SRV is 100% meant to remove all of those ships blocking the ground entrance into microtech so I can sell my cargo. Someone even managed to stash a Fury right next to the door... impressive tbh
Only if the game determines that the dead ship also has shields disabled otherwise you can't tow it and as someone else said you get a crime stat for doing so anyway. I got a crime stat for hitting invisible debris earlier on today, which is entirely unrelated but anyway, the SRV is not really useful in game right now as far as I can tell apart from the 1 use case mentioned in the video.
@@demonfandango You can also use it to flip ships for salvagers or looters. You can pull the hammerhead contract for Vulture salvagers. There are other uses just, not really good ones.
Here's a little something they could do to make this thing at least useful: you can sell the wrecked ship to an insurance company or a salvage yard for cash. This would at least enable the salvage playstyle until the devs can figure out a more unique system to warrant the recovery of ships as anything but scrap.
@@Oct0avion They already showed, contrary to what CIG themselves said, that they are happy to release ships without working gameplay, and considering S404 is still being worked on, that kind of tertiary function for the SRV (if even true) is not going to be a priority, to the point its moot. Its pointless to treat it like it exists past being a theoretical plan for some far flung future (if it exists even as a plan at all).
I live by a major river and watch tugs like the SRV help enormous cruise ships down the river, if they're making the SRV to be like a tug, actually make it work like one in real life.
@@kerradephthe truth is, there are three different types of tugboats. Harbor tugs are slow, but highly maneuverable and powerful vessels designed to aid large cargo ships in maneuvering into port. River tugs are designed for long, sustained bullard pulls, either dragging or pushing a barge up or down river. Ocean tugs are similar to river tugs, but significantly larger with many design considerations made to facilitate the crossing of oceans. In its present form, the SRV is none of the above.
@@davidblalock9945 Yeah, the SRV is the smallest of the tugboats. Considering it gets held up by anything larger than a Lancer or something, it's pretty weak overall.
tugging a tank in the black as a possibly last-ditch attempt at killing a softened capital ship is the kind of imagery that comes to mind with the phrase "tanks in space"
I honestly though the only use for the srv was going to be removing the thousands of abandoned ships at outposts and stations to be salvaged. Then they said the target has to have its shields down..... lol
Just add a time penalty for a stalled ship in the vicinity of the Station. If the ship go passed it, the captain get fined and the game create a mission to remove the ship. There you go.
Honestly I think for events like xenothreat it could be useful. Have one person in an SVR sitting back and towing ships back to safety to it can be repaired and get back in the fight. That’s a scenario where every second counts and it would be faster than waiting for an insurance claim
Why is no-one talking about the real issue... Who is soft deathing a ship and letting it be towed in the first place... Xenothreat will hard death it. A player will hard death it unless they want to take it for themselves, so how is the ship owner just calling a tow truck when the damage state is caused by combat 99% of the time
@@Carebear_Sparkles In the future ships wont just explode like they do now. They fall apart in stages and even as a husk can be repaired, not to mention ships will be much harder to kill. A player under fire from multiple sources might not have time to hard death a ship in the middle of a firefight. Maybe you manage to kill the threat but your thrusters or engines are damaged and you cant fly yourself to a port, ive been in dogfights that ended like that a few times and had to abandon ship because there was no way i was going anywhere.
@@Luxorcist you might switch targets until active threats are cleared but you are then going to clear the radar of any soft death ships before leaving. An srv isn't going to wander in to an active combat zone. So the only time something can be towed is if you are the last man standing. But as this video shows, old mate soloing a c2 is complaining it can't be towed... But 99% of the time that ship will be hard death or stolen. Let's not forget cig only release ships with game loops that exist right now... Not soon tm
@@Carebear_Sparkles No they dont? We have a handful of ships with specific gameloops that arent in game yet. Like the Terrapin has 0 use as of right now, The MSR has almost no function right now as Data running isnt in game yet, id argue that the explorers are currently useless too as most of them are missing their advanced scanners and charting mods.
It is a case of the marketing team being unaware I think. It was originally sold as not even being able to move a Connie on its own, now the tractor beam can at least move larger ships and you're just limited by the quantum drive.
Why in space would it not be able to move a larger ship? There is no resistance to motion in a vacuum. Sure, there will be an acceleration penalty, but you should be able to move a ship of any size eventually.
@@sergarlantyrell7847 Inertia. Same reason you can't just move a planet. The more massive something is, the more energy it takes to make it change velocity. Something too big and the engines on the ship would not be able to move it appreciably, which becomes a big problem if you need to make a course correction or slow down quickly. Even in real life when NASA intentionally smashed a probe into an asteroid at high velocity the effect was minimal solely because of inertia.
the best use case i had out of my and my orgmates SRVs is, we went ERT hunting, and sometimes, the ships land in a very awkward way that prevents getting the loot out of them. Using the srv often helps in orienting them right, or better, even if i can't tow it into space.
You need several SRVs to Quantum with larger ships. You need more SRVs; there's a mass limit to the tractor beam for each of them. You're meant to be able to work and Quantum together with multiple ships.
I think there are some definite refactors needed for the SRV. One thing I think may be really interesting, once we have a greater level of persistence, server meshing, and overall reliability is player run salvage yards, with the SRV hauling back salvage to player determined areas either in orbit around a point of interest, or on a planet. This enables groups or org s to have a constant supply of salvage material immediately available for members to salvage, enables haulers to collect the spoils of any cargo the salavage contained, and enables orgs to stash ship components and weapons. Of course, all this requires those things to actually work ... so the SRV still has some time to grow into its role, and ample time for that role to change as CIG tweaks the bells and whistles on the gameplay loop, the ship, and the verse at large.
Firstly, cool vid! The situation of the SRV's use that I'm about to describe is more due to the game's bugs than a game feature: My Connie Taurus couldn't refuel at the station I last docked it at. It had exhausted all q-fuel as I was jumping from lagrange points for salvage missions to see what inventory the ships had. It had valuable cargo so I wasn't going to reclaim it. No matter the region I switched to, workarounds involving the pad/hangar, landing/hovering, storing/spawning - all these led to no avail where the refuel service failed to work. So I had three options: 1) Ask someone who may have had a Starfarer to come; 2) Transfer to cargo to someone else's ship that could hold the cargo or 3) Use my SRV to tow the Taurus. I chose the latter, as it felt like that was the least work. I had a friend who I asked to stay in the Taurus (in case another bug occurred that disconnects ships from the SRV in deep space. In case this happened, I could qt back to them due to the party qt marker. This didn't happen, luckily.) I was able to successfully tow the ship to New Babbage and my friend landed the ship. I stored both and sold my cargo. That being said, there are some cases where it shows its value despite the limitations of the first tier of its features and the state of the game, but it can shine in those aspects. In conclusion, I can't agree that it's a "meme ship", or not all that useful right now. For the bugs that exist in the game, despite the SRV also bringing its own bugs, it presents another way of getting around those bugs albeit, depending on the ship it's towing as described in your vid, which suggests that it has its (bug related) uses now. It's an ironic thing that features within the game are useful to get around features that have bugs, and it ain't an excuse for CIG to not fix those bugs of course. But such is the case for a game that has so many branches of possibilities in getting things done, while these bugs exist within it. This ship is an example of that I think, not necessarily only for gameplay but to also mitigate gameplay blocking aspects when (not if) they occur right now. That being said of course, if someone requires assistance, I'm going carefully tow a ship/vehicle to them in case they're stranded, so they can get into that ship or vehicle, instead of them coming onboard my SRV for my and my teammates' security protection. They get a 'free' snub or vehicle at the same time and a towed ride :) Or a ship gets toppled upside down, and someone can't get back into it, it'll be easier for someone with an SRV to tractor it into space so said person can eva into their ship again rather than do what we all sometimes do LOL (e.g. bump the ship until it's ride-side up etc. and risk both ships exploding!).
Maybe following a pirate raid, it can quickly move those 36scu containers from the target ship to the cargo bay of the pirate Caterpillar, etc. Moving BIG freight boxes where time is a factor and and EVA + hand tools is too slow and leaves the whole raiding party vulnerable to counter-piracy or the UEE Navy? So it’s main use is for bulk pillaging.
Would rather use a 315p for that since it has the tractor beam in the front I guess. I was so excited when I saw the SRV and now I'm just disappointed about so much stuff 😅
they changed the dangerous salvage missions to not be able to be pulled by traktor, since it was abusing risk/reward of the mission or something stupid
@@garrettthefrank1903which was the whole concept of the two missions. You also got a 32k fine and CS2 if the comsat was up around yela. I think the real broken bit was/is connie and cutty black one, 80k and quantum tow capable.
The SRV will probably have a use case someday, but I think the Starfarer will have its use a lot sooner. When systems keep getting bigger or when part of a system isn't friendly to you, you could set a refuel beacon and deal with your predicament that way, but when your ship with valuables goes in soft death, you'd probably be better of relocating the cargo to different ships over getting it towed 9/10 times
My crew has been using the SRV to shuffle salvageable panels in the belt to one location for reclaimers to process. It works very well. You can do the same with other ship tractor beams but it doesn't take long before the distances are better traveled in QT with the SRV. Best use case at the moment afaik.
isn't the idea that its ability (or inability) to take ships through QT is a known bug? pretty sure it can do the things shown, but think servers and the bugs prevent the SRV from working as intended. I actually like the idea of the ship, especially to bring ships that I soft death like my carrack or one of my bf's ships back to port so I can off load inventory or sell cargo and, if they are able to fix the ship repair/refuel/etc on stations as that is also not working and is a known bug, I believe it will be able to do the things seen in the video, just right now, the bugs and server performance are hidering it
I can say they definitely were able to QT with a hammerhead around a week ago? I'm not sure if the server stability issues factored into it, or if with the new HH salvage missions they quickly changed that due to the immense money (Although that doesn't really nerf them still.) Either way here's to hoping it's just a known bug and will be sorted.
@@jacist indeed, I do believe its a bug and not a intended feature, both from in-game stuff prior as you mentioned and in their recent video, I believe that once IAE ends and more optimization, bug fixes and such will hopefully fix the issues and allow the SRV to work as it was intended
No, there is a mass limit to what can be towed in quantum, a connie and cutty black can be, a hammerhead can't be. The HUD literally says "Mass Limit Exceeded, Quantum Drive Disabled" when one is being towed.
@@EwanMarshall Hmmm interesting, wonder if you could get around it by using multiple SRVs to balance the weight, then do a simutanious QT jump so two SRVs are dragging a heavier ship behind them in tamdum
What CIG should do for these ships that have single use cases like the SRV and Starfarer is introduce a mission where an NPC is stranded and needs to be towed or refueled. At least with a mission there is some use to the ship untill the utility comes in with other systems. Same goes for medical gameplay.
See, this creates a problem to be solved by the existing solution. A better method would be making it worth it for the players, therefore they feel like it's fun, rather than punishing them with high costs and long wait times that aren't spent actually having fun. It's becoming an issue with SCs stability these days, where finishing a mission is a miracle without multiple game breaking bugs or crashes.
True, plus it will cost resources as well, economy and all. Not just money and time. If the system you are in does not support a certain size ship to be build from scratch or it would take very long, it is suddenly very attractive to hire a towing service.
@Briggsby The long respawn times and high costs was ALWAYS the intended purposes, though, because when Quantum comes online your insurance will have to build and DELIVER the ship to you. So no, it will not be faster to reclaim, and the purpose of its value is to ensure that players are more careful with what they do with their ship.
@@Briggsby It's not *that* bad, but I get your point. Everyone's randomly died for no apparent reason and it's taken the wind out of your sails because of how little respect SC has for your time. It's gonna get worse, btw, before it gets better, so if you don't like it now I'd put the game down until Meshing is finished, because once that is introduced....oh boy...if you thought 3.18.0 was bad. Anywho my point is that the SRV doesn't make a ton of sense now, but it's also the last of the ships that were put into development prior to CIG's "no game loop, no ship" policy. They'd spent the time and money making it and had to get it out the door and make money off it. Also every time CIG's tried to increase claim times Spectrum turns into even more of a salt mine than it already is and they reverse the decision. IIRC they've stated they're not going to touch them again until the game is in a much better state.
"after 20 minutes", "waiting quite some time of doing some set up" - How many times have we backspaced waiting for someone to come med resurrect us and just laying there incap'd for ages before we gave up. Imagine it's going to be the same for this, there's only so much time adults get to play games, hanging around for ages because 'immersion', doesn't exactly make for a fun break from regular life.
I think what they could do is make the quantum drive it take a size larger so the bubble it produces could theoretically encase two ships. Also they need to increase how in place big ships are during a tow
My idea for towing larger ships through QT is requiring the player to repair (only) the QD of the larger ship and "synchronize" it to the tug's QD. This way, there is still a time and resource cost for needing to tow a ship that the tug QD can't handle by itself but it's still possible.
@@AngleSideSideThm I dont entirely disagree, but i think it would be better if the SRV can do it itself. Obviously only sub cap ships but still i think a team of SRV's should be able to recover large wrecks without stuff needing the wreck to be powered.
You're not wrong, this thing is pretty useless atm. CI should not be releasing specialized ships like this (or the Starfarer as well since you mentioned it), without some NPC missions to let people enjoy some game loops with them. Seriously, just have a towing mission were if someone wants to go take an NPC back to port, let them do it. Same thing with the Starfarer, there should be NPC missions where if a player wants to take that ship out and have fun filling up gas tanks of stranded NPC spaceships, they should be able to. You won't see any of these SRV ships post-IAE, the novelty will die off quickly.
Currently it can tug medium and smaller ships. If CIG wants to make this ship useful there needs to be missions for it to exits such as like a tow truck bringing ships into port and getting paid to move the ship. Since the SRV only tugs med to small ships in quantum there will need to be a larger ship to tug larger ships.
Eventually CIG has to , or at least should, introduce harsher death and loss of ship penalties/mechanics. Think old school Ultima Online corpse runs. If insurance claims either don't cover components and/or come with a high UEC "deductible" then retrieving downed ships becomes a valid game loop. Insurance wait times are insufficient penalty to offset high risk. You shouldn't be able to completely off-set risk vs reward by simply having a lot of ships and being able circumvent wait times. A meaningful UEC fee to claim any insured ship claim would have more teeth to it. If you file a lot of insurance claims the "deductible" UEC fee goes up. Sort of like real life. Total your car and your insurance is likely to go up substantially. In the face of a meaningful UEC hit to file an insurance claim towing and repairing a downed ship might be a more reasonable thing to do to off-set costs.
That's weird that you couldn't tug the Hammerhead in space. Citizen Kate was able to quantam jump with a hammerhead in her SRV video 2 weeks ago. And Olli43 could tug a Caterpillar from ground to orbit.
@@Billy-bc8pk I'm sure that's true, but it directly contradicts M's statement saying that the SRV can't. Is it frustratingly unwieldy, from what I've seen, but still quite possible.
It is a big money maker right now AND I have been using it to set-up org Reclaimer events and drag salvage out of trespassing zones. It will have some good uses in the future to quickly pull ships to a safe zone for a crucible. It can quatum jump with something as large as a Connie taurus loaded in-tow also!
The same points you make about the SRV and the Starfarer are the same concerns I have about the Apollo. More carts being placed before the horses. Ships with no corresponding gameplay.
There are towing missions in the game now, though. A lot of people are making big bucks towing salvage claims. And the Starfarer will get a ton of use in Pyro.
Good to know the current state and good video, I am sure the promised use case would be coming soon as this is the first patch that the ship came out in. I guess we will wait and see. Keep up the good work!
Even with towing bigger ships into QT, I was trying to figure out how you could get a ship to the station to be repaired. 1. Not every ship fits on a landing pad. 2. Whether pad or hangar, won't the owner get a warning for blocking an active flight bay? Does the owner of the disabled ship have to go back into the pilot seat, request docking, then communicate which hangar/pad to put them in? It seems like they need a section of empty space near the station to drop towed ships, kind of like what you need to do with the Hull C to pick up and drop off cargo.
I've another practical use case for the SRV. Some of those VHRT and ERT bounty targets and escorts still carry valuable cargo. Any that spawn in atmo can be soft deathed close to the ground (which is easy enough if one's paying attention), but they don't always land in a position allowing for easy access to the cargo. The SRV can tow them up to orbit, restoring access to the cargo in a null G environment.
It's probably never going to be a thing since it would quickly create chaos... but it would be funny if you could get a swarm large enough to tow around space stations. (actually how do space stations come to be in Star Citizen? are they just build "on site" in space or actually towed there from a factory, possibly in segments?)
It’s even more useless than you think! Someone on yt also tested it and dragged soft death ships on a landing pad. As it turns out they can’t be repaired.
One day me and a friend were in a scorpious fighting near a moon by microtech when we got the quantum drive blown out in a dog fight. We could of used a tow back to port tressler or even a base on the moon for a repair by a tow spaceship. But instead we just logged out. Because nothing we could do but float in space.
What about getting a soft death on an enemy ship, fly it back to port and repair and use it, basically getting a high tier fighter for a player that doesn’t want to spend the money on expensive ships like the banu defender etc ?
What annoys me about the ship is the fact it was added to the game without a gameplay loop for it...something CIG said they was not going to do anymore.
Take your observation and consider it next to the expectation created at Citcon that they’ll be rolling out lots and lots of features over the next 12 months. If they can’t get these relatively small features working, why should anyone expect even bigger features in the next three months?
Im glad its released now - instead of waiting until the missions like those salvage yard missions come into game. I make my own game loops and having the SRV in my hands now - even though there are some bugs and non working features (the rotate and push/pull only works sometimes).. theres theories i wanted to test and wanted to get hands on to get used to the mechanics of using the ship .. PLUS the things i am already using it for. I wish missions for the ship were in right now (There already is.. the salvage missions that give the options to tow away the ships) - but id rather take the ship right now vs wait for missions.
If you read the patch notes you can learn that CIG implemented a second intended way to solve the illegal salvage cover-up missions. You can complete the mission by towing the to-be-stripped ship a fair distance away from the area, giving you the complete reward (250k with a Hammerhead clean-up). The reasoning being that security couldn't find and identify the ship if its not there anymore.
yeah, and it works, and one can use it for the lower level salvage clean up missions (connie and cutty black) with those it is 80k, and you can quantum with them in tow, so it is hook up, carefully align with an OM point and punch the quantum and instant 80k, with 32k fine if comsat is up.
Contracts to clear those dead ships that are always floating near the stations, blocking the hangar entrances. Tow them to a specific point in space or an orbital salvage facility (obviously, that would have to be added, so it’s a FUTURE use case) and get paid per ship, based on its size, mass and undamaged components. It would also require that tractor beams can be used in an armistice zone.
I'm mostly a solo player. You can make 250k in about 5-10 minutes by towing a hammerhead on a high risk salvage mission. You can also tow a hull-A with cargo on it from a lawful salvage mission towards a station, sell the cargo, and strip the hull. There are other use cases, like towing a ground vehicle to a hostile bunker mission to take out the turrets, without needing a ship that's big enough to fit one, and the possibilities are plenty. On the contrary, I think its very useful, even in the current state of the game.
I got a small, tiny org. My friend uses the SRV to pile up scrap around my Vulture which has been useful. Saves fuel on the vulture and lets me just rip into ships without having to stop aside pulling out boxes to be transferred to our cata for selling later. The SRV could certainly use more systems to it, but for us that are out in the black of old battle fields, it works.
There is a practical scenario - missions. They modified illegal salvaging missions to 'salvage OR tow away'. You grab a Hammerhead and move it a few km away - done. Currently SRV has one of the highest credits/hour rate among medium ships (250k every 5-7min). Vulture joined it with structural salvage as breaking a ship destroys hull and triggers mission.
I think the srv would be better suited at the moment for missions regarding ship recovery services. Like you're contracted to go out and snag a ship that's been disabled and tow it to a designated station and drop it off in an open area for repair drones to do the rest. Though, of course this is after they buff the ship and fix some bugs
Adding the SRV was a mistake because you can either salvage your broken ship, or you can claim it back on insurance. The way to balance the SRV and salvaging mechanic is to add the insurance feature... 😬
Hey Morph. I don't know if this is related or not but Noobs Gaming just did a video where he found a bug in the salvage missions where if you tow a Hammerhead (or other ships) out of the "Trespass" area it gives you the reward as if you had 100% scraped the hull. I am wondering if you tried to tow the C2 after that bug was found? Did the try to fix it by limiting the strength of the tractor beam because of it?
I'm also wondering exactly what benefit it'll have in the event of the Crucible. I mean, if we can just jump a repair depot out to the ship, then your only real limitation is having a prize crew to bring the dead ship back to port once you've finished putting it back together.
There will be systems with no ports and ships like the Crucible and Starfarer will come into play with empty systems. We've been spoiled with the current systems having accessible ports to fill our needs but that wont always be the case
(EDIT: NVM apparently it's illegal to do that) The best practical use I can think of right now is towing all the abandoned ships away from landing zones.
I wish we could, thats what i got it for. But they made it illegal to do, gives you crime stats and 30k fines for tugging ships. Also requires me to brake into the ships to turn there shields off if they are still up while abandoned.
If the ship is abandoned long enough or the owner claims the ship then the owners name becomes 'Game Rules' and at that point u can tow it, blow it up, do whatever to it and you get no fine or crime stat.@@StrayArctic31
Hi morph! Just want to ask a quick question, what starter would you recommend for pyro especially regarding fuel consumption and combat. I’ve narrowed it down to a 300i, 325a, or the Titian. The 300i has lot fuel but loses out on some combat capabilities compared to the 2 others, what do you think?
I feel like the Gatac Syulen has to be on that list. It has 3 size 3s and massive fuel capacity for quantum. Not to mention a solid complement of missiles.
100% agree @Morphologis and I'd add that tossing things around with this would definitely be a viable mechanic because a ship like this could really do those things if it were built. You can already do things like use a towline to pill another car into a smash and grab target but, at the end of the day, the additional payoff doesn't justify the fiddle factor and it will be the same with space tugs. There's always a better tool for the job than something jury-rigged and, for those who want to play with that, jury-rigging and improvisation should never be prevented in gameplay because McGyviering your way through a game is just as valid a playstyle as the playstyles that are more familiar to certain developers who may not have seen a lot of the world outside.
We were able to pull a C2,A2,Carrack and a caterpillar just fine so not sure why you couldn't. Could not get it to pull a 890 though. Server problem or new bug?
I love the humility you use when you think something "should be" one way. I ran across a TH-camr today RedJay who was the exact opposite and is giving wild speculation saying what CIG is "going to do"! Clearly he thinks he know a lot more than what he really does. I pity the people who make ship buying decisions on his speculation.
I kind of thought that when you find a "soft death" ship and you tow it back and fix it up, it would be something that you could keep in your fleet. Kind of like how people fix up cars that are totaled. Probably less re-sale value, but still useful if you have a need for it in your line-up. That was my take on it.
I think adding hiring contracts into the game would be a major feature. fuel, merc, mine, taxi, repair, rescue, Delivery, Bodyguard, merchant, Hual/take cargo to here, ect. So when you make a contract with said player they wont get paid till the contract gets check marked off like taking a broken down c2 to port. Contract: Take Broken Down C2 To Port: Baijini Point, Distance "Blank" Payment: 90,000 Credits, Payment upon Completion. Warning: Any contact with the contract owners ship after delivery will result in a crime stat.
I rented the SRV and did the 250k payout salvage missions that make you salvage a Hammerhead. I was able to tow it far enough to pass the mission within 3 minutes and repeated it until I got bored at 7mil auec. Fly to OM-1, take mission, complete within 3-5 mins, fly back to OM-1, retake mission, repeat. Bonus if you disable the comms satellite to avoid the crime stats. I owed 250k in fines with a level 3 crime stat and 5 hours in prison on two occassions.
Ehhh... I get that it's more fun to have highly-specialized ships, but I feel like if this is *JUST* going to be a tow-truck, players aren't going to use it. As for the false-marketing, I'm assuming they'll fall back on their classic "We said it's FLYABLE now, we didn't say it was feature-complete!"
In the current 3.21.1 patch you can use the SRV to tow ships from the risky clean-up salvage missions and make a quick 250k credits from completing the mission when the ship gets far enough away from the original location.
I could see its use in search and rescue, but not for salvage or reclamation. I could see towing a ship out of fuel back to station or any ship where the players aboard don’t want to respawn. Also is there a mass limit to the tractor?
This thing is a beast! Don’t let its functionality fool you. First it’s the only small ship with all medium components including a quantum drive for really fast jumps just be sure to stop by cousin and crows for a XL-1 instead. 14 scu cargo is perfect for quick runs. Next hammerhead missions for cash. A whopping 2700 quantum fuel tank can travel to the farthest point and back. Most “homey”living arrangement I’ve seen in a ship. Flies great. The only thing is it’s Cross section but your not using this to fight it’s to get to one planet to another or deliver packages or do small repairs and salvage with the gun and towing for cash. Overall I love this thing to death. Best overall performance, mileage and travel time.
We did this in my org as well on a carrack. You can tug slowly in space, but could not quantum. We used two, still couldn't. We didn't have a third. Ah well. Enter new ship, with Size 3 tractor the same size as the C2/Carrack class vehicle.
When you tow a ship in a risky salvage mission, you get paid a lot. For a few minutes of play. You actually complete the mission by removing the ship (Hammerhead for example) from a certain area.
I see these and starfarers as fleet support ships, similar to the little argo shuttle ship. Got a fleet of 25 ships and want to keep some fighters from being lost? Grab the SRV and fetch the ship once the battle shifts away from it, tow it back to a larger carrier and repair/refuel and get back in the fight. It's not super useful now and I am sure carriers will figure out how to carry enough ships for it to not matter, but in a fleet on fleet fight, these little things might actually be the heroes of the battle.
Pretty funny how in the Star Citizen Live episode that launched at pretty much almost at exactly the same time as this vid they clarified you can not actually repair from soft death yet.
I suspect that the two additional tractor beam dishes will help with towing bigger ships. I don't think that you should need more than 2 SRVs to lift ships like the Caterpillar and Hercules from a planet and no more than 4 to lift ships like the Javelin. At some point the amount of towing ships you'd need otherwise would get ridiculous. So unless CIG made a statement about the tractor beam power of the SRV being in fact as high as they want it to be, I'm of the impression that it's just an error of the set power. But I also think you're looking at this from a limiting POV. The SRV can remove ships and ship parts from around stations for example, and don't forget that it's not necessarily just big haulers that would prefer to get their soft deathed ships repaired rather than backspace and move the cargo over, smaller ships become soft deathed as well and it becomes more and more viable to try and rescue those rather than abandon them.
One possible use for it that I havent seen said is recovering a disabled ship that cant fly properly due to missing engines and damage. This primarily useful when said ship is filled with your gear and you're stranded. And, yes, I know the time and effort are more in favor dying, grabbing a new ship and going back to pick up your stuff. However, depending on how much stuff is on the ship, as well as how much money the person is willing to lose, it would be more advantageous for some people to call a tug(so long as its not that slow.)
4:30 and you even get a crime stat for towing these risky salvages ships. And yes, their messaging in ISC and SCL was very conflicting. In SCL (call all devs edition) they actually said it's not working right now. So yeah, i made the joke that at least you could fling A2 bombs at space stations with the SRV. So I'm glad the ship is finally in the game but the real career opportunity is non existent. You could maybe try to fly a small ship on a landing pad from a space station (other than seraphim, because preparing there actually doesn't work consistently at all). I think we're going to have to wait half a year before the SRV's intended function will be working as intended.
Very realistic to have to wait an hour or more for a tow. 🤪 I think it's basically a proof-of-concept test. IRL If you were going to move a C2 (in space) - or just about any other ship - you'd bring another C2 up and have a mechanism by which you would lock the landing gear together (or have some other standardized ship-to-ship coupling procedure) and you'd fly the healthy ship back with the dead ship attached (accounting for mass, etc. of course). Then when you got to your destination something like an SRV would maneuver the dead ship into "drydock" or whatever (or the station would have tractor turrets). There are ocean-going tugs, but on the open sea you generally tow a ship with another ship until you get to harbor where the tugs take over.
I do hope this all gets balanced out. And I think it will. But you are right Morph...they should just come out and say "hey, we are working on these mechanics but until we get them all worked out the SRV is going to get the multitool treatment and we are going to essentially make it's tractor beam and engines super powerful until we figure out how this will all work so this ship can do it all."
I would love the SRV to be my ‘Barnfinder’. Go out into the verse, find some absolutely disastrous wrecks, tow them back to my base and fix them up to sell them on or be able to purchase insurance for them and add them to my ship collection!
@@jodofe4879 its not meant for towing but to repair smaller craft in its internal bay and large capital ones with telescopic grabby hands which, knowing CIG, they will probably just replace with another beam during the rework anyway.
@@Pr1zzm tried to look it up but all info I could find about it was a very brief mentioning during the 2015 QA where they mentioed that the grabby hands got replaced by remote drones and that they considered dropping the already very limited tugging capabiltiy alltogether but that they were thinking about a dedicated tug variant replacing the sacrab, nothing of substance though.
As mentioned below, why not have a set of checks and a parking area penalty? A ship within a parking restricted zone gets a small fine to notify the captain and slightly discourage this behavior (not enough to matter, we actually want salvaging to happen). If the captain has bed logged in the ship, a fine accrual begins and no further action applies. If, however, the captain retrieves another ship and is more than a million km away, a time begins. At the end of that timer, the ship is considered abandoned and the captain is fine a flat rate per mass by the tug driver. Now you have a mechanism that enforces parking while also being a legitimate business model. It also allows an owner to venture planetside for a time when outside of a parking restricted area, like 1,000 km above a random location.
I'm very much looking forward to them adding Ship Tow missions. Tugging dead NPC ships back to a station so they can repair them seems like a relaxing way to play and earn some Creds.
I think u forgeot to mention that the cool new feature - repair softdeath ships - is currently not working at all... (making the srv almost completely useless)
The only thing I can think of is to use it to catch falling ships in a soft death state and prevent them from hitting the ground hard enough to go full death. That way you can save "cargo" on those ERT missions.
when the game finally gets closer to being completed or has more game mechanics implemented, I'm going to be in my precious SRV just flying around the hangars like a vulture waiting for all of you to crash when flying out of them lol
I think for solo players with no friends online, the srv can be a way for you to spawn a second ship to get ypur first ship back. Otherwise everytime you die and leave your ship where you died, you will have to file a claim and just wait.
So you park somewhere, die, respawn, take out your SRV, return to the scene of the crime, tow your other ship back to a station, place it on a pad, park your srv in a hangar, store it, go back to the pad and fly your original ship away? How is that better than just taking a cheap/quick claim starter, abandoning it, and leaving with your original ship? Yes in theory the claim will be more expensive eventually, but it's not now and this video is about what you can do now. If we are talking about the future, a better solution would be faster/cheaper claim on misplaced ships than destroyed ships.
@turrboenvy4612 it's not necessarily better, I'm just saying the time is about the same and atleast this way the scenery changes. Additionally, it does allow you to also get your gear back from both your body and your ship. It's also worth noting, sometimes when ships are claimed , some lose there equipment...so there's that as well.
litterally right now you can have reclaimer in space safe area out of the way and you can go to crash sites and such with crashed npc ships or player ships and tow them to the reclaimer, and just keep bringing it new stuff to suck on , it works well enough. there is just the issue of the salvage lasers not picking things up , so one of 3 things you bring might be a dud but still it works we made 2.3 mil in one session with just two people
For my two cents from using the SRV in PTU and PU Its the new starfarer or reclaimer in 2016 ship Its only feature is towing with a rubber band that offers next to no control Forget gentling putting a damaged ship down on a pad, you be lucky not to rubberband and slam it into the station or ground It is missing the features that actually make tractor beam useful to move, rotate, and place an object So its, well I think it only in, because they needed it for a cutsceen in SQ42.... And has as much function as the Argo MPUV
My concern here (if everything was working as advertised), is how to you "call for tow". If you create a beacon for a SRV ...everyone sees the alert...thus anyone could accept it, get the navpoint and reach the ship. But what if the one accepting the beacon is a pirate? He knows youre in distress and prolly hauling valuables since you wouldnt bother calling a towing if you were just chilling there empty. So he arrives, and just, either utterly destroys you or overwhelms you and steal your stuff. Is there/will there be a mechanic preventing this or will this be part of the dangers of using beacons? Is there a way to send a towing beacon only to SRV owners?
As much as I love the idea behind the SRV with having an actual tug boat in SC, it's very disappointing that it can't really pull anything. Tug boats are built to tow ships and heavy barges in or out of ports and help them maneuver, after all. So why not just emphasize on that and make the SRV really powerful (but slow) to then be able to help big ships like e.g. a Reclaimer or even a Hull-C out of atmosphere? Maybe it'll become more viable when master modes are integrated and atmospheric flight will rely more on a sort of decoupled mode that we have now.
I really understand your frustration since there is SO MUCH potential here and we're so close to it being viable. The best thing they could do imo is just make it able to pull any ship size alone when the shields are down even on planets. There's no balancing problem here imo since the srv is squishy as hell, not mobile and has no weapons. And as you said being able to replace the srv with other ships prevents too op options. So make it happen, CIG you just need to adjust some numbers ^^ The other thing which would require a little bit more effort is to implement a big box where you can store stuff in. Vehicles. Cargo. Equipment. People. Limitless possibilities. There has to be a balancing factor ofc. But this could really increase the versatility of the SRV. Just being able to tow an empty box with a cargo grid already could really smooth out the edges for the SRV usability and enable game loops. So please CIG gib beeg box gameplay ^^ But imo the future for SRVs is bright: It's a towing truck. It's a crane. It's a transport for any single object. No ship has that much utility.
The basic current problem of SRVs from my point of view is that a huge part of their utility comes from turning heavy losses into small ones. However in the current state of the game you just reclaim your 890 Jump, do something else for an hour and done. Ships in this game have no value which is necessary in the current game state. Because of this you're often times worse off if you use an SRV than just reclaiming. There are still opportunities for the SRV to have a game loop though but they would need more implementation and idk if CIG really cares if we test the SRV by coming up with stuff ourselves or use it for missions. One thing that the SRV can do right now is transporting any ship that it can go into qd with with maximum qd speed. The size 2s are the fastest in the game iirc. So you can cut down travel times by pulling others. Also you can pull ships that can't qd on their own or racers that have their qd removed to reduce weight (yes, that's a thing). But as you can see those are mostly very niche cases. There's just no game lop for SRV owners. As a bonus: Cool things I can think about right now that the SRV could be used for (feel free to add on those): 1. Have SRVs gather salvagable ships from around the system and tow them to the stations for easier processing. Other players with Salvage ships could dismantle the remains while other players unload the cargo into the station which then gets hauled by massive ships like C2s, Caterpillars, Hulls etc. to the best buyer. The specialisation could make huge amounts of auec per hour because the travel times are shorter and economy of scale. (requires balancing and cargo elevators to store the goods) 2. Or just make contracts where npcs are the contractors and you get a small share but since you can work quickly, it will be worth it (requires implementation of said missions) 3. SRVs will help you out in case your ship breaks down (requires engineering gameplay) 4. SRVs could collect remains after any ship battle. This could create more of an incentive to not finish ships off if you're the winner of an encounter since you can claim the ressources of your enemy which in turn creates more interesting gameplay. This is only the tip of the iceberg, I could talk about this for hours. (requires more valuable ships) 5. Have prepped habitats for Pioneer light gameplay. (requires prepped habitats)
They did say group QT towing will be coming later on for moving larger ships. Alot of support role ships are kinda pointless right now untill we get more systems that lack infrastructure.
So the Use Case my org found for the SRV was reclaimer level salvaging; The reclaimer went out to the primary wreck site and began salvaging its target myself and a buddy went scouting for near by wrecks and derelicts then would pull them back to the primary site to be queued up for the reclaimer to snack on and pull a used one away.
Or that person in the SRV could bring a Taurus or something, become a QT beacon to quickly get to the wreck, and sell the cargo and weapons while the reclaimer does it's thing, as it's too hard to do both at the same time in the reclaimer with the rear access being so far from the front.
Yeah, I agree with you and looking at the current CIG's tendency to create Sm, Med, L and XL ships in every categories (looking at mining and salvage) and if the SRV can't tow big ships, it's useless!
you are seeing it backwards, it's useless so they can release a "large" tow ship that can actually be useful so people who bought the SRV will *have* to upgrade to do the gameplay they wanted ^^
![An Architect Reviews - Drake Cutlass Black [Star Citizen]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/F5rjD0p7GtQ/mqdefault.jpg)
SRV is 100% meant to remove all of those ships blocking the ground entrance into microtech so I can sell my cargo. Someone even managed to stash a Fury right next to the door... impressive tbh
It's just a shame that doing so rewards your kindness with a 32k fine and a CS2
@@johnlesterr8927 He is the hero we need, not the hero we deserve.
Only if the game determines that the dead ship also has shields disabled otherwise you can't tow it and as someone else said you get a crime stat for doing so anyway. I got a crime stat for hitting invisible debris earlier on today, which is entirely unrelated but anyway, the SRV is not really useful in game right now as far as I can tell apart from the 1 use case mentioned in the video.
@@demonfandango You can also use it to flip ships for salvagers or looters. You can pull the hammerhead contract for Vulture salvagers. There are other uses just, not really good ones.
@@demonfandangoyou can get in and disable the shields in theory in that case. As said, crime stat is an issue in certain cleanup scenarios currently.
Here's a little something they could do to make this thing at least useful: you can sell the wrecked ship to an insurance company or a salvage yard for cash. This would at least enable the salvage playstyle until the devs can figure out a more unique system to warrant the recovery of ships as anything but scrap.
Munching is coming in literally the next patch.
They won't put in effort just to let the SRV eat into a profession it's not meant for.
Pretty sure that is intended gameplay for the SRV@@canniballistic555
Yeah I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with using an SRV for salvage, but it would obviously pay far less.
@@Oct0avion They already showed, contrary to what CIG themselves said, that they are happy to release ships without working gameplay, and considering S404 is still being worked on, that kind of tertiary function for the SRV (if even true) is not going to be a priority, to the point its moot.
Its pointless to treat it like it exists past being a theoretical plan for some far flung future (if it exists even as a plan at all).
Thats an upcoming loop - the salvage yards where u can take missions to bring and or repair wrecks you tow there.
I live by a major river and watch tugs like the SRV help enormous cruise ships down the river, if they're making the SRV to be like a tug, actually make it work like one in real life.
River tugs don't use quantum travel. Being able to lug things along in space are exactly what tugs are doing on that river.
I think the srv has ended up being more of a tow truck than the tug we all expected
@@kerradephthe truth is, there are three different types of tugboats.
Harbor tugs are slow, but highly maneuverable and powerful vessels designed to aid large cargo ships in maneuvering into port.
River tugs are designed for long, sustained bullard pulls, either dragging or pushing a barge up or down river.
Ocean tugs are similar to river tugs, but significantly larger with many design considerations made to facilitate the crossing of oceans.
In its present form, the SRV is none of the above.
@@davidblalock9945 Yeah, the SRV is the smallest of the tugboats. Considering it gets held up by anything larger than a Lancer or something, it's pretty weak overall.
@@anepicotter4595 Still works, just you need 3 or 4 tugboats working at once for larger ships.
tugging a tank in the black as a possibly last-ditch attempt at killing a softened capital ship is the kind of imagery that comes to mind with the phrase "tanks in space"
Oh yes, the famous "space marine division" tactic. Now in actual space.
Macguyver vs Kraken
I honestly though the only use for the srv was going to be removing the thousands of abandoned ships at outposts and stations to be salvaged. Then they said the target has to have its shields down..... lol
It’s worse than that, even if their shields are down you get a 30k fine and 2 star crimestate for the first attempt.
@Morphologis ah god. How backwards is that? It should be the ones that abandoned their ships that are fined!
Just add a time penalty for a stalled ship in the vicinity of the Station. If the ship go passed it, the captain get fined and the game create a mission to remove the ship. There you go.
Oh hey! There's a use case for the EMP ships now.
@fuzzyeagle142 how do you define "abandoned" and not just "sitting while the owner does stuff"
Honestly I think for events like xenothreat it could be useful. Have one person in an SVR sitting back and towing ships back to safety to it can be repaired and get back in the fight. That’s a scenario where every second counts and it would be faster than waiting for an insurance claim
most pple just claim another ship while insurance claim is running in background and fly that.
all the guys with 10 javelins....
Why is no-one talking about the real issue... Who is soft deathing a ship and letting it be towed in the first place... Xenothreat will hard death it. A player will hard death it unless they want to take it for themselves, so how is the ship owner just calling a tow truck when the damage state is caused by combat 99% of the time
@@Carebear_Sparkles In the future ships wont just explode like they do now. They fall apart in stages and even as a husk can be repaired, not to mention ships will be much harder to kill. A player under fire from multiple sources might not have time to hard death a ship in the middle of a firefight. Maybe you manage to kill the threat but your thrusters or engines are damaged and you cant fly yourself to a port, ive been in dogfights that ended like that a few times and had to abandon ship because there was no way i was going anywhere.
@@Luxorcist you might switch targets until active threats are cleared but you are then going to clear the radar of any soft death ships before leaving. An srv isn't going to wander in to an active combat zone. So the only time something can be towed is if you are the last man standing. But as this video shows, old mate soloing a c2 is complaining it can't be towed... But 99% of the time that ship will be hard death or stolen. Let's not forget cig only release ships with game loops that exist right now... Not soon tm
@@Carebear_Sparkles No they dont? We have a handful of ships with specific gameloops that arent in game yet. Like the Terrapin has 0 use as of right now, The MSR has almost no function right now as Data running isnt in game yet, id argue that the explorers are currently useless too as most of them are missing their advanced scanners and charting mods.
It is a case of the marketing team being unaware I think. It was originally sold as not even being able to move a Connie on its own, now the tractor beam can at least move larger ships and you're just limited by the quantum drive.
Why in space would it not be able to move a larger ship? There is no resistance to motion in a vacuum.
Sure, there will be an acceleration penalty, but you should be able to move a ship of any size eventually.
@@sergarlantyrell7847 Inertia. Same reason you can't just move a planet. The more massive something is, the more energy it takes to make it change velocity. Something too big and the engines on the ship would not be able to move it appreciably, which becomes a big problem if you need to make a course correction or slow down quickly. Even in real life when NASA intentionally smashed a probe into an asteroid at high velocity the effect was minimal solely because of inertia.
you can even QT with a connie done that a few times.
@@sergarlantyrell7847it can, it is slow to do and can't quantum with it over a certain mass.
@@EwanMarshall Oh, then the SRV has actually seen a fairly significant improvement in its capabilities from concept in that regard as well.
the best use case i had out of my and my orgmates SRVs is, we went ERT hunting, and sometimes, the ships land in a very awkward way that prevents getting the loot out of them. Using the srv often helps in orienting them right, or better, even if i can't tow it into space.
The official art for the SRV shows it towing a javelin
This game's motto is, "When the game is further developed."
You'd almost think this was a game in active development
You’d think it has been 10 years already and it would be further along.
@@medic4christ777Starfield took 10 years. Cyberpunk 2077 took 10 years. You don’t have the legs you think you have.
@@duckdictator6531 Took 10 years to FINISH. We are still in alpha after 10 years. Big difference.
@@medic4christ777those games are not finished lol
You need several SRVs to Quantum with larger ships. You need more SRVs; there's a mass limit to the tractor beam for each of them.
You're meant to be able to work and Quantum together with multiple ships.
I think there are some definite refactors needed for the SRV. One thing I think may be really interesting, once we have a greater level of persistence, server meshing, and overall reliability is player run salvage yards, with the SRV hauling back salvage to player determined areas either in orbit around a point of interest, or on a planet. This enables groups or org s to have a constant supply of salvage material immediately available for members to salvage, enables haulers to collect the spoils of any cargo the salavage contained, and enables orgs to stash ship components and weapons.
Of course, all this requires those things to actually work ... so the SRV still has some time to grow into its role, and ample time for that role to change as CIG tweaks the bells and whistles on the gameplay loop, the ship, and the verse at large.
Firstly, cool vid!
The situation of the SRV's use that I'm about to describe is more due to the game's bugs than a game feature: My Connie Taurus couldn't refuel at the station I last docked it at. It had exhausted all q-fuel as I was jumping from lagrange points for salvage missions to see what inventory the ships had. It had valuable cargo so I wasn't going to reclaim it. No matter the region I switched to, workarounds involving the pad/hangar, landing/hovering, storing/spawning - all these led to no avail where the refuel service failed to work. So I had three options:
1) Ask someone who may have had a Starfarer to come; 2) Transfer to cargo to someone else's ship that could hold the cargo or 3) Use my SRV to tow the Taurus. I chose the latter, as it felt like that was the least work.
I had a friend who I asked to stay in the Taurus (in case another bug occurred that disconnects ships from the SRV in deep space. In case this happened, I could qt back to them due to the party qt marker. This didn't happen, luckily.) I was able to successfully tow the ship to New Babbage and my friend landed the ship. I stored both and sold my cargo.
That being said, there are some cases where it shows its value despite the limitations of the first tier of its features and the state of the game, but it can shine in those aspects. In conclusion, I can't agree that it's a "meme ship", or not all that useful right now. For the bugs that exist in the game, despite the SRV also bringing its own bugs, it presents another way of getting around those bugs albeit, depending on the ship it's towing as described in your vid, which suggests that it has its (bug related) uses now.
It's an ironic thing that features within the game are useful to get around features that have bugs, and it ain't an excuse for CIG to not fix those bugs of course. But such is the case for a game that has so many branches of possibilities in getting things done, while these bugs exist within it. This ship is an example of that I think, not necessarily only for gameplay but to also mitigate gameplay blocking aspects when (not if) they occur right now.
That being said of course, if someone requires assistance, I'm going carefully tow a ship/vehicle to them in case they're stranded, so they can get into that ship or vehicle, instead of them coming onboard my SRV for my and my teammates' security protection. They get a 'free' snub or vehicle at the same time and a towed ride :)
Or a ship gets toppled upside down, and someone can't get back into it, it'll be easier for someone with an SRV to tractor it into space so said person can eva into their ship again rather than do what we all sometimes do LOL (e.g. bump the ship until it's ride-side up etc. and risk both ships exploding!).
Maybe following a pirate raid, it can quickly move those 36scu containers from the target ship to the cargo bay of the pirate Caterpillar, etc.
Moving BIG freight boxes where time is a factor and and EVA + hand tools is too slow and leaves the whole raiding party vulnerable to counter-piracy or the UEE Navy?
So it’s main use is for bulk pillaging.
Would rather use a 315p for that since it has the tractor beam in the front I guess.
I was so excited when I saw the SRV and now I'm just disappointed about so much stuff 😅
they changed the dangerous salvage missions to not be able to be pulled by traktor, since it was abusing risk/reward of the mission or something stupid
But they keep in game breaking pvp expoits😂
no the mission was auto completing if you moved the ship away, so you could just show up and instantly complete salvage claims
@@garrettthefrank1903which was the whole concept of the two missions. You also got a 32k fine and CS2 if the comsat was up around yela. I think the real broken bit was/is connie and cutty black one, 80k and quantum tow capable.
@@EwanMarshall thats fair
The SRV will probably have a use case someday, but I think the Starfarer will have its use a lot sooner. When systems keep getting bigger or when part of a system isn't friendly to you, you could set a refuel beacon and deal with your predicament that way, but when your ship with valuables goes in soft death, you'd probably be better of relocating the cargo to different ships over getting it towed 9/10 times
My crew has been using the SRV to shuffle salvageable panels in the belt to one location for reclaimers to process. It works very well. You can do the same with other ship tractor beams but it doesn't take long before the distances are better traveled in QT with the SRV. Best use case at the moment afaik.
isn't the idea that its ability (or inability) to take ships through QT is a known bug? pretty sure it can do the things shown, but think servers and the bugs prevent the SRV from working as intended. I actually like the idea of the ship, especially to bring ships that I soft death like my carrack or one of my bf's ships back to port so I can off load inventory or sell cargo and, if they are able to fix the ship repair/refuel/etc on stations as that is also not working and is a known bug, I believe it will be able to do the things seen in the video, just right now, the bugs and server performance are hidering it
I can say they definitely were able to QT with a hammerhead around a week ago? I'm not sure if the server stability issues factored into it, or if with the new HH salvage missions they quickly changed that due to the immense money (Although that doesn't really nerf them still.) Either way here's to hoping it's just a known bug and will be sorted.
@@jacist indeed, I do believe its a bug and not a intended feature, both from in-game stuff prior as you mentioned and in their recent video, I believe that once IAE ends and more optimization, bug fixes and such will hopefully fix the issues and allow the SRV to work as it was intended
No, there is a mass limit to what can be towed in quantum, a connie and cutty black can be, a hammerhead can't be. The HUD literally says "Mass Limit Exceeded, Quantum Drive Disabled" when one is being towed.
@@EwanMarshall Hmmm interesting, wonder if you could get around it by using multiple SRVs to balance the weight, then do a simutanious QT jump so two SRVs are dragging a heavier ship behind them in tamdum
@@PsychicSoldierPro that is something I have considered, but not tried.
What CIG should do for these ships that have single use cases like the SRV and Starfarer is introduce a mission where an NPC is stranded and needs to be towed or refueled. At least with a mission there is some use to the ship untill the utility comes in with other systems.
Same goes for medical gameplay.
Reclaim times and cost will eventually go up, making repairs more feasable.
true, faster respawn is important for testing
See, this creates a problem to be solved by the existing solution. A better method would be making it worth it for the players, therefore they feel like it's fun, rather than punishing them with high costs and long wait times that aren't spent actually having fun. It's becoming an issue with SCs stability these days, where finishing a mission is a miracle without multiple game breaking bugs or crashes.
True, plus it will cost resources as well, economy and all. Not just money and time. If the system you are in does not support a certain size ship to be build from scratch or it would take very long, it is suddenly very attractive to hire a towing service.
@Briggsby The long respawn times and high costs was ALWAYS the intended purposes, though, because when Quantum comes online your insurance will have to build and DELIVER the ship to you. So no, it will not be faster to reclaim, and the purpose of its value is to ensure that players are more careful with what they do with their ship.
@@Briggsby It's not *that* bad, but I get your point. Everyone's randomly died for no apparent reason and it's taken the wind out of your sails because of how little respect SC has for your time. It's gonna get worse, btw, before it gets better, so if you don't like it now I'd put the game down until Meshing is finished, because once that is introduced....oh boy...if you thought 3.18.0 was bad.
Anywho my point is that the SRV doesn't make a ton of sense now, but it's also the last of the ships that were put into development prior to CIG's "no game loop, no ship" policy. They'd spent the time and money making it and had to get it out the door and make money off it.
Also every time CIG's tried to increase claim times Spectrum turns into even more of a salt mine than it already is and they reverse the decision. IIRC they've stated they're not going to touch them again until the game is in a much better state.
Having the SRV do something in an advertisement that it can’t do in game feels bad faith.
Its gotta be a bug then. I doubt theyd show it in an ad if it didnt work, that doesnt sound like something CiG would do imo
Still waiting on that freelancer vtol
"after 20 minutes", "waiting quite some time of doing some set up" - How many times have we backspaced waiting for someone to come med resurrect us and just laying there incap'd for ages before we gave up. Imagine it's going to be the same for this, there's only so much time adults get to play games, hanging around for ages because 'immersion', doesn't exactly make for a fun break from regular life.
I think what they could do is make the quantum drive it take a size larger so the bubble it produces could theoretically encase two ships. Also they need to increase how in place big ships are during a tow
My idea for towing larger ships through QT is requiring the player to repair (only) the QD of the larger ship and "synchronize" it to the tug's QD. This way, there is still a time and resource cost for needing to tow a ship that the tug QD can't handle by itself but it's still possible.
@@AngleSideSideThm I dont entirely disagree, but i think it would be better if the SRV can do it itself. Obviously only sub cap ships but still i think a team of SRV's should be able to recover large wrecks without stuff needing the wreck to be powered.
You're not wrong, this thing is pretty useless atm. CI should not be releasing specialized ships like this (or the Starfarer as well since you mentioned it), without some NPC missions to let people enjoy some game loops with them. Seriously, just have a towing mission were if someone wants to go take an NPC back to port, let them do it. Same thing with the Starfarer, there should be NPC missions where if a player wants to take that ship out and have fun filling up gas tanks of stranded NPC spaceships, they should be able to. You won't see any of these SRV ships post-IAE, the novelty will die off quickly.
Currently it can tug medium and smaller ships. If CIG wants to make this ship useful there needs to be missions for it to exits such as like a tow truck bringing ships into port and getting paid to move the ship. Since the SRV only tugs med to small ships in quantum there will need to be a larger ship to tug larger ships.
Eventually CIG has to , or at least should, introduce harsher death and loss of ship penalties/mechanics. Think old school Ultima Online corpse runs. If insurance claims either don't cover components and/or come with a high UEC "deductible" then retrieving downed ships becomes a valid game loop. Insurance wait times are insufficient penalty to offset high risk. You shouldn't be able to completely off-set risk vs reward by simply having a lot of ships and being able circumvent wait times. A meaningful UEC fee to claim any insured ship claim would have more teeth to it. If you file a lot of insurance claims the "deductible" UEC fee goes up. Sort of like real life. Total your car and your insurance is likely to go up substantially. In the face of a meaningful UEC hit to file an insurance claim towing and repairing a downed ship might be a more reasonable thing to do to off-set costs.
That's weird that you couldn't tug the Hammerhead in space. Citizen Kate was able to quantam jump with a hammerhead in her SRV video 2 weeks ago. And Olli43 could tug a Caterpillar from ground to orbit.
It depends on the tractor beam you have equipped. There are different types that serve different purposes.
@@Billy-bc8pk I'm sure that's true, but it directly contradicts M's statement saying that the SRV can't. Is it frustratingly unwieldy, from what I've seen, but still quite possible.
@Shaiyo5 Yes, you're very correct.
SRV: *tows*
Authorities: "Hello sir, enjoy your crimestat"
It is a big money maker right now AND I have been using it to set-up org Reclaimer events and drag salvage out of trespassing zones. It will have some good uses in the future to quickly pull ships to a safe zone for a crucible. It can quatum jump with something as large as a Connie taurus loaded in-tow also!
The same points you make about the SRV and the Starfarer are the same concerns I have about the Apollo. More carts being placed before the horses. Ships with no corresponding gameplay.
At the very least the Apollo would be a mobile respawn that isn't 120m long and costs half of your monthly rent.
There are towing missions in the game now, though. A lot of people are making big bucks towing salvage claims. And the Starfarer will get a ton of use in Pyro.
I like how the wall behind the bed pillow is sloped so it is comfy to sit up against when not sleeping. Cool detail.
I was expecting that it a space tug should be able to pull the big ones ... not quickly mind you but pull them ... what else do you have a tug for?
Good to know the current state and good video, I am sure the promised use case would be coming soon as this is the first patch that the ship came out in. I guess we will wait and see. Keep up the good work!
Even with towing bigger ships into QT, I was trying to figure out how you could get a ship to the station to be repaired. 1. Not every ship fits on a landing pad. 2. Whether pad or hangar, won't the owner get a warning for blocking an active flight bay? Does the owner of the disabled ship have to go back into the pilot seat, request docking, then communicate which hangar/pad to put them in?
It seems like they need a section of empty space near the station to drop towed ships, kind of like what you need to do with the Hull C to pick up and drop off cargo.
I've another practical use case for the SRV. Some of those VHRT and ERT bounty targets and escorts still carry valuable cargo. Any that spawn in atmo can be soft deathed close to the ground (which is easy enough if one's paying attention), but they don't always land in a position allowing for easy access to the cargo.
The SRV can tow them up to orbit, restoring access to the cargo in a null G environment.
It's probably never going to be a thing since it would quickly create chaos... but it would be funny if you could get a swarm large enough to tow around space stations.
(actually how do space stations come to be in Star Citizen? are they just build "on site" in space or actually towed there from a factory, possibly in segments?)
Good question. I always assumed they were like offshore oil platforms. Built elsewhere and floated there.
It’s even more useless than you think! Someone on yt also tested it and dragged soft death ships on a landing pad. As it turns out they can’t be repaired.
One day me and a friend were in a scorpious fighting near a moon by microtech when we got the quantum drive blown out in a dog fight. We could of used a tow back to port tressler or even a base on the moon for a repair by a tow spaceship. But instead we just logged out. Because nothing we could do but float in space.
good point. What do you think of the terrapin and other ships with radars?
Was the tractor beam fully upgraded? I thought utility ships have the upgrade function
What about getting a soft death on an enemy ship, fly it back to port and repair and use it, basically getting a high tier fighter for a player that doesn’t want to spend the money on expensive ships like the banu defender etc ?
What annoys me about the ship is the fact it was added to the game without a gameplay loop for it...something CIG said they was not going to do anymore.
Take your observation and consider it next to the expectation created at Citcon that they’ll be rolling out lots and lots of features over the next 12 months. If they can’t get these relatively small features working, why should anyone expect even bigger features in the next three months?
Im glad its released now - instead of waiting until the missions like those salvage yard missions come into game. I make my own game loops and having the SRV in my hands now - even though there are some bugs and non working features (the rotate and push/pull only works sometimes).. theres theories i wanted to test and wanted to get hands on to get used to the mechanics of using the ship .. PLUS the things i am already using it for. I wish missions for the ship were in right now (There already is.. the salvage missions that give the options to tow away the ships) - but id rather take the ship right now vs wait for missions.
If you read the patch notes you can learn that CIG implemented a second intended way to solve the illegal salvage cover-up missions.
You can complete the mission by towing the to-be-stripped ship a fair distance away from the area, giving you the complete reward (250k with a Hammerhead clean-up).
The reasoning being that security couldn't find and identify the ship if its not there anymore.
yeah, and it works, and one can use it for the lower level salvage clean up missions (connie and cutty black) with those it is 80k, and you can quantum with them in tow, so it is hook up, carefully align with an OM point and punch the quantum and instant 80k, with 32k fine if comsat is up.
Are there different towing heads, like mining heads? Is there a large ship head?
Can you quantum jump when hauling a crate? If you can then this thing would make a surprisingly good entry level hauler.
Contracts to clear those dead ships that are always floating near the stations, blocking the hangar entrances.
Tow them to a specific point in space or an orbital salvage facility (obviously, that would have to be added, so it’s a FUTURE use case) and get paid per ship, based on its size, mass and undamaged components.
It would also require that tractor beams can be used in an armistice zone.
I'm mostly a solo player. You can make 250k in about 5-10 minutes by towing a hammerhead on a high risk salvage mission. You can also tow a hull-A with cargo on it from a lawful salvage mission towards a station, sell the cargo, and strip the hull. There are other use cases, like towing a ground vehicle to a hostile bunker mission to take out the turrets, without needing a ship that's big enough to fit one, and the possibilities are plenty. On the contrary, I think its very useful, even in the current state of the game.
I got a small, tiny org. My friend uses the SRV to pile up scrap around my Vulture which has been useful. Saves fuel on the vulture and lets me just rip into ships without having to stop aside pulling out boxes to be transferred to our cata for selling later. The SRV could certainly use more systems to it, but for us that are out in the black of old battle fields, it works.
There is a practical scenario - missions. They modified illegal salvaging missions to 'salvage OR tow away'. You grab a Hammerhead and move it a few km away - done. Currently SRV has one of the highest credits/hour rate among medium ships (250k every 5-7min). Vulture joined it with structural salvage as breaking a ship destroys hull and triggers mission.
I think the srv would be better suited at the moment for missions regarding ship recovery services.
Like you're contracted to go out and snag a ship that's been disabled and tow it to a designated station and drop it off in an open area for repair drones to do the rest.
Though, of course this is after they buff the ship and fix some bugs
Adding the SRV was a mistake because you can either salvage your broken ship, or you can claim it back on insurance. The way to balance the SRV and salvaging mechanic is to add the insurance feature... 😬
Hey Morph. I don't know if this is related or not but Noobs Gaming just did a video where he found a bug in the salvage missions where if you tow a Hammerhead (or other ships) out of the "Trespass" area it gives you the reward as if you had 100% scraped the hull. I am wondering if you tried to tow the C2 after that bug was found? Did the try to fix it by limiting the strength of the tractor beam because of it?
I dont think its a bug because in the mission description they say to either scrape the hull to remove its identifying paint/markings - OR tow it away
I'm also wondering exactly what benefit it'll have in the event of the Crucible. I mean, if we can just jump a repair depot out to the ship, then your only real limitation is having a prize crew to bring the dead ship back to port once you've finished putting it back together.
There will be systems with no ports and ships like the Crucible and Starfarer will come into play with empty systems. We've been spoiled with the current systems having accessible ports to fill our needs but that wont always be the case
(EDIT: NVM apparently it's illegal to do that) The best practical use I can think of right now is towing all the abandoned ships away from landing zones.
I wish we could, thats what i got it for. But they made it illegal to do, gives you crime stats and 30k fines for tugging ships. Also requires me to brake into the ships to turn there shields off if they are still up while abandoned.
@@StrayArctic31 oh crap, rlly? Dang
If the ship is abandoned long enough or the owner claims the ship then the owners name becomes 'Game Rules' and at that point u can tow it, blow it up, do whatever to it and you get no fine or crime stat.@@StrayArctic31
Hi morph! Just want to ask a quick question, what starter would you recommend for pyro especially regarding fuel consumption and combat. I’ve narrowed it down to a 300i, 325a, or the Titian. The 300i has lot fuel but loses out on some combat capabilities compared to the 2 others, what do you think?
I feel like the Gatac Syulen has to be on that list. It has 3 size 3s and massive fuel capacity for quantum. Not to mention a solid complement of missiles.
100% agree @Morphologis and I'd add that tossing things around with this would definitely be a viable mechanic because a ship like this could really do those things if it were built. You can already do things like use a towline to pill another car into a smash and grab target but, at the end of the day, the additional payoff doesn't justify the fiddle factor and it will be the same with space tugs. There's always a better tool for the job than something jury-rigged and, for those who want to play with that, jury-rigging and improvisation should never be prevented in gameplay because McGyviering your way through a game is just as valid a playstyle as the playstyles that are more familiar to certain developers who may not have seen a lot of the world outside.
We were able to pull a C2,A2,Carrack and a caterpillar just fine so not sure why you couldn't. Could not get it to pull a 890 though. Server problem or new bug?
I love the humility you use when you think something "should be" one way. I ran across a TH-camr today RedJay who was the exact opposite and is giving wild speculation saying what CIG is "going to do"! Clearly he thinks he know a lot more than what he really does. I pity the people who make ship buying decisions on his speculation.
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”
I kind of thought that when you find a "soft death" ship and you tow it back and fix it up, it would be something that you could keep in your fleet. Kind of like how people fix up cars that are totaled. Probably less re-sale value, but still useful if you have a need for it in your line-up.
That was my take on it.
That should be the way to obtain an F7A
I think adding hiring contracts into the game would be a major feature. fuel, merc, mine, taxi, repair, rescue, Delivery, Bodyguard, merchant, Hual/take cargo to here, ect. So when you make a contract with said player they wont get paid till the contract gets check marked off like taking a broken down c2 to port. Contract: Take Broken Down C2 To Port: Baijini Point, Distance "Blank" Payment: 90,000 Credits, Payment upon Completion. Warning: Any contact with the contract owners ship after delivery will result in a crime stat.
I rented the SRV and did the 250k payout salvage missions that make you salvage a Hammerhead.
I was able to tow it far enough to pass the mission within 3 minutes and repeated it until I got bored at 7mil auec.
Fly to OM-1, take mission, complete within 3-5 mins, fly back to OM-1, retake mission, repeat.
Bonus if you disable the comms satellite to avoid the crime stats.
I owed 250k in fines with a level 3 crime stat and 5 hours in prison on two occassions.
Ehhh... I get that it's more fun to have highly-specialized ships,
but I feel like if this is *JUST* going to be a tow-truck, players aren't going to use it.
As for the false-marketing, I'm assuming they'll fall back on their classic "We said it's FLYABLE now, we didn't say it was feature-complete!"
How would you get the C2 into a hangar? If you hail the port, they'll open a tiny hanger for your SRV, the C2 would not be able to fit.
In the current 3.21.1 patch you can use the SRV to tow ships from the risky clean-up salvage missions and make a quick 250k credits from completing the mission when the ship gets far enough away from the original location.
I could see its use in search and rescue, but not for salvage or reclamation. I could see towing a ship out of fuel back to station or any ship where the players aboard don’t want to respawn.
Also is there a mass limit to the tractor?
This thing is a beast! Don’t let its functionality fool you. First it’s the only small ship with all medium components including a quantum drive for really fast jumps just be sure to stop by cousin and crows for a XL-1 instead. 14 scu cargo is perfect for quick runs. Next hammerhead missions for cash. A whopping 2700 quantum fuel tank can travel to the farthest point and back. Most “homey”living arrangement I’ve seen in a ship. Flies great. The only thing is it’s Cross section but your not using this to fight it’s to get to one planet to another or deliver packages or do small repairs and salvage with the gun and towing for cash. Overall I love this thing to death. Best overall performance, mileage and travel time.
I'm really impressed by your b-roll footage lol, it looks so good that I got distracted from your voice
We did this in my org as well on a carrack. You can tug slowly in space, but could not quantum. We used two, still couldn't. We didn't have a third. Ah well. Enter new ship, with Size 3 tractor the same size as the C2/Carrack class vehicle.
When you tow a ship in a risky salvage mission, you get paid a lot. For a few minutes of play. You actually complete the mission by removing the ship (Hammerhead for example) from a certain area.
I see these and starfarers as fleet support ships, similar to the little argo shuttle ship. Got a fleet of 25 ships and want to keep some fighters from being lost? Grab the SRV and fetch the ship once the battle shifts away from it, tow it back to a larger carrier and repair/refuel and get back in the fight. It's not super useful now and I am sure carriers will figure out how to carry enough ships for it to not matter, but in a fleet on fleet fight, these little things might actually be the heroes of the battle.
Pretty funny how in the Star Citizen Live episode that launched at pretty much almost at exactly the same time as this vid they clarified you can not actually repair from soft death yet.
I suspect that the two additional tractor beam dishes will help with towing bigger ships. I don't think that you should need more than 2 SRVs to lift ships like the Caterpillar and Hercules from a planet and no more than 4 to lift ships like the Javelin. At some point the amount of towing ships you'd need otherwise would get ridiculous. So unless CIG made a statement about the tractor beam power of the SRV being in fact as high as they want it to be, I'm of the impression that it's just an error of the set power.
But I also think you're looking at this from a limiting POV. The SRV can remove ships and ship parts from around stations for example, and don't forget that it's not necessarily just big haulers that would prefer to get their soft deathed ships repaired rather than backspace and move the cargo over, smaller ships become soft deathed as well and it becomes more and more viable to try and rescue those rather than abandon them.
One possible use for it that I havent seen said is recovering a disabled ship that cant fly properly due to missing engines and damage. This primarily useful when said ship is filled with your gear and you're stranded.
And, yes, I know the time and effort are more in favor dying, grabbing a new ship and going back to pick up your stuff. However, depending on how much stuff is on the ship, as well as how much money the person is willing to lose, it would be more advantageous for some people to call a tug(so long as its not that slow.)
4:30 and you even get a crime stat for towing these risky salvages ships. And yes, their messaging in ISC and SCL was very conflicting. In SCL (call all devs edition) they actually said it's not working right now. So yeah, i made the joke that at least you could fling A2 bombs at space stations with the SRV. So I'm glad the ship is finally in the game but the real career opportunity is non existent.
You could maybe try to fly a small ship on a landing pad from a space station (other than seraphim, because preparing there actually doesn't work consistently at all).
I think we're going to have to wait half a year before the SRV's intended function will be working as intended.
Very realistic to have to wait an hour or more for a tow. 🤪
I think it's basically a proof-of-concept test.
IRL If you were going to move a C2 (in space) - or just about any other ship - you'd bring another C2 up and have a mechanism by which you would lock the landing gear together (or have some other standardized ship-to-ship coupling procedure) and you'd fly the healthy ship back with the dead ship attached (accounting for mass, etc. of course).
Then when you got to your destination something like an SRV would maneuver the dead ship into "drydock" or whatever (or the station would have tractor turrets).
There are ocean-going tugs, but on the open sea you generally tow a ship with another ship until you get to harbor where the tugs take over.
I do hope this all gets balanced out. And I think it will. But you are right Morph...they should just come out and say "hey, we are working on these mechanics but until we get them all worked out the SRV is going to get the multitool treatment and we are going to essentially make it's tractor beam and engines super powerful until we figure out how this will all work so this ship can do it all."
Can SRV be related to upcoming base construction?
I would love the SRV to be my ‘Barnfinder’. Go out into the verse, find some absolutely disastrous wrecks, tow them back to my base and fix them up to sell them on or be able to purchase insurance for them and add them to my ship collection!
They will surely introduce a bigger recovery ship for the capital class ships but right now the SRV should be able to pull a C2 or a Cat.
The Crucible afaik is meant to be able to tow larger ships.
@@jodofe4879 its not meant for towing but to repair smaller craft in its internal bay and large capital ones with telescopic grabby hands which, knowing CIG, they will probably just replace with another beam during the rework anyway.
@@BizzMRKACHTUALLY the Crucible's original concept DID have a tugboat module which was meant to tow larger ships. You can go look it up.
@@Pr1zzm tried to look it up but all info I could find about it was a very brief mentioning during the 2015 QA where they mentioed that the grabby hands got replaced by remote drones and that they considered dropping the already very limited tugging capabiltiy alltogether but that they were thinking about a dedicated tug variant replacing the sacrab, nothing of substance though.
@@BizzMRK Check the original brochure, it mentions the tugboat capability. But if the devs already commented that they scrapped that then oh well
As mentioned below, why not have a set of checks and a parking area penalty? A ship within a parking restricted zone gets a small fine to notify the captain and slightly discourage this behavior (not enough to matter, we actually want salvaging to happen). If the captain has bed logged in the ship, a fine accrual begins and no further action applies. If, however, the captain retrieves another ship and is more than a million km away, a time begins. At the end of that timer, the ship is considered abandoned and the captain is fine a flat rate per mass by the tug driver. Now you have a mechanism that enforces parking while also being a legitimate business model. It also allows an owner to venture planetside for a time when outside of a parking restricted area, like 1,000 km above a random location.
Did you have a try and successfully fix anny ship. I saw a lot of videos where they couldn't repair it from soft death
I'm very much looking forward to them adding Ship Tow missions. Tugging dead NPC ships back to a station so they can repair them seems like a relaxing way to play and earn some Creds.
I think u forgeot to mention that the cool new feature - repair softdeath ships - is currently not working at all... (making the srv almost completely useless)
The only thing I can think of is to use it to catch falling ships in a soft death state and prevent them from hitting the ground hard enough to go full death. That way you can save "cargo" on those ERT missions.
when the game finally gets closer to being completed or has more game mechanics implemented, I'm going to be in my precious SRV just flying around the hangars like a vulture waiting for all of you to crash when flying out of them lol
I think for solo players with no friends online, the srv can be a way for you to spawn a second ship to get ypur first ship back. Otherwise everytime you die and leave your ship where you died, you will have to file a claim and just wait.
So you park somewhere, die, respawn, take out your SRV, return to the scene of the crime, tow your other ship back to a station, place it on a pad, park your srv in a hangar, store it, go back to the pad and fly your original ship away?
How is that better than just taking a cheap/quick claim starter, abandoning it, and leaving with your original ship? Yes in theory the claim will be more expensive eventually, but it's not now and this video is about what you can do now. If we are talking about the future, a better solution would be faster/cheaper claim on misplaced ships than destroyed ships.
@turrboenvy4612 it's not necessarily better, I'm just saying the time is about the same and atleast this way the scenery changes. Additionally, it does allow you to also get your gear back from both your body and your ship. It's also worth noting, sometimes when ships are claimed , some lose there equipment...so there's that as well.
litterally right now you can have reclaimer in space safe area out of the way and you can go to crash sites and such with crashed npc ships or player ships and tow them to the reclaimer, and just keep bringing it new stuff to suck on , it works well enough. there is just the issue of the salvage lasers not picking things up , so one of 3 things you bring might be a dud but still it works we made 2.3 mil in one session with just two people
Towing just needs missions - “tow dead NPC ship x to station y”. That would make it instantly useful in the current game.
What happens if two tugs tractor each other? Is it like crossing the streams?
For my two cents from using the SRV in PTU and PU
Its the new starfarer or reclaimer in 2016 ship
Its only feature is towing with a rubber band that offers next to no control
Forget gentling putting a damaged ship down on a pad, you be lucky not to rubberband and slam it into the station or ground
It is missing the features that actually make tractor beam useful to move, rotate, and place an object
So its, well I think it only in, because they needed it for a cutsceen in SQ42....
And has as much function as the Argo MPUV
My concern here (if everything was working as advertised), is how to you "call for tow". If you create a beacon for a SRV ...everyone sees the alert...thus anyone could accept it, get the navpoint and reach the ship. But what if the one accepting the beacon is a pirate? He knows youre in distress and prolly hauling valuables since you wouldnt bother calling a towing if you were just chilling there empty. So he arrives, and just, either utterly destroys you or overwhelms you and steal your stuff.
Is there/will there be a mechanic preventing this or will this be part of the dangers of using beacons?
Is there a way to send a towing beacon only to SRV owners?
As much as I love the idea behind the SRV with having an actual tug boat in SC, it's very disappointing that it can't really pull anything. Tug boats are built to tow ships and heavy barges in or out of ports and help them maneuver, after all. So why not just emphasize on that and make the SRV really powerful (but slow) to then be able to help big ships like e.g. a Reclaimer or even a Hull-C out of atmosphere? Maybe it'll become more viable when master modes are integrated and atmospheric flight will rely more on a sort of decoupled mode that we have now.
I really understand your frustration since there is SO MUCH potential here and we're so close to it being viable.
The best thing they could do imo is just make it able to pull any ship size alone when the shields are down even on planets. There's no balancing problem here imo since the srv is squishy as hell, not mobile and has no weapons. And as you said being able to replace the srv with other ships prevents too op options. So make it happen, CIG you just need to adjust some numbers ^^
The other thing which would require a little bit more effort is to implement a big box where you can store stuff in. Vehicles. Cargo. Equipment. People. Limitless possibilities. There has to be a balancing factor ofc. But this could really increase the versatility of the SRV. Just being able to tow an empty box with a cargo grid already could really smooth out the edges for the SRV usability and enable game loops. So please CIG gib beeg box gameplay ^^
But imo the future for SRVs is bright: It's a towing truck. It's a crane. It's a transport for any single object. No ship has that much utility.
The basic current problem of SRVs from my point of view is that a huge part of their utility comes from turning heavy losses into small ones. However in the current state of the game you just reclaim your 890 Jump, do something else for an hour and done. Ships in this game have no value which is necessary in the current game state. Because of this you're often times worse off if you use an SRV than just reclaiming. There are still opportunities for the SRV to have a game loop though but they would need more implementation and idk if CIG really cares if we test the SRV by coming up with stuff ourselves or use it for missions.
One thing that the SRV can do right now is transporting any ship that it can go into qd with with maximum qd speed. The size 2s are the fastest in the game iirc. So you can cut down travel times by pulling others. Also you can pull ships that can't qd on their own or racers that have their qd removed to reduce weight (yes, that's a thing).
But as you can see those are mostly very niche cases. There's just no game lop for SRV owners.
As a bonus: Cool things I can think about right now that the SRV could be used for (feel free to add on those):
1. Have SRVs gather salvagable ships from around the system and tow them to the stations for easier processing. Other players with Salvage ships could dismantle the remains while other players unload the cargo into the station which then gets hauled by massive ships like C2s, Caterpillars, Hulls etc. to the best buyer. The specialisation could make huge amounts of auec per hour because the travel times are shorter and economy of scale. (requires balancing and cargo elevators to store the goods)
2. Or just make contracts where npcs are the contractors and you get a small share but since you can work quickly, it will be worth it (requires implementation of said missions)
3. SRVs will help you out in case your ship breaks down (requires engineering gameplay)
4. SRVs could collect remains after any ship battle. This could create more of an incentive to not finish ships off if you're the winner of an encounter since you can claim the ressources of your enemy which in turn creates more interesting gameplay. This is only the tip of the iceberg, I could talk about this for hours. (requires more valuable ships)
5. Have prepped habitats for Pioneer light gameplay. (requires prepped habitats)
i thought of it more of a clean up vehicle. pulling old broken ships to a scrap yard for a compensation, keeping the vers clean and pretty :)
They did say group QT towing will be coming later on for moving larger ships. Alot of support role ships are kinda pointless right now untill we get more systems that lack infrastructure.
So the Use Case my org found for the SRV was reclaimer level salvaging; The reclaimer went out to the primary wreck site and began salvaging its target myself and a buddy went scouting for near by wrecks and derelicts then would pull them back to the primary site to be queued up for the reclaimer to snack on and pull a used one away.
Or that person in the SRV could bring a Taurus or something, become a QT beacon to quickly get to the wreck, and sell the cargo and weapons while the reclaimer does it's thing, as it's too hard to do both at the same time in the reclaimer with the rear access being so far from the front.
@@canniballistic555oh we had a C2 on standbye for just that, it was an 8 man Op
@@waywardrush Yeah if what you want is for everyone to be doing nothing half the time I can see 8 people being the number you might use.
Strange.
I was able to pull a softdeath Drake Corsair in space and use QT to move it around. A question of weight?
Yeah, I agree with you and looking at the current CIG's tendency to create Sm, Med, L and XL ships in every categories (looking at mining and salvage) and if the SRV can't tow big ships, it's useless!
you are seeing it backwards, it's useless so they can release a "large" tow ship that can actually be useful so people who bought the SRV will *have* to upgrade to do the gameplay they wanted ^^
Cig: yeah it works
Players: yeah shits broke