Carrier fighter/drone question

[StormMagi]

Going to admit that I have about 8-10 hours of actual serious gameplay so far, the rest has been hop in fly around just kinda goof off with no saving (also in part because I was waiting for a lot of the heavy post release patching to finish up). I have not seen any carrier combat yet in my game, I just acquired my first M6 last night and discovered the horror of drone AI. But this got me thinking as I am also currently teaching myself Blender (2.80) to model a carrier + maybe a couple other ships into X4, or that is the plan at least.

For carriers, do they have more than one launch pad that they can use for fighters/drones? If so, is there a limit to how many launch pads a ship can have? Do these pads have to be on the exterior of a ship or can they be in a hangar? I am trying to go for the mass rapid launch/recall similar to X3:TC
A few seconds showing a mass launch (only clip I know of) https://youtu.be/89vNkHYwgfQ?t=274

[7ate9tin11s]

Beyond launch pads there can also be launch tubes which are smaller and used mostly for deployment only. An example ship with lots of them is the 'hidden' Terran ship (ship_tfm_xl_carrier_01_a_macro), it only has tubes.

[StormMagi]

Beyond launch pads there can also be launch tubes which are smaller and used mostly for deployment only. An example ship with lots of them is the 'hidden' Terran ship (ship_tfm_xl_carrier_01_a_macro), it only has tubes.

I assume tubes are same as X:R and drones only? What do you mean by mostly for deployment only? Can you not retrieve drones with them (unlike X:R)?

[Tomonor]

Defense and asteroid collector drones seem to only utilize the docking pads on the ships/stations.

Only cargo drones seem to utilize special deployment ports on ships.

[peteran]

I've seen a colossus spewing out fighters via it's launch tubes in some official video but can't find it now. It did look epic! Don't think it's working properly yet but haven't done very much combat except OOS.

[7ate9tin11s]

I assume tubes are same as X:R and drones only? What do you mean by mostly for deployment only? Can you not retrieve drones with them (unlike X:R)?

Small fighters use them just fine (drones are just small fighters), but the AI cannot handle docking in them (you have to back in and land!) and can only launch.

[StormMagi]

WTF broke from X:R then? I don't recall them being nearly so troublesome there....

[Requiemfang]

WTF broke from X:R then? I don't recall them being nearly so troublesome there....

I think he meant in X4 it's borked up and quite troublesome.

[StormMagi]

That is what I meant too, what changed so much between X:R and X4 that broke them that badly....

[Requiemfang]

That's what I want to know as well, my theory is is that the devs are just being lazy. I mean if the code worked in XR why wouldn't it work in X4? XR has xml format script code, X4 uses the same damn thing and the same engine except for the Vulkan part and the different rendering. X4 is practically the same game with some updates. WHY did they not import things that worked in XR into X4 when it would have been so easy to do it? Import things they know that work, make use of it, if it doesn't work quite right off the bat make the necessary changes especially if it isn't completely broken, heck it beats having to make a new set of script code from scratch especially if it works.

[StormMagi]

I doubt it is being lazy. I am leaning more towards the shift in drones from being XR/X3 rapid launch kinda teleport into hangar when close to being classified as S/M5 ships and needing landing pads... bad decision game design wise (from what X was) but it does make some sense lore wise. As for the why overall? Probably because stuff was so old that overall it needed to be done just to clean house.

[UniTrader]

requiemfang

the drone Pads in XR were very Hacky. Basically they had two points which ships passed in order to dock. they didn't have and locking so literally hundreds of drones could dock simultaneously, clipping into each other on the pad. While it certainly works it's imo very lacking. In X4 there is proper locking of the pad and a real landing procedure, not just flying close to 2 waypoints while ignoring all collisions and disappear.

[StormMagi]

requiemfang

the drone Pads in XR were very Hacky. Basically they had two points which ships passed in order to dock. they didn't have and locking so literally hundreds of drones could dock simultaneously, clipping into each other on the pad. While it certainly works it's imo very lacking. In X4 there is proper locking of the pad and a real landing procedure, not just flying close to 2 waypoints while ignoring all collisions and disappear.

Considering that out of the overall volume frigates (or M ships if you will) have, 80% or so is the small landing pad, I think we could have lived with X:R style. Even in larger ships, I know the X series hasn't been great overall (X3 Brigantine launching 40 fighters which would fill up it's entire volume, but the size difference between ships was enough to offset that fact) with size/storage comparison between classes, but holy crap X4 cranked that to 11. It is like an M6 can fit 17 M5's inside it (to use X3 terms)... And now that I have followed carriers around... it ain't any better there. In terms of overall game design the lack of size scaling between classes seriously has me wondering what the hell led to this decision.

Makes me wonder if I should work on a size scaling mod (and learn that before modeling) first...