Yeah 5 light fighters in a Trident, it's more plausible and we also don't have multiple lights in XC's anymore.

I would still like to see some consideration given to the trade-ability of ships, but this is an improvement, cheers!

Allow me to point to an amazing piece of futuristic military technology that enables many more small craft to fit inside a carrier vehicle than one would think possible given their relative dimensions.

This is also a zero-g environment, so they can be packed a bit more creatively than IRL, and probably with fewer support systems for moving them into place since they apparently use 6-dof reactionless drives.

As has been suggested before, just have 2 different holds. One for cargo and one for docked ships. When we were all discussing loading ships as cargo, I expected that to be EXACTLY that, cargo. If a vulture, or X1, or anything is broken down and shipped in a crated manner, it should (and be expected to) take up less space than its space-ready form would require. This would anticipate that capships have 2 different holds.

For example: if we were to use the original stats for the Trident, it could dock 4 ships and carry 600cu of cargo. This would suggest a dock hold of 400cu in size, if we're assuming small ships (e.g. vult). Given that ships like XCs use 300cu, a Trident could dock only a single XC with another 100cu to spare for a smaller ship. So long as we separate the 2, we can tweak both hold values however desirable.

As long as you mean in the sense that only packed-ships and normal cargo goes in the cargo bay, but anything can go in the docking bay, then I don't really care. If you mean to say that only unpacked-ships should be allowed in the docking bay, constraining cargo to only the cargo bay, then I have a problem with that.

if the cargo hold gets explanded i would expect the armor to be reduced in turn. i mean isn't that the reasoning behind an XCs increased hold?

TRS... It's like prison. You can fit many more men in a cell if they are all spooning.

One of the reasons it's so hard to agree on this is because the cu values are completely out of touch with how the ships look.

I'll give you an example, looking at its shape, lack of weapons and armor, you'd think the Behemoth XC would be the ship with the most CU per cubic meter but it's actually average in that respect. Another example related to the Behemoth, is that in the cubic space it takes, from extreme to extreme you could fit about 36 ECs, of course it's not a perfect cube and the ship is not just the cargo hold but still it could hold a dozen ECs. So either the Moth has too little cargo or it just looks way too big.

Now this is relevant because since the Behemoth is the biggest ship we have that can dock in a Trident it would be the perfect reference point if not for these inconsistencies.

My suggestion for sometime in the future is that we need a complete review of all the ships' cargo capacity and actually make the ships' CU (both its cargo capacity, and its size as cargo) match the way they look.

Meanwhile the compromise solution is to do what has been done so far and tweak things as gameplay imbalances occur.

...but still it could hold a dozen ECs.

...what? ECs are small, but they aren't THAT small.

Yea, you are correct, it's more in the line of 4-6 ECs.

I could see maybe fitting 3 in there if you leave the third one hanging halfway out the bay door with some ratchet tie-downs to keep it from drifting off.

Here's how I see it happening: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzhMW2SODeyWVXYwSnQ0NGJoMjA/edit

Surely you can put 4 in there, the 5th and 6th depends on the actual shape of the cargo hold so it might not be possible.

So, where do the engines, jump drive, powercell, turrets, crew quarters, armor plating, and large ports fit?

Stop being realists. Just stop already!

Well, there's space in the front and in the back and some of those systems fit in the tiny EC and in other smaller ships. I don't have side views of those ships, but surely there's enough space left for all those systems.

However the main point of my statement wasn't that, it was about the relative volume of all ships and how they relate to CU units but like I said, this requires a re-calculation of every CU value in the game and at the moment we can all agree that there are other priorities.

Here's a more realistic drawing which should cover all the possible combinations: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzhMW2SODeyWdUNyZ3I4OVNaUGs/edit?usp=sharing