skilled supercarrier pilot will be launching 20 fighter bombers, and with 5 Drone Control Units has the bandwith to have 25 out at once. Have I taken this the wrong way?
Kilometer-long, massive-scale warships designed to carry fighter-craft smaller than frigates can only maintain 25 at a time with heavy modification.
In case you did not get it, that's a problematic, if not out-right idiotic short-coming; ship that big should be able to carry hundreds if not thousands of them and send out at least a few dozen at a time.
Keep in mind, the fighter bombers are the size of cruisers. If you're using say, light, medium, heavy or sentry drones you can have hundreds or thousands of them. And you can still spit out 20 unmodified.
Frigates, not cruisers.
To everyone else:
If I wanted to RP, say, a battleship with sub-frigate size point defense systems.. would that be so bad? I don't see a pressing need for this because I don't particularly enjoy roleplaying space battles... but if I wanted to throw the reference in there would that be fine?
I'd have to agree with the posters above that capital ships are shockingly lacking in ability. For all their mass and volume, they really don't have much beyond EHP to show for it. You'd think these things would be bristling with weapons or fighter bays, yet they are not. Even so, there's so little PF about the workings of a capital ship, it wouldn't be so bad to slap on a battery of smaller turrets, right?
Hrmmm...
As far I can see, the current precedent with player fiction based on PF is sort of that the PF "is", with no question and little room for interpretation. Anything not PF is left up to interpretation, BUT this doesnt extend to godmodding, as there still needs to be some kind of realistic in-game base to what you're writing.
For instance, some people claim they helped create the tech for the Dust 514 soldiers. We all know this to be BS. Some claim they are powerful spymasters with ears as far as the Inner Circle (or rather they shout this over the IGS, like all good intelligence operatives do...)
BUT this is not to say that creativity should be frowned upon. Their mistake was to do something publicly with no PF or in-game base and expect people to just roll with it. If say you were to IGS post about it or talk about it in summit, someone would probably clock that it doesnt really have an ingame base and the conversation would be downhill from there. But if you were just playing around with a concept, privately or with a few friends, or maybe writing some fiction, and not trying to pass it off publicly as "This totally happened yo" then theres no real problem with that as its your business and you're not trying to tell players something exists when they believe (and can back up with in-game reality) that it doesnt.
Like I said, theres no official rules, more of a social consensus and no-one will stop you. Feel free to play around with ideas, the best player fiction does. Just be warned that some players may object and cause unneccesary drama.
*EDIT* Of course, the in-game base rule only applies to in-game concepts. If its not directly related to anything actually in-game, huzzah! The only thing that can ruin you now is TonyG
