What prompts me to make this post today is the not completely vanished hope to make the following upcoming content good and potentially revolutionary.



It is clear to all of us that we won’t get Fleet Carrier and Squadron mechanics tomorrow, and yet I have seen a lot of pessimism (understandably so) regarding the usefulness and potential fun-factor of these features.



In this post I will try to express my concerns and the concerns of fellow CMDRs when they hear about fleet carrier and will try to think of simple ways to make them fun and actually worth looking forward to.



First off, what do we know about Fleet Carrier/Squadrons?

According to the game wiki : “Squadrons are a new organizational structure for player groups [...] Players can create and run their own squadrons.”

From the way I see things, I will think of this upcoming mechanic as an improvement of the wing system we have, it will make it easier for large wing (player alliance) to operate within the game and pursue various objectives, I think most of the features will improve gameplay and even with the lack of details i’m not particularly worried about a potential “implementation failure”.



But then comes the Fleet Carriers, with very few info regarding this upcoming feature we can only speculate about the details but we do know the basic idea behind Fleet Carriers. From the game wiki : “The Fleet Carrier is a very large, dockable vessel that will act as a mobile base of operations for Squadrons [...] Squadrons can purchase their own fleet carrier. Squadron members can refuel, rearm, and respawn there.[1] It will be the first fully player-owned capital ship type.”

Now this is at the same time very exciting and very worrying, what am I/are we worried about?



Well, we/I am/are afraid of Fleet Carriers having very limited functionalities in the end. the concept of Fleet Carriers revolves around the squadron mechanics and it is easy to extrapolate and guess their purpose. Right now it looks like once a player-group has founded a squadron, they can then work towards the goal of obtaining a carrier and use it for logistic purposes i.e: the deployment of a fleet of ships controlled by the player of the squadron.



While there is nothing wrong with any of that (I’m sure it will be useful in some situations) I don’t think that Fleet Carrier should only serve logistic purposes. If Fleet Carrier are only restricted to the role of carrying Squadrons around and serving as a refuel/repair dock, there is little to no point in getting them in the first place. Only the repair/refuel function will be useful, the rest will be a fancy way of moving around the galaxy as a group.



Now i’m going to try and explore some ideas that could make the Fleet Carrier good and even revolutionary gameplay-wise.



-Fleet Carriers shouldn’t be exclusively tied to squadrons and player2player groups.

“Lone wolves” players should be able to get their hands on Fleet Carriers provided that they have the resources needed.

But why would a “solo” player want/use a Fleet Carrier?

Well, to put it simply, It would give hired npcs a whole new purpose besides sitting in SLF’s.

There are many scenarios I can think of. A solo player could for example have gathered a large amount of wealth and resources, hire 3-4 npcs and let them use the ships stored on/in the Carrier. It would be an additional cost but in some cases it would be interesting to be able to deploy your npcs in a conflict zone to turn the tide.



-Fleet Carriers shouldn’t be limited to combat purposes only.

Why? Well there are many exploration, trading and mining scenarios that would greatly benefit from the Fleet Carrier mechanics. For example, a player-group focused around trading could use the carrier as a large freighter for their operations, a player-group focused around mining or exploring could use the Carriers to deploy their squadron in an asteroid field and mine there or use it as a mobile base and go on an exploration trip thus benefiting from the repair/refuel function when being away from civilization.



-Fleet Carriers should be hard to obtain for groups or solo player and require commitment to get one.

What I mean by that is that these types of ship are custom ordered much like Imperial/Federation ships, you can’t just walk into a shipyard, dump 2 billions cr and fly away in your carrier. Fleet Carriers should require credits for assembly fees and resources as well, you could purchase them in only specific location and you would have to provide a large amount of raw resources to complete the order, the player(s) would have to gather the resources and once that is done, they can pay the shipyard to start the order.



Should there be different sizes for carriers? The short answer is yes. A small wing or solo player would ideally be able to purchase a small fleet carrier that would only be able to carry a very restricted number of ships (like two medium and two small ships for the sake of perspectives) and a large group with dedicated members would be able to afford a large carrier to move large ships around.



We don’t know yet if there will be such a thing as Carrier outfitting but that would diversify their role and would prove useful/interesting.



All of these suggestions are based on speculations about what frontier intends to do and on the feedback I've seen on forums/reddit/in game, I tried to be as concise as possible.



Feel free to agree or disagree with the points above and make your own suggestions, I really hope Fleet Carriers can be a good thing and I urge frontier to take all the time they want to think the concept through before implementing it.



Good day commanders o7.