 Welcome to Witchspace, I'm Commander Burr. As you're almost certainly aware by now, Frontier released the first proper details about Fleet Carriers at Gamescom last week. Now that we've had a few days to chew over the detail, we wanted to offer up some thoughts and analysis that have been floating around the burr pit since the announcements and our previous video on the subject. When the Fleet Carrier concept was originally announced way back in 2017, it was originally intended to be a squadron owned asset. Between then and now something has obviously changed in Frontier's approach to carriers and by association surely to squadrons themselves. The change to it now being an individual commander's carrier has certainly surprised the community at large. The original pitch for squadrons at FX17 was that it would improve coordination and communication in the achievement of joint goals whether that be power play, community goals or background simulations etc. Just from our own experience, I think it's fair to say that that hasn't been the case on the PC at least, that's not really Frontier's fault, these days nearly everyone uses Discord to communicate and as things stand, if squadrons had not been introduced it would make no difference now to what we do in the game on an actual day to day basis. Was it the metrics on how squadrons are being used in the game that drove the ownership decision, or was it feedback from the forums demanding a rethink? We'll probably never know, but if you browse squadrons in game you will be presented with a wide selection of one to four man armies to choose from. This tells us there's clearly a large portion of the player base in very small squadrons. Whilst it would be a huge shame if a large volume of elite players were excluded from carrier gameplay because they're not in a squadron or they only play in solo, by the same token there's a danger that fleet carriers could become as ubiquitous as the venerable Anaconda losing some of their cache in the process. You could argue that it might have been better to keep the fleet carrier as a squadron asset and add a smaller capital vessel for individual purchase to avoid locking the non-squadroned out of the gameplay. Also, adding the fleet carrier as a joint squadron goal might have given us the best of both worlds and driven squadron membership. With that said, Frontier haven't specifically stated that the quote personal fleet carrier unquote as it's now being called overwrites the fleet carrier concept that we heard about at FX17. We and the community have just automatically assumed it has. Right up until last week the carriers were still being called just fleet carriers. And suddenly we're now introduced to personal fleet carriers. Brewer, the company and elite law that makes the Coriolis starport and the Mark IV weapons platform and now the personal fleet carrier could be entering the capital ship marketplace with this as a tier one vessel before introducing a larger ship for squadrons. Could we still see a squadron tier fleet carrier? Maybe. My gut is telling me no but we will see. There's a huge number of unanswered questions around carriers and how they function at the moment. For it to be a truly useful asset it will have to have some functionality over and above what we currently know about it. Each of the carriers mentioned by Frontier have a role or a profession specific theme to them. The trading carrier is a great example of what I'm talking about. The trading carrier is only really useful where there are stations and outposts to trade in, i.e. within the bubble or within regions like Colonia or the Witchhead Nebula. In order for the trading carrier to have value it must surely be able to hold cargo internally in some sort of depot or bank system that we don't yet know about, otherwise why would you own it when an engineered type 9 and a fuel scoop would do the job just as well so there must be a reason why it's trading specific. A solid argument could be made that the depot system introduced for cargo movement on the mission boards is ideally suited to the task of carrier cargo storage. By the same token the mining carrier must have similar or storage facilities allowing you to drop your pythons load of diamonds in a depot and then quickly return to the hotspot to hoover up some more. Which brings me to my next conjectural point. You must surely be able to target a specific body or a spot in the system to drop your carrier into, otherwise you could potentially be looking at a 250,000 light second journey in supercruise to go back and forth to your chosen hotspot. What any sensible commander would do surely is park the thing in orbit of the target body and just ferry backwards and forwards to the ship before hyperspacing back to the best trading opportunity. I very much hope this is the case anyway. One point that a lot of commentators in the elitosphere have taken exception to is the word upkeep from a Will Flanagan quote. A lot of comments are, understandably, taking it to mean something like, your carrier will have ongoing maintenance costs on a weekly basis, oh and you're going to have to pay some guy every week to come and clean the thing and keep your tires inflated. That's an easy assumption to make, but if you take Will's comment in the full context in which it was delivered, it possibly means something different. He made that comment in response to a specific question asked by a content creator included in an email Q&A thread that we were part of in the week running up to the carrier announcement being made. The question was, and I quote, can you, in a war, attack the enemy's fleet carrier again like megaships or are they invulnerable? Is there any way to force them to leave like capital ships? Will's full response to that question was, quote, fleet carriers are not destructible, but they will require a certain amount of upkeep to maintain their functionality and presence. This is something we'll be going into more detail about in a future livestream, unquote. So Will is answering a question about the carrier being attacked and not talking about weekly upkeep and maintenance at all. When I originally read the response in its full context, I took it as having the very different meaning of your carrier could potentially come under attack in a similar way to the installations in and around scenarios and if the attack is successful your carrier won't be destroyed but it might lose function or leave rather than be destroyed like the non-player character capital ships in combat zones do. Not to put too fine a point on it, that would be awesome and it would make Will's future livestream far more interesting than some guy coming and cleaning the light fittings in the mess hall on Deck C. There's obviously a lot of unanswered questions outside of the stuff we've talked about here. What if someone is docked at my carrier and I want to jump to Seoul but that guy doesn't have a Seoul permit? How is instancing and carrier visibility going to be handled in supercruise? Seoul players docked at a carrier get a warning that a carrier has scheduled a jump. We know people can dock but we don't even know if they can actually jump with us yet. There's a fair bit of uneasiness in the community right now, I'm not sure that it's all entirely justified but by the same token I'm as keen as anyone to start getting some answers, not least of which is money. Just how much will one of these Uber ships cost? That's it for now, thanks for watching and we'll be back later this week with more videos. Until then, O7 CMDRs, follow the Greens on the way out and do keep clear of the toast rack. We very much look forward to seeing you next time.