Information about upcoming Zoner changes

[Echo 7-7]

Disclaimer: I was not involved with most of the decisions relating to the changes for Zoner ships, and as far as I recall, these plans have been in motion for quite some time.

Is anything other than ship types going to be changed here?

If not, then I fail to really see the issue so long as the Zoners will still have Gunboats and the like. Jinkusu's and Nephilim's are nice and all, but if you really think about it...those ships will still exist, no? Just having been slightly repurposed.

Nobody is being "Forced to be a trader", so far as I can tell. Losing battleships that provide heavy firepower does not limit RP, neither does it limit your ability to take down "enemy" capships.

Turning battleships with established lore, purpose and role play into battletransports is the issue. People will lose billions of credits of investments and months worth of RP for the sake of a faction of lel. You'd be singing a different tune if it was liberty caps being turned into battletransports.

One of those "Battleships", was originally meant as a habitable colony ship, yes? So all I really see is that they're taking the military bite out of it, and making it actually function as more of a colony ship, which...makes sense.

Also as far as I recall, the Nephilim and Jinkusu "Battletransports", if you want to call them that, are still going to be pretty well armed, if I remember what was said in the thread a little while back.

Additionally, I have no interest in getting into an argument here, I was just adding my opinion, but uhm...Yes I admit, I would be markedly upset if the devs decided "Oh hey we're gonna turn Lib caps into transports", because that wouldn't make any sense at all, Because Liberty is a well established interstellar government with a well funded and properly organized military.

This is something the Zoners are not, and do not possess, lorewise.

It's nice when non-Devs beat me to the punch. (Yes, that is quoted from a locked thread.)

This change is definitely not just because of the Zoner Alliance player group. They are simply one group in a long line of lolwut Zoner groups that have sown discord, confusion, and mis-representation of Zoners in general. (For example, the ORI group were utterly malicious; the members of that group were all perma-banned with good reason.)

While I wasn't active at the time, the introduction of Zoner "capital ships" was probably done at a time before Discovery was a roleplay server, or during the early phases of "relaxed roleplay" [citation needed]. This means that certain lore content of that age is not quite up to par with the current era of Discovery, the latter which can be generally described as having more veracious continuity. Therefore, it is most appropriate to solely consider the status quo of Zoner "capital ships" today.

Let us consider what is currently the Nephilim (internal nickname dsy_munificent). It is, as Sarawr referenced above, a colony ship above all other things. Since there is no "colony ship" vessel class in the game, it was introduced to the mod under the mechanics of a battleship, which the developers of the time must have considered to be appropriate for the size of the model. Unfortunately, the ship's infocard also described it as a battleship; something I feel is inappropriate. Being described as a battleship, and also having the mechanics of one, are the primary factors for the unwarranted concept of Zoners having warships equivalent to the capabilities of more militarily-orientated factions. The general Discovery policy of having open access to capital ships only made things worse.

The same approach was used for all of the Zoner "capital ships". The Aquilon is an ultra-light mobile freeport. The Fearless is heavily-armed cargo ship. The Corvo is a research vessel... not a platform for military-grade munitions. That said, I'm not sure if the latter two ships are changing model or ship class, as they're not the worst offenders of this scenario.

With certain capital ships being changed to transports for purposes of game mechanics, the fundamental lore elements of the ships are not going to change. There will still be ships for colonisation, exploration, and mobile habitation. That is what this change is about.

---

There was a sig here, once.