Carriers carrying (best method?)

[Tiberius]

I'm seeing a lot of carrier designs where connectors are expected to be the mechanism for attaching the ships to the carrier. While you want to have connectors for refeuling, recharging, and ammo loading, I'm not sure they should be considered secure 'clamps' as they aren't as strong as landing gear. At higher speeds the fighters fling right off the carrier (I don't consider the argument to watch your speed a very good one). Plus there is no way to turn off their power for conservation (or the connector deactivates).

Isn't it a better to have pad space and have the fighters use landing gear (or even use large landing gear of the carrier) to clamp onto the ships which are powered down?

What are your thoughts on this? Thanks :)

[VanGoghComplex]

Landing gears are bugged and have mixed results when used by themselves. There is a possibility of them exploding for no reason.

The most stable setups I've seen actually use both: connectors and landing gears in conjunction.

[SievertChaser]

Which is sort of the most natural solution anyway - connectors fitted flush to a heavy armour deck.

[Tiberius]

Yeah that's a cool idea to combine them. I haven't noticed the landing gear issue - hopefully temporary. What about this: large landing gear on the carrier forming the floor of the hangar, with connectors in between flush with it. Then the fighter docks with the connector, activates its landing gear, and you also have the LG in the carrier activate. (no stealing my spaceships without clearance from hangar control lol).

[SievertChaser]

That's the extreme variant, and a bit cumbersome without modded parts.

[Fizzgig]

The thing you have to remember about carrying any ship (landing gear or connectors) is that the gyros and thrusters on the ship are still active. They are constantly trying to "fight" being moved and this tends to make them fly off and get damaged. On a connector the ship is still being powered by the main ship reactors, so to fix this problem put all the ships thrusters and gyros in a group. After you dock on the connector select the group and toggle them off. Now when you move the main ship around the little ship cannot try to balance itself and there is less of a chance that it will break.

[SievertChaser]

But the issue of the fighter dragging the mothership will remain. Try to keep your bays close to the centre of mass.

A corollary: never build battleships with hangars.

[Bobmin357]

Originally posted by Tiberius:

Yeah that's a cool idea to combine them. I haven't noticed the landing gear issue - hopefully temporary.

Temporary? Its been going on for quite a while now. Bug fixing seems to be far down on Keen's list of priorities. I've seen landing gears explode, taking out huge chunks of a ship. It's gotten to the point where I routinely grind the landing gear off ships to keep them safe.

[DarkExcalibur42]

Originally posted by VanGoghComplex:

The most stable setups I've seen actually use both: connectors and landing gears in conjunction.

Originally posted by Fizzgig:

The thing you have to remember about carrying any ship (landing gear or connectors) is that the gyros and thrusters on the ship are still active. They are constantly trying to "fight" being moved and this tends to make them fly off and get damaged. On a connector the ship is still being powered by the main ship reactors, so to fix this problem put all the ships thrusters and gyros in a group. After you dock on the connector select the group and toggle them off. Now when you move the main ship around the little ship cannot try to balance itself and there is less of a chance that it will break.

Did both of these with my Feresa-clas Escort Carrier.

Large ship landing gear is more powerful and stable than the fighter's own small gear, so my hangars make use of them.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=373225579

[Tiberius]

Fizzgig, yes that's right about the engines resisting. But my understanding is that you merely need to turn off their dampeners and they will not try to fight being moved. Turning off the engines and gyros seems to be a good way to make sure I suppose :)

Even so, as Dennis said, there will still be resistance due to the mere mass of carried ships. But carriers are usually so much larger than the fighters they carry that the landing gear seems to work really well for me.

That is, assuming they're not blowing up as Bobmin reports. Bobmin, I guess one of the frustrating thing about bugs is that they may manifest inconsistently with different people and conditions. I guess that's why I haven't seen the problem. I'm usually playing solo - don't know if they has anything to do with it. In any case, I agree I'd like to see more bug-fixing too.

[Tiberius]

Really cool ship DarkExcalibur! I suppose it's not very usable right now due to the piston bug though huh? That's the one I see a lot - they seem to universally explode when used on moving ships so I only use them for bases. Still I'm going to play with your awesome ship next time, thanks :)

[DarkExcalibur42]

Landing gear can only withstand so much mass. Small ships above 50k kilograms can destroy their landing gear by putting too much force on them as they move. That's not a bug, that's just how heavy the ship is. My Longbow Bomber has to be VERY careful when landing, or it'll blow out its gear.

That's why I connect small ships with large ship landing gear: higher durability to ensure secure fits even during combat maneuvers.

[DarkExcalibur42]

Originally posted by Tiberius:

Really cool ship DarkExcalibur! I suppose it's not very usable right now due to the piston bug though huh? That's the one I see a lot - they seem to universally explode when used on moving ships so I only use them for bases. Still I'm going to play with your awesome ship next time, thanks :)

Glad you like it! It still needs to have some basic script-writing done, but I suck at that...

What piston bug? I've tested the ship thoroughly (including flying to make sure the small ships were properly secure), albeit not on any servers, and had no problems. Unless a new piston issue arose with a recent patch that I hadn't heard about.

I suspect that because those doors are actually two separate pieces, and their weight is split between the two pistons, it's not too much stress on any of them. However the carrier doesn't accelerate very fast. If it did, the force very well could destroy those pistons. I've not tested it.

[Nightwing]

It's become ingrained habit for me to build connectors and landing gear into my small ships. I simply turn the dampeners off when the connector is in proximity, but not locked. I lock right after, and I have no issues.

[Kraft51]

i contrived a clamping system that does not require connectors at all. i used 2 1x1 wheel suspensions with rotors to "pinch" the ship in place, it works rather well and if you have landing gear or better, connectors, then the clamped ship is going to be very secure.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=394379607

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=394379560

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=394379441

sorry if all the black hinders seeing it clearly but you should get the idea behind it. in retrospect i think i will be reworking it a little to utilize connectors instead of landing gear as it would be easier to line up the ship for docking.

[Namdoolb]

I've found a couple of things whilst playing around with fighters in hangars:

Connectors are fine for stationary or slow moving stuff. Others have mentioned things about power, and about thrusters and gyros.
Regarding power consumption - You can switch off the fighter's power source after docking. The fighter will remain docked because it is drawing power through the connector. (you of course won't be able to use the "Y" key because that will control all the reactors & batteries on all the connected ships. Instead try grouping your power sources and binding them to the toolbar.)
(As an addendum to this, you should make sure that no docked ships share names for their groups. Because of the way the game handles groups of items it will actually merge two groups with the same name if it finds them connected to the same ship.)
The thrusters and gyros on the fighter can be handled in the same way as the power source(s). (I believe Fizzgig already covered this well enough.) Just remember if you have multiple docked craft to differentiate the names for their control groups.

For ships that are going to move at a fair speed, I still use connectors, but I make sure that there is landing gear locked in place as well. Connectors are reasonably strong, but Landing gear is much stronger.

I also ran head first into the "heavy ship" issue during a recent build: The small ship I was building was just over 300,000kg and the landing gear were pretty much exploding on contact with the deck.
I did find a fix for the issue, but unfortunately it's not carrier-safe.
Basically you mount the landing gear on either pistons or rotors. They don't need to be set up to move.
When you attach the landing gear in this way it allows the gear to have a small degree of movement relative to the ship it's on. This gives the ship a strangely "bouncy" feel when you land it, but does allow you to land much heavier ships without breaking the landing gear.
As mentioned above though, it is unfortunately not going to work on a carrier. That much mass on pistons will spazz out as soon as the ship it's parked on even thinks about moving.