Where are your titans and can I go there and count them?

When the initial deep space safe nerf news hit, I made an offhand comment on another blog that maybe pilots should be able to set a password on a ship when ejecting; this, I supposed, would make it slightly easier for super-capital pilots to leave their ship inside a POS. Of course, there is still the possibility another pilot with access to the POS will laboriously bump the Titan out into open space. Since then, I’ve been thinking about this idea.

Exploratory Thought 1: Bumping is a ridiculously stupid mechanic.

When I read this post, I decided to convert some of my thoughts into a blog post of my own; don’t get me wrong, I know variations of this idea have been floating around the Assembly Hall for quite some time. I’m going to frame these thoughts with the context of intelligence gathering.

I’ve spent a lot of time in various null-security regions. I’ve never seen a Titan in space that wasn’t being actively used. Titans are big. They are about 8 times larger than a dreadnought which are in turn about 40 times larger than a battleship. And battleships are big. So Titans are bigger than big. You can’t park them in stations. You can park them in a capital ship maintenance array, but then you don’t have any space left; maybe my imagination is poor, but I don’t imagine that a lot of Titans are parked in maintenance arrays.

So where are all the super-capitals? We know there are a lot of them; they’re used in droves by the major New Eden superpowers. When a pilot logs off in a Titan, where does it go? These bigger than big masses of firepower and awsomeness just disappear into the offline ether.

Exploratory Thought 2: If the Titan continues to appear as the pinnacle of a combat player’s career, everyone will continue to want one and super-capital proliferation will continue.

I understand the need for a ship to disappear as it relates to smaller ships and can’t bring myself to suggest that it work otherwise with Titans — so instead I’ll just suggest that super-capital pilots be presented with a semi-safe option and expect that more than one of them will take advantage.

Allow pilots to anchor and password protect their ships. Prevent them from being bumped while anchored. And let anybody blow the ship up if it isn’t inside a POS shield. Just like anchored cans.

Currently, super-capital pilots are anchored to their ships. Allow anchoring the ships so the pilots can drop the dead weight of a Titan when it’s more fun for them to hop back into their battleship and cause a ruckus. The result, I hope, would be more pilots doing what they want to do when there isn’t a situation where the Titan is useful and fewer Titans in the ‘offline ether’ meaning more Titans I can go and count in space.

Exploratory Thought 3: People build lists of Titan pilots; if they weren’t always in their Titan, we’d actually have to locate them in space to know what they were flying.

~ by paritybit on 2010/04/22.