The only reason they came up with carriers in the first place is that these ships are popular with the playerbase since every other sci-fi universe features them. I always thought that fightercraft in deep-space don't make much sense for Star Trek since their space combat is inspired by 18th century naval mechanics, cruiser based. Small underprotected fighters that face tractor beams, shields, 360 degree directed energy weapons capable of continious fire - it's just ridiculous.
Each and every ship in star Trek aside from small frigates should be able to deploy auxilliary craft, however. A Galaxy launching two Danube runabouts in combat would be alright, for example. Think of games like Starfleet Command where almost any ship could launch shuttles. Star Treks "shuttles" are not only transportation vessels but came a long way being multi-mission auxilliary craft even replacing planetary ground vehicles for combat completely. The infamous "Federation Fighter" in DS9 is a refitted civilian courier, inspired by the Maquis who used small civilian craft for a lack of larger vessels in their guerilla freedome fight.
Putting that aside and concentrating on STOs gameplay which does feature "carriers" however, I too would oppose a Fed full carrier. Let the sides keep some diversity from each other. If you want a carrier play KDF or ROM, you are free to do so (or the Atrox). I don't like this complete equality between the factions both in design and gameplay. Takes all the fun out of the game imo
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
"Putting that aside and concentrating on STOs gameplay which does feature "carriers" however, I too would oppose a Fed full carrier. Let the sides keep some diversity from each other. If you want a carrier play KDF or ROM, you are free to do so (or the Atrox). I don't like this complete equality between the factions both in design and gameplay. Takes all the fun out of the game imo"
I can't agree with this sentiment at all =/
There are countless methods by which faction flavour and diversity could be preserved without the need for outright denial of resources in this fashion. I'm not going to elaborate on this point because it would likely turn into an entire dissertation, suffice to say it faction distinctions could be maintained quite easily without the need to restrict ships at all.
Furthermore, segregating available game mechanics based on faction is a really effective method of strangling the potential of encounter design. When your factions have access to two entirely different subsets of tools, you inherently limit what you're capable of in terms of balancing content by having two entirely different sets of considerations you need to account for.
To draw on the most obvious example i can think of, World of W@rcr@ft originally restricted Paladins and Shamans to one faction each. This persisted for a fair while but was ultimately changed for the very reason stated above. It was simply too difficult, counter intuitive and generated too much extra work having to balance content around two different toolsets available to two different factions.
To use an extreme illustration, if you have two teams, one who is entirely ranged and the other who uses exclusively melee, how do you effectively balance the same encounter for both subsets? Without gimmicks or arbitrary stopgaps, its surprisingly difficult to do. In fact you almost have to design the encounter twice to accommodate for the differences.
As an aside, making mechanical restrictions that might affect game balance in certain areas based on the lore of the game world, isn't something that I consider to be a terribly good idea from a game design perspective. i enjoy STO quite a lot, but frankly I think its largest problem from a game design and progression standpoint, is the fact that it's shackled fairly restrictively to the Star Trek universe. It's already a game that has had its potential scope narrowed by a strongly defined genre, there's no reason to go adding additional arbitrary (and to my mind wholly unnecessary) restrictions to make the issue even more pronounced.
Additional note: I don't think this problem is restricted solely to carriers. They're certainly the most obvious example in STO, but there are enough ship distinctions present elsewhere that i feel directly contribute to the generally very poor encounter design, bland and challenging feel and general lack of much structured mechanical balance of "end game" content.
Edit: Seriously? "W@rcr@ft" gets filtered? What is this Cryptic, I don't even...
Each and every ship in star Trek aside from small frigates should be able to deploy auxilliary craft, however. A Galaxy launching two Danube runabouts in combat would be alright, for example. Think of games like Starfleet Command where almost any ship could launch shuttles. Star Treks "shuttles" are not only transportation vessels but came a long way being multi-mission auxilliary craft even replacing planetary ground vehicles for combat completely. The infamous "Federation Fighter" in DS9 is a refitted civilian courier, inspired by the Maquis who used small civilian craft for a lack of larger vessels in their guerilla freedome fight.
Quite frankly, having every ship launch at least a couple runabouts would make me happy. My beef with Cryptic is not being able to control such auxiliary craft (see Odyssey Chevron and Aquarius). So if Cryptic is willing to put a small wing of runabouts in every ship (KDF, FED, and ROM, mind you) and make any auxiliary craft controllable in the same manner as carriers, I'd be happy.
As far as having every ship having a small wing of runabouts, whether or not Cryptic would exclude ships that already have an auxiliary craft (Odyssey, Galaxy Saucer, etc.) would have to be a balance issue that I think could only be resolved through testing.
Has anyone ever looked at the galaxies hanger deck? Check out the minecraft ent-d project where they show it off. It was never built for the show or movies because it was too expensive.
If any ship would benefit and it fit for to be retrofitted into a carrier it would be the gal, with that huge main hanger deck, 1k crew they sure have the there there already to put a few fighters on it and have the crew to maintain and etc them.
The galaxy class main hanger was on the saucer section and could accommodate a defiant sized ship. I would like to see many of the smaller ships such as defiant, bird of prey, and Jim Hadar attack ship converted to shuttle type craft and missions. There's no way any of those should be able to take on a Borg cube and live...let alone excel in estf's.
I do feel smaller craft have a place. Most of the "canon" everyone leans on was based on limited budgets and cheap producers. Nobody wanted to do an A+ job on comp gfx. Too expensive on the series. Thus we saw less of the smaller ships and more repeats of scenes over n over.
I do feel smaller craft have a place. Most of the "canon" everyone leans on was based on limited budgets and cheap producers. Nobody wanted to do an A+ job on comp gfx. Too expensive on the series. Thus we saw less of the smaller ships and more repeats of scenes over n over.
I don't think this is an argument to shoehorn generic fighter dogfights into Star Trek. I mean Galactica and Star Wars have also been low-budget in the days and they centered around Starfighters. Trek didn't and it makes sense that way.
There is, however, room for small craft. They are called shuttles - it might not sound very military but they are perfectly capable of providing auxilliary duty in combat. They are smaller than the "Federation Attack Fighter", are warp capable, have shielding an can be armed or are already geared to be more sturdy like the Danube - it just makes no sense to throw swarms of them at a battlecruiser. The federation "fighter" is more of a corvette, warp capable as well but too large to be "carried" around and not very efficient compared to Jem'Hadar "fighters" which are already frigate-sized.
If every ship would be able to launch one or two shuttlecraft to provide light fire support, buffs/debuffs or repairs I'd be perfectly fine with that.
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
I don't think this is an argument to shoehorn generic fighter dogfights into Star Trek. I mean Galactica and Star Wars have also been low-budget in the days and they centered around Starfighters. Trek didn't and it makes sense that way.
There is, however, room for small craft. They are called shuttles - it might not sound very military but they are perfectly capable of providing auxilliary duty in combat. They are smaller than the "Federation Attack Fighter", are warp capable, have shielding an can be armed or are already geared to be more sturdy like the Danube - it just makes no sense to throw swarms of them at a battlecruiser. The federation "fighter" is more of a corvette, warp capable as well but too large to be "carried" around and not very efficient compared to Jem'Hadar "fighters" which are already frigate-sized.
If every ship would be able to launch one or two shuttlecraft to provide light fire support, buffs/debuffs or repairs I'd be perfectly fine with that.
FED fighters are not corvette sized. The peregrine attack fighter is a two man ship.
the and the jem ships are totally different story as they are, for lack of a better term escorts. and they are defiant sized. JEM FIGHTERS on the other hand may be quite alot smaller as they are not seen on screen it is hard to tell.
Inertia just means you can do Powerslides in you carrier!
I am Il Shadow and i approve these Shennanigans!
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
FED fighters are not corvette sized. The peregrine attack fighter is a two man ship.
the and the jem ships are totally different story as they are, for lack of a better term escorts. and they are defiant sized. JEM FIGHTERS on the other hand may be quite alot smaller as they are not seen on screen it is hard to tell.
There are no Jem'Hadar starfighters, the Jem'Hadar attack ship and "fighter" are the same ships http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Jem%27Hadar_fighter and are a tad bit smaller than the defiant which is a small frigate. The Jem'Hadar "carrier" and any fighter pets are Cryptic's invention.
The "federation attack fighter" may be piloted by 2 people but used regular shuttle interiors, like the Danube which is around the same size and can hold cargo or up to 40 (i think?) passengers. The physical model of the "fighter" was also at least the same width as the Defiant, just shorter. That's what I'd call a corvette (not in STO as we now have a "corvette" there which is larger than the Defiant I think?). Definitely nothing you'd "carry" around
Granted, we'll never know the size it's actually meant to have (since it's size seems to vary every time it's been shown akin to the Defiant or B'rels) but considering the armament it is supposed to have it's at least the size of a runabout if not larger (at least wider).
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
The only reason they came up with carriers in the first place is that these ships are popular with the playerbase since every other sci-fi universe features them. I always thought that fightercraft in deep-space don't make much sense for Star Trek since their space combat is inspired by 18th century naval mechanics, cruiser based. Small underprotected fighters that face tractor beams, shields, 360 degree directed energy weapons capable of continious fire - it's just ridiculous.
Not quite true; the Peregrine and Scorpion are canon ships; the Scimitar was shown with a large flight deck, and at least in design notes the Akira was meant to be a carrier. There is also an unused Andrew Probert design for a Klingon fighter which is a lot like the in-game To'Duj.
Fair point about fighters vs larger ships; though I think a better comparator would be modern-day Navies with the current standoff between larger, "conventional" warships and small, fast attack craft such as those favoured by the Iranian navy. The FACs lack endurance and range, but carry powerful enough weapons to threaten large ships on a one-shot basis; not unlike STO fighters.
Not quite true; the Peregrine and Scorpion are canon ships; the Scimitar was shown with a large flight deck, and at least in design notes the Akira was meant to be a carrier. There is also an unused Andrew Probert design for a Klingon fighter which is a lot like the in-game To'Duj.
Fair point about fighters vs larger ships; though I think a better comparator would be modern-day Navies with the current standoff between larger, "conventional" warships and small, fast attack craft such as those favoured by the Iranian navy. The FACs lack endurance and range, but carry powerful enough weapons to threaten large ships on a one-shot basis; not unlike STO fighters.
You are right, though the Scorpion at least is a sub-warp fighter, probably meant for orbital actions rather than deep-space encounters and the Peregrine was a civilian design refitted by Maquis guerilla troops and adapted by Starfleet out of desperation to throw a distraction at the Dominion fleet. Besides, again, you don't have to carry those (arguably rather large) craft around unlike shuttles that are more compact and at least capable of performing equal if not better (Runabouts). About the Akira design I can only say that there's probably a reason it didn't make it on screen "as intended".
The whole superiority of carriers and fighters is based on two things: The first being air vs. sea, two vastly different "media" and the second being speed and agility (like the FACs you mentioned as well) having an advantage when shot by "blindly fired" projectile based weaponry. Both of these advantages vanish in Star Trek as both are in space and Trek vessels don't use ballistic weaponry but primarily beam emitters and arrays with in-canon ranges of hundreds if not thousands of kilometers and highly sophisticated targeting computers, plus a sub-warp fighter wouldn't generate enough amount of power to support shielding and weaponry that can hope to compete with anything the cruisers can put up. Shuttles (and arguably the Peregrine courier as well) have warp cores and thus can generate a power output to at least support some shielding which may even take a few (weaker) shots and might even feature weaponry that might be able to at least land a direct hit.
Of course this all is theoretical nerd-fiction The true reason being: Star Trek doesn't need starfighters and carriers, every other franchise has those already
EDIT: I'm curios why no one had ever picked up the idea of Sentry Pods ( http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Studio_models_(TNG)?file=MarsDefensePerimeter.jpg ). I think that would be what Starfleet would use instead of "fighters" - I could even believe that those things could somehow perform manneuvres to evaise the advanced weaponry of cruisers.
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
Comments
Each and every ship in star Trek aside from small frigates should be able to deploy auxilliary craft, however. A Galaxy launching two Danube runabouts in combat would be alright, for example. Think of games like Starfleet Command where almost any ship could launch shuttles. Star Treks "shuttles" are not only transportation vessels but came a long way being multi-mission auxilliary craft even replacing planetary ground vehicles for combat completely. The infamous "Federation Fighter" in DS9 is a refitted civilian courier, inspired by the Maquis who used small civilian craft for a lack of larger vessels in their guerilla freedome fight.
Putting that aside and concentrating on STOs gameplay which does feature "carriers" however, I too would oppose a Fed full carrier. Let the sides keep some diversity from each other. If you want a carrier play KDF or ROM, you are free to do so (or the Atrox). I don't like this complete equality between the factions both in design and gameplay. Takes all the fun out of the game imo
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I can't agree with this sentiment at all =/
There are countless methods by which faction flavour and diversity could be preserved without the need for outright denial of resources in this fashion. I'm not going to elaborate on this point because it would likely turn into an entire dissertation, suffice to say it faction distinctions could be maintained quite easily without the need to restrict ships at all.
Furthermore, segregating available game mechanics based on faction is a really effective method of strangling the potential of encounter design. When your factions have access to two entirely different subsets of tools, you inherently limit what you're capable of in terms of balancing content by having two entirely different sets of considerations you need to account for.
To draw on the most obvious example i can think of, World of W@rcr@ft originally restricted Paladins and Shamans to one faction each. This persisted for a fair while but was ultimately changed for the very reason stated above. It was simply too difficult, counter intuitive and generated too much extra work having to balance content around two different toolsets available to two different factions.
To use an extreme illustration, if you have two teams, one who is entirely ranged and the other who uses exclusively melee, how do you effectively balance the same encounter for both subsets? Without gimmicks or arbitrary stopgaps, its surprisingly difficult to do. In fact you almost have to design the encounter twice to accommodate for the differences.
As an aside, making mechanical restrictions that might affect game balance in certain areas based on the lore of the game world, isn't something that I consider to be a terribly good idea from a game design perspective. i enjoy STO quite a lot, but frankly I think its largest problem from a game design and progression standpoint, is the fact that it's shackled fairly restrictively to the Star Trek universe. It's already a game that has had its potential scope narrowed by a strongly defined genre, there's no reason to go adding additional arbitrary (and to my mind wholly unnecessary) restrictions to make the issue even more pronounced.
Additional note: I don't think this problem is restricted solely to carriers. They're certainly the most obvious example in STO, but there are enough ship distinctions present elsewhere that i feel directly contribute to the generally very poor encounter design, bland and challenging feel and general lack of much structured mechanical balance of "end game" content.
Edit: Seriously? "W@rcr@ft" gets filtered? What is this Cryptic, I don't even...
Quite frankly, having every ship launch at least a couple runabouts would make me happy. My beef with Cryptic is not being able to control such auxiliary craft (see Odyssey Chevron and Aquarius). So if Cryptic is willing to put a small wing of runabouts in every ship (KDF, FED, and ROM, mind you) and make any auxiliary craft controllable in the same manner as carriers, I'd be happy.
As far as having every ship having a small wing of runabouts, whether or not Cryptic would exclude ships that already have an auxiliary craft (Odyssey, Galaxy Saucer, etc.) would have to be a balance issue that I think could only be resolved through testing.
If any ship would benefit and it fit for to be retrofitted into a carrier it would be the gal, with that huge main hanger deck, 1k crew they sure have the there there already to put a few fighters on it and have the crew to maintain and etc them.
I do feel smaller craft have a place. Most of the "canon" everyone leans on was based on limited budgets and cheap producers. Nobody wanted to do an A+ job on comp gfx. Too expensive on the series. Thus we saw less of the smaller ships and more repeats of scenes over n over.
I don't think this is an argument to shoehorn generic fighter dogfights into Star Trek. I mean Galactica and Star Wars have also been low-budget in the days and they centered around Starfighters. Trek didn't and it makes sense that way.
There is, however, room for small craft. They are called shuttles - it might not sound very military but they are perfectly capable of providing auxilliary duty in combat. They are smaller than the "Federation Attack Fighter", are warp capable, have shielding an can be armed or are already geared to be more sturdy like the Danube - it just makes no sense to throw swarms of them at a battlecruiser. The federation "fighter" is more of a corvette, warp capable as well but too large to be "carried" around and not very efficient compared to Jem'Hadar "fighters" which are already frigate-sized.
If every ship would be able to launch one or two shuttlecraft to provide light fire support, buffs/debuffs or repairs I'd be perfectly fine with that.
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FED fighters are not corvette sized. The peregrine attack fighter is a two man ship.
the and the jem ships are totally different story as they are, for lack of a better term escorts. and they are defiant sized. JEM FIGHTERS on the other hand may be quite alot smaller as they are not seen on screen it is hard to tell.
I am Il Shadow and i approve these Shennanigans!
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
There are no Jem'Hadar starfighters, the Jem'Hadar attack ship and "fighter" are the same ships http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Jem%27Hadar_fighter and are a tad bit smaller than the defiant which is a small frigate. The Jem'Hadar "carrier" and any fighter pets are Cryptic's invention.
The "federation attack fighter" may be piloted by 2 people but used regular shuttle interiors, like the Danube which is around the same size and can hold cargo or up to 40 (i think?) passengers. The physical model of the "fighter" was also at least the same width as the Defiant, just shorter. That's what I'd call a corvette (not in STO as we now have a "corvette" there which is larger than the Defiant I think?). Definitely nothing you'd "carry" around
Granted, we'll never know the size it's actually meant to have (since it's size seems to vary every time it's been shown akin to the Defiant or B'rels) but considering the armament it is supposed to have it's at least the size of a runabout if not larger (at least wider).
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Not quite true; the Peregrine and Scorpion are canon ships; the Scimitar was shown with a large flight deck, and at least in design notes the Akira was meant to be a carrier. There is also an unused Andrew Probert design for a Klingon fighter which is a lot like the in-game To'Duj.
Fair point about fighters vs larger ships; though I think a better comparator would be modern-day Navies with the current standoff between larger, "conventional" warships and small, fast attack craft such as those favoured by the Iranian navy. The FACs lack endurance and range, but carry powerful enough weapons to threaten large ships on a one-shot basis; not unlike STO fighters.
You are right, though the Scorpion at least is a sub-warp fighter, probably meant for orbital actions rather than deep-space encounters and the Peregrine was a civilian design refitted by Maquis guerilla troops and adapted by Starfleet out of desperation to throw a distraction at the Dominion fleet. Besides, again, you don't have to carry those (arguably rather large) craft around unlike shuttles that are more compact and at least capable of performing equal if not better (Runabouts). About the Akira design I can only say that there's probably a reason it didn't make it on screen "as intended".
The whole superiority of carriers and fighters is based on two things: The first being air vs. sea, two vastly different "media" and the second being speed and agility (like the FACs you mentioned as well) having an advantage when shot by "blindly fired" projectile based weaponry. Both of these advantages vanish in Star Trek as both are in space and Trek vessels don't use ballistic weaponry but primarily beam emitters and arrays with in-canon ranges of hundreds if not thousands of kilometers and highly sophisticated targeting computers, plus a sub-warp fighter wouldn't generate enough amount of power to support shielding and weaponry that can hope to compete with anything the cruisers can put up. Shuttles (and arguably the Peregrine courier as well) have warp cores and thus can generate a power output to at least support some shielding which may even take a few (weaker) shots and might even feature weaponry that might be able to at least land a direct hit.
Of course this all is theoretical nerd-fiction
EDIT: I'm curios why no one had ever picked up the idea of Sentry Pods ( http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Studio_models_(TNG)?file=MarsDefensePerimeter.jpg ). I think that would be what Starfleet would use instead of "fighters" - I could even believe that those things could somehow perform manneuvres to evaise the advanced weaponry of cruisers.
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