Fighter Pilots

We were just talking on the OOC about the weakness and there for inability to really play a fighter pilot. Yes, I get that against a capital it should be hard, if not next to impossible to have a toe to toe fight with them, but dying in one to two rounds makes them completely useless for a PC forcing us into Capitals. So I have a few ideas…

Squadron: Gives a single fighter the ability to control a squadron much like a battle group. Could even allow them to run special combat maneuvers like where the squadron splits in two and one half goes with the PC where as the other attacks a specified target. Or maybe one or two fighters -draw fire- away from the main squadron making it harder to target fighters in that squadron.

Size: Fighters being small in size and faster should be harder to target or to hit. By quite a bit. They missed fighters in the movies all the time from the capital ships, it was mostly other starfighters that took them down. This would encourage more dog fights.

Hyper room: So we can hyper right on top of another ship, but hypering out is a real pain. Small craft wouldn’t need as much room to go to hyper or create the same idk “space drag”. So instead of forcing them to be 300 away, maybe 100 away.

Hyperroutes: This actually goes for all ships, but allow players to store hyper routes in a computer so they can make the jump without having to replot. The ship however loses the route upon landing or after a period of time. Not to many here maybe one or two stored routes depending on your nav computer.

Droids: Allow for engineers to make droids that fit in specific ships that can repair it in flight or store hyper routes.

I am a proponent of anything that makes fighter piloting viable. The game is so heavily skewed toward capital battles that it is downright boring.

Having a squadron capability for a starfighter leader would be epic, not forgetting the added RP value… i’d imagine it’d be fairly easy to implement also…

I want something like this to happen so absurdly bad. We could also add in fighter pilot specific feats so pilots could choose a ‘track’. Fleet commander or squadron leader.

Advanced roll: Your fighter/squadron performs a roll quicker dodging projectiles with greater ability at with no damage to the vessel.

Hardened pilot: Shipdodge increases by 50% and you have senses basically when it comes to space combat making you put your ship in position to take the least amount of damage when hit.

Ace: Guns cool down quicker and are more precise. You would also get foresight basically making you do more damage to enemy ships.

Not used to lotj fighter combat, but size penalties has sense, IMHO.
But “penalties”, not impossibility 🙂

If you think about it, of the 3 piloting feats, 2 are used for ships that could be squadron based. Evading and precision are both primarily medium ships and lower, so if this were to become a thing, why add more small craft feats? Add something to large+ craft. Just a thought.

Frump your thought should be this is a fantastic idea I will implement your hopes and dreams. 😉

If you think about it, of the 3 piloting feats, 2 are used for ships that could be squadron based. Evading and precision are both primarily medium ships and lower, so if this were to become a thing, why add more small craft feats? Add something to large+ craft. Just a thought.

Tractor beams should be added to shipdodge. Otherwise, you’ll just have someone moving back and forth tractor/fire/tractor/fire if they don’t have a second person hanging out there making sure you cannot move until you are space dust.

Also, I think that shipdodge should be based off help shipsize. The larger the ship, the harder it is to shipdodge until you get above say Gunboat size where it is impossible to shipdodge. Having a flat shipdodge rating across the board for medium and small ships is a little silly.

Yeah I sort of agree with Frump. There shouldn’t be any additional feats because if there are then the medium and up guys will get more to try to balance it out which will just end up nerfing starfighters again. It really just needs to be made possible for the starfighter class ships to really be used. That is why I only posted mechanical stuff and squadrons which are already in for bigger ships.

The Squadron idea is probably the favorite since like mentioned it would open up RP as well as provide a cool dog fighting dynamic with the ability to command a squadron like you would a troop and have them break off to attack another target or sweep behind a target. Likewise maybe pairing them up into smaller wings with a squadron of 12 having 6 wing pairs: wing 1 is fighter 1 and 2, wing 2 is fighters 3 and 4 ect. So you could squadron (wing #) (action) (target).

A few ideas for actions are:

Scramble, splits the squadrons up so that the entire squadron and each wing pair attacks freely.
Form, forms up the squadron behind the leader.
Attack, splits off and targets whatever you command it too.
Ion, only use ion blast.
Hold, holds an area in space within so many units at location. Like 300 units around. Squadron (wing #) hold (x y z)
Halt, stops firing or attacking.
Atwill, fire at will.
Comearound, splits a wing off to come around behind current target.
Flee, will flee the battle.

Then for your wing man there should be a dynamic too that is mostly the same, ie wing (action) (target) and similar commands:

Scramble, splits off the wing man from you allowing them to attack freely.
Form, brings the wing man back to form up on you.
Attack, commands them to attack designated target.
Hold, holds a defined portion of space again. Wing hold (x y z)
Halt, stops fireing or attacking.
Atwill, fires at will
Comearound, splits off and comes around behind a target.
Six, forms up behind your six. Good for taking care of possible bogies you might have on your 6.

Pretty simple little system, maybe more or less to it than offered. It should at least make it more viable and maybe then some non-pilot mains could jump into battle more too making space battle a really awesome thing with more involved.

Dear dummies: The higher the ships maneuver, the more it dodges and the better it handles.
TL;DR for that, raise the maneuver for small ships significantly, they should corner way faster than they do anyway.

I just checked the maneuver on one ship at 85 vs one at 55. Not much difference. Star Fighters could really use a boost.

After looking over some of the bigger ships an easy fix might just be to give starfighters 100+ maneuvering, mediums around 50, heavy around 20, and large around 5. Or something more drastic like SF 200, medium 100, heady 50, large 25. That might balance it out better.

I wanted to bump this thread, and I wanted to also add this:
I remember saying this during the OOC conversation and I thought I put it up on the forums.

ROLL
A skilled pilot can override the system of a starfighter, enabling him to
escape missiles that may be following his vessel. This also has a chance,
depending on his skill as a pilot, to break a target an enemy vessel has on your
ship.
Please note: Usage of this ability can damage your ship. I think this should be raised as well, since I’ve never experienced it.

we were talking about this the other night too… love me some snubfighter action!