I'll go through what I've seen here one by one, trying to link similar posts, presenting my thoughts on each point, before issuing my own ideas.

One mentioned has been a recycler ship, able to dismantle other ships and receive some of the resources expended back.
Pro- get rid of those unwanted ships
Con- Not sure

Think would have to be based on the base value of the ship and not on the present value, such as ones with experience. - Cajin

Make it a building, with different levels of speed of breakdown. There's no real benefit I can see to making it a ship other than mobility, but then that decentralises the game and there already incentives enough for that.

With regards to the experience issue, I suggest the following. The building (regardless of level) will break down and return 60% of resources. Then for every 1% of Exp, you will recieve 0.5% of ship total value.

Note; To maintain game balance, this will be in material required for build, not for training.

That way a 500k result will see an initial return 300k base iron, with a fully trained assault returning a total of 800k iron.

I believe this will maintain some game stability. It is possible and in some instances profitable (i.e if you desperately need a 2.5m transport) to do, however it takes time (unless you invest in the building) and ultimately any profit is short term, encouraging a longer term view (HW attacks) than a look at immediate profits.

problem I see with dismantler is just balance. Defeats the point of the cost of the ship, cause you use it and use it, and when you need to change strategy, just dismantle them and get some resources out of them after using them to attack etc. Would be one thing if it took a week or something to dismantle them or something..but instant I see a major balance issue - System Admin

My own personal opinion on this is that it shoul breakdown at 1 level per 1m resources (input) per week. I.E at level 1, you can break down 2 500k assaults per week. That way you get resources back, but it takes time.

I'm not sure about balance issue with the recycler, especially if only get a portion of the resources back from the initial cost, so if you happen to have a couple hundred 50k assaults laying around that have various levels of experience and decide you don't want to use them anymore then what are your options for them? Delete it and destroy all the ships, use them as fodder to train up fighters. This way you'd basically be sacrificing the troops that you used and the experience you had as well as some of the building cost, if you only got say 75% back. This also provides an option for new players since in all reality what are they going to do with their dinky tranny they start with and the small assaults they use. This would make it so they aren't wasting their resources as much waiting to get enough resources for real assaults, allowing them to steadily upgrade. - Cajin

True. I believe building issue resolves this quite nicely. For an experienced player trying to bin ships it will take no time at all. For a new player, those small assaults are still going to be a primary source of attack power for a reasonable amount of time. By the time they're looking to get rid of them entirely they should be at a point where they can at least build a Level 1 building to recycle them.

I wonder if a recycler/shipworks building would make more sense than a ship model. I would think it could dismantle ships but also repair damaged ships. That way, one would have to fly ships to a planet with the building and park them there.

I think it should take a certain amount of time and have some kind of cost to run the building (paying the workers per unit of effort). More work should take longer (e.g. repairing the shielding on a 2.5M transport should take a lot longer than dismantling a 50K assault).

Without actually going through the math, I would think something like 2/3 recovery of resources when dismantling a ship, and requiring 1.5x the resources than needed when repairing a ship would make sense. Maybe a level 1 building could work on 1 ship at a time, level 2 could work on 2 ships, etc. - FORTRAN

Good idea, but should be a different building - if only because of programming complexity I imagine would come with an idea of this magnitude! I'm also more open to the idea of a repair ship than I am a dismantling ship - you already have Salvage Vessels in Navies worldwide today But your initial numbers look sound. My only issue with it being a ship is that it would have to be an immediate fix to tie in with current ship programming, but at the same time I don't think a building allows the neccessary mobility we enjoy so much. Unsure on where I fall on this issue, however it will lead on nicely to the Salvage Vessel I was going to suggest.

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Make your move, reindeer games.

fighter carrier

pro-could transport large amounts of fighters

cons-could be slower flight time?/or double the uranium?


thing might be a nice model? -Tiernan

Yes. This has been brought up all too often and not acted upon. Personally I think they should be built so that of the ship size, it can carry 80% of that in fighter volume (i.e 100,000, can carry 80k of fighters). It should be capable of I-Flight, but not Hyperdrive.

My rationale for the I-Flight/Hyperdrive issue is simple. By current settings, vessels with attacking capability have only been able to travel by I-Flight. Support or Auxillary vessels whose entire job is intelligence or supply, have been capable of H/D travel. Although I'm unsure as to whether the vessel should definately have a mechanism of attack, I think it would be complete nonsense to suggest it is not an aggressive vessel (in a completely different way to a transport too).

However on your second point, the cons. Bullhicky! The fastest Capital sized ship in the USN is the Nimitz (a 96,000t aircraft carrier), it happens to be 20 knots faster than any NATO Frigate and just under 3x faster than the UK Carriers (which, conversely are 3 knots faster than their French counterpart). As for the Russian carrier, speedwise it's UK equivalent.

My point being, it should be capable of travelling at the same speed as any other vessel.

Personally, my own view on pro/con for this vessel?

PRO
Can transport large amounts of fighters
Has the capability to launch fighter attacks against a planet

Cons

It should be incredibly expensive
Have limited counter-attack ability of its own (transports have 10k, this should have 5)
Limited defence (to the 50k standard)

The way you combat the defence issue is with the idea of fighter launches - the fighters onboard the carrier leap to it's defence if she is attacked. That way it takes a sustained effort (as you would expect) to attack and destroy a Carrier.

how bout a mother-ship? acts like a small planet, able to make ships but only can iflight. can dock ships like a planet except its Mobile, has attack and def not energy and troops. - blaze

This idea has been bandied about for as long as I can remember, personally I am very much in support of the idea, except I don't think it should be able to dock assaults. If you want a visual representation (not a particularly good one as the pieces don't fit too well), I envisage this "mobile planet" as more of an Aircraft Carrier, with the assault ships being things like your LPH/LPD Vessels and/or frigates - they act on their own because of the functions they are required to perform. So in short - I think your idea ties in nicely with the carrier Cajin and Tiernan have bandied about.

Another one mentioned recently was a tracking ship, a guy said they had one on FL, perhaps another use for the invisible ship, be able to attach to an enemy ship, you lose the ship but you can see the other ship, or the FL concept was that anywhere that it traded showed up in your board computer for 15 trades- had a building could build that would disable the tracking. - Cajin

Completely opposed to it being a re-usable ship in any sense, FL is far more mobile in SL. However the idea has some merit if applied in a probe sense. Ship is a one-time capable ship; when an enemy launches an I-Flight, your ship is destroyed and you get a PM/Board Computer message with co-ordinates that are only accurate to the nearest 1000. That way it requires some work in order to make benefit of what I imagine will be a very cheap thing to build.

My key issue with this is that, if it shows up every 15 flights, it's a very cheap way of finding whole fleets of assaults and subsequently destroying them. Because of the amount of time that I-Flight takes currently and the fact that SL is very much a fleet based game, I don't believe a re-usable tracker is either feasable or good for game play.

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Make your move, reindeer games.

Own Personal Ideas for Vessels

Bomber

Has the ability to attack buildings on a HW. Has a 50/50 chance of avoiding turrets (remains constant regardless of experience) Attack cabilities similar to that of fighters, but has very low (if any) defence. Perhaps can not attack turrets? (unsure on this issue)

Warp Ship

Able to create a mobile link to any HW Based Stable Warp you have built, accessable to all ships, costing say, 2000 uranium to make use of. Ship should be relatively expensive to combat long term savings in urainium, but ultimately should represent a profit for people who regularly use their HWs. A similar ship should be available for I-Flight destinations so you have a 1-Click destination for regularly used waypoints.

These are both speculative and un-refined ideas that I've had on the back-burner for some time, I realise they'll need tweaking and changing!

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Make your move, reindeer games.

I like fortran's idea a lot. A station which orbits closely around a planet, with the option to dock like on a planet and then choose repair or dismantle.

Dios' Bomber:
"Has the ability to attack buildings on a HW. Has a 50/50 chance of avoiding turrets (remains constant regardless of experience) Attack cabilities similar to that of fighters, but has very low (if any) defence. Perhaps can not attack turrets? (unsure on this issue) "
Yeah, dios, it shouldn't be able to destroy turrets, as it would eliminate one of the main reasons of existence for fighters.


- Idea:
300% assaults. Experience above 200 would only be be earned by attacking planets over 1m defence, with only the defence above 1m counting towards experience at a reduced rate. Assaults above 200% would have a (xp-200)/200=P chance of surviving a HW attack. That would mean an assault 0f 210% would have a chance of 0.05 to survive, a 260% a 0.3 chance, and a 300% a chance of one in two. Surviving a planet assault would give you an experience penalty.
It would bring back a use to the 'Ships by experience' chart.


- Another idea:
A ship/moving station, built at a planet like a building, capable of storing resources like a tranny, but then for every upgrade one, or maybe even two million. it would be possible to capture it just like a planet, with every capture knocking one upgrade off until the station is destroyed. It wouldn't be capable of Iflight or moving around in a system, but it would have one hyperjump per week. It's T+E would be for defence, but it would not have shields or production points.

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Where has the rum gone!?

"A ship/moving station, built at a planet like a building, capable of storing resources like a tranny, but then for every upgrade one, or maybe even two million. it would be possible to capture it just like a planet, with every capture knocking one upgrade off until the station is destroyed. It wouldn't be capable of Iflight or moving around in a system, but it would have one hyperjump per week. It's T+E would be for defence, but it would not have shields or production points."

Can you just highlight the point of this to me? I'm struggling to see the benefit of it over a transport.

Other idea is reasonable. However I want some clarification:

1) Is that surviving outright, or is it surviving after failing to capture?
2) How would you penalise experience?

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Make your move, reindeer games.

OK, this is maybe a little OT from the original post, but since it has been mentioned, I think that some of the resources of an attack should survive on the attacked planet. When an attack takes place, something like 40% of the raw materials of the fighters and assaults should be available on the planet about an hour after the attack begins. In addition, maybe 20% of the attacking troops and energy should survive. Experience of the ships should not be included in the calculations.

This would provide an incentive for both the attacking player and the defending player.

I think this would also make all those inactive HWs more attractive targets.

For example, if an attack on a well-defended 50M defense planet takes place, and it costs the attacker the following:
20 9/8 5K volume fighters = 180K energy, 160K Si, 100K Fe, 1K Au
33 500K assaults = 16.7M Fe, 16.7K Au, 16.7M troops

So the winner of the contest would receive:
16.8M Fe x 40% = 6.72M Fe
160K Si x 40% = 64,000 Si
17.7K Au x 40% = 7080 Au
16.7M troops x 20% = 3.34M troops
180K energy x 20% = 36,000 energy

Comments?

I like it, seems sensible - certainly you wouldn't expect to lose everything from an assault, nor would you expect to find a barren planet - SL isn't 1942 Russia afterall

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Make your move, reindeer games.

"1) Is that surviving outright, or is it surviving after failing to capture?"
The latter, surviving after capture. penalising XP after a sucessful capture would seem rather odd to me.

"2) How would you penalise experience?"
I'm not sure yet, but perhaps subtracting a full 100 from the XP? That way you wouldn't instantly have another army of HW-taking assaults directly after taking one, otherwise you'd immediately be able to take another 60M HW after taking a 120M.

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Where has the rum gone!?

Blazecon's idea of a mothership...

A few years ago I thought of an idea similar to this but with an added requirement... that it would be so expensive it would require an entire clan to support the construction costs. Never put idea out because of doggs constant abuse of those who thought the game could use some change. (personally I blame him for much of today's inactivity )

If were following the idea of a recyclers, we can do what some games do and implement comets and asteroids to be mined... certainly would ad another dimension to the game if lets say the comets locations are broadcasted on the news like aliens are.

comet would have large amounts of metals but no t,v, e, or h.

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10:35:19 | Karil has been defeated by Relic.
10:35:19 | Karil planet 0 Demonville has been captured by Relic, RedRum.
01:52:34 | Professor planet 0 BZ neg13 30 20 has been captured by Relic, RedRum.

i cant beleive i didnt think of that
it goes nicely with my "way to exist w/o violence" complaint i made sum were. we could make the roids/ comets probable or make large string/belts of roids that can be picked up by a ship (which can detect these?) for a combination of silicone, iron, and points
but i would like to do this in a way thats not practical for ppl who do a lot of fighting... any ideas?

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knowing is half the battle, violence is the other half.