Pyroblaster

@Pyroblaster

The Last Flight of the ITC Thank You - 184 Hours

After capturing a Xenothreat Idris last Sunday, the Interstellar Trading Corporation has been manning it around the clock for the last 7 days allowing a glimpse into the future of multicrew ships and SC as a whole. What we found is amazing.

last year

Upvoted by

The crew of the Thank You embarking on deep space carrier ops.

First initial fleet ready to head into the Wreck site at Pyro. - the cutty black in the background is filled with dragonfly's which our biker gang used to get inside

Severely damaged but now ours we take the ship to go and repair and get some more crew aboard.

At first all our ships we're being packed in the hanger like it was going out of style but we soon assigned Deck Officers to take care of hanger operations

With all the NPCs killed and thrown overboard we manned all of the turrets and went to go take out the XT Idris. - we proceeded to do this 8 times

meanwhile on the other side of the system another group of players had managed to steal another Idris and brought that to fight for three way Idris battle. - courtesy to Luminotik for the footage and the Idris

No wonder the XT guys were so bad pilots.

To keep the ship from disappearing and it falling into the hands of pirates we often had a night shift that mothballed the Idris to keep it safe until marines woke up the next morning.

When landing on pads, the ship was actually larger than some of the outposts themselves and the landing gear barley fit on the largest ones. The ramp didn't go all the way to the ground when landed so we used a Pisces for troop transport.

Halfway through the week we came up with a system of fighters and transports the allowed us to operate a wide range of missions and gave us the ability to use the Idris as a carrier when it's guns we're inoperable. - which happened quite a lot

This was our preferred layout when it came to inside the hanger. The bikes we're insanely useful when used right.

Felt sometimes like something straight out of Battlestar Galactica

Flying the Idris in atmosphere was a pain in the ass -and it ate tons of fuel - but the reentry effects almost made up for it... almost

We tracked down multiple player bounties and attacked a few pirate orgs in the process, we even caught griefernet with their pants down at brios.

Took a picture during of Weekly Corp Raid of our entire salvage and trading fleets with the Idris - every single ship is manned btw

Costs for the Idris as we found out are very expensive with repair and refueling costs easily reach over 300k per trip if you're using it as much as we we're

Pray not for easier lives gentlemen, but pray to be stronger men
-Inigma just before we engaged another faction's fleet at SPK

Unfortunately nothing lasts forever and around half way through day 7 Avenger Squadron got wind of the Thank You and fought us for over and hour for control of the ship. Ultimately it was lost in the drift of space as the server can finally rest now

We would like to thank the valiant crew of the Thank You - especially FireFlyz for doing what you did for the last 180 hours manning and running this boat to the end. You guys are the best.

After over a year of trying we finally did it!!!

We have always been looking forward to the idea of massive multicrew ships and ever since the drop of 3.19 we have tried over and over again. We have actually succeeded several times in glitching into the cockpit of an Idris and flying it around. Back then the only interior of the ship was a bunch of floating seats you had to wallclip into just to get to them, and even then there was only so much you could do with it. Ever since the addtion of a full Idris interior to the game, we have been looking forward to the day of fighter carrier events with a fully-manned, multicrew ship that requires a pretty big gang of players in order to successfully run it. So when Xenothreat came back to town this year, we decided to take one, and Oh Boy did we take one.

Over the past 7 days, since this post was made, our crew of the now named ITC Thank You has converted this laggy convalouted mess into a fully operational battlestation equiped with supplies, weapons, respawns, clothes, troop transports, fighters, scouts, and much more essentually making it our home and mobile base. In that time we got to know the Idris inside and out and it's pretty safe to say we probably have more flight time with the Idris then some of the devs do themselves. In order to keep the ship operational we had to deal and dodge more bugs then Neo did in the matrix.

TLDR: here are a few interesting things we learned about the Xenothreat Idris that obviously won't be in the final version but here they are anyway for feedback.

-When you're landed in the hanger with a ship, and you repair the Idris, there is a 1/5 chance that your ship will despawn leaving only it's landing gear behind

-That left behind landing gear will create a blackhole effect in the ship where the floor no longer exists sucking you into it if you step on it -The gun range on the ship tends to kill you when you step into a corner -When going into Vtol sometimes only half of the ships thrusters will rotate on the clients side of the game causing problems -Sometimes when manning a turret, the game will lock you into it and you will be unable to use it (and so will everyone else) -You can fix the above bug by someone killing you in the seat and no one else besides you reenters it. Otherwise that turret will be permanantly bugged until the server resets -The Idris has ten size 5 missiles in its missile bay that can be controlled by entering into the seat behind the copilot and accessing the remote cameras on top and on botton of the ship -Cargo elevators on the ship will sometimes jam and bug like the ones on the 890 and Carrack -You are able to stand in a gap behind the stairs leading to the hanger giving a near perfect nest from which to defend the hallways -The Medical Bays on the ship do not work or funtion but this is most likley intentional to keep people from binding to the ship (on this note a single XT NPC has a chance of being spawned inside of the closed off portion of the med bay making it nearly impossible to kill) -You can do this anyway by bringing a pisces or a nursa onboard and stuffing them in the corners near the airlocks -Up to four furys will fit in the corners of the MPUV bay but only the corners because when the bay opens ship gravity will throw anything sitting on the door into space -The Idris has over 1200 units of chaff but only ten missiles. Ten missiles for a ship this large is quite ineffective -Repair costs (not including fuel and ammo) will set you back around anywhere from 30k to 350k

Overall we planned on keeping this going for as long as we could but AVS showed up at the end and the fight ended in the self destruction of the Idris. Ultimately this was an amazing test for multicrew ships in general and we are excited to see what CIG has in store for us in the future.