Fighter Questions

[Rillruin]

1. Any tips for loading fighters? It took over 10 minutes to load the fighters on my ship. They just keep circling and attempting to land in the hangar but then circle again for another landing over and over and over and over again....

2. Any way to change the fighter appearance? I created a new fighter with a design from the workshop but it added it to an incomplete squadron which I guess overwrites the appearance. Even moving it to a new squadron didn't change the appearance to the design it was created with.

3. Any suggestions for fighter stats? Maybe added manoeuvrability helps with the landings? My fighter built as an R-Miner points were spent as Size: 7, Durability:6, Speed: 8, Manoeuvrability: 8. Durability was probably too high for their role. Does size affect anything other than how much space they use in the hangar?

[rickcarson]

Travel mission loads them instantly. Use %cooldown to make travel missions tolerable/great.

Increase the surface area of the docking bay. There's a suggestion from somewhere that the depth helps too (i.e. if the bay is too shallow the fighter will calculate a future position that is a 'miss' and circle back around to try again.

Also you should be stationary. But you are no doubt already doing that.

Manoeuvrability 8 should be fine. Size only affects the space they use. (Specifically -> AFAICT it has no combat effect). Note that a lot of older workshop designs assumed (based on the rules at that time) that docking bays were useful up to approx 1200 spaces. Whereas for actual size 1 the current max is 120 because you can't have more than 10 squadrons. So if your favourite carrier design has 600 hangar space then any reduction more than dropping it down to 5 spaces is 'wasted'.

[Das Trojanische Pferd]

the location of your hangar playes a big role i had my hangar at the middel of the belly and the ships had so many problems to land then i changed it to sidefaceing hangars and suddenly they load instantly.....

[lalelunatic]

from my experience with a 120 hangar tubes ship... it seems that the fighters dont approach them in a strait line alone, but also diagonally. this combined with the placement can lead to retries pretty often. i always had at least 1 guy that got stuck in a loop... i even gave him a name later...

the size of the tubes itself doesnt seem to be a problem, but the size determines the launch/land corridor size, and that one beeing to close to another feeled problematic, so indirectly the size did matter, or at least the distance to another. especially when some fighters do approach them diagonally instead of strait.

furthermore, i got them set so they got a double entrance/exit (flythrough hangar), with front and back openings, which also was a problem, as the fighters choosing the back ones kind of sometimes flew through the front ones corridor and aligned at the back afterwards, which doubled the chance for diagonal alignment (which seems to be the problem as the cross other corridors that way).

also, having 120 tubes and only 60 fighters still made them use the back ones despite the front ones where exactly enough and closer. so it might use them randomly or in the order you placed them like with the docks for stations. as even placing new ones in better positons they still chose the older ones.

moving the ship until the fighter in question gets a strait approach helped 99% of the time to secure a landing.

so, spacing out tubes with a single entry point (no flythroughs) and having no hull even close to the corridor (even further away than it shows) helped. some fighters still approach diagonally though, so nothing you can do there i guess...

what also works is a single huge tube, at least for landing, but it takes forever to deal with a lot of fighters. on the other hand... having them wait in line, but land immediately is probably faster than waiting 10 minutes for the 1 guy to finally make it...

PS:
for fighter appearance, you should be able to switch that at any time. its bound to the blueprint (squad not single fighters) you chose it for and cant have more than 200 blocks (iirc), otherwise it wont work. sometimes (not only for this problem) the game seems to have a "graphical glitch" where visuals dont get updated (especially in building mode), so try to reload the game (or at least the save file).

PPS:
fighter stats... depends on their role pretty much.

as the materials the fighters are made out of (turrets not blueprint, other way around for boarding pods) give different boni, you can take that into account. it depends on what you find of course, but for everything combat related i tend to ignore minituriasation and rather give the carrier ship a bigger hangar. and also priorize hp more than on salvage/mining fighters, where hp is pretty much the last stat i look at.

as a priority break down... for combat fighters:
1 speed/hp - depends on the material
2 hp/speed - depends on the material
3 manouverability - fighters not move much anyway...
4 size

mining/salvaging:
1 speed
2 size
3 manouverability - same as above
4 hp

repair fighters depend on the ship their on.. on a combat vessel they get combat stats and on miners/salvagers they get their stats. but mainly combat stats.

[Meemai]

1.- Make sure your hangar openings are at the outermost parts of your ship's geometry. The more obstacles on the way, the more likely they will be to struggle.
Make sure you have enough surface area on each hangar opening so they do not struggle aiming at it.
It is also better to have multiple smaller hangar blocks than a single smaller ones, allows for simultaneous deployment and pickup.

2.- There is a little option on the left hand of each squadron on the fighters UI that allows you to replace the design for the whole squad.

3.- I am not good at stats and numbers, so cannot help here.

[Jaevwyn]

as far as stats go, i always max durability. Fighters take too long to build on ships that arent dedicated for it, i usually get my size to a point where i can house the number of them that i want, generally i build smaller hangers so i usually use size 2 fighters, the point difference between size 2 and 1 is a lot.

After those i generally make sure my fighters are approximately the same speed and put a few manoeuvrability to finish off.

[Das Trojanische Pferd]

Originally posted by Jaevwyn:

as far as stats go, i always max durability. Fighters take too long to build on ships that arent dedicated for it, i usually get my size to a point where i can house the number of them that i want, generally i build smaller hangers so i usually use size 2 fighters, the point difference between size 2 and 1 is a lot.

After those i generally make sure my fighters are approximately the same speed and put a few manoeuvrability to finish off.

helpfull in this are stations just let your stations build your fighters they work much faster anyway.....

[ÐC]

best setup for fighter for mining/salvage/loot:

size : 1
than max speed, than max manoeuvrability
durability plays not a mention able point for that job

best setup for fighter who fight :
size : 1
max manoeuvrability, max speed
durability last cuz the rest makes a larger impact that just plain hp on a 1 shot fighter

if your fighter need forever to get into hangar its simple, bad placed hangar in size or location, if you see just one fighter bouncing instead of landing you can fix this by building better.

and for you with size 7 i`m sure its simple a hangar size issue 1st


if they patched and changed that size goes into dps meanwhile ignore what i wrote but last time i played size doesn't changed dps

[thestile]

The hangar isn't big enough. Make the opening bigger and they will make it in.

[Rillruin]

Originally posted by ÐC:

...

for you with size 7 i`m sure its simple a hangar size issue 1st

The fighter wasn't size 7... I'd put 7 points into size so if I recall correctly it was around size 1.7. It was only the 1 custom squadron of 2 fighters (it hadn't built more) that had trouble landing in the hanger. The purchased fighters all popped into the hanger immediately on recall.

Thanks to everyone who posted replies, haven't played since I posted to try out any of the suggested changes but I likely will soon.

[Rillruin]

Increasing the hangar height to enlarge the entrance and exit by roughly 50% didn't help. I haven't tried changing the position of the hangar to have more clearance around both entrances yet. 1 is pretty clear in all directions, the other needs a few changes. I'll try modifying the design a bit next time to allow for clearer flight paths on the back end.

Oddly its always the same Squadron that has issues loading. Other squadrons are larger and smaller in fighter size, as well as other squadrons are more and less manoeuvrable. The only notable difference between the squadron that loads slowly and the other squadrons is that its a custom design and built with assembly blocks on the ship, and the other squadrons are 100% made up of ships purchased from stations.

It's weird that all 4 other squadrons load in 20-30 seconds and its always that 1 squadron that takes 10 minutes+ to load.

[thestile]

That's too bad that it still didn't work. I feel like I could always get my fighters in when I enlarged the hangar. I know the fighters definitely have trouble getting in when it seems like they should fit. There's some sort of collision issue or something. Some of the pre-made ships on the workshop had very small hangars that didn't work out very well for me.

Maybe i'm used to having smaller fighters and I haven't really dealt much with the larger size ones. This may be a problem that I just haven't seen.

[Rillruin]

Placing a copy of the hanger on top of the original hanger worked. I closed off the gates to the old hanger. Still find it weird that it was only the custom squadron that had issues. Bigger slower less manoeuvrable purchased ships had no issue with the old hanger, and smaller faster more manoeuvrable purchased ships had no issue with the old hanger either.

Just really weird...