New Unit Idea: Air Hangar

Theory:
This units works as a it sounds, a structure that can house, repair and rearm aircraft, and a large number of them. Rearming an repair is done at a MUCH slower rate than a traditional airpad.

It would have limited storage, and take time to launch aircraft (time dependent on type: fighters launch faster than bombers, swifts being the fastest, likhos slowest).

It would also run auto-defense, acting as a sort of mini-AI in that it would launch interceptors to hit incoming bombers and use scouting data to micro the interceptors away from AA.

Reason for this unit:
Honestly, I hate having 20+ planes circling around my air fac, and it would be nice to have a place to store and hide planes (from scouting and damage) for future use without having to land them in a massive cloak field.

Second reason is that micro managing fighters is a complete pain in the ass when they decide that chasing down 1 enemy fighter is a great idea, and then all die to AA.

Cost: 800M

HP: ~ 6000-8000

Repair and Rearm Rate: .25E

Max Storage: 40 Planes

Negatives: Destroys or captures all planes inside if destroyed or captured, respectively.

Practice:
I don't know if it is actually possible for the Spring Engine to store units in a "vault" akin to Age of Empires 2

Yes I know this is an incredibly stupid idea . . .

I thought the ideas of hiding/disappearing units strictly opposes the design that everything can be interacted with physically. Otherwise it would be possible to have a multi-unit transport for example.

One problem is that it would make it possible to hide how many air units you have in an un-scoutable way.

Also, while fighters could probably use some AA avoidance AI, I see no reason to not implement it directly into them, instead of into an intermediary unit.

Fighter screens being very vulnerable to enemy AA might also be an inescapable consequence from how small distances are in Zero-K overall. Your fighter screen needs to be at your frontline to be effective, but that will often put your fighters into range of things such as chainsaws. Fighters also need to maneuver during battle which tends to make them dip even more into enemy AA ranges, even if they aren't moving particularly far from the patrol route.

quote: I thought the ideas of hiding/disappearing units strictly opposes the design that everything can be interacted with physically. Otherwise it would be possible to have a multi-unit transport for example.

As far as I know multi-unit transport is also mostly being held back by difficulty of (robust) implementation rather than design concerns.

This unit would be useless for repair function. It would be used vs aa defense to tank dmg and then ground porc spammer would say that its unfair air buff. In which i agree. Especially for 800 metal cost which is far too low.
I don't see any need for plane hiding. Except for reef. But reef as aircraft supporting ship is trash and almost nobody uses it for aircraft repair.
Airpad could be improved adding few more repair/repair slots and lower repair/rearm rate. Plus adding on/off function for each airpad that it hold aircraft on ground. So you could allocate aircraft to stand ground without changing their own flying options just sending them to specially selected airpads. If this change would make airpad more costly then i suggest also improving aircraft factory who would need one or two extra repair/rearm slots.

Scylla with 40 or more missiles is bad enough (24k metal, more than a detriment's worth). Now imagine a hangar with 40 Lichos, that's 80k metal in a single building with a single point of failure.

For transports, I like how it's possible to attack both the transport and the unit being transported. It would probably make sense to remove stockpiling from Nukes entirely and to transform Scylla into a much cheaper single missile boat. Also it's not like I ever asked for Screamer to have a metal cost on its missiles.

As for protecting planes, I think it would be great if they weren't targetable by anti-air while landed. As for hiding your strength, I think that should be reserved to cloaking devices. Reef: How about a shielded repair pad? (Actual shield, not collision box shield) It could have a much stronger shield than usual since it's personal and only protects planes that can't shoot back.