A type of ship that your receive when you're level 1 that has a dynamic amount of hull based on your level or rank, maybe 25-50 initially. Each time you rank up, you get an additional bit of hull added to it. Should be a fairly linear increase.

The ship is accessible from any AI base, undockable, so you can keep spare weapon sets, fuel, or whatever you fancy inside. I can't currently see how you could justify such a device (wormholes!), but i figured it would give a little more meaning to being level 3-4k.

I don't like this idea for the same reason that I do not like DP's suggestion. Some classes are more suited to certain aspects of the game than others. My Engi's DF is a lot slower than my SDs but it has a lot more hull for example.

I prefer it this way as it gives meaning to picking class over just the combat skills. When I switched my main from FC way back I was very upset at having to ditch the M3 as I saw the DF as a huge downgrade, but that was a loss I was willing to swollow in order to have larger SS with easier towing abilities.

You're basically suggesting each player's own plot of real estate in a "pocket universe." I don't see why it should be undockable though. Perhaps it should be account-wide, so you can actually transfer modestly sized gear between alts without undocking or using a transfer base. Something would have to be done to determine the proper hull space then, but it shouldn't be too hard.

This approaches a more general issue that I'd love to see addressed one day. The current system of storage is pretty barbaric, where you have to buy a ship hull and jam stuff in it if you don't want it floating around in a user base somewhere. I think the fundamental issue is that empire-building is not compatible with having a single physical persona. If you have assets spread out over many galaxies, you should be able to check on their basic status without physically visiting each one. In a game like Civilization, you don't have to run a little guy from city to city just to see how they're all doing. I'd love to see a new high-level management system that departs from the single-persona model, though I do acknowledge it would take a bit of thought. This ties in with the suggestion above since having your assets spread out all all over the universe (e.g. needing to borrow just one out of a set of weapons that happens to be on a Zerk in perilous space) is really annoying.

EDIT: Spatzz, the way I read it this isn't about having tons of extra hull available on a Speed Demon. You'd have a relatively modest space that is accessible from every base (but not mid-DG).

I apologize, jumped the gun on my response without fully reading I guess. Still iffy on the idea simply because of it's rather large departure from current game mechanics. Your example of needing the 3 shots that are on your Zerk in Peril is solved by having an extra set of 3 shots which keeps items like that in high demand.

I'll let Biggee weigh in on whether he likes the account-wide idea, but at any rate it makes sense to me that if I own an asset (3-shots here), it shouldn't take 10+ minutes to transfer it between characters. If you disagree, then you probably disagree with my more general assessment of the single-persona problem in SS, which is OK with me. At any rate, I'm quite sure people would still work towards having enough for all their characters without having to swap around. I also don't think market demand should be governed so strongly by inconvenience of transferring assets from player to player, in the first place.

Say 5k hull at level 20, 25k at 100, 100k at 500, 1m at 1k?


Not sure on how much other people hoard, I have only 1 thatch for NON BASE GEAR storage and its at about 1m hull of random shit.

Starts with 50 at lvl 0, +1 every level

Again, why should it be such a hassle to move your assets around? I'm objecting to the philosophy of that itself. Since you would only be able to access the space while docked, it couldn't be abused to keep a DG camper fuelled up for days or some such.

I'm all for account wide. After all, you paid for all the gear necessary for your characters, why be limited to how you can use said gear mainly because it's inconvenient to do so?

As for the hull space issue, I think around 1mil for lvl 2k or so would be okay. Sometimes you have to move large base gear etc. between alts and it's a pain with current mechanics to do any kind of trading between your own characters. Just an additional perk of being high level.

I'm glad I took this in the same direction as the OP. I was envisioning a much smaller total space, but that's a secondary concern. I do think that access should be limited to AI bases to prevent ad hoc transfers through temporary user bases.

For the doubters, let's examine possible "exploits" of this system. You could "teleport" an item from one base to another. However, in order for the transfer to work you'd need a ship of sufficient hull space at the destination, which means you'd need to have moved such a ship there anyway. So it doesn't help you get gear into enemy space.

You could keep an alt supplied with fuel and pass DG loot back to storage directly. I don't think this is a bad thing. It's already possible to bring fuel and freeze it in a Massif (or similar) at some AI base near your DGs, and to store DG loot there as well. The only difference in the new system is that you wouldn't have to freeze fuel or do a big freight run to bring all the loot home at the end. You'd still have to deal with fuel consumption while in DG.

You could transfer gear between alts much more safely and efficiently than before. As I've said, I'm all for this change. If I own something I shouldn't have to jump through hoops to get it from one of my characters to another, and making me dock at a base (potentially AI base only) keeps things from being abusable as far as I can see.

Perhaps there should be a one-time charge every time you put an item into the storage, based primarily on size. That way, transferring things like fuel and weapon sets wouldn't cost more than a few million credits but base gear might cost a few hundred million. I'm just thinking in terms of offsetting the considerable amount of free storage you are talking about. The charge would be up-front and nothing like docking fees.

Initially i was considering a lot smaller hull as well, something in the ballpark of 2-5k for lvl 2k. Mainly was intended as a way to just keep your alternate weapons and gear on a specific character always available at an AI base.

But since we've discussed it a bit, i believe it could easily fill the role of trade space between the chars on your account.

This is some what like the organic idea from ages ago where ships would grow to better stats over time.

I approved of it then, I approve it now

/signed

Actually, after further thought I'd like to amend my contribution to this discussion. With the new C2 inventory system, I don't see any reason at all why I shouldn't be able to dock and access the inventory of every docked ship on my account. Make it only work if I dock at an AI base and only access ships that are docked at AI bases as well, if necessary. This would supersede the suggestion in this thread and also do away with the clumsiness inherent to it. It would also introduce no new "exploits" that the original suggestion did not already have.