So in design we usually talk about the best ship or the best doctrine or some odd balls designs. Though I guess I have a question for the community what ship designs have you done that either didn’t have combat ability or just built for pure RP. So i’ll give a few example i’m going to be working on for my next campaign.
Hospital Ship - Pure Rp that get’s deployed for combat landings or colony. Going to be making it with full armor and a host of self created component to represent the medical wings of the ship.
Training Carrier and training fighters - So one of the things I want to do is roleplay training experience for young officers to give them something to do. The fighters are going to be a mix of old fighters or unarmed trainer fighters.
Training Ship - deweaponed ship to train crews and upcoming commanding officers. The idea of the two ships here is to help academies feel abit more proper for RP and just allow some fun.
Old Armory station - So going to try and keep old military stock piles. Now alot of time I always shifted there to frontline bases but going to try somthing different. Sometimes there is systems that are just worthless and away from the main fronts but I have had NPRs knock me back and production lost on forward worlds. These stations away from the front line and I think it though it will cost alot building these stations I think it might be cool to have this wayward stations being used as a last resort in a long war.
Research Stations - Though planetary labs are cool I think im just going to build small stations to represent different fields of research. This will be unarmed stations that will be over different planetary bodies. I do alot of humanity civil war rp so i’ll use this if a civil war breaks out to allow the newly created rebels to catch up.
Marine training station - So this is orbital that going to be designed for practice board like a orbital kill house. Going to base its tonnage wise off some common ships with fake components. Should just be fun and a surprise for boarders if they show up at the wrong time lol.
So just some ideas I had but main thing I want to see what things you have cooked up for rp and other fun
I simulated an orbital research station once in a game awhile back. I found a massive blackhole as the 4th or 5th system explored of that game. It ended up have something like 17 gates.
I spacemaster added a dwarf planet in close orbit of the blackhole just to have a place to put research labs, but the population, defense, and maintenance all stayed orbital with recreation modules, maintenance modules, etc. I did all further jump theory research there. I just had to pretend the labs were in orbit and not an a little rock I conjured up and ignored.
You’re forgetting a type of RP ship that naturally comes about in every Aurora playthrough for me: Museum Ships. If you want you can even refit old ships to take off their weapons and use them as dedicated museum ships, taking them from world to world.
I also keep at least one of each boarded enemy ship as a “spoil of war” ship that I also show to my colonies.
I made Hospital ships too, though I made them really small like 1kt and with cryo capacity so that they can be take in carriers and rescue crew lifepods.
Also, I made actual working marine training stations with ark modules and cargo for GCCCs so that I can train high gravity specialists.
Usually I do start a campaign with a legacy fleet - like a generations ship museum (the ship that colonized the capital world), or a small museum fleet of the oldest TN ships that colonized Solar system (when I start in Solar system).
Science stations here and there (I do know they are mechanically useless, yet here I am, with my proper military patch telling that I’m a Nerd Master and The Ruler of the Galaxy, instead of the statutory Ground Forces patch).
Police cutters stationed at traffic nexuses.
Small fast passenger liners to emulate government personnel movements (they are moving cycled on different routes between the fleet stations).
Valkyrie class fleet hospital ships to accompany the Battle Fleet. Technically it’s fast military-grade armed cryotransports supplemented with emergency cryo resque shuttles (I do know emergency cryo are useless with current mechanics, especially with the crew pool so overproduced I just need no resque operations at all, outside of pure roleplay).
Orbital fighter bases, even for direct fire fighters, just because I feel it more proper for a space fleet.
I do use training fighters too, yet I do not consider them roleplay, because they do make fighter pilots grow in skills much faster.
