What Else Will the Odin Need To Be In the Game

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00][music] >> Hello, this is Danny Rayman, the voice behind Rays Guide. In my previous video about the Anvil Odin, I hinted that I would do another video on the things I thought was going to be needed before the Anvil Odin would be ready for being in the game. This is the video where I went into that. And almost exactly 1 year ago, I did a video about what the Idris would be needing. And in reviewing that video, some of those [music] things, like shipboard servicing and carrier on-board delivery, have been addressed. [music] And some of those haven't and form the core of this video.

[00:00:33]And honestly, the Idris and Odin are not alone. The Ironclad also represents a ship designed for long-duration multi-crew operations. So, much of this video will also apply to all the new Ironclad owners, too. And the main [snorts] thing that we are going to need is more content intended for these large, long-duration, large multi-crew ships.

[00:00:54]You can consider the Tactical Strike Group missions as the first of these.

[00:00:58]But honestly, would TSG challenge an Odin? I'm skeptical that it would. So, we are going to need missions designed for either an Odin, but also possible to be done with a small fleet of an Idris or Ironclad assault with a support group of ships like the Perseus, Polaris, and Tiburon.

[00:01:16]Because let's be clear, if there isn't something for the Odin to do that is challenging and someplace to do it, then it's just going to cruise around cheese-winning every mission that the rest of us are trying to actually have fun and challenge completing. We've already seen a bit of that when the Polaris first came out. And obviously, you can't have conflicts challenging to an Odin happening someplace where ordinary players are going to be stumbling into it. Maybe that could be accomplished with instancing, but I'd rather have it done by just placing it somewhere where those lesser ships will not wander through on their own. But it isn't just needing a whole new category of content. There are core technology items, too. The first thing you are going to need party formation tools that were promised on the social universe presentation that Benoît didn't at the Manchester CitizenCon. But the associated reality of such large and long duration team missions is that they are going to be running longer than any particular single participant's game session. And that means a couple of new technologies and first among them is something that I call bed logging 2.0.

[00:02:23]Particularly, this is the ability to bed log on someone else's ship besides your own, say to have lunch or do some real life chores, and then to log back into the same ship wherever it is now in the game. But this means that you have to consider a number of possibilities.

[00:02:40]First, you have to cover the possibility that the ship has been destroyed while you were in bed, in which case you need to arrive at your main respawn point, preferably with all your stuff intact, because CIG's broad promise that you can't have your stuff taken from you while you are not in the game. Or the ship might need to be stored, in which case you should be able to be alerted to that in the menu system, so you can wait to re-enter the game until the ship is as well. You need to be able to cover the possibilities that you don't want to return to the carrier and choose not to return to the carrier, but that the last station that the ship visited. This prevents people from being held essentially prisoner on a carrier. A way to possibly do this would be similar to the system of long-term and short-term med bed images. And [snorts] there needs to be some sort of limit of the number of people allowed to be bed logged on a ship to avoid abuses and a way for the captain to disembark excess bed logged passengers when at the starbase or landing zone, which brings up another problem. What if the captain is the one who needs to bed log for a short while in the middle of a long duration mission? You can't just have the captain bed log and have their own disappear dumping players into space and tossing all the gear that they might have had in various places on the ship. Something like the Odin must be treated much more like a long-term persistent base. There needs to be a way to delegate a large subset of the rights of the captain to someone else, preferably by default if the captain has a sudden client crash.

[00:04:11]And then there will need to be a need for captains or their delegates to have tools for managing flight decks because even though there may not longer be the person be bedridden on the ship, the ship that they came on may be taking valuable flight deck space.

[00:04:27]Or even they might have done insurance claim on their ship that they left on your carrier, leaving you with a bricked ship on your flight deck.

[00:04:36]There'll need to be a tool to get rid of brick ships, and also a way for you to be able to brick the ships on their flight deck owned by people who are not there, and then to vanish them. So, returning to missions, let me describe the sort of mission that would be worthy of a fully crewed Odin, or an equivalent firepower of ships like the Idris, Perseus, Tiburon, et cetera.

[00:04:57]For convenience, I will call this mission strategic strike group. Wink. To start with, there are only two powers in the 'verse strong enough to need such a flotilla to go against them.

[00:05:08]The first would be the UEE Navy, and the fundamental presumptions of the game would have never have us trying to go after the whole UEE Navy.

[00:05:17]The second, of course, is the Vanduul.

[00:05:19]We know that the Vanduul are operating in the far reaches of Nicks, so that is the obvious choice. And by far reaches, I mean out in the Ort Cloud, so that even an Idris will need a multi-step supply chain to reach the mission area.

[00:05:34]In other words, they would be able to make it there, but they couldn't make it back without a refueling. That keeps ordinary range ships from stumbling across it. And to make a little more interesting, let's tie it to the question of whose planet really is Nicks one. So there would be three different givers of the mission. One by Intersex Security on behalf of the People's Alliance who assert that the entirety of Nicks, even the outer reaches, is under their [clears throat] jurisdiction.

[00:06:02]Another by UEE Civilian Defense Forces on behalf of the UEE asserting that protecting humanity from the Vanduul is the role of the UEE who should now be taking a bigger role in protecting Nicks since it is now under Vanduul threat and represents a gateway for Vanduul attacks on the important UEE world of Stanton.

[00:06:22]And some by Genesis Terraforming or whoever is really behind them asserting that Nicks one is theirs by right of occupancy and so is the responsibility of protecting it. And behind the scenes who you get the mission from and succeeded it will help one side or another in that meta dispute. So a mission that would be just fly out there, kill something, even something truly huge, and then fly back would be unworthy of the capabilities of the ship and the effort taking to assembling it for a mission.

[00:06:52]So instead the mission just directs you to the center of a huge area of space and the Ort Cloud is definitely huge where the Vanduul activity is suspected.

[00:07:00]You can then do a deep space scan and get a small number of potential exploration points, less than a half dozen. As you explore those you might find early encounters but each will expose three more suspicious signals even further out which might open three more, etc. etc. and an expanding sphere >> [snorts] >> of search points. Quickly it becomes obvious that you have to use the base ship as exactly that while deploying exploration missions using the fighter wing. A greater concentration of encounters eventually develops in a particular part of the sphere until you eventually encounter the super boss Vanduul fleet and then you have to organize a concentrated final battle with everything. The point though is that the missions cannot be quickly defeated and particularly cannot be completed by just the main ship itself.

[00:07:48]The meta game of assigning and supporting the exploration missions launched from the carrier will make or break the total mission chain success.

[00:07:57]Now, very quickly, my channel events. We have for the Captains members the VRU a squadron 42, where one of the Captains will be awarded a VR headset with the wood swan depending on the number of Captain member months by then. Then for everyone else, this video will qualify both for the IAE week giveaway for the Galaxy and then next year's DefenseCon or whatever they will be calling it, big [music] ship giveaway. One entry per video for each of these members at any level are entered automatically.

[00:08:22]Everyone else just subscribe and comment with the secret word. And the secret word for this video is my name for the mission design [music] for the Odin. Fly safe, keep it real, and I'll see you in the 'verse. This is Daniel Ayresman with Ray's Guide.

[00:08:44]>> [music]