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ASI "Courser" Light Carrier U

Vanilla+DLC : Survival ready : Fighters armed and fuelled

PCU: Total with fighters 176,176. Just the carrier 27,016

AurenStone Industries Courser class Carrier is designed to transport attack craft in space and on any of the vanilla planets. It is rated for up to 2 million kg of vehicles/cargo.

It has 30 medium fighters locked to the flight deck.

While it does have some limited weapons for self defense this carrier is primarily a transport. If you're close enough to take direct fire from enemy warships, you're in trouble.

=UPDATE=

The fighters are now set up with the AI blocks.

They can be launched as a group by activating the "LAUNCH DECK FIGHTERS" group. This can be done from either the forward or aft cockpit, or from one of the four access panels with buttons around the ship.

Each fighter can be launched individually by either using the forward cockpit or pressing the buttons on the left hand side of the nose.

I've tested this in space and on pertram and they seem to fly well enough. If you launch them all at once it is not uncommon to lose one or two to friendly fire in the first attack run. Casualties can be a little higher in gravity because of the spacing. Moving the carrrier down after all engines are lit helps.

If you manually launch from the forward cockpit you can get a lot more control of the deployment.

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Navigation

In general when operating over planets and moons keep the ship aligned to the gravity field. It can fly everywhere but more hostile places like Pertram and Triton are going to make it's engines work hard under load. Feathery strokes when heading down to the ground, she's not a race car.
If you need to get some extra brakes involved when travelling laterally you can bring up the nose to get the bottom engines involved. But keep any incline shallow and plan your trip.

The plus side of this setup is she only burns uranium in all environments. So operational time is basically unlimited compared to a hydro carrier. She's designed for a server where hydro is limited so this is the way I went to get something that can do heavy lift without hydro thrusters.

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Cargo

All fighters are fully fuelled and loaded with ammo. The carrier has a supply of uranium and some ammunition but is not set up for rearming or extended fighting at the moment. My next generation of fighters that this vehicle is actually designed for also don't need fuel. So this version is just meant to bring you to the fight. I'll be expanding and organising the internal storage better as I test this ship more.

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Purpose

The fighters on board are quite old and were built pre warfare 2. But they are still plenty fun to fly. If you want to launch manually make sure you unlock from the flight deck before turning on engines or you will turn on all fighter engines on the ship. It seems the AI really wants a more balanced thruster pack than these fighters have, so flight performance will be worse than a specially designed fighter.

Best use of this blueprint is as one half of a dogfight event without turrets or as an instant enemy airforce for a scenario or campaign.

Or strip off the fighters and run it with your own builds.

I'll be posting an empty version later once it has had some refits and testing.

I've stripped out the fighters from the drop hangar as my poor machine is struggling to run so much stuff at once, let alone set up another 20 fighters with AI. If you want to add some back in they are the ASI Dart fighters
https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2657653224