I had an idea while watching Star Trek Deep Space 9 this morning.
It would be good to see fleet formations. The idea is that when a group of ships are flying together, anchoring up on the FC by keeping at range, the FC should be able to select a formation for the fleet.
One could be the ships are all in a horizontal line. Another could be 2 ships are grouped together with space in between the next group of 2. Another could be a long line with 7000m in between each ship.
I’m sure you catch my drift.
So eve doesn’t need fleet formations because we can’t kill eachother by bumping one another and we don’t need targeting solutions to hit the bad guys.
The only purpose for fleet formations that is any benefit to eve is making sure the right ships are in the right position, which eve players already do manually (and those that don’t rightfully lose).
Anything else is actually worse for the fleet. Imagine a fleet of 250 ships in a formation. Turning that fleet around is going to take ages…and remember 10minutes in full tidi is over and hour and a half.
Half the fleet will be in range of the enemy, the other half won’t be. Logi range will be the same, half the fleet will get long fall off reps.
Finally, the FC shouldn’t be flying peoples ships for them. There has instead been attempts to reduce control FC’s have on other peoples ships and more responsibility on the individual players.
Now sure, we’re not gonna remove the option to keep a friendly at range, but we shouldn’t take more controls away from the player and consolidate to the FC.
I don’t think you would ever want to form up a large fleet, but I could see cases where a smaller fleet, really squadron, could have formations that accentuate the capabilities of the ship classes.
Thinking about how the flying fortress fleet worked in WWII.
It is essential that combat pilots learn manual flight: double clicking in space, Q-click (both forms), manually throttling your speed, quick full speed/full stop, etc. This knowledge is also prerequisite for learning speed tanking. Introducing this feature will result in players neglecting to utilize the tactical advantages of manual flight (including damage mitigation via speed tanking), and also will diminish the perceived value or need of learning manual flight. These are training wheels that provide little aid but much liability. The idea sounds neat but the disadvantages far outweigh the advantages. (That, and there are numerous other issues regarding ship speed/agility, formation rotation, and how the formations would be programmed to begin with that would make it impractical to implement/use.)