well they stopped the movement of the titans once the shields are down

""We're taking fire!  We've lost our escort and fighters, and our deflec.BZZG...ZGT"" came the broken voice over the radio.  Up ahead Captain Woodat saw the source of the frantic cries.  Amidst a green and red birdcage of fire was a Nebulon B.  The ship was listing slightly and blaster fire was streaming down its sides.  The hangar was open and explosions were pouring forth as wrecked ships crackled and burned on its landing pad.  In front of it lay the nebulon's tormentor: A carrack carrier ship.  The nebulon shook as volley after volley of turbolaser fire flew from the carrack's forward cannons and pounded what remained of the neb's deflectors and armour.  TIE fighters, deprived of any further X-wings, instead danced back and forth over the stricken ship, adding withering blaster fire and dodging the nebulon's top turrets, which were unable to bring their fire down on the carrack.

Woodat fired up the engines and altered course towards the fray.  He had been traveling to assist another nebulon that was engaged in a similar combat, but it had fallen before he was able to arrive.  Fortunately though it hadn't gone down without taking a carrack and a lancer with it.  And as that thought passed through his through his head, another lancer started emerging out of the blackness of space.  It too had smelled blood in the water and was now taking up position behind the carrack to lay into the nebulon.

Pushing his engines harder, Woodat gave the order to his guncrew to take out the lancer first.  The nebulon was lost, it was obvious, but Woodat hoped that it would hold out long enough to get him in position.  His single functional turbolaser battery was mounted below his ship, as was the lancer's.  If he could get himself above the lancer and behind the carrack, he'd be out of fire of either of their capital ship weapons. 

Luck was on Woodat's side.  As he pushed across the battlefield neither of the capital ships diverted their attention.  Several TIEs diverted their attack towards his ship, but Woodat's gunners started giving them trouble as soon as they arrived.  As he pushed his ship higher and further forward he brought his blockade runner over the lancer just as the nebulon imploded. 

"FIRE!" Ordered Captain Woodat, though his gun commander hardly waited for the order.  Turbolaser bolts blasted forth from under the runner, striking squarely in the back of the lancer.  The carrack, so focused on its earlier fight with the nebulon, now found itself nearly out of the fray entirely as Woodat had positioned the lancer between them.  It'd take a good minute for the carrier to fire up its engines and come about; a minute the runner desperately needed if it had any hope of surviving.

The lancer too realised its terrible position and started changing course.  several more shots crackled off its hull as it focused its blaster batteries on Woodat's runner.  The carrack's anti-aircraft blasters also were streaming towards the corvette, though with the lancer between them they were having a hard time contacting his ship.  Though meant to be anti-fighter weaponry, the mass of blasters coupled with the additional blasters from the TIE fighters were slowly withering away at Woodat's deflector shields and armour.

"Alright men.  I want you to break into two groups" came Woodat's voice over intercom.  "We only have a slim chance, so everyone must help.  I want engineers to get to the generators and start repairing immediately.  Keep this ship running, I don't care how!

Second group, take assault weapons and board using our escape pods.  I want you to knock out the bridge crew on that carrier. NOW MOVE!"

As Woodat said these words the lancer fired a single turbolaser volley into the blockade runner's side.  The imperial destroyer had managed to get itself into a proper firing arc, but too late. Returning fire, Woodat's gun commander placed another shot into the centre of the lancer, breaking the ship into pieces as the turbolaser blast blew apart the ship's engines.  A few cheers of cry came from Woodat's crew as the gunner reported the destruction of the enemy lancer, but were quickly silenced by another order from Woodat to repair.  With his shields now down to a third of their full strength, Woodat turned towards the carrack.  it was nearly turned around and if he didn't move across the back of it and behind it again, it would decimate the runner with its forward mounted turbolasers.  The heavy stream of blaster fire continued to rake his ship, with the repair crews struggling to keep the thing intact.

As the runner pushed back over the carrier Woodat's gun commander began planting shots across the ship's back.  Unfortunately, the carrack, larger and with a bigger crew compliment, was keeping its deflectors up dispite the barrage it was receiving.  To make matters worse the runner was still experiencing withering fire from the TIEs. The fighter-gunners could only cover the top and sides, and the TIE pilots knew this.  They kept up their runs from below, turning away before they entered the firing arcs of his gunners. 

Seeing this, Woodat turned his ship in line with the carrack and pushed his ship at full speed towards the carrier's flat back.  Pulling his ship in right above and behind the imperial one, Woodat began using it as a screen from below.  With the carrack blocking the lower section, the TIEs were again forced to attack from above.  This gave the runner time as the gun crew started breaking up their attacks and keeping them from making attack runs.  What's more, with his ship so close to the carrier his turbolasers would do much more devastating damage to the other ship's hull.

As Woodat ordered his crew to keep repairing, he noticed the carrack's armour was dropping.  As he was to later find out, several members of the boarding team had successfully gotten aboard and were then engaged in a firefight down the carrier's main hallway.  The crew, preoccupied with defending the bridge, no longer were able to repair the ship.  Even more amazingly, a few lucky blaster shots managed to take out the carrier's pilot, leaving the ship drifting for most the remainder of combat.

With the carrack no longer able to repair itself, Woodat's turbolasers were cutting away into it.  Constantly barking out orders to repair, Woodat held his ship in position above the carrier.  Blaster fire was still filling the sky.  Everywhere he looked he could see a stream of green fire coming in and impacting his ship.  Red streams answered them, pouring out towards the TIEs that were now forced to attack from above.  Every 20 seconds his ship shook from the explosions from his own guns, impacting the carrack at point blank range.

Then it happened.  Woodat saw the carrack take one last hit then start to break up.  Explosions apepared in a few places along its hull.  Firing up the engines again Woodat pulled his runner away to clear it of any possible blast radius.  The few remaining TIEs turned and fled as their mothership's guns fell silent and it shattered itself with a roaring explosion.  Stunned that they were still alive, Woodat's crew gave a resounding cheer.  The ship was a near-write off, but it was still flying.  What's more, it had taken on odds far greater than it could have hoped to have survived and won.  With that, Woodat enabled the hyperdrive and the battle concluded.

Fear the Woodzilla

Now to get back to actually arguing a bit.

Lag is something we hope to avoid, obviously.  There's no point making a game that no one can play.  It has to be realised though that you can't compare the titans to our capital ships, simply because DICE really screwed over the titan models in so many ways.  Whereas we can make an adequate model of a capital ship in 6-10,000 polys, DICE used a whopping 80,000 polys on the ship alone.  All the low and medium range systems should be rendering in a game is 100-150,000 polys as is, so to have all of them on just the model alone creates a large amount of graphics lag.

Secondly, they never fixed the gameengine, so you still get network lag when one col mesh drags another.  This is why people slide and stutter when the titans move.  Indeed, it's haunted us since 1942 with the carriers (and our capital ships in GC).  currently there is no fix, but there are workarounds.

For smaller capital ships (blockade runners, lancers, etc) it may not even be necessary to build an interior.  The ship, while relatively large, doesn't have to be boardable.  Indeed, we could just spawn three players into the Captain's seat and guns and the rest straight into the escape pod slots.

For the carrier vessels we just need to install force fields on the hangar doors so that they can't be boarded either.  These also could get people spawning directly into the seats (or being able to enter them from the hangar).  You'll notice that a lot of the time the movement slipping lag isn't really noticeable on the hangar end of the Titans.  It's only when you're trying to hit a target with your weapon do you ever see it.

And finally, for our *really* big ships we have a few options.  Firstly, we could just do the Titan thing where they lose their ability to move when their shields go down.  Or secondly, we could attempt a method whereby their interiors are linked to "teleport" spots.  you dock with them with your ship (or fly into their hangar) and you are then teleported to a spot on the map with the ship's interior layout.  It's actually a static but it also has PCOs inside of it that you can destroy (like titan consoles and the reactor core).  You blow those up and we then just detonate the real one on the map.  Note that we can also have entire ships fly in and out of these "teleport spots" if we really wanted, so you could crash your A-wing into a hangar or fly a TIE fighter out of a Star Destroyer.

And the last option we have (and my personal favorite) is to just disable the ship.  Fit the Y-wings and TIE bombers with ion cannons/bombs.  Have them knock a ship's engines out.  After that it's dead in space and boarding is easy   With any luck 2142 should allow us to do that without much grief.

Anyway.  Boarding is fun, but don't believe for a minute that we're going to throw away capital ship combat just so we can have more infantry combat.  We have plenty of places for the infantry combat already in our mod

Fear the Woodzilla