posted on September 6th, 2011, 3:04 am
Interesting thread.
What about creating a command that would allow for ships not to be destroyed. A sort of 'take them alive' button.
I'm not sure how it would be implemented though... entirely.
It would require ships fire upon vessels without compromising hull integrity. You would disable shields as normal, and perhaps damage hull to certain percent ... say leave it with 15% capacity. Then you would have ships target subsystem ... life support.
Maybe this isn't an option for all ships classes. In order for ships to be able to manage this, they need something of a command ship to organize the operation of the fleet. Destroyers and smaller vessels wouldn't be able to salvage ships as much... there job is to see to interception, and such.
Well, we could make it any kind. Large battleships. Particular support vessels. Etc. In birth of the federation, there was classification for command ships and such. In dominion wars, you had level 5 tier vessels, and specific crew.. engineers, security officers, and command officers I think or something like that.
These ships somehow have the ability to order fleets to engage but not destroy certain vessels. Not to the extent of what you had in A2 where you would lower the shields and then board... It would be a controlled disabling of shields, cripple the hull to a certain level, and disable life-support. That would in the end render the ship derelict.
It would be my suggestion to have it mimic the assault ships which lower shields and transport crew aboard, although instead, this would order a ship to attack an enemy vessel, disable its shields and its hull to a certain lower percent that would then make disabling life support much easier, and then cause the death of the crew members. The ship could have a sort of individual fleet component. Say for instance or battleships could do this command, but you assign up to say five ships to be commanded by this one vessel.
So to execute, one ship takes 'command' of up to 5-10 ships, to disable shields, weaken hull, and disable life support causing the ship to become derelict. Transportation isn't an automatic consequence though. It isn't an assault ship. You would have to manually take control of the ship at a later time, or immediately on your own.
