Player Features and Ideas Discussion

TL;DR: Increased focus on research means this station needs some serious help in terms of being sanely accessible.

As part of the summer industry revamp or in the near future, the Caldari outpost model and docking radius / hit box / collision mesh badly needs some attention. Right now, it's a near-instant kick-out, while the services prevent cloak to a much greater distance, and it's absolutely tiny, barely large enough to safely cyno a capital onto (contrary to popular belief it can in fact be done). Given the post-revamp increase in need for copying and the fact that these stations will be more likely to hold items industrial players typically count as their most valuable assets, the current state of it cannot stand.

The appearance of it, aside from it's diminutive size, is not at issue here. I like to jokingly refer to it as the "doughnut in space," but it has a very scientific-themed appearance which seems to fit its' nature. The fact that undocking a battleship or capital from it looks like a mouse giving birth to an elephant, however, is a major problem. I feel the best solution to both this and the kick-out issue would probably be a significant enlargement of the station model and related tweaks to associated meshes so that it is no longer the "red-headed stepchild" of nullsec.

Personally I feel it would probably be best sized so that its' horizontal cross-section is roughly equal to the long dimension of the Amarr outpost given its' appearance, but this might be too small still, and visual scaling + balance concerns might dictate a different scale as well. A partial redesign might help to address scaling concerns without it getting massive, but that's hard to judge as a player and would obviously be much more work.

The core idea is that it needs to be viable to dock and undock with the outpost in a ship of any size and without needing an "insta-undock" bookmark to avoid getting left out to dry 5 km outside the dock radius yet 5 km inside the mesh of the services. Risk is of course a core principle of EVE, but a station should not need expert-level navigational ability to access with some basic measure of safety. My reason for not getting more specific on suggestions as to what size it should be is that I find it somewhat difficult to visualize how it would scale, and feel the scaling specifics would be best left to an experienced game designer. If I had it my way, it would be much larger than what I am suggesting here, but there's no legitimate need for it to emulate the Caldari Administrative Station type.