NO Warp Gates? Discussing their potential replacement, Space Highways.
- Thread starter Fingle
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Given even the smallest style of gate concept, the acceleration/hypergate is still technically the sizr of a station, ship-mounted microgates would take like most of the space in a 300m dreadnought hull to service things like strike craft and toss them out to maybe 10-30km. It's a supercool concept, but scaling the limitations down to fit on ships and still be balanced makes them mostly useless outside of something like a large fleet action and then they become just slightly less useless.
Disagree, that's where it'd be needed the most. Small stations are the least defensible, especially where it's company's only station because of low membership. That's also why I like scalable siege mechanics where cost of entry is low to moderate but the cost of combat scales proportionately to the participants. For instance the Sanction Vouchers idea, perfectly scalable when it afflicts all of an invader's stations with the debuff and/or all of its sieges with higher declaration costs.
But I digress, this is a warp thread not a siege thread.
Ostensibly, as far as I understand it, the station core anchors the station, preventing movement physics, and raises the safezone, preventing damage and weapon physics- that's two separate mechanical effects caused by the same object/system. There's no reason at all that anchoring and the safezone should be bound up in a rules sense even though they share the same origin. If they were bound up mechanically, dropping a safezone would remove the anchor. Though removing a station's anchor would drop the SZ because you're disabling the core, so I guess being anchored is sort of a precondition to putting up an SZ.
But I digress, this is a warp thread not a siege thread.
Ostensibly, as far as I understand it, the station core anchors the station, preventing movement physics, and raises the safezone, preventing damage and weapon physics- that's two separate mechanical effects caused by the same object/system. There's no reason at all that anchoring and the safezone should be bound up in a rules sense even though they share the same origin. If they were bound up mechanically, dropping a safezone would remove the anchor. Though removing a station's anchor would drop the SZ because you're disabling the core, so I guess being anchored is sort of a precondition to putting up an SZ.
or a big space hot dog bun, if we're going by anything like the old gate assets- the concept of a ship that carries a short-range gate of whatever type is cool, but it also feels really close to high technology that you shouldn't see much because it's both limited and expensive, making it impractical outside a select set of situations
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I completely agree, but in the beginning, it can’t happen like that, or the whole idea behind the devs wanting the players to lay down the infrastructure of the game goes out the window. If they do it how I expect they will do it in the long run, they will let the initial swarm of players reach the shortest distances by whatever means they figure out to be possible. Afterwards they will implement some kinda of warp system. I don’t know how they will do the intra-system travel though. In eve and ED, they have warp to this place and warp to that place and super cruise for intra-system travel, but the thing with those games is that everything that you can warp to or get to via super cruise is already an entity in the game, or in the case of ED, there are so many systems that it is ok to have a way of fast travel. Once SB gets up and running, I believe they will implement some means, probably like ED’s supercruise for intra-system travel, or maybe like other people have been saying with the hyperlanes that increase fuel efficiency but still do not allow for greater than max speed travel. Who knows, only time will tell 😁
They would increase speed too, by lowering space jelly. So not just fuel efficiency.
Unlike SE, in SB most ships won't reach even half of the max speed. Thus 2x-4x speed increase is quite useful.
Main advantage of such system is easy implementation. Area of space with diluted space jelly is simple numerical fix in the code. Unlike creating separated warp-space or detecting all the objects in the path.
It's also much less artificial than than early-collision warning, when we don't have the same functionality during normal flight.
Aren't you arguing about game mechanics that lack consistent logical explanation?
We're arguing about not forcing players to waste time. But nobody is forced to travel far away repetitively, unless he wants.
You can send your goods with other people, you'll be able to travel AFK in some forms of cryo-chambers (or even teleport your consciousness, who knows). There's plenty of people enjoying playing truck simulator. Nobody is threatening to take all your valuables overnight unless you take 3-hour trip.
Unlike SE, in SB most ships won't reach even half of the max speed. Thus 2x-4x speed increase is quite useful.
Main advantage of such system is easy implementation. Area of space with diluted space jelly is simple numerical fix in the code. Unlike creating separated warp-space or detecting all the objects in the path.
It's also much less artificial than than early-collision warning, when we don't have the same functionality during normal flight.
Aren't you arguing about game mechanics that lack consistent logical explanation?
We're arguing about not forcing players to waste time. But nobody is forced to travel far away repetitively, unless he wants.
You can send your goods with other people, you'll be able to travel AFK in some forms of cryo-chambers (or even teleport your consciousness, who knows). There's plenty of people enjoying playing truck simulator. Nobody is threatening to take all your valuables overnight unless you take 3-hour trip.
Yeah, but then you might as well make it a ship system like a warp drive if we're still keeping the same max speed and lowering drag constraints. Having it be a massive and expensive gate for such a trivial benefit isn't worth the cost or trouble to set up. And space drag lacks a consistent logical explanation, so warp gates don't really need one either, devs have said they want to do very fast speeds via gate systems and/or hyperlanes. Removing fast travel entirely isn't a replacement, you're not getting traction on this one, I think it's dumb.
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Honestly, I couldn’t care less what kind of fast travel there is in the beginning, my opinion before was based on the assumption that we wouldn’t be getting one anytime soon. However, I learned today from Lauri that fast travel in some form will be tested in CA, so that’s good enough for me, no matter what form it is 😁
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I wouldn’t mind a ship warp drive in some form, whether that be sort of like hyperdrive, or just straight up warping to a point of interest, as long as the materials to obtain one were significantly rare enough to at least slow EVERYONE down enough and to keep exploration a decently challenging part of gameplay.