Player Features and Ideas Discussion

hey all.... ive known for a long time that we are not able to attach rigs or modules to our freighters... as far as cargo is conscernd its ok, however it would be nice if we where able to attach some kind of defenseive modules to them to throw off enemys, missiles etc. this way freighters are not totally defensless.
what do you all think

Generally as has been posted ,freighters are there to carry vast amounts of materials around ,and have set tanks They arnt combat orintated at all and rightly so.But maybe it would be nice for them to able to fit just modual for defensive purposes only .Specifically im thinking of the Target breaker availble only to BS and i think above class ships.That i feel wouldnt change the game mechanics to much if limited to Obalisk,Charon size frieghters only.These are expensive ships ISK and skills wise ,and deserve some chance of escape if attacked imo.Seems very strange that even a frigate if it is given enough time could destroy such a big ship

there is a defensive module for freighters.

it's called common sense.

yeah, common sense. Don't carry 20b isk worth of freight in your freighter, you don't get ganked!

The whole "don't use autopilot"-argument doesn't make much sense when discussing freighter ganks in high sec these days.
It is just as easy for the gankers to target manually flown freighters when they are about to warp away from the gate, as it is for the gankers to gank an auto piloted freighter approaching the gate.

While I definitely agree that common sense should be used when determining how many billions of cargo you wanna carry in your cargo hold at a time, I worry about cost of actually ganking a freighter in high sec. From what I have seen, it starts to pay off ganking a freighter with about 1.2+b worth of cargo. Fortunately the gankers mostly stick to ganking freighters carrying +5 billion worth of cargo, but I am worried this amount will just keep dropping, as freighter pilots learn their lesson and carry less in their holds, eventually making the freighter obsolete hauling stuff through systems such as udema and niarja, compared to its cheaper competitor, the customizable orca.

There are plenty of such defences. Tornadoes, Falcons, Damnations, Hugins, just to name a few.

At the risk of restarting the freighter vs gank vs dumb autopilot vs crafty ganker maths vs insert random stupidity ad nauseum argument for the Nth time......

Riskless freighter bumping is the majority of the problem with freighter ganks nowadays. I say this only in the sense that the bumps prevent the freighter from gaining alignment with no risk to the bumper(s) thereby allowing them time to scan (and assess value better) the contents and/or call for accomplices to hit gate/target (in other words go time).

Is there any way to correct this? No, not likely, easily. It would require real collision physics and at that point we'd see frigs and dessies being bumped into the middle of the next system after tangling with something with several orders of magnitude more mass than they have. While hilarious to witness (think capitals bumping other capitals off of cyno points at several thousand meters/second) this would also have the unintended consequence of making undocking (from someplace like JIta IV-4) an absolute cluster **** with ships being bumped all the hell over the place due to mass displacement.

So - the long and short of this is that the only defensing mechanism the (non-bad, high value autopilots) freighters need is proper collision modeling so that they can't be bumped off course or out of warp alignment by a ship with the effective relative mass of a gnat. This won't happen in EVE. So, there won't be any recourse for freighter pilots but to split carry contracts or mass x number of times to defeat the "crafty ganker maths" I alluded above, don't autopilot and travel with fleet (friends/corp mates/alliance) that could be on hand to scoop the most valuable loots in the event of a splosion.

For those who can't adapt to this very real (and probably unchanging) paradigm shipping might just not be advisable.

Maybe freighter pilots shouldn't be idiots who carry so much isk in their stupid fat freighters? Freighters don't get ganked unless their contents are worth substantially more than the amount it'd cost in tornados to gank them - which is a decent lump of isk.

The more likely result would be no more ganking at all because no more scanning at all. Might just as well remove scanning.

Bad Idea.

Very very true. Especially considering ganking has become a secondary play style. I am still not against a buffed up expensive as hell freighter though. One that I would ideally see people pushing through low sec with - With escorts. Or carry more valuable cargo through high sec on a regular bases with. Having a trade off with the regular freighter and being slightly cheaper then the jump freighter.

This way we would hopefully get haulers coming through low sec so I can shoot them.