Hard to say. 5 billion to buy but EACH service you add (Outfitting, Shipyard, Commodity exchange etc..) COSTS a one time BUY IN fee as well as Maintenance. BUY in is in the 10's or hundreds of Millions and Upkeep is a significant fraction thereof)





No problem, I didn't specifically make them private, it was just the default.

Edit: I saw it was set to SQUADRON ONLY... I reset it to Public.... I have nothing to hide... and a Corvette Ready if you come for my Credits (or the toilet paper stashed in the Cargo Hold)

So how many of the optionals would a carrier typically have? What's the limit? So fully outfitted we might be looking at 20 billion? More? That would take forever and a day to make back, but I still don't really know the scope of a carrier's ability to bring money in.

Them be for the high falutin' folks. Plebes like me in poverty will have to watch this all unfold from a distance I reckon.

Obsidian Ant said it seemed to him that Frontier didn't intend Players to necessarily trick out their carrier with EVERYTHING, but to make them more specialized which would cost "LESS". He also said the costs were subject to change from the beta, but in his opinion, they would have to be slashed by A LOT, not just 10-20% to make them remotely achievable for most players.

With every service included about an extra Billion and a half upfront with 150 million Weekly upkeep...by the way, that is JUST for the services, you would STILL have to BUY the stuff to put in OUTFITTING/SHIPYARD/COMMODITIES etc.. and HOPE to sell at a profit..


Attachment from the YAMIKS video:

I have to believe we will see a price correction after the beta. That's some serious cash. But it is a magnificent ship.

Where's Wingy's head on the matter at the moment? Are any of you guys in the beta?

IMO of course, I think that a large part of the shock with costs is not realizing that Fleet Carriers are not intended for profit or earning money. To me they seem directly a top shelf toy who's primary mechanic is to waste player wealth (wealth that is now essentially wasted anyway, with some CMDRs stockpiling immense piles of essentially useless credits). Essentially giving something for those credits to do other than stack. And stack.

Fleet Carriers also serve to create a gameplay loop for CMDRs who are both the owners (as management), and non-owners (who will mostly likely be grouped with and contributing/supporting the owner CMDR and his Fleet Carrier mission, as a whole. That gameplay loop is key for Frontier, keeping logins active and engaged in cooperative a multiplayer activity.

Good post and I agree with most of it adlabs. Especially the bit about Frontier looking to keep log-ins going. I see similar things in GTA Online all the time. Keep 'em playing.

I think we all knew it would be end-game content, and early on I knew not for me. It's for commanders like Winguts and Rec who have many billions sitting around doing nothing. And maybe you too adlabs. We are not friends on Inara so I've yet to have a look at your stuff Maybe you've got the dosh for one too.

I think the problem is in the upkeep and decommissioning rules. I for one didn't think the carrier would make money, but could at least help to offset some costs through the market and shipyard. But no one wants to pay a premium so in order to turn a profit the carrier owner needs to buy stock at a discount, and from I've seen so far that's not a thing. Is it?

So if I want to buy a new ship I don't mind paying over the odds to help a friend and his carrier. A 10% premium is reasonable with the knock-on effect of helping out. Actually I don't know how any of that works. Or will work. Or if it works at all!

I think they should just double the buy-in and sh!t-can the rest of the costs. If someone wants to (or is forced to) take a break from Elite, it is silly they will lose the carrier through decomissioning. That's what happens?

It seems Frontier have realized there may be issues if a lot of people buy them, and then want to have them in the same systems. They've built this, but I think have realized they need to find artificial ways to limit how many commanders actually buy one so that the logistical problems of fielding so many carriers doesn't rear it's ugly head.

No, I never really got above 1.5 billion in all assets (ships included). Thing for me was I tended to target specific gameplay elements, and the money was a side effect. So that's mining (most of the money), humanitarian aid (outbreak and famine trade), and salvage/rescue/recovery (no money at all, really... but some fun experiences). It would not be uncommon for me to build a $200 million credit ship for salvage, and never earn $2 million back with it. But I'd play it for hours, and still had fun.

As far as a Fleet Carrier owner buying stock at a discount, not that I'm aware. Ships and modules for the Shipyard, yes, IIRC.

But actually Fleet Carriers are nothing like what I imagined. I was expecting a large up front payment (credit sink), and then mainly get a massive ship garage. Park it where it's straddling my current play area, fill the hangers with my regular ships, and go do my usual thing. Fuel costs I expected for moving the Carrier, but all this stuff like being able to sell ships, or have a Commodities Market, and Interstellar Contacts... basically a player owned station?

Yikes, never thought of all that. And I don't have much interest in those modules, for what I do.

I'm almost thinking that a good bit of my being "underwhelmed" with Carriers is that they are neither decently simple and useful (my early imagination as a garage), nor moderately involved as far as management. Heck for all the modules and costs they are adding, Frontier might have well just made Fleet Carriers into a management/optimization mini-game. Something where I sit at a desk on my Carrier Commander's Office (instead of the controls of a ship), and have a little spreadsheet game to optimize income and expenses, and try to keep the ship finances in the black. Smart placement of the ship for my economic goals, wholesale goods contracts improving as my reputation with local factions increases. Even cooperative profit sharing contracts for CMDRs who contribute bulk mined resources to the Commodity Market for other CMDRs to buy at competitive prices.

*shrug*

I'm underwhelmed too. Not that I was going to get in on this, and certainly not once the price was announced. But as i see it the implementation is a bit absurd. I mean it's literally a fleet carrier that cannot carry a fleet, unless you drop the money on the shipyard. If you buy a carrier, this thing has got to be able to carry your fleet straight out of the box, at bare minimum. But it cannot.

I asked earlier and it still stands, why would a player use this instead of any of the thousands of stations? To carry a fleet far from stations? Yes, but then they've made it so expensive and slow to go to that spot. The whole thing seems a mess and I'm glad I wasn't counting on it to have my fun.

I think we'll see some serious changes through or after the beta.

Well I only have a little over 5 billion, so I am not quite in the ED 0.1%

I do, however, agree with the sentiment that Fleet Carriers are a way for Players who have amassed 10's or 100's of billions of Credits to put them to use with a shiny new toy and embark on another arc of novelty (WOW How's That for a Fleet Carrier Name: "ARK OF NOVELTY")

Not me at the moment. I think I would need at least 25 billion in the bank to take the risk..

I only watched OAs video and read some announcements and forum threads - seems not to be particularly attractive for a player. It's going to be near impossible to make any profit with it, be it with commodity trade or other facilities like shipyard etc. And if at all, it will still be far below the upkeep.

Maybe as a group repairing stations - jump with a bunch of T9s near a station that sells cheap, load the carrier and T9s to the top, hop back to the station under repair and sell at such a price that the carrier and the traders make a profit. With 2 hours (1h jump cooldown + 1h jump preparation) even three or four T9 might be able to fully load/unload a carrier (25000t = ~35 T9 trips).

Deep space seems also to be prohibitive due to time and constant refuel mining (can you carry tritium in your cargo hold to refill from?!). And then I wonder what happens when you die out there - will you rebuy at your carrier or at the last station with your carrier way out there? On the other hand, if you were just a visitor on the carrier, you might actually prefer to respawn in the bubble...

Also wonder whether it's possible to shut it down with thargoid mats, or whether thargs would attack a carrier loaded with such mats (haven't checked, but I guess those are on the list of mats that can't be traded on the carrier, like other rare mats)

All good points WC. I have to believe this will be redesigned. Almost no one likes the way it's been done. As it is, there really isn't much of a point to it, from a gameplay perspective.

For all that cash it had better have a clear and compelling purpose, and right now I can't see it.

Just ditch all this sh!t and make it a freakin' fleet carrier. One time buy-in, it carries your fleet and people can go to stations to do stations stuff.

I read that NPCs use the carrier, coming and going. But they make you no money and you can't stop them from landing. Is that true? Why do I want NPCs landing if I can't cash in?

I give F Dev a lot of slack. And they've built a pretty amazing game. But fleet carriers is a boondoggle in it's current implementation.

In the FRONTIER Livestream they showed an option where you could RESTRICT carrier use to ONLY FRIENDS or SQUADRON MEMBERS. Not sure if that is only applied to HUMANS, or if restricting to FRIENDS ONLY would also restrict NPC's...

From what I read those only restrict human commanders. NPCs are a spawned feature, like the system security which arrives to patrol around the FC. Currently no way to stop the NPCs if I understand it.

Which, unless it's changed, means you could take your FC to the deepest reaches of space and boom, there's all your NPC traffic coming and going, 34,000 light years from civilization. I guess this is what betas are for.

Oh boy, even more costly than I estimated. I've close to 8 billion now and really do want a carrier for the group. Well, we'll see what release looks like, but I'm not going to throw away four to five billion just to find out it
sucks and unfeasible to sustain. Hell I'd rather play in open and use that money for rebuys.

Your thoughts?

Can't you try it in the beta, but have all the money back outside the beta?

And anyway, I don't think it will be released in the same state it is now. So who knows, right?

But if that's how the beta works it seems a good way to try it without risking your mountains of cash.

OK, yeah, they took a snapshot on March 26 of all commanders' accounts. So as long as you had 5 billion then, you can buy a carrier in beta and try it out risk free. As they say in this post, what happens in beta, stays in beta.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/guide-participating-in-the-beta.540562/

Updates:

https://www.pcgamesn.com/elite-dangerous/fleet-carriers-update-changes

Yep, that was inevitable

Cue Wingnuts' covey of carriers.

More info...

https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/g1q8pl/fleet_carriers_beta_1_feedback_changes/