The team at Frontier Developments had more to say at Gamescom in relation to the previously announced Fleet Carriers in Elite Dangerous and it seems that anyone interested in having one of these behemoths in the game better start saving credits right away. The full details can be found here on the Frontier Forums but what I had taken away from it was:

• Each player can have their own carrier if they choose but the cost (not announced yet) will likely make them outside the range of many players.
• With 16 landing pads and repair/refuel/rearm facilities a carrier could potentially operate as a mobile outpost. You can even set permissions on who is allowed to land on it.
• Carriers can have custom loadouts applied to further enable specific vocations in the game. Newly announced support vessels will reinforce these loadouts.
• They have a jump range of 500LY allowing you to move them around at a decent rate but make use of unique resources for refuelling that could greatly restrict the mount of consecutive jumps.
• They are not flyable – the most you can do is assign them a destination to jump to so there’s no prospect of carriers facing off against each other at this time. They’re also indestructible so no concerns about losing one either.

I’m curious if players will be allowed to stash their own ships on a carrier as currently you’re forced to leave your extra ships (if you have any) dotted around various locations and then pay to move them. For a player flush with credits having a carrier act as a portable space station that takes all their goodies with them could be an appealing prospect. If it’s big enough to allow so many ships to land there must be enough room to park a few of your own too…

Though it’s great every player can have the opportunity to own one it seems a shame that there might not be a way for squadrons to pool resources and reduce the grind that individual players may face. Despite that it’ll be interesting to see when this update arrives in December how many players can immediately afford one and how quickly they become a part of regular play for everyone in the game.

Elite Dangerous is out now for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4.