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[Gniwu]

This is a totally minor thing that won't change anything about the game's balance, but instead of it having a completely baked-in Borer drone wing, would you consider recoding the Shepherd so that it can field any type of unmanned fighter craft? I got the incredibly silly idea into my head of challenging myself by cruising around in just one of those rustbuckets and nothing else for the next version, gradually upgrading it with permanent hull mods like militarized subsystems or the two flux enhancements via story points, and replacing the Borers with Wasps and later with Sparks.

'Really? Just a Shepherd, out on its own? Today is our lucky break, fellas!' - Future famous last words, hopefully.

[Plantissue]

I rather like the Shepherd, but a 30 ship cap screws hard with having more than a few of them. They can carry cargo,  they can survey, yet they can fight,. They are pretty boring to pilot though. And normal starts gives you two ships to start off with anyways. I think the concept from what I read a long time ago was that it was supposed to introduce the player to fighters. It wasn't meant to be a full carrier.

[Gniwu]

I rather like the Shepherd, but a 30 ship cap screws hard with having more than a few of them. They can carry cargo,  they can survey, yet they can fight,. They are pretty boring to pilot though. And normal starts gives you two ships to start off with anyways. I think the concept from what I read a long time ago was that it was supposed to introduce the player to fighters. It wasn't meant to be a full carrier.

Oh, it'd be a custom start, for sure. And I'm talking about soloing the game with it for as long as possible, doing cargo runs, exploiting humanitarian crises in warzones for profit, opportunistically ganking small but overconfident ship groups, etc.

[MesoTroniK]

Frigate carriers are overpowered unless the wing is built-in and balanced around that.

[goduranus]

You can do make the change to the Shepherd yourself.

go to the hull data folder, and find Shepherd.ship and delete this line:

    "builtInWings": ["borer_wing"],

[Thaago]

This sounds like something to spend a story point on!

[Plantissue]

Ventures with Sparks. Why not?

[Megas]

Shepherd is a civilian.  It also happens to be the only frigate that qualifies as a carrier.  It is fine for what it does.

Instead of repurposing Shepherd for pure combat, I like to see a new combat frigate-sized carrier with a single deck that can take any fighter chip.  Maybe high-tech since that pack is anemic (only Wolf, Shrike, and Apogee) compared to low-tech and midline packs.

Given that Drover can work just fine without weapons, this frigate carrier can have no weapons, or maybe one or two small turrets and/or one hardpoint for missiles.

[Sinosauropteryx]

Instead of repurposing Shepherd for pure combat, I like to see a new combat frigate-sized carrier with a single deck that can take any fighter chip.

I like this idea, but a full sized fighter wing is already stronger than a frigate 1vs1. So access to something like this would have to be very restricted early game. I could see it costed correctly for late game, and more DP-granular options that are death-resistant and useful in a big fleet would be great.

[Megas]

I am not too worried about one-on-one frigate duels early in the game, especially without Remnant LPCs.  I imagine a small frigate carrier would probably be worth at least 6 DP, more than all but the high-end frigates.  It does not need to be super-fast or have a strong system, just functional.

[Gniwu]

Ventures with Sparks. Why not?

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic here or not, but now that I think of it: Yeah, the Venture and the Tempest are the two other ships that have in-built fighters, and I don't see why they couldn't use this proposed system either (That is, have their default, 0 AP fighter option as a fallback if the slot is empty, but be able to override it with one of the unmanned options if you're willing to pay the price in AP). The Venture is a bit crap right now, anyway, and having access to a better fighter squadron than mining drones would be a welcome upgrade in addition to the possibility of installing military subsystems permanently in the next version. It might actually be worth a damn after that! For the Tempest, I'm less sure about replacing the two existing Terminator drones, because it's already kind of starved for AP, and paying 5 extra for a bunch of Wasps or 8 for Sparks might cripple its overall usefulness. But if the player wanted to, why not? It's all single-player, anyway, and you could program the AI not to touch in-built fighter bays.

On the idea of a regular quality frigate carrier: Sure, as long as spamming 30 of them won't break the game in half, I'm all for more tactical variety. That said, this is a problem you'll definitely never have even with 30 of the Shepherds I am proposing, haha! The only thing that'll break in half in a large fleet engagement is them.

[Plantissue]

I was being half sarcastic, at the idea of a presumably valuable story point being wasted on these ships. But I don't know how story points would work, so it was a little cheeky of me.

The Venture is not as bad as I make it out to be. For its deployment cost it's not bad. It's just that you'll never really want to buy it for its cost and it doesn't do anything particular. Unless you are desperate for a pristine cruiser hull for whatever reason. Perhaps if its Mining Pods had Mining Blasters instead. That would be hilarious.

Tempest is a bit of an odd one, as it is small enough that it shouldn't have any fighters, yet it does innately. Contributing to the Tempest being seemingly more mysterious and high tech seeming than remnants themselves. It's Terminator drones are amazing. They are almost Sparks defensively. I was thinking that tempests should be nerfed by having only one terminator drone or even none at all. There's no way it can possibly fit any actual fighter wing inside it. Same with the Shepherd. Their drones are tiny.

I don't even want to think what a fleet of Tempest carriers would be like.