Fractal Softworks Forum
Starsector => Suggestions => Topic started by: Megas on June 09, 2019, 06:38:05 AM
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Basically a destroyer or cruiser-sized freighter (or troop transport for marines instead of loot) with phase cloak designed to sneak into ports and smuggle stuff like cargo or haul goodies stolen from raids. Due to its nature, civilian-grade hull is probably not appropriate, but needs some downside to put it on par with hybrid or even dedicated haulers. Probably should not haul as much as conventional haulers, but having a phase ship with more capacity than other combat phase ships' lack of capacity (without hullmods) would be nice.
Sure, we have stuff like low-tech ships with Shielded Cargo Holds, but this idea is for those rich crooks who want to show off or for governments that have bigger plans in mind.
Handy for pure phase fleets that want to sneak around and do less fighting and more robbing or illicit trade. Could be handy for smuggling bombs or a planet killer for special campaign hooks.
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Hah, funny - I just added this to the todo list yesterday based on the conversation in that other thread!
So, needless to say, yeah, I like the idea :)
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Imagine phasing a planets worth of recreational drugs in a modified Atlas through a stations armor plating just as a patrol rounds a corner to confront your dubious possibly smuggling related actions.
Except they dont find anything because you just phased a superfreighter into a isolated dedicated offloading bay with no exit for normal ships.
The Ghost Freighter strikes again!
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I like this idea; it'd also solve a lot of the whackiness with making the Pirate bases... approachable, lol.
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Nice! Sounds fun.
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Considering what phase space does to people (and flux), do you think they'd actually run a cargo hauler in phase for long enough to approach a station? How long is that, considering how fast time moves on the strategic view?
To me this is a combat system that does serious psychological damage to the crew - and that's only the damage we know about. Putting it on a cargo ship feels wrong. Except for expensive black-ops.
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A phase hauler will not be used by general public for commerce. It will be used as black ops or simple piracy (and smuggling before the raid). Bringing a full phase fleet to rob stations (of their blueprints) is acting like a pirate. Of course, raiding also coughs up more loot than blueprints, and it is a shame I cannot take that too because phase ships have terrible capacities to haul anything more than few special lightweight items.
Also, nobody said the phase cruiser that hauled Tri-Tachyon's planet killer in one of the missions/scenarios was a Doom. Doom is the logical choice because it is the only phase cruiser. But the cruiser can be something else, something built to haul stuff while using phase field for the least profile.
Think of it as a phase ship specially designed to haul stuff, not a modified civilian freighter with phase coils strapped on and gaining built-in Ill-Advised Modifications.
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Imagine phasing a planets worth of recreational drugs in a modified Atlas through a stations armor plating just as a patrol rounds a corner to confront your dubious possibly smuggling related actions.
Except they dont find anything because you just phased a superfreighter into a isolated dedicated offloading bay with no exit for normal ships.
The Ghost Freighter strikes again!
What a cool visualization 8)
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If I may raise my hand here, phase freighters are one of those concepts that's fairly volatile in the modiverse. I've tried to make one, and I had a bunch of people tell me it wasn't a good idea, and as it turned out they were right. A phase freighter, in the simplest sense it can be, is a tad broken because it's nigh impossible to catch, so suddenly all your fleet's cargo is 100% safe no matter what.
Not saying the idea is inherently bad! But it's a risky one, as other folks who've tried it will no doubt tell you. Definitely needs to be treated with caution.
Generally, if you're going to go with a phase freighter, you want its capacity to be very limited - good for a phase ship, perhaps even good for a warship, but rubbish compared to a good old civilian hauler. It has to be very specialized, in order to not be "the best" at its job.
(If you want a sneaky "spec ops" freighter or personnel carrier though, I'd just go with the Phase Field hullmod. It doesn't need a full-blown phase cloak to get the point across.)
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Make it incerdibly slowly outside phase and not able to make it phase indefinitly. Problem solved.
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Cannot be anymore "broken" than a Hound or other ship with Safety Override, Unstable Injector, and possible mobility system and outrunning everything. But fleeing phase ships are no match for almighty auto-resolve, which is my typical go-to method of cleaning up fleeing ships after a fight. I am not exactly worried of a few pip-squeaks escaping occasionally. More where they came from - a lot more. Sector is always burning with lots of fires to put out.
Phase Field/Delicate Machinery only is not a bad idea itself. Wonder how it would fit in with the Warship/Carrier/Phase trio. If it is a phase ship, it should go all the way.
The main point of phase hauler is zero profile on campaign to compliment phase ships. Fleet doctrine has Phase Ships as one of the three options among Warships and Carriers. Even carriers have a hauler, the Gemini.
It would be nice if there were more brawly smaller phase ships like Doom or the old-fashioned ghost tanks, but that is beyond the scope of this topic.
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It even can be a midline/low tech phase testbed. Something like Shadowsword from Dickersons, which is basically a prototype testbed for some high-tech components.
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It even can be a midline/low tech phase testbed. Something like Shadowsword from Dickersons, which is basically a prototype testbed for some high-tech components.
Sounds like the Gremlin, in terms of prototype tech. Not something I want to pilot, but if I wanted phase ships to raid stations, but did not have the high-tech ones to build, I probably would build Gremlins, which are among those known from the start.
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If I may raise my hand here, phase freighters are one of those concepts that's fairly volatile in the modiverse. I've tried to make one, and I had a bunch of people tell me it wasn't a good idea, and as it turned out they were right. A phase freighter, in the simplest sense it can be, is a tad broken because it's nigh impossible to catch, so suddenly all your fleet's cargo is 100% safe no matter what.
Not saying the idea is inherently bad! But it's a risky one, as other folks who've tried it will no doubt tell you. Definitely needs to be treated with caution.
Generally, if you're going to go with a phase freighter, you want its capacity to be very limited - good for a phase ship, perhaps even good for a warship, but rubbish compared to a good old civilian hauler. It has to be very specialized, in order to not be "the best" at its job.
(If you want a sneaky "spec ops" freighter or personnel carrier though, I'd just go with the Phase Field hullmod. It doesn't need a full-blown phase cloak to get the point across.)
Yeah the concept of a phase freighter applies to the strategic layer. A tactical phase on a freighter is absurd - it's the phase field that's relevant.
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It is not necessarily absurd, especially if a hypothetical destroyer-sized phase hauler could haul only 150 cargo but is unable to fight effectively much like a dedicated hauler. Or even 100 capacity to act as a phase Mule with limited fighting ability. The player would be paying extra for no profile and guaranteed security (but only if the fight is not auto-resolved. Phase is no protection against auto-resolve, only chance). If it is the player that is fleeing, he has bigger problems to worry about (e.g., lost big war fleet, big setback, and would reload but decides not to for some reason.)
But, yes, the important part is the strategic layer, which was the main reason why I posted the OP. Phase fleet that cannot haul what it wants to smuggle or take what it raids and steals is not very useful, especially when Phase is one-third of the fleet doctrine triangle, and it is possible to crank that to 5. Phase fleet forced to bring loud transports is not much of a sneak fleet (and might as well bring a full war fleet that can crush what it cannot sneak by). Phase fleets have low variety, and most are optimized for one-shot (or small series of) bomber runs, with Doom being the sole exception. (Doom is the only viable brawler of the phase ships.)
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If I may raise my hand here, phase freighters are one of those concepts that's fairly volatile in the modiverse. I've tried to make one, and I had a bunch of people tell me it wasn't a good idea, and as it turned out they were right. A phase freighter, in the simplest sense it can be, is a tad broken because it's nigh impossible to catch, so suddenly all your fleet's cargo is 100% safe no matter what.
Not saying the idea is inherently bad! But it's a risky one, as other folks who've tried it will no doubt tell you. Definitely needs to be treated with caution.
Generally, if you're going to go with a phase freighter, you want its capacity to be very limited - good for a phase ship, perhaps even good for a warship, but rubbish compared to a good old civilian hauler. It has to be very specialized, in order to not be "the best" at its job.
(If you want a sneaky "spec ops" freighter or personnel carrier though, I'd just go with the Phase Field hullmod. It doesn't need a full-blown phase cloak to get the point across.)
This makes sense, yeah. I was thinking that as long as its efficiency is quite bad, it'll be alright.
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Another thing that could do it would be to lower burn speed. A phase freighter, for the purposes of non-combat, is almost just a frieghter that already has insulated Engine Assembly and militarized subsystems. So long as its radius is lower than your top 5 it doesnt matter much if its radius goes to zero. Which means that as long as your entire fleet isnt phase ships youre not going to gain all that much value out of it. And even then you can get Buffalo and Phaeton and Valkyrie down to 30 radius which means that your sensor margin for moving from non-phase to phase transports is at most 15 per ship... so long as the rest of your non-phase fleet is frigates with insulated engine assembly.
So in terms of sensor radius i am not too worried about huge adverse impacts on gameplay or in terms of significant efficiency reductions being all that necessary. After all if sensor radius is an issue the margins are pretty thin. Once you have a few cruisers in your fleet destroyer level transports need neither militarized sub or IEA in order to have minimal profile impact.
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Maybe a good compromise would be to make it so it's a phased freighter but due to some pseudoscience technobabble it's basically impossible to make a cargo hold big on a phase ship due to interference caused by the un-integrated cargo space in the middle of it, so the best you can do is strap a bunch of phase coils on it to reduce it's signature down to 0, but you can't actually "phase" the ship.
tl;dr: "phase" freighter has no shield, and can't phase, but does get the "low level phase field" hull mod that reduces it's sensor rating to 0. still expensive as heck to run because it's a phase ship though.
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My notes for a phase freighter I was planning on making just have it with a really low base speed and possibly custom phase field that either doesn't dilate time, doesn't dilate it as much, and/or reduces top speed while phased. 8)
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If I may raise my hand here, phase freighters are one of those concepts that's fairly volatile in the modiverse. I've tried to make one, and I had a bunch of people tell me it wasn't a good idea, and as it turned out they were right. A phase freighter, in the simplest sense it can be, is a tad broken because it's nigh impossible to catch, so suddenly all your fleet's cargo is 100% safe no matter what.
Not saying the idea is inherently bad! But it's a risky one, as other folks who've tried it will no doubt tell you. Definitely needs to be treated with caution.
Generally, if you're going to go with a phase freighter, you want its capacity to be very limited - good for a phase ship, perhaps even good for a warship, but rubbish compared to a good old civilian hauler. It has to be very specialized, in order to not be "the best" at its job.
(If you want a sneaky "spec ops" freighter or personnel carrier though, I'd just go with the Phase Field hullmod. It doesn't need a full-blown phase cloak to get the point across.)
I think a good idea is to change the phase field hullmod-the 0 sensor profifile ability only takes effect when go dark, which means you should be careful to seize the opportunity to use this ability.
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In a situation where some one needs a phase cargo ship, why not just retrofit commonly found pirate Gremlins with expanded cargo hold? That's what people would probably do if they are confronted with this situation irl, attaching stealthy payload pods for the F-35, rather than building a stealth cargo plane.
Imagine some one owning a very specialized vehicle like that, it would be so rarely needed that the economics for owning it would be terrible, so the company making it wouldn't be able to get any customers, and so they wouldn't be able to justify the cost of designing it.
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When I decided to bring a pure phase fleet for raiding, I thought about the choice between more cargo or more personnel (in addition to Efficiency Overhaul). Since the priority of the time was blueprints and not cargo (because I already had millions to buy whatever I need), I put the crew hullmod on all of my ships that did not need the campaign mod for Augmented Engines, for more marine capacity.
But if I wanted to design a new phase ship with expanded capacity, I would pick cargo because it can be used either to smuggle or take everything (not just the blueprint or special items) from a raid. Personnel would be only good for raiding. Phase ships have significantly less capacity than conventional warships or carriers, let alone haulers. A phase hauler with less capacity than others (but more than other phase ships) in exchange for no profile and better evasion seems like a good idea from a worldbuilding view. As for killing it, if it is not an effective combat ship that always runs away (like civilians do), it can meet Mr. Autoresolve, which I almost always use in a pursuit.
Imagine some one owning a very specialized vehicle like that, it would be so rarely needed that the economics for owning it would be terrible, so the company making it wouldn't be able to get any customers, and so they wouldn't be able to justify the cost of designing it.
I think phase field alone would be military only, but the military needs to haul stuff too. Not to mention outlaws who care less about legality and more about what they want. Yes, the phase hauler is very specialized. In this case, hauling without adding profile to a pure phase fleet, which is very specialized indeed.
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Alex: I'd like to strongly suggest that any phase hauler be made to also be a combat freighter - that should make pursuit scenarios where the player has to try to hunt one down be a little bit less obnoxious.