If Zoners are getting their caps removed...

[Jihadjoe]

2. If we're only questioning the Hessian battleship, I have a hard time understanding why the RPC - made by Hessians - is on the chopping block. It seems like a perfect ship for several unlawful groups to buy (and SRP as needed); it's simply an outdated model that the Hessians still have the plans for because why delete them. By not questioning the Hessian cruiser, you imply that you believe the Hessians have the production capacity for cruisers.

3. This one did strike me as being a bit strange.

Just to answer...

Yes I do believe the hessians have the ability to construct, crew and maintain a cruiser.

I do not believe the smaller rheinland factions could afford to maintain and crew cruisers, even if the hessians were selling them outdated versions of their own.

---

[Magoo!]

In a world where a film director has built a submarine capable of reaching the bottom of the Mariana Trench and is hoping to develop an asteroid-mining project, the question has been raised whether or not sometimes-black market mega-merchants operating outside of the law could raise the money? A world where a boxer bought his wife a $2 million bathtub? American Idol hosts give £6 million in cash and real estate as a gift to friends? We are all familiar with the same international culture of extravagance, yes?

Elon Musk alone is worth enough to build two aircraft carriers at $4.5 billion each.

As somebody who's played a Zoner for seven years, the fire in my heart has faded, so please don't interpret my post as fiery. I've seen the Zoners continually nerfed, nuked, altered, bent, face-lifted, and turned upside-down and we've always been under scrutiny because of misunderstood notions of neutrality. It's the same old song and dance it was years ago, and I'm happy to see Joe quite level-headedly offering up an idea that brings double-standards to light. Good on you, Joe.

My thoughts: If the Zoners are the hyper-capitalists that the devs say they are, yes - I think they would have the capital to produce colony ships. There's a long string of lore-related conjecture that I have to offer, but I doubt anybody is really interested and I'll leave it at simply offering my opinion.

On the line of compromise, I support the idea of nerfing the Zoner vessels' armament as described here:

Could've been easier removing the heavy battleship slots on both Nephi and Aquillon or at least keeping two on them rather than four. After all the main issue is the fact of these being used for military purposes rather than their actual role as colony ships.

PS: Well, correction, the Aquilon is meant to be a carrier, so as carrier should remain with an also nerfed firepower.

Because, as somebody who flies CSFs to pirate people with, I prefer RP over explosions; and sometimes it's freaking cool to be able to say you fly a city.

-Edit- Ah, but I didn't read the fourth page because it's 2:30 in the morning. I apologize for feeding the misdirection of this thread, Joe.

[Coin]

Eh, I just realized something, guys.


Zoners cannot support battleships, right?

We give them 3 new types of transport.

They turn out to become a massive outer-house trading empire.

It becomes OORP for them NOT to have battleships with that wealth.














Wat.

Ouch, it appears the Devs concerned have shot themselves in the foot.

But, they refused to listen, so they cannot place the blame elsewise.

Small as in less then 20 battleships iirc from what AeternusDoleo said.

If we consider the fact that in vanilla FL, 20 battleships would have been larger than the size of a house military...

Organised as in Guildmaster, centralised power, recruitment process, ranks, a goal, as oposed to zoners who are independent.

Yep, that makes sense for a group who are a paramilitary outfit.

Funded as in all the money from bounties in four houses from governments, corporations, civilians go to them.

How much do you think the houses would be spending on this? Then how much of that would be knocked off in various costs of keeping the hunters themselves in pay, maintaining the house-hunting vessels, supply costs, administration and employing the people to do the administration, the amount of credits lost to "the system" if you want... How much does it actually cost to build, crew, maintain and field a large warship?

The houses would have to be spending a significant portion of their GDP on merely employing bounty hunters, if enough cash was flowing to the guild core for them to field 20 battleships + screens... Are they doing this, in lore?

These are things to consider. I don't have the answers.

there are four houses, and if we assume that they are each spending 10% (numbers used for example) of their GDP in supplementing their armed forces with bunters, the bunters are receiving 40% of the value of the GDP of a house, but don't have a house to run. no schools to build or bridges to burn, they can spend 100% of their GDP on their paramilitary aims. This represents a good deal for the houses involved, as their 10% is actually purchasing a fleet worth 40% of their GDP - in essence, the BHG *could* be a very very strong military force, and their RP could well be a 'king-maker'.

What about Order caps? They're stranded in fug all nowhere with lawful enemies in nearly every house.

What about Order caps? They're stranded in fug all nowhere with lawful enemies in nearly every house.

This is something of a tricky issue with The Order. They really shouldn't have lawful enemies everywhere. The Order and Liberty, for example, probably shouldn't be hostile to one another. The fact they have been in disco is slightly mystifying to me, due to the ending of the vanilla plotline.

I think this was something of an oversight in the early development of the mod, which has subsequently been justified by having things to do with stationing caps in soveriegn space, and disagreements about nomad experimentation, and so on... But all these reasons being given are largely just trying to find logic in a situation that the two groups have been stuck with. (And possibly giving Liberty a reason not to have the Osiris?)

As for the Order having a cap fleet - they are a small paramilitary group with limited funding, so I tend to agree that their cap-fielding ability is certainly limited. However, they do have lore precedent for the Osiris, which changes the game somewhat.

The Order are a bit of a problem case in this regard.

as i understood it, a bunch of order caps came to visit ny and shot up the place, and they've been enemies ever since. InRP, the order doesn't have the funds of the bhg, but they do occasionally 'pull an orillion' and lift themselves a new toy from the lib navy. jeez, those guards must notget trained very well. As a result of their larcenous recidivism, the LN are mighy mad at them, cos they are building ships and the order are stealing them, so they are forced to turn to that strong fighting force, the bhg, to slap them around and try to get it back. consequently, the bhg has caps, the order has the LN's caps, and the LN should have all their caps turned into transports just keeps on building them.

Less caps, less lags, less nubs, more snubs, more activity, more groupfights, more fun.

fourteen words of poetry. you should post more often. kudos, sir, kudos.

---

A Day in the Life of an NPC | Coin | The Journal of Caius Oakley | Build Your Dream Boat

[Highland Laddie]

Hmm...

[McNeo]

GDP is total economic output per year, not total government budget per year. I don't have to tell you which is larger, or what 10% of GDP looks like in a government budget.

Governments would also not spend 10% of their budget on hunters. Why would you do this when you can spend 10% of your budget on the military on top of what you already spend on them?

I think you are grossly over-estimating the power and revenue stream of the Bounty Hunters Guild. They may be rich, merc work is paid well, but it's not paid so well as to create huge assets like a battleship or even a cruiser. How would they be financed? What kind of financing model would be used to pry the credits out of the hands of the bounty hunters that earn them? Is it an investment for hunters, or do they give part of their earnings as commission? If they give earnings as commission, how much do they give?

There's a lot of work for bounty hunters. But if there's so much work that you can create a fully equipped fleet from the earnings, why not privatise the military organisations instead? Liberty already started moving down that road with the LPI ...

That said, I agree with Joe on almost all counts. I see the RPC being an overall good thing, because in my mind, the Unioners in particular are likely to be organised and skilled enough to maintain them. Perhaps not with the stupid interhouse wars ruining their lucrative trade interception routes in Hudson and Bering but thats a different discussion.

Im in favour of making this mod make more sense.

[Haste]

That saying, I would put The Order's raw military strenght between houses and everyone else. By that I have also to stress out on fact that I estimate lore numbers (let's simplify and concetrate on the big pewsticks without going into detail with cruisers and other classes) of The Order to be ~10 battleships while house-grade capspam I would put at 100+

To me, this makes very little sense. The way I see it, Battleships in the Freelancer universe are massive, expensive projects with upkeep costs that only houses can really afford. In vanilla, the Order was a small-scale organization (from the looks of it) with agents planted all over the place to keep information flowing in. There's no evidence that other than the Osiris (which they stole from a House) they had any kind of capital ship fleet or the resources to build and maintain one.

Due to the Order's secretive nature it seems iffy to me that they'd assume a high profile by (probably) employing millions of people and/or gathering the colossal amounts of resources required to build a capital fleet. It seems far more logical that they'd strengthen their ties with the Houses (Liberty in particular) to have military strength at their disposal if necessary, while the organization itself could remain "small" and low-profile. Composed of only the best of the best to ensure that they're not infiltrated and so forth.

But then again, we're stuck with the inflated Discovery universe where everyone and their dog has mineral-rich planets, shipyards and a huge workforce at their disposal.

---

[Omicron]

Someday during course of development, some person decided that everybody knows or at least heard of the Nomads, The Order's true purpose and slapped million people's colony to us. Not to mention it was deemed at that point to be "logical" that Order gave Ossiess to Corsairs.

Can't be helped now. I am trying to salvage what I can while keeping continuity intact. You can check Order database for some of those products.

---

[SMI-Great.Fox]

The Mollies are sort of working together with the Brets against the Gallics. So I'd say let them keep the dessie, since it is sort of like an extra powerful transport by RP already.

We havent had mollies working with us for a while in Bretonia, indies here and there, but fully? Anyone remember the Molly Seperatists? While I can agree to dissagree on such, The mollies have Londonberry full of gold to promote -buying- said parts for cruisers and such but the Rouges. Im not sure how to comment on such. But hey. PLR has an LN dread. Go sign up

Now if the Mollies gained their independance, which one particular admin said is impossible cause gaining their main objective destroys the molly faction, in favor with Bretonia, Yeah. I'll see more reason for such cruisers to stay around.

Again. My $0.02.

---

-"If we do not learn at least one thing a day....Our minds turn to stupor"- Kyle Sparrgrove -2005

http://i849.photobucket.com/albums/ab53/Vandread010/BAF_1_FltAdm_zps4239822d.jpg
http://i849.photobucket.com/albums/ab53/...e32039.jpg
http://i849.photobucket.com/albums/ab53/...89ade0.jpg
While the signature did not break any rules before, the lack of third party hosting caused your signature to take up over half of the page. Until the problem is fixed, I'll have to revert those images to links. ~Inferno

Ships Log of the Maverick IV Logs of the Maverick.V  The.Maverick.IV & Maverick.V Feedback Lot How it all began...

[HuggieSunrise]

Its obvious this need to be less about removing who has acsess to capships.

And more about to total rebalacing of the system and order of battle. Kinda like what the star wars mods done. (if our devs havent been following thier progress then shame on them)

Vessles with standard armaments. Big ships are a large economic drain and require you to BUILD them. then again comparing the ISD to the marduk the isd is about 8 times bigger. But that shouldent stop us from dreaming bigger and better and phasing out what just doesent work anymore.

[SMGSterlin]

- Blood dragon caps.

Agreed, should be removed. I don't see how the BD have the assets to build capital ships, they don't have any major export to bring in money to afford the materials to build them, and they don't have any raw materials in their territory.

You -could- say that they have funding from supporters for their cause, and this allows them to build caps, but I doubt their supporter's pockets are deep enough to afford a fleet of cruisers.

Started to comment on the other factions you mentioned, but I don't actually care enough to put that much effort into this post. *shrugs*

---