Spent the last 45 min or so trying to whip up a mobile shipyard by playing with the things the carrier produces. Essentially, I want to make a semi-self-replicating carrier (I was thinking about making it make Kol battleships, but a free, build time 1 carrier that builds itself was too funny to pass up)
The fundamental problem is that I haven't figured out how to do so, and I've tried a bunch of different things.
The three ways I approached the problem are the following:
1. ideal solution is to just have it produce the ship itself by substituting squadtypeentitydef variable from squadtechbomber to frigatetechcarrier. I didn't have much faith in this working as it seemed this required a entitytype squad to work, but I tried it anyway. didn't work.
2. set up a dummy squad file that has a total of 1 ship, and references frigatetechcarrier, similar to how the squads now reference fightertechcombat, etc. this didn't work, core dump as usual.
2.5. copy the squad file and make it reference a new file called fightertechfrigate, with the contents copypasted from frigatetechcarrier. I later realized this was the exact same thing as #2 except with a new file, but oh well. this didn't work anyway.
3. gave the carrier a entity type of the planet module shipyard. i didn't have much faith in this working either - and it didn't, as it was missing half the variables used in the shipyard data type.
So, dear modders, has anyone figured out to solve this problem? I think the way to do it is really #2(.5), but every time I make a squad file based off the bomber and reference the carrier, it still doesn't work!