60-75 seems a bit slow for a long trip, but any faster would make it too fast for shorter ones. Maybe have a max speed of 100-120, but once it gets past 60-75 the ship will take much longer to accelerate.
Or better yet, in order to break 75 the ship would have to shut down its weapons. Maybe automatically drain it's battery to just above empty so it will take time for the weapons to come online and the battery to charge.
This is just so that a ship can take a risk and run when it needs to, but it will have to render itself defenseless if it does so. That and the fact that flying along at 120m/s in my maud feel agonizingly boring. I'd shudder to think of how bored I would get going 60-75.

Wait to suggest changes until:

A) IT MOVES:
It will be an easy target if it can't move, many of the suggestions are just things that compensate for it's lack of movement, which won't be good ideas when it's moving. Getting 50m away will likely end you up as a scratch in the paint on the side of the frigate as it starts to turn or roll (how many people found the spinning roid in s405 easy? Well it was in comparison since it was 100% predictable).

B) the AI fighters are done:
It will have a fighter guard that will be intelligent. They won't let you drop your guard or focus on the frigate. Doing things like a barrel roll at 300-500m away from the frigate will make you easy lunch for any of the fighter gaurd.


Have patience we all know it's easy to destroy it at the moment, but I don't beleive any of us can accurately predict what methods will or won't work in the future.

Amen.

However, I don't think it is bad to suggest features you would like to see on the frigate, so long as you are not merely requesting "band-aid solutions."

But almost all have been "fixes" which are by nature band-aids.

Well, how about giving it a nice... nuclear launch capability...

On a random basis or when the frigate feels its getting really slaughtered all the fighters suddenly scatter and out come a nice blanket of avalons... and.. BOOM.. there goes a large part of the area up into tiny little pieces :D That'd be fun, wouldnt it?

"A) It moves."

Are you suggesting that the Frigate is likely to be as fast and agile as a fighter? That spinning roid in 405 was about 2km across and was doing a full revolution every 4s or so. I very seriously doubt that any capital ship is ever going to be anything like that.

Relative to the acceleration rates and rates of turn of a fighter, the Frigate is always going to be nearly motionless by comparison. If it isn't, it raises the serious question of what you'd need a fighter for.

"B) It will have a fighter gaurd that is intelligent."

Can you always gaurantee that? Do you really think that having NPC fighters infinitely respawning in zero time is the best way to go? On capital ships of all sizes? In all TP scenarios that you might want to use one in? Whether controlled by a NPC or a PC? At all hours, 24/7?

I don't consider my 'fixes' to be bandaids in any fashion. For one thing, I've been promoting most of them for months before the 'frigate' even existed.

This thing used to have a fighter gaurd, remember? That didn't stop people from finding ways to cheap kill the Frigate back then, and it won't after the frigate gets its gaurd back either - even if the Frigate gets cheesy 'def bots' as gaurds. Cheap goes both ways.

A) I expect its speed will be about the same as all other ships, and it's acceleration to be much worse. It is about as long as the spinning roid (largest roid in s7) though I don't expect it will turn end over end as quickly I would expect it to be able to roll faster, either way the fact that it's not easily predicted makes it much hard to deal with. Most of the suggestions are ways of dealing with "dead spots." First off I'd like to say there's only 1 dead spot. It covers the entire frigate except for the small spots where there is a turret. In some places it only extends 1m away from the surface of the ship others it extends over 50m. It will be infinitely harder to stay within this dead spot when the ship can move and change direction. It also wouldn't surprise me if capital ships were able to travel long distances faster. Either by turboing at top speed for longer and/or having a higher top turbo speed. So the frigate might be able to flee to a safer sector for it, and get repairs if some fighters are trying to take it out alone.

B) Yes I think a fighter guard will always be needed for a capital ship to perform well. If the frigate is an NPC frigate then I would expect the guard to be the same. Will player frigates always have guards? No. Will they always live?
The frigate never had an intelligent guard. The ships would ignore you if you got within 500m of the frigate, they'd often fly around aimlessly while people sat next to the frigate holding +shoot1. I definitely agree with you that instant re-spawn is not the way to go. One possible future would be fighter docks allowing fighters to repair, and in NPC's cases re-spawn after their time delay finished.

Practically, if the devs make Capital ships too slow, everyone is going to go crazy trying to fly them. Imagine, spending an hour cruising across s4 from the station to the s8 wormhole...

So, I'd go with Eldrad and HOPE that the devs will allow it an excellent top speed (in the 150 range) but an abysmal accerleration rate. As in, 10+ seconds to come to a complete stop. And don't worry, turbo would put too much strain on such a ship and tear it to pieces. Oops...

If there is a docking bay on the frigate, how are we going to regulate who lands there? Just a question.

I have worked on the assumption of around a 60-75m/s top speed on large capital ships, with a 5-7 m/s^2 accelleration rate, and a the ability to make a 180 turn in 7-10 seconds. I'd be interested in hearing reasoning in support of other speeds.

Magus: What I'm worried about is the 'strategic speed' of capital ships.

Strategic speed is the average speed of a unit over a long distance. Tactical speed is how fast you can get across the battlefield. Strategic speed is how fast you can get from battlefield to battlefield. For example, old fashioned horse cavalry units have higher tactical speed than infantry units, but a reasonably well trained light infantry unit has a higher strategic speed. A cavalry unit mounted on warhorses has a higher tactical speed than one mounted on ponies, but the one on ponies will probably have a higher strategic speed.

Since ships don't have to take a break to refuel in Vendetta, tactical speed is equal to strategic speed for any ship that doesn't turbo. For fighters, the vast majority of thier tactical speed is turbo, which generally has a relatively short duration. So, tactical speed on a fighter is higher than thier strategic speed.

For some games, it might be interesting to give capital ships the same or higher strategic speed as fighters, but not if you want to keep the game fighter-centric. You think it might be boring driving a sluggish capital ship, just think how much more boring it would be if the best way to get from place to place was parked in the black belly of another ship.

Besides, while getting from place to place flying a capital ship might be slower, I think its a job enjoyed by a different sort of player than the sort that likes zipping around in fighters. It's less twitch and more planning ahead. Fighters swarm. Capital ships engage in slow dances.

Also, I wanted a fairly even progression in agility between fighters, medium sized vessels, and capital ships. If capital ships can 'cruise' at 120m/s - faster than fighters - then by the same token the medium sized ships need to have higher 'cruise' speeds as well. But, if they have lower cruise speeds than capital ships, they'll effectively be slower both tactically and strategically than larger ships unless we give them Turbo. BUT, if we give them both turbo and higher cruise speeds than fighters, we run the risk of making them effectively faster both tactically and strategicly than smaller ships.

I had the same consideration, just didn't have the terminology for it. I didn't want the capital ships to "cruise" at 120, that would be a huge mistake. I was also wary of giving them turbo since that would, as you say, risk giving them a higher tactical and strategic speed. That's why my idea attempted to meet this issue halfway. Forcing the ship to shut down all its weapons and defenses in order to get a type of "turbo" in order to restrain their tactical speed down to a maximum of 60-75 while keeping their strategic speed at an average of about 100 so that fighters can still outrun them, but their travel times don't become too long.
It's not only the fun of zipping along in fighters, it's also the issue of how much time a player would have to invest in the game. The problem with thinking too far ahead is that real-life will eventually make demands on you, so spending the majority of your time traveling for an in-game emergency would just bore the ship's crew.

Both of you seem to be forgetting that "flying around" in space isn't the only way to get around. The devs have mentioned a navigational system for getting between two points quickly, like the wormholes. Perhaps strategic speed will translate into how far a ship can make a wormhole jump. In that case a crew wouldn't have to sit around bored while their cap ship flew all 100 km to the battle scene, the cap ship would simply make the jump via a wormhole.