Greyhawk1 wrote:A carrier is too small to fit 150 ships into it let alone a hundred crewmembers. Thats a bit of licence on the part of the devs...
First of all, an M1 doesn't require 100 crewmebers in this script. It requires 50. The M2 requires 140.
Now, let's take a look at the claim - that an M1 can't hold 100 crewmembers. The ship that I am most familiar with is the Titan, so let's look at that. It's not an M1, but most M2's are slightly smaller than M1's.
The Titan is 2.4 km long. The internal volume is about 250 million meters³, or about 9 billion ft³. For those who deal with square footage, it's about .75 million m²/8 million ft² per deck. A VERY conservative estimate, based on 8m/25' high decks, is a total of 36 million m²/400 million ft².
The Colosus is even larger. I haven't ever worked out its exact dimensions, though I will if people believe it's an issue. Anyone want to continue to claim that an M2 can't fit 140 crew, or an M1 can't fit 50?
Yes, the new gunnery crew system is a paradigm shift. Moving to live crews. The old gunnery crew system was supposed to have live crews too, just I didn't do a very good job of implementing it. Ideas don't come all at once, unfortunately, and the idea to make use of an otherwise used "ware" (the "Military Personnel" ware) was late in coming. I was more eager at the time to get the turret code working well. Some of the negative comments seem to make the point that the new method is bad simply BECAUSE it's a paradigm shift. If change is bad, then don't install anything new. Problem solved.
Ok, perhaps that wasn't a fair comment. I do try to take criticism constructively. However, I am becoming more and more convinced that my real mistake was releasing the early versions to the public without making the players actually have to DO anything to get the kind of firepower increase that the script gave. The reaction from people who are seeing the plugin for the first time is almost universally positive.
I'm sorry if the system seems poorly thought out. I assure everyone that a great deal of thought went into it. Honest - 3000 lines of code just don't spring up without a little of it. I'm not saying that it was good thought. I'll leave that up to you to make a value judgement on it.
The issues seem to be consistently focussed on three areas. I will go over each one in detail, and give you mt reasoning:
- AEGIS costs too much/The crew cost too much.
AEGIS costs 54 mil and change. If you want your warship to engage other warships with, AEGIS is not needed. It is an area air defense system - for engaging lots of fighters. I may nerf the basic system a little more in favour of making AEGIS better against capital ships (by comparison). The reason I didn't do this to begin with is I hate nerfing things in order to make something else better by comparison. Hate it with a passion. As I was writing the different new things in version 3, I essentially put most of the new features as a function of the AEGIS upgrade. The only existing feature that was moved to AEGIS was turret tracking speed improvements. Oh, and the Maximize Capture command - but that's a money maker, so I have no sympathy for people who complain about the cost (AEGIS pays for itself in one mission if you capture a couple of Xenon K's). My problem was, I ran out of things to add to the actual turret code. If there were more sources of extreme numbers of fighters, then AEGIS would be very worth the price paid. My next project is to make Carriers a whole lot meaner. What would you say to a system that launched all a carrier's fighters during in-sector combat at once? Beam the fighters out of the ship. 
Now imagine fighting a carrier that actually launched all its fighters. That would be a fight and a half! No one would complain about the cost of AEGIS if they saw it take down a hundred khaak fighters (try it with the stock turrets and watch your destroyer disintigrate).
As it is now, yes, AEGIS is overpriced for the benefit you get from it. But since you don't need it for capital ship engagements, it's a good "last" upgrade for when you have hundreds of millions of credits and want your flagship to "be all that it can be". When you an get 200mil from a XI mission, and 25 mil a pop from an assassination mission, a single overpriced ware that is a luxury anyway doesn't move me to tears. Sorry if that seems callous.
The crew aren't overpriced. The crew cost is realistic. This is an area I have experience with. How many in-sector-combat capital ships do you expect to use at once anyways? At the very most, an M2 will cost 420k per hour to operate with full crew on permanent alert. A few crystal fabs or chained SPPs will net you that. A single assasination mission will operate a ship for 50 game hours.
Those of you who are put off by the cost are looking at the numbers in comparison to the tiny charges other things cost, not in relation to the kind of income it is very easy to get.
- Crew are too hard to get
This is by design, though part of it is because of a "feature" in the game I didn't fully compensate for and will be fixed in the next release.
Crew disappear even faster than I intended because the game has a system where any ware on an AI dock is "consumed" at a certain rate, to simulate it getting purchased. The rate of consumption is based on the maximum quantity of that ware. The max quantity of Military Personnel on a dock is 10,000 - which means they get consumed VERY quickly. Sometimes within seconds. Of course, the readme makes it clear that these crew are in very high demand, so this is in keeping with the fictional basis for things.
If you haven't read the XML readme, you may not be aware that if you own your own Equipment Dock, that a command is available that will give you a report of every military transport currently flying. At the cost of 5 fast TPs (I suggest SPlit Iguanas) with jump drives, you can then get your crew as fast as the system produces them. Every 10th transport will give you up to 20 crew. Every 20th will give you up to 100. Crew is hard to get, but not so hard as is made out.
- Crew takes up too much cargo space
I agree. If I could limit the cargo volume used by each crewperson to 1, I would. This requires a mod, though, and I can't offer a signed mod.
The Ray is the big loser here. 420 cargo space is hard on a Ray. However, even here it can be done with a few minor sacrifices. For example, the ventral guns - lose the Beta PPC's there in favour of GHEPTs only. That's a savings of 255 cargo space. This has a VERY low reduction in combat efficiency. The Ion Disruptors in combination with GHEPTs will take appart fighters quickly. Against capital ships, there is no combat efficiency reduction, as you need to get in fairly close to use the IonD's anyways, and the slower bullet speed of the GHEPT is not a problem against large targets.
For other ships, I used to regularly stock 800 energy cells on a Titan and Xenon K. That's also stocking 80 mosquitos, 40 wasps, etc etc. Dropping the 800 energy cells to 400 and keeping the extra 400 in a Goner Ship isn't a big sacrifice. And, the same dorsal/ventral Beta PPC/GHEPT swap is still possible.
All in all, while I sympathize with this issue, it's not insurmountable by ANY stretch of the immagination. I would suggest those that think it is haven't thought it through enough. Turnabout is fair play people 
You were warned... pirates will be hunted down like vermin.
Ex Turbo Modestum
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