Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Countersuggestion:

Station Container Jumpframe

This is not a ship, and does not contain station containers. This is in stead a spiderey assemblage of propulsion systems and grappling arms used to do one thing only: get station containers in to space and moving.
This is an ORE vessel as there isn't a whole lot to be gained from racial variants of such a simple system.

Essentially, it's not so much a ship as it is a big claw thingy you wrap around a station container to turn it in to a ship. It is targetable separately from the container, and can be destroyed or disengaged in space.

When latched to a container it has the expected sluggish handling characteristics, but when unlatched it is suprisingly compact and agile due to its massive propulsion systems push very little mass. When unlatched its characteristics are more akin to that of a cruiser.

This would allow:

Anchoring station containers in space
Moving full station containers from system to system

This would not allow:

Opening station containers or browsing their contents in space. These containers are mag-sealed and function like super plastic wrap. The ball has to be in our court before you can get at the contents.
Jettisoning mini cans in space


Why is this better than a new bigness ranked freighter?
Risk and meta.

You can move an obscene amount of cargo in one swoop with these, but if you're shot off your box the entire thing can be grabbed up by an enemy cargo frame, creating fun pathways for emergent content. This means that you trade the risk of not only losing your cargo, but handing the entire sum of that cargo to your opponents if you screw this up, assuming station containers have a pretty huge mass of EHP once in space.

Considering the low cost of containers, you could use these to play a shell game of real and fake containers.

This vessel would be cheap to construct, but due to its construction would have expensive fuel costs to latch containers, undock containers, and jump. The idea here being that you're actually taking a bigger risk using it to move things in a single trip, and that as a high reward action this is also high risk but low investment enough to be worth trying.

In essence it employs a new and fun piece of content generation rather than absolute removal of risk, while still performing the goal of efficiently moving single large shipments vast distances within a single trip. I feel that just another big cargo ship wouldn't add much to gameplay for anyone but the hauler, and wouldn't be all that attractive to entities that already have or have contracted JF fleets, escorts, etc. to handle the logistics chains where it would be useful.

The idea of a cheap ship than can push unopenable station containers means more use because it's cheaper to both get in to and lose, and more lucrative to intercept, both of these create improved gameplay for both the hauler and the interceptor, and it doesn't invalidate or remove the role of the existing freighters which are much better suited for multiple trips and decently tanked hauling without a large escort contingent, and would still fill a vital role on sov deployment and a large number of already established supply chain uses.

These would be op-enablers. Ships that would reward and encourage fleet escort/transport ops because the whole shipment gets there in one trip, and there is potential for some real objective based fights that don't just involve blowing something up that has tons of HP.

Additional crazy idea:
Allow it to be fit like a poor man's T1 cruiser, but have the fittings only be effective when unlatched from a container. This would allow it to release its box and tackle or otherwise participate in defending its cargo. Might be OP, might be fun.

Such a ship could also move capitals into highsec.