Patroklos wrote: ↑2017-08-12 03:29am
Fractal, do you have a rule of thumb regarding internal volume reserved on fighters for when you want them hyper capable? I know you pay attention to reactor sizes on your capital ships. Just curious.
I assign total flight group volume by hangar, but I figure the space is more or less modular from there. So you can stow a squadron of TIE/I, or a flight of T/D. Some ships I figure should operate many types (or potentially many types) - that's why my frigates have such variable carried craft numbers; you can cram a wing of something like Interceptor into the volume of a pair of StarWing squadrons, for instance. The key visible limits are aperture height (if you want to operate StarWing or T/D, for instance), and depth (if you want to operate, say, Scimitar). This is really only an issue for corvettes and less. Frigates are generally going to be large enough to operate any fighter, but it just might not be a lot of any given fighter, if they are big craft.
I also assume that at least for launch bays volume is pretty efficiently used. Not like the big multipurpose hangars seen in the movies, that can take big shuttles, for instance - the fighter launch bays would have two or more rack layers since they only operate fighter.
The kicker to getting it all to work visually if I ever opened the bay doors is an adaptable rack system. I haven't built one yet, but in principle it should be doable. It'd involve extensible manipulator arms that retract into the ceiling carousel, with enough attachment points to add additional arms to grab odd geometries like Defender. At that level of detail I'd have to model stuff like walkways and railings and ladders and control panels, and have it all make sense, with different versions to accommodate my twenty-odd fighter types. It's enough of a mechanical engineering pain that I haven't bothered to date; interiors I find are kinda a pain to do.