[TerranC]

-Fighters stack in combat. This is the biggest balance issue. Having 200 odd fighters moving around individually would be evil, but I'd rather see that (on an enlarged combat screen) than have all these constant niggling problems and patches to do with fighters. Besides, maybe ships could be stackable again, like in SEIII.

Ships stacking?... This could lead to something like what the that species did on voyager: Link up ships to destroy a planet. Or: One ship to hold arnaments, One ship to hold armor, One ship to hold supplies and one ship designed to carry sensors and you have a fleet that works as one ship. I see more usage for all-pupose ships, but I see 5 baseships destroying homeworlds in a single shot.

-Fighters are destroyed when they run out of supplies. I think. This could be fixed by adding a "destroyed when out of supplies" ability, and giving it to fghters only.

I think you're thinking of drones. I don't know about fighters since I never seen them go out of supplies.

-Fighters can be stored in cargo. I can see that this would be a nightmare for Aaron to uncode, but imagine the possibilities if there was a "can be cargo" ability for ship (ie fighter) hulls (in fact, 2 abilities- "can be cargo on ships" and "can be cargo on planets"): Then you could mod the game so that you can launch escorts from baseships and bring dreadnoughts down from orbit for to hide them from detection- hell, maybe even the game could use them as weapons platforms=-)

Launching Drones and recovering them would be more economic. Since they are units, they don't have maintenance. Now if you're talking about destroyers...

Also, ships smaller than 500KT should not be allowed to land in planets. Heavy ships are subject to heavy gravitational pull. Heavier the gravitation pull, the more the ship becomes subjective to inertia. In order to lift off from a planet, you need to have enough force (Escape velocity) to overcome inertia. Heavier the ship, the faster the escape velocity. If the ship is light enough, it should lift off without any difficulties, but a battlecruiser lands and tries to lift off:

1) lifts off gently, to account for the crew members or the fragile equipment. Force isn't enough to overcome inertia and gravity and the ship lands back down again, or worse, crashes.

2) Lifts off hard and overcomes newton's laws, but every crewmember has died, even the ones on seat belts, when their organs ruptured when they hit the walls on the back of them equal to the force of the ship lifting off or their bones shattered for the exact same thing. All fragile equipment has been destroyed since they just flung to the back.

Star trek compensates for this with technobabble, and sadly, real life problems cannot be solved by saying: the inertial dampeners are working 1000% skip.

Forgive my rant, but it did give me something to chew over.