Originally by: Johannis

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As noted above, sharing ships does not fit the game. We'll have multiple ships which actually do the job much better, and also avoid things like what happens when one person crashes.

However, I would totally endorse the idea of being able to dock into some ships. Perhaps this could be done with a Docking Bay. A Docking bay will hold assembled ships only, and it can be either entered while in space, or filled with unmanned ships on a station.

Cruisers are a bit too small to have docking bays, in my opinion.

A battleship-class could be docked by a single shuttle. (After all, they're supposed to be about a kilometer long or bigger.) Same could apply to dreadnoughts.

Carriers can be docked by a frigate or perhaps two, or shuttles up to this capacity.

Motherships can be docked by several frigates.

Titans are, in this aspect, similar to carriers as their purpose is not carrying ships around.

In addition to this, ships could hold a pod or a few. Possibly there is, in addition to Docking Bay size limit, a limit on how many ships can be docked (and thus, they can hold "additional" pods/maximum number of docked players only up to this capacity). This could be justified IC such that even when the extra ships would fit to the docking bay, there wouldn't equipment to take care of those extra ships.

Players docked would have the view of the ship carrying them, with no command over ship functions.

In case of battleships, carriers and dreadnoughts, when the ship docks into the station, the players inside the ship are ejected with the ship they are currently in. So you're in a pod, you end up in a pod. (Problem: Do you get a newbship, then?)

However, there is the problem of a player logging out while docked on a ship. What should happen? If they arrive back, they should be in the same ship. If the ship docks, they will end up in the station first docked after they logged off (as if they were online riding anyway). Problem: Bus service. (How serious it is? Perhaps those players should show as being inside the ship when cargo scanned?) If the carrier (regardless whether or not it is a carrier class ship or something else) logs off in space and the people carried log on while the carrier is off, they appear at the last known location of the carrier (i.e. the carrier's auto safespot).

In addition, the pilot of the carrier has a possibility to eject players docked, regardless of their status. If the player ejected is offline, s/he will automatically warp to safe as if s/he had logged just off.

Docking, naturally, requires the permission of the carrier. No unpiloted ships may be scooped into the Docking Bay, as the docking procedure requires the entering ship to be piloted for safety reasons.

Finally, why this thread is not in Features and Ideas?

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