Hangar Bay - in a Ship & in a PDC

[TMaekler (OP)]

Hi there,

was experimenting a bit with Hangar Bays. As far as I see it, if you use a Hangar Bay on a Ship the Maximum Size of a single vessel to store there is 1000t. At least if I try to "land" a ship larger than 1000t into a Hangar Bay (even though it can be assigned to that ship being its Mothership), it simply will not land.
This is different with a PDC. Assigning and landing ships there larger than 1000t is perfectly possible.

Was thinking of a "Mothballing" Space Station but that does not seem to be possible, right? Is there a reason for the size limit in ships?

[Paul M]

The maximum size of a ship you can land in a hanger bay is equal to the total size of the hanger bay.  So far as I know it would be a bug if you could land a 2000 tonne vessel in a PDC with a single hanger bay (1000 tonne capacity).

Number of hanger bays*1000 tonne = Total mass of ship(s) that can be landed on the "carrier."  This can be split between several ships or a single ship.

The NCNs Fort Dublin U1 class of PDC has 12 hanger bays for 12 000 tonnes of capacity maxium.  It could land a single Fallen Class CL (12 000 tonnes), or a Tribal Class DD (9000 tonnes) plus 6 Starslayer A2 class FAC (total 2400 tonnes) or 17 Starslayer A2 class FACs or whatever combination of ships that comes to 12 000 tones total displacement.

[TMaekler (OP)]

Maybe I explained it poorly, but it is exactly what you described what I meant.

If you have a PDC with a total of 12.000t Hangar Bay you could load up 1 Ship size 12.000t or 12 Ships size 1.000t. You cannot exceed the total limit (so no bugs there).
But if you do the same on a ship, having 12.000t of Hangar Bay the maximum size of one single ship is limited to 1.000t. So in 12.000t of Ship Hangar Bay you could load 12 Ships size 1.000t or 24 Ships size 500t - but not 1 Ship size 12.000t (or 2 Ships size 6.000t).

My question is why? Is this limitation intentional?

[AL]

I've been able to land a 10kt ship in a carrier with 10 hangar bay components, so I think you must be doing something wrong then. Do you get any error messages at all when you try to do it?

[Vandermeer]

I was interested, since this definitely worked for me before 7.x, so I tested it again by SM-editing some ships I had in my current game. AL is right though, and docking large ships in ship hangars still works in 7.1. Here is the proof:







No errors or anything. Works as it always did.
What kind of error do you experience TMaekler? Is it a legitimate error window, or do the task groups not merge no matter what, or they do merge, but the ship isn't officially docking and consumes fuel on move, ... ?

[TMaekler (OP)]

Well, good question. I went into Ship Screen and assigned different types to a Carrier and then pressed the "Land"-Button under "Parasite Commands". It did it for the ship smaller than 1000t and not for the ship larger than 1000t. That stayed at "Current Assigned: None". Now I tested it again and it worked. I don't recall the exact setting but does that button check if the ships are in the same place? If so that might be the answer why it might not have worked before.

[AL]

That sounds like a possible reason. Might also have failed to land if you were lacking the space after docking other ships first without releasing them.