Currently there aren’t really any upgrades for dropships that are explicitly tailored for transport pilot except the landing light camera. What I was thinking is an upgrade that allows the transport DS (henceforth just Alamo because Alamo is almost never cas) to hover above LZs and pick up marines with ropes on each door, 3 in total, which wouldn’t allow xenos to come up too. This wouldn’t be able to pick up crates or anything heavy and each rope would have like a 2-3s cooldown after use to make it balanced. Also while hovering the Alamo could choose to land which would only take it 5s to do so or to return to the Almayer or other LZ for a standard flight time.
Transport PO is pretty universally agreed to be extremely boring and I feel like this would make transport PO actually have a job that cant be replaced by autopilot other than +1 cap when their cockpit gets broken open.
Transport duty is certainly boring, but I do believe the solution for something like such should be a more dynamic capacity for both the Dropships to land anywhere in the map, according to obvious conditions that would limit where the Vessels could go, such as the Landing Zones to not have weeds, being sufficiently open enough to make the landings possible, and requiring signal flares for the Dropship to localize where they could land. That way the Dropships would be able to land closer to the frontlines or other points of interest that would be ‘safe’ for landing, for example landing in a FOB-2 in the beach on LV-624 after the troops are already on the caves, the area is caded and protected, and no xenos are on sight. Morrow shared the same idea, but he wanted for it to be used with a smaller Dropship, of wish I don’ t think would be as efficient, because the own size of the DS would be a proper limitation for its use.
Your idea is interesting and well-thought but maybe would have balancing issues with the capacity of xenos to siege the Dropship in moments of FOB siege. For example, boilers wouldn’t be able to gas it anymore.
The ropes are a cool idea, but as @ lc4492 already said, it would probaly be unbalanced for marines to be able to evac the FOB by teleporting themselves onto the dropship, leaving no chance for the xenos to prevent the evacuation as long as marines can get to the pad. Instead of flying through space with only the console giving a hint about that the DS is hovering above the FOB, maybe make it so that xenos can see it (maybe a shadow hovering above the landing pad) and are able to spit at it or gas it, leading to some damage to the dropship which would make the flights take longer until repaired shipside? Most cool would be of course a multi-z map so you can look down onto the ground from the dropship and use a look-up verb to look on the dropship from groundside, but I doubt we’re getting that added.
About the “land everywhere”, it would be interesting as well, but I think some kind of smaller dropship for that with the alamo being put on auto and the transport pilot flying around the mini dropship would be better than just landing with the alamo, since it would be pretty frustrating if you have a few hugged at FOB and a few bravoids waiting shipside together with the FOB doc/FOB MT and the transport pilot only does frontline drops. The dropships should then be able to turn around and just not face north (I think there even was a PR for that) so it is able to land in all areas with enough place. The damage system I described in the section about the “teleport marines from FOB to DS” would be also good for this purpose, preventing pilots from just landing right next to the xenos, knowing that their dropship is pretty much indestructible.
The problem with your idea is how the dropship can’t actually be made to be damageable unless if it was remade by design, and sadly multi-Z mapping simply does not exist in CM. Kugamo developed some type of Multi-Z on the USS Western Eye of his, but the whole thing wasn’t multi-Z and, just a very interesting effect that made it feel like there was a lower and an upper deck, just like how stairs work onboard the Almayer.
About the idea I described before, if you make a third DS and leave alamo to continue with the usual automatic flights, then we are simply not solving the problem of how boring transport missions are. Landing outside of the LZ would be supposedly hard, and wouldn’t be made like a constant cycle, unless the PO was a complete idiot. Making the dropship need to communicate to change between fixed landing zones and temporary ones can improve a lot on how transport missions can be conducted, remember that I said before that the PO would need a clear and fortified space, with flare signaling and confirmation from the ground troops that the area is safe for drop. I can imagine an scene where the Alamo firstly drops on a marked LZ, then lands on the fixed FOB, and then returns to Almayer, making the whole flight proccess quite dynamic. Remember that, in the way Im thinking it, the FOB would always be the first place the DS would land in every operation, being (supposedly) the safest area to land in the map and the automatic landing would only be possible to the main LZ, so there would need to be a pilot to proceed with those temporary zones landings.
I would advice you to look at TGMC and look up what the TADPOLE is.
Like thats completly what you all are describing. But im not so sure how much it would fit into CM if im honest. DS landing everywhere migth fit better then just to add Tad.
No I won’t touch TGMC cause it sucks Already had the tadpole in mind, but maybe a bit bigger, like a mix of dropship and tadpole (maybe only one seat row and half the length, but still has dedicated cockpit and everything), but it should atleast require a flare so it cannot just land anywhere and skip right to the hive’s door from FOB.
True, having it landing everywhere migth be a bit too much. Having a small DS migth be the way to go. Question i would have is would it have parts of the self build aspect of the tad or just being a mini DS. The whole fact that the tad is out of destructibel walls makes it a lot more risky after all.
