I need a bit of guidance about Ships, Equipment and Personnel

[RAVEN.myst]

- A personal squad comprising a couple of fast L fight ships to follow me around for some extra muscle when I bite off more than I can chew. Set up so that one is protecting me with one or two other ship watching its Rs, so that I could control the whole squad by commanding the one follows me.

In theory fine - in practice doesn't always have the desired effect. However, if you are content to be patient/tactical when doing then biting, by preemptively wrapping yourself in your squad, it may live up to its intention.

I don't really have any need for this, at the present time, other than to satisfy my megalomania.

A fine reason on its own Keep in mind that such fleets tend to be VERY (read: "extremely") cumbersome - the ships end up spending more time veering to avoid colliding than actually going where you tell them, unless you are out-of-zone with them, which means you (disappointingly) don't get to watch them in action. Not that it can't be fun. And there is a particular engagement where you will, in fact, NEED such a battle group.

- A trader mini-fleet, made up of a Lyramekron and something heavy to protect it. The idea is to use this set up for all my traders as to reduce, if not eliminate, the chance of them been destroyed while stopped in space for a cup of coffee or something.

Personally, I don't like to trade manually - I prefer to set up factories and have them do their thing, and set up warehouses for system-wide auto-trading. However, I have enough experience with it to say this much: pairing combat vessels with trade vessels (to act as escorts) sounds like a great idea, and even works sometimes, but you need to keep something in mind when it comes to combat: different enemies treat combatant and non-combatant vessels differently. So, you could have a freighter that can move freely and unmolested through a region, but as soon as you give it an escort that ends up drawing heat. However, this really only applies to "legitimate" factions - pirate factions, on the other hand, don't care, so there the escorts are theoretically a good idea - if only the group actually moved together - which it won't. Sadly.

. First of all, are my plans doable or more trouble than they are worth?

Only you can really answer that After all, if setting up these things is fun for you, maybe it doesn't matter how effective it works out to be... Alternatively, however, if the end result is your priority, then the effectiveness is significant.

understand that only L/XL ships are to be considered.

Why? The more I've played this game, the more I've leaned on M sized vessels, along with some fighters (S), though admittedly the latter are still quite tricky to put to proper work, given how they can't jump and also can't be taken along on carriers. But M-sized freighters form by far the bulk of my trading operations.

Do I have to baby sit them for things like refuel and rearm or can I set them up to be self sufficient?

Mostly, you can set automatic behaviour. Mostly

Can I do a support fleet to autonomously rearm/refuel my fleets if needed?

I've never tried, in part because I can't think how I'd do it (certain tools that were present in the previous Xs, such as CLS and Supply Command Software, are conspicuous in their absence in Rebirth.)

and are there safe mods that you would recommend for fleet management/support, for example something to use a carrier to dock small ships even if not for fighting but for transport of captured crafts?

I'm afraid this one I can't even attempt to answer - I'm a pure vanillaist But I suspect there must be *something* out there to suit your needs in this regard...

Happy hunting

[Brinnie]

Thanks Raven some fine answers for me, in particular:


"... After all, if setting up these things is fun for you, maybe it doesn't matter how effective it works out to be... "



With regards to S and M ships, I thought they are not practical to use due to their lack of jump engines and perhaps more so to the fact that they cannot auto-repair. I could not be bothered to do the maintenance on them myself. Now if I could just assign small and medium crafts to capitals ships or stations and have their engineers to take care of all repairs it would be a different thing.

Anyhow I'll get busy and see what happens.

[RAVEN.myst]

With regards to S and M ships, I thought they are not practical to use due to their lack of jump engines and perhaps more so to the fact that they cannot auto-repair.

I completely agree - I don't see why a station manager or defense officer, for instance, can't oversee the maintenance of ships assigned to him/her; made worse by the rigmarole involved in issuing orders to assigned ships: detach by adding to own squad - order the repair - wait for ship to get there and repair to be carried out - keep an eye/ear open for the repair, in order to then reassign the ship back to its task (inevitably the ship ends up sitting idle for quite some time before remembered!) I'd happily have repair costs be automatically charged to the appropriate overseer's budget.

Freighters, although they suffer from all of the above, tend to be rather less maintenance for the most part. They avoid combat as much as possible, so it's only when their shields have been depleted before they could GTFO that they take any damage (by contrast, fighters' job is to... well... fight! ) Also, fighters would, as you've mentioned, be SO useful if they could be operated from *carriers* (this thinking could happily be extended to a freighter or two, homebased to a capital ship in order to continuously and semi-autonomously resupply it with fuel, ammo, drones, repair materials...

[Brinnie]

Raven I suppose the solution might lie in the mods section, although I have not checked yet as for the most part I like to experience the game without mods, or as near to that as possible, before delving into them.

I have been spoiled with the previous X games, so many interesting scripts that took advantage of the open architecture of the game (clearly not so by coincidence but by merit of the game makers) that I remember I enjoyed to spend time just checking them out .
Fascinated by the ingenuity of the authors who extended the game's, already vast, scope by adding features at times needed and at other times welcomed.
There were some scripts that expanded fleet control, management and support to the point of giving the user the option to play the game as if it belonged to a different genre.

However, from first impression I have not found half as much stuff as what I did for the X3 series, but I will look harder. In the mean I am enjoying Rebirth and that is the main thing.

The other thing is

the community is as cool as ever.