Thought about that, but abandoned the idea of an Autopilot or Route Planer for the sake of simplicity and travel time, now i base my work on the idea of using L-Points as simple entry and exit points, meaning that you could use any L-Point as exit as long as its in range of your drives max range, that would also increase the importance of large jump drives beyond mearly a short charge time.
In order to do that, you need reaction time. People can jump in cloaked/jammed I believe, and it takes all of 0.5 seconds to fire off swarmers and jump out. As soon as they are fired, you cant change their target, so your strategy is moot with the current system.
it takes 5 seconds to lockon, plus the few seconds for the missile to hit. and if someone does notice the attacker, they are most likely toast as most alpha damage ships have relatively low shielding for their size.
If somebody notices the attacker, the attacker may notice that he got noticed and jumps out.
"Lock on". The problem isn't Missile/beam (which still has instant lock with turret AI btw, so lock time is moot), but swarm missiles, which do not have a lock time at all. The lock is instant, and the best you can do is jump away, or purge all turrets and docked items and hope that missiles were locked to some of those.
What exactly is the problem with this? If you'd rather charge a single jump drive and go 8 sectors at a time for the same travel time (probably faster, actually, due to the singular drive having faster charge than a large number of small ones), you can do that. In fact, I'd say that's relatively balanced. You can go much faster, but only 8 sectors at a time and with increased risk of being attacked while charging, or you can spend AGES charging numerous drives and go the whole distance at once.
Because it's safer staying in one sector and charging all your jump drives, as opposed to stopping and jumping in sectors that may have pirate stations and whatnot. Insta jumping also removes a part of combat gameplay, which is capturing and holding territory. The idea of fleets of ships skipping over most of your space to attack a single station or point is not fun. It makes it near impossible to defend.
Depends on your thrust:mass ratio and server speed limit. Generally, I don't have a problem outrunning Alpha station missiles at 100% overdrive. I'm not sure of the speed, though. But I did leave the missiles in the dust, so you probably need about 300 m/s to out run them.
Nah, it depends on what type of missiles wants a piece of you, unles the admin changed the weapons multiplications, every weapons projectile speed is based on the speed limit.
If you build it less than 100% slave, it will go over the speed limit, easily. I think with about 50%, you'd probably have ten missiles going at approximately 149.5m/s. To outrun that, you'd need to have at least 5% of your ship's mass dedicated to overdrive, at the bare minimum. And that gives you just .5m/s over the missiles. You're toast if a ship jumps in and dumps swarmers right on top of you, because there's just no way you'll accelerate in time to outrun, and it's too close for your PD to do any good.
You make a good point. I think station mounted interdiction systems that can completely prevent enemy jumps in an 8 sector radius sphere would be a good solution to preventing enemies from completely bypassing defenses, while still allowing people just traveling long distances to do so.
I like the idea of station interdiction systems. However, traveling distance in one shot still is detrimental to the game's health because it makes traveling much safer.
People will select the unfun option given the chance , for security or combat effectiveness. Game design in which the unfun option outcompetes the others is broken.
The only "danger" that comes from jumping is landing right next to a Pirate Station Alpha and getting instakilled by its nukes because you were in a small ship without the capacity to survive it. People DO NOT encounter each other in the middle of space nowhere near a faction base, unless one of the people is using cheats or tricks to track the positions of other players. Even with a "long range jumper," you can still get instakilled by PSA when you land.
I do see your point. However, this is an issue with other aspects of the game. Your argument hinges on the fact that currently, the biggest danger from enemy station is being insta nuked. However, when we have more natural objects, and the AI locking on to radar jammed ships bug is fixed, and we have actual trade routes and what not (Places where players travel frequently) that negates your argument.
Supply and demand. Some parts of the galaxy would spawn with more ores and other resources than others. This would create trade routes because one faction may build their base in a certain area with say, lots of larimar, and they'd be able to produce shields cheaply. A war mongering faction may want to buy some, so you'd probably have ships going back and forth. There was a good thread on it, but I don't know where to find it.
I've been pondering this, the relevance and implications of what you said didn't sink in until today. If I get you right, a docked ship can jump it's parent ship???
On the first point, the answer is no: last time I tried, a docked craft cannot jump while attached to the parent ship. Rail docked ships might be working differently because of the nature of the dev build being weird, if that's what you're using.
No. That's not what it is. You can use an escape pod with a pre-charged jump drive to escape, and it can jump regardless of physical obstacles in the way, so you can have it safely secured deep inside your ship.
Oh. Yeah, not really relevant to this discussion. I somehow suspect that's only something an rper would try anyway, the rest of us would go down with our ships (like a good....rper captain?). On a practical level I can't imagine that if you're about to get cored that you would be able to get to your escape pod, since with my luck I'd have to hop through every turret I had to get there anyway.
