Escape Pods

[Julo]

In space battles spaceships will be destroyed, and I think that the crew (NPC's) and the captain (Player) should be rescuable, because they might cost money and have Skills, but that is a Phase 2 discussion. So, I think that there should be escape pods and maybe different types of them, like:

Drop Pods, just original escape pods that drop down to the surface and stay there, have a little bit survival gear and can only have 1-4 occupants.


Interplanetary escape pods, more small shuttles than a pod, they can fly from the battle to a safe Planet/Station/Carrier, have more survival gear and small vehicles and hold 5-10 occupants.



Interstellar escape pods, more like small frigates, that can warp/jump from the battle to a safe Planet/System, have no survival gear, as they can reach civilization and they can hold 10-50 occupants.



I think that the two small ones should be craft able and can be stored in chests, so that you can fire many of them without an extra hangar. The big one should be built out of blocks and docked to the ship or directly built on the ship and then decoupled by special blocks.
How do you imagine this? Please give a feedback.

[Ivan2006]

Nope.
We are trying to make a special system involving vehicles not being random items, allowing a single person to carry a whole company of tanks with him.
...needs further discussion, actually.

[Dr. Mackeroth]

I think we don't need specialised escape vehicles, but you build them out of blocks and give them a core, like any other ship.

[Iv121]

Too small to be built out of blocks.

[fr0stbyte124]

It should be simple enough to give them a place in the modular vehicle framework. The difference between an escape pod and a freight container or an escape pod and a bipedal mech is simply a matter of what is attached to what. In this scenario, there wouldn't be a designated "escape pod" entity, but rather a collection of modular parts which can be swapped out to perform different roles. This model, in turn, gives us more flexibility in producing content and lets players create far more variations on vehicles than we could ever hope to produce by hand.

@Mackeroth
The difference between doing it with modular vehicle parts vs regular blocks is that we can imbue vehicle parts with advanced logic and functionality much more easily and competently than we could with typical blocks in some unpredictable configuration. At the ship level, blocks make sense because there is enough real-estate to sandbox the entire system, but at the personal vehicle scale, there's nowhere near enough space to cover the basics with a framework designed to fill out large ships. Plus, with modules, we'll have some level of control over what modules will work together and how they connect, which will help a lot in making everything work predictably.