Given Lauri's most recent statement on the direction of warpgates as they enter the design phase, I have thoughts and questions relating to their deployment.
First, one-gate "accelerators" seem to be off the board for the time being; I'd been expecting to chain several of these together to create a supply highway to build the other end of a more advanced two-gate pair. Kind of disappointed we won't have that linear utility and have to rely on the super-big, hard-to-set-up stuff from the start. Second, Lauri's base range appears to be 5,000km, expectations had been, to my recollection, that tier-one gates would be limited to several hundred kilometers at best and later tiers would be used to build such super-massive highways. While on the scale of millions of kilometers, 5Mm doesn't sound like much, for traveling around the belt or to the moons, it's pretty significant especially for "short-range" intrabelt travel. Lastly, I'm curious as to how gate-pairs will be aligned to each other and how the hyperlane they create will function if the alignment is really bad, as well as how any alignment assist the gates might have will function if you build multiple gates into a single station or if that will make them impossible to use in such a way. The following are suggestions based on these three points and a poll is included to measure general support for each idea while discussion goes on in the thread.
*Bring back single acceleration gates: these gates can be as small as 20m wide and have a power cost based on their width (and thus the width of the hyperlane), the speed boost, and their falloff range, and have a startup power drain of ~20x the energy required to maintain the hyperlane to prevent its abuse as a ship-mounted system; with the speed boost dropping along a gradient by 50% with each increment of the falloff range dropping straight to zero at the end of the fourth falloff increment (i.e. falloff = 10km; 0km-10km = 100%, 10km-20km = 100-50%, 20km-30km = 50-25%, 30km-40km = 25-12.5%, 40km+ = 0%)
*Tier One warpgate pairs should have a short range of about ~500km (I prefer lower), meant for creating basic highway chains and linking together economic zones; higher tiers would have a longer maximum range to correspond with a much larger size and power cost, shorter highways would be better suited to the one-gate "acceleration gates", creating "back roads" and small long-distance supply hyperlanes for constructing the larger hypergate pairs
*Warpgates should have some manner of alignment assistance to aim the sending gate in the desired direction and create a hologram/blueprint of the receiving gate at the desired distance for ease of location and allowing the easy construction of "warp hubs" built around a series of outbound gates with their returning pairs built off the frames of the naturally-aligned receiving gates; this feature would also allow the easy replacement of a destroyed gate so long as its pairmate was still intact
First, one-gate "accelerators" seem to be off the board for the time being; I'd been expecting to chain several of these together to create a supply highway to build the other end of a more advanced two-gate pair. Kind of disappointed we won't have that linear utility and have to rely on the super-big, hard-to-set-up stuff from the start. Second, Lauri's base range appears to be 5,000km, expectations had been, to my recollection, that tier-one gates would be limited to several hundred kilometers at best and later tiers would be used to build such super-massive highways. While on the scale of millions of kilometers, 5Mm doesn't sound like much, for traveling around the belt or to the moons, it's pretty significant especially for "short-range" intrabelt travel. Lastly, I'm curious as to how gate-pairs will be aligned to each other and how the hyperlane they create will function if the alignment is really bad, as well as how any alignment assist the gates might have will function if you build multiple gates into a single station or if that will make them impossible to use in such a way. The following are suggestions based on these three points and a poll is included to measure general support for each idea while discussion goes on in the thread.
*Bring back single acceleration gates: these gates can be as small as 20m wide and have a power cost based on their width (and thus the width of the hyperlane), the speed boost, and their falloff range, and have a startup power drain of ~20x the energy required to maintain the hyperlane to prevent its abuse as a ship-mounted system; with the speed boost dropping along a gradient by 50% with each increment of the falloff range dropping straight to zero at the end of the fourth falloff increment (i.e. falloff = 10km; 0km-10km = 100%, 10km-20km = 100-50%, 20km-30km = 50-25%, 30km-40km = 25-12.5%, 40km+ = 0%)
*Tier One warpgate pairs should have a short range of about ~500km (I prefer lower), meant for creating basic highway chains and linking together economic zones; higher tiers would have a longer maximum range to correspond with a much larger size and power cost, shorter highways would be better suited to the one-gate "acceleration gates", creating "back roads" and small long-distance supply hyperlanes for constructing the larger hypergate pairs
*Warpgates should have some manner of alignment assistance to aim the sending gate in the desired direction and create a hologram/blueprint of the receiving gate at the desired distance for ease of location and allowing the easy construction of "warp hubs" built around a series of outbound gates with their returning pairs built off the frames of the naturally-aligned receiving gates; this feature would also allow the easy replacement of a destroyed gate so long as its pairmate was still intact
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