Why can't we summon ground vehicles without spawning our ship? Is this intended or a bug?
TL;DRGround vehicles likely count as spaceships and the restriction isn't a design intention, possibly originally a performance measure, and ships designed to carry vehicles should eventually let you spawn them.
I think this is just because ground vehicles are counted as spaceships. I don't actually know if that's intentional or not.
It's not, but as it stands, you can only have one summoned vehicle at the moment. If you've got one out there, it just goes. I think we may have even done something for 3.6 for that, because I'm sure I saw a forum post. It's not something either of us actively deal with.
Are we safe saying that it's not a design intention? We're not sitting here saying we want it forever to be a ship or a vehicle, because obviously many ships are designed to carry vehicles.
For ships that are designed to come with vehicles, you'll eventually be able to spawn the vehicles in them. But if you wanted to spawn a PTV and a Valkyrie separately, you should be able to do that and just load it up and then go on your travels.
Honestly, I think originally that decision was made as a performance improvement to stop having too many vehicles on the server, because a lot of people have a lot of ships.
Just spawn a ship, let somebody take it out, then spawn a ship, move it out. Because somebody would try to spawn their entire fleet just to take a picture of it.
And someone would do that at the landing pads, seeing the framerate tank.