I remember back when the new modular stations were still in planning and some screens/rendres of them were released.

The docking bays would fit 6 mauds!

I still have one of those screens as my desktop image at work and it looks awesome. Why are the stations so small?
Where did the huuuuge stations in those screens go?

Given dev permission I'll put one of those shots online and link to it here for illustration.

I would definitely like to see some seriously massive orbital stations in this game. so far it seems the most outreached stations are only about 1500m wide or long at most.

I'd also like to see rare appearances of those divinian heavy freighters as outlined in the backstory. 6000m long ship!!! >:D

it would be exciting to see someone announce on the nation chat that one of those goliath ships is spotted in some sector. crowds of people would come to see it.

I know that's far out in the future of VO, but no doubt if VO is successful, we'll see it!

for VO to be successfull we need to see them sometime SOON in the future, not later!!!

The devs have been working in sort of a cycle of fixes followed by content. Short term goals include the cap ship / frigate for now. They'll fill us in as we go.

To clarify: those old screens were concept sketches. These things were never in the game (just so we don't get posts for people calling to have them added back). Much has transpired since then. I'll leave it to the devs to discuss them further.

apex the first time we see people looking at them with awe.

And then 2 days later we see people shooting the heck out of them. And guess what it will explode since it has no defensive turrets at all since it is far from ready. Not to mention that it moves so slooooow that it takes 1 hour at least to cross 1 sector, a lot of people will be bored after 10 mins.

Then we will see people complain that it is boring and people will ask for even bigger ships. And the circle contineous.

cheers

What I think what would make the largest so awe inspiring, is if you have a number of ships at sizes in the range between large and (what we currently use) that create a range.

People may in fact become bored of a capital ship, if all it is is a tourist site.

However. I remember seeing a post for more midrange ships, ones maybe twice to 3 times the size of a centaur, with turret class ports, etc... I think that then the Capital ship seems to hold a place as the king of larger ships. Instead of currently, where its so alien from the ships we now use as to barely create the HOPE of piloting one.

The cap ship *will not* be a tourist attraction:

From In Progress:

"In any event, you should see the cap ship appearing as a named Serco flagship at some point in the not-too-distant future. The idea, at present, is to make it a centerpiece for Serco/Itani set of conflict missions.. the Serco will help escort their ship on patrols of the borders, the Itani will have missions to attack it. It will not be player controllable, but it will be an AI-controlled NPC with individually targetable and destructable turrets, a vast amount of firepower, and an extremely large explosion should it fall prey to enemies. We're also playing with making it dockable, but that would involve some media updates, as the docking bay on it isn't large enough to be useful at present."

Demonen: Yes, please upload the screenshot. The current nation capitol stations are the largest I've designed, and I'm curious which station you're talking about.

They're also about the biggest the engine can handle on our minimum system requirements. Unless I suddenly find the time to do lots of hand-optimizations of larger designs, you won't be seeing bigger stations any time soon.

so... does that mean we won't ever see the 6000m Divinian Heavy Freighter?

/me drools

There are a loooot of problems with a ship 6000m long from a gameplay standpoint. I'm sure Celebrim would've been happy to explain it to you ;)

You could EASILY fit six mauds into the docking bay of the current stations. You could probably fit that many into the old docking bays.

6000m?!

geeze if it was hollow you could use jump-engines inside of it!!!! (provided it was wide and tall enough also)

althoug i have to admit, if it were feasable it would make an interesting piece of angry terrain, to fight around.

so if stations can't get any bigger, why not make everything else smaller in respect to the stations?

He's not talking about physical scale, Waylon is referring to polygonal complexity. If we were to place say.. two of the largest current stations in a sector, the minimum-requirement people would find it pretty choppy. This doesn't mean that there aren't possible things we could do, but it's a bit more complicated than just making more and bigger stations (which would be easy).

Flying through a massive "city" scale station is something I've always wanted, the concept of the UIT homeworld was based on that.. but it's technologically a little more complex. Not impossible, just a bit more involved.

what is the polycount of the Biggest station?

Hell, I'm near the top of available systems and I struggle with some of the current biggest, most complex sectors. That might be the 4xAA/Anistropic filtering. Or maybe not. Who knows?

Waylon:
Sorry for the delay, I've been swamped with work over the last few days.

I put the pic on my webserver:
http://www.z0rz.net/station2.jpg

Now compare the maud to the docking port...
[edit]
BTW, I should have been more clear in the original post:
It can fit six mauds by WIDTH.
Wingbugging on that thing would take effort, not bad luck :D
[more edit]
Oh, and I'm quite clear on the fact that it's a concept shot.
That's what it was introduced as back in the small universe.

Was glad to here that the capital ship was going to be part of a series of serco itani combat missions that would be cool, to bad they will not be piolitable that would have been interesting though perhaps boring since they will be so large.

Maybe make them piloitable but so expensive that it takes a group of players to own one make them guild ships?

Not sure if this has been mentioned before but some sort of guild station that could be used to protect rich mineing areas might be interesting then various guilds could take it over/destroy it should probably be 100,000 k or more in price though. Love the game keep up the good work!