I didn’t get to do something important today which is why I had time to work on the Admiral Hipper. So I’ve got mixed feelings floating around.

Anyway, the workaround I mentioned in the title is a solution to a fundamental problem my size 8 carousel hangar has. By the way, the merge block idea, while interesting, was ultimately abandoned. That means the riders won’t be able to be blueprinted with the ship itself (at least not all of them) and will need to come in a separate ‘package.’ As for the problem with the hangar, it has no connectors, so fighters can only ‘dock’ inside the ship. They can’t refuel there.

Now that all of Hipper’s heavy weapons have been moved to the front of the ship, I’ve got room for support facilities. This will hold for some of the other ships of the class, too. For Hipper though, she’ll have two connector docks just behind the hangar gate, right in front of the stern. I also added two walkways and an exit tunnel to reach those docks.

This is a picture from just prior to the installation of the aft door and the walkways inside the hangar. Everything still looks pretty much the same, but both sections are more navigable now.

Somehow the entire ship is just barely over 62k PCU. I wish I could lower it a bit more but I’ve already cut way more corners than I should have with the design, everything from completely omitting interior signage to replacing beds and cryo chambers with placeholders. I even removed two airlocks and swapped every vanilla hydrogen thruster on the ship (15 PCU each) for ‘Rex’ RCS hydrazine thrusters (8 PCU each).

Well, at least she looks good. Hipper can fight, too, though I doubt she could put up a strong solo fight against some of the ‘gun laden’ designs I’ve seen using the same weapon packs. (That’s what the 8-10 Riders are for) I’m working with some strict limits to keep the overall fleet reasonable in scale, so it’s fine.