A raiding party can travel via aethership to a plane, dock, and use their ship as a safe haven from which to raid the plane. I'm not sure where the docks are on Celestia, Nil, or Earth, but the dock on Water is in the middle of the starry sea, and the dock in Ethereal is in the middle of Faethorn. There is no way to block access to these docks once the ship has landed, and no way to raid the ship from the docks. Traveling into the ship does not take balance or equilibrum or even movement balance, and nothing can hinder it (I think).

I personally think there should be more ways to stop raiders who are using an aethership as a base of operations. Even with the aethercraft specializations, there is no skill there to adress this, only one to stop the raiders from landing in the first place if you have prior warning and a ship already at the dock.

Opinions? Suggestions of what to do? I used this tactic to raid water during the event two days ago, and it was really easy to escape, and noone could really do a thing about it. Distort does nothing, lying in wait does nothing, chasing does nothing, etc.

I'm assuming it isn't distortable. Simple solution would be to make the dock distortable.

Only non-prime docks then, or make non-prime docks take eq/balance, or make non-prime docks allow anyone to access the ships docked there regardless of the ship's access list

Greaterpentagram the docks.

That's what I meant, it'd just be for griefing if you could distort the City/Commune docks.

Make the docks themselves targettable from aetherspace.

Non-prime docks could be damaged to the point where no incoming ship can use them and any docked ship that remains docked is destroyed and returned to prime.

Carrying capacity for aetherships. Something small, like 2 people max per room in the ship, so larger ships actually have a benefit. A 1-room superfast ship should be a freaking scout craft, not a troop transport, damn it.

(along with this, allow for giant ships to carry more weapons please, so there's even less of a drawback for having a large ship )

Doesn't solve the problem at all, imo.

It makes it much more costly to send a raiding party to Cosmic.

Tesseract.

D'oh.

Any problems with shootable docks?

I suggested awhile ago that ships docked outside of city or commune port should be breachable from the docks, to a limited extent.

I seem to recall from somewhere, someone suggesting that docks have a number of turrets for repelling raiders. (Think it was cities having turrets that phase into aetherspace or something, don't recall exactly). Of course, that's no good if you can't target the ship because it's docked...

So have a way to disengage a ship from the dock. Takes a short while, half a minute maybe, and the ship is then forcibly undocked. Add a time limit where the ship is barred from docking again, so they can't just re-dock straight away - biological rejection, heh.

This way, the dock becomes a strategic point that the raiders have to be careful to control. If they're on the plane raiding and leave the dock unattended, their ship could be left afloat and wasting power until it implodes and they won't have their easy way out. Or if they sit on the ship and try to wait for another chance at attacking, they can be ejected and shot at by the dock turrets. The turrets could be made targetable from aetherspace as well, but only when manned. So the raiders can either risk it to stay and destroy the turrets or they can run away with their tail between their legs.

One other possibility might be to have a way for ships to scan docks for other ships (probably using the empath grid) and attack them that way. Probably best for that to happen at docks other than Prime (or at least not at the Aetherplex where everything is connected) to stop idiots from going around and blasting people who are sitting around in their manse/ship. Though I guess... you snooze you lose... Anyway. This would give defenders another way to repel raiders, while conversely giving the raiders another strategic objective to keep in mind - destroy the defending navy first. Granted, that's easy to do if you just fly up unannounce and blow the unmanned ship away, but it's a rough suggestion.

Maybe have something of a wait time to undock and load dock. Have it made sure that you tether the ship to the dock. If it's not tethered and you try to dock it, you can fall and break your bones. If you try to fly and it's tethered, you have a chance to injure the ship. And perhaps when you are going down from the ship, there could only be one person who can go down at a time. Maybe if that means there be a different room called bridge when you are going down, and only one person or two people can be there at a time, so you can hold specific defence in that room. If you choose to jump from the ship onto the dock, you would then have a chance to break your bones, or lose something in the transit.
If you want to stop the ships, maybe make it possible to web it. Instead of writhe, as a ship can't do that, you have to do something like CUT WEB on specific parts of the ship to leave. And if it's webbed, then you can board the ship by CLIMB WEB.

Just a thought.