Fleet Carriers is a feature update to Elite Dangerous Horizons (3.7) released on June 9 2020. I had ownership of Fleet Carrier update from server side, including: requirements gathering, design, implementation, deployment, monitoring and maintenance. I was also responsible for running two beta's on our public test servers.
Fleet Carrier's add an entire new dimension to the Elite Dangerous galaxy, with the ability for players to own and run their own space stations. In addition, the player owner of a Fleet Carrier has the ability to pilot it through the galaxy, jumping from system to system until they find the perfect location. Alternatively, the player may want to use their Fleet Carrier as a transportation system, by allowing other players to board before jumping across the galaxy together.
Fleet Carriers are cross platform and run in real-time. Once an owner sets a jump or changes the state of an onboard service, all players receive the update via IRC data channels. This allows us to synchronise the entire Fleet Carrier experience not only between players inside a single instance, but across all players regardless of platform.
There are a few key technologies that make this possible. IRC for pushing data and time synchronisation to the client, with each starsystem and Fleet Carrier having a dedicated IRC channel. MySQL & MongoDB for storing the state of Fleet Carriers, their services and the piloted route. And a Scheduled Tasks system to run departure and arrival code in sync with the in-game jump event allowing the server to: notify players in the arrival system of the time/location for the approaching Fleet Carrier, move all player characters to the new location and move their stored ships, modules & data.