none of u get to complain because this is the long long texts about whatever niche subject website
i made this dinky looking carrier, mostly intended to hold a large amoutn of really tiny ships, like 3x4x3 miners or something. alternatively it can house a couple small ships or maybe one medium tall ship.
ships are loaded through the back, which is almost entirely made out of one big door which opens when loading or unloading the hold.
The back lights up green when ships can approach to dock, & red when its in the process of unloading whatever is inside
Both the door toggle & switching between loading & unloading is done through internal ship switches, which can be activated by the current pilot (i wish id make them manually overrideable too but i had to botch the logic a bit)
The cockpit has these pretty basic but always fun displays for the current state, so the seated crew can get a sense of whats going on too.
Theres a moving elevator that goes from the cockpit + engine room + airlocks to the ship docks in the lower beige parts. That has two levels which you can kind of see in the 4th image. i forgot to take a screenshot of the elevator so ull have to trust me on this
one thing that i liked a lot about how it turned out is that everything is accessible by the crew, no component are hidden in a solid chunk of armor & u can freely walk between the reactor & its chambers + the shields. i just really like that it feels like a real ship that a real crew would use and not a box of pure function over form
Stats-wise it turned out way better than i thought it would. It has a max speed of like 600 ish m/s and i beefed up the jump drive for rapid & automatic charging. Shield recharge is quite slow but. this thing should in no way be anywhere near hostiles. It has 0 offensive capabilities and i took absolutely no precautions to make it more durable in an attack. you can snipe the ship core through a window lol.
But thats fine! its not meant for that. The idea is that it'll likely be put to use mostly for transporting a lot of tiny mining drones in a fleet. Maybe it can carry a couple small fighters or smart nukes or something though
With the souped up jump drive the hope is that it can Just Leave if things get too heated
made a miner design that fits in the footprint (3x6x3) and after Way Too Long figured out how to make them actually mine (turns out, cant send them after planets & u must claim the asteroid ur targeting by placing faction block)
theyre pretty slow and shit but its very neat to watch :>
shuold probably have a couple of these pod-like ships with other roles, like repair or something. just in case. or maybe to have like an "ambulance" fleet that you can warp over after a combat fleet has ceased fighting & needs repairs or something
also filling the hold does put a bit of strain on the reactor. theres still space for expansion so im not super worried, but i think if thered be some more sizable ships docked it would probably not keep up very well
