Returned to game recently, and noticed battleships have “Frig escape bays”. I understand that these are used as a last resort for players to save their pod, however…
I don’t see why a battleship can launch a frig, But a freighter can’t have a ship hold large enough for an industrial ship?
Reasons? It is often required to make several smaller deliveries within a few jumps of the main destination, and being able to carry a rigged and fitted industrial ship would save wasting rigs constantly repackaging an industrial, and save the space this would take in the freighters cargo hold.
I do understand that this would immediately be abused, with players filling up itty mrk5 with cargo to increase the load one freighter can carry, so a limit on the ship bay would be required to only accept industrials/blockade/dst with empty cargo holds.
I just never rigged the blockade runner i had in my jump freighter. It didn’t cost me anything that way. That and I had the agility implants and expensive inertials, my JF aligned in <10s.
You could also assign yourself a courier contract with another character and the assembled ship will get packaged into a courier box that your freighter can carry.
I purposely haven’t replied because in my head am like ‘wtf, have people read my post or am I going mad or something…’ So thankyou for pointing out that, and hopefully future input from people could constructive in bringing this request to ccp’s attention, instead of suggesting stuff completely redisclose, or suggesting in game work arounds (such as the courier contracting rigged ship) which I already knew about, but still doesn’t work as that takes up the cargo space as mentioned in the OP.
Apologies, I misread your post. Sure, I don’t see why freighters couldn’t have a cargo hold AND fleet hangar. The only sticking point is that the fleet hangar could be used to increase cargo space and would probably be abused.
To make things simple, a tugging mechanic could be introduced, this means a ship can tug another ship (their align time and cap use for initiating warp is added up, perhaps).
I dont recall of any IRL precedents of spaceship being tugged by another or any sci-fi that does something like that.
But it would be nice to be able to tug a second fitted ship along with your freighter. But its probably bad taste
A frigate escape bay for freighters would be fine. An “Industrial Escape Bay” would be dumb. A ship maintenance bay like every other capital sized ship has… should have already been a thing? Not sure why freighters are the only capital sized ship without a ship maintenance bay.
