Fleet Carriers: Are they your bag?
Fleet Carriers are coming in December. Last week at GamesCom, Frontier released more information following their brief announcement at LaveCon in June.
What have they said?
December Update - The FLEET CARRIER Update
The news you've been waiting for... Fleet Carriers.
Take a peek below at the initial details about Fleet Carriers, coming as the December Update.
Ownership
Purchasable with a large amount of credits.
One Fleet Carrier per Commander. Available for base game and Horizons players.
Capacity
Fleet Carriers have a total of 16 Landing Pads, composed of:
Set permissions to allow others to dock at your Fleet Carrier.
Operations
All Fleet Carriers feature rearm, refuel and repair services.
Commanders can choose a number of loadouts for their Fleet Carrier, governing services/module and ship availability to support a number of different activities, such as:
- Bounty Hunter
- Mercenary
- Pirate
- Trader
- Smuggler
- Miner
- Explorer
- Search and Rescue
Travel
500 LY jump range (per jump)
Schedule jumps from the Galaxy Map when you want and from wherever you are in the galaxy.
Commanders require a unique resource to fuel the Fleet Carrier in order for it to jump.
What does that tells us that we didn't know?
Any commander can buy their own carrier (just one). It's going to cost Billions of credits in all probability. This makes them an end-game goal. They're going to be available in the base game - not just Horizons, so EVERYONE gets a shot at owning their own BattleStar!
They are persistent (if other players can dock, they have to be). So once parked, they stay put. They are indestructible and only one can be in an instance, so no mega-battles. But also no ganking the most expensive ship you'll ever own. Which is nice.
Persistence means you won't just be able to chart a course and jump, you'll have to fuel up, set destination and wait for a server tick (Thursday AM). This means with a 500LY maximum jump range, it would take 2.5 years in real time to get one to Beagle point - not sure how useful an exploration support ship would be under those limitations. They run on an as-yet-unannounced type of Jumponium 2.0 and probably will require some effort to refuel. It may be that they WILL be able to jump at any time rather than the server tick, based on the refuelling requirement. Hopefully Frontier will provide more details of this soon - after the September update. Until then we can only speculate.
If you've lots of credits and a few friends to help you with refuelling, then the Galaxy will be your oyster come December.
And did I mention, they look damn sexy too.
In other news, a new Thargoid Interceptor variant was discovered over the weekend; the "Orthrus". It can be identified by distinct yellow plating around the central core of the ship and yellow markings. There are more details and some screenshots here.