Should Chain Drives Remain?

[MrFURB]

For those of you who aren't a part of the discussions on the topic of emergent tech that take place here I will describe what a 'chain drive' is and what all the hubbub is about.

A chain drive utilizes the (around) 23 second maximum charge time of a jump drive computer by having a large number of computers with one module each and using an automatic logic clock to charge and activate them in sequence. After an initial spool-up time the chain drive will be charged and each jump drive computer will activate one after another.
Due to 'who knows' one jump drive computer won't attempt to jump while another is jumping, instead waiting for the first logic signal after the jump is complete before performing another jump, however non-charged jump drive computers will continue to charge while in jump. This allows large enough chain drives to continuously jump with no wait time in between.

You can see why it is this way when you look in the blockBehaviorConfig.xml within StarMade's data/config folder:

'Charge' Needed For Jump:
230000 + (1200 per jump drive module until 5% 'module to ship block' ratio) + (1 per jump drive module past 5% 'module to ship block' ratio)

'Charge' Provided Per Second:
10000 + (50 per jump drive module)

You can see from the above that until you reach the point of 5% of your vessel being jump drive modules connected to one computer, your charge time is nearly unchanged. Only after that point does the charge time begin diminishing.
On a front line warship with over 500,000 blocks, that is a huge investment in both resources and space; over 25,000 expensive jump drive modules need to be placed before the charge time begins to diminish, and at that point you need over 30,000,000 'charge' to jump, with each additional jump drive module placed giving 50 'charge' a second.

To help illustrate the difference in size and power cost, here is a quick 3 minute chain drive I put together a minute ago and a galaxy away:

(dun yell at me Jaas plz, only meant to show how the parts are set up)

That is why chain drives have proliferated through faction technology to the point they have.
Not to say that they are perfect, though. Since each jump drive computer charges at or slower than manually charging them they are susceptible to even tiny jump inhibitors that drain all of them at the same time.

My own opinion on this matter is that they are a player-made bandage for the problem of poor and expensive jump drive scaling. If the needed charge per jump drive module was lower people could see an improvement in their jump times without needing to hit that 5% ratio of jump drive modules to total ship blocks.

 

[TheHunter111_1]

Logic Drives are fine, they are (usually) 1 block systems so you have a ridiculously long initial spool up time, during this time 2 block inhibitor can completely shutdown your logic drive, and you have to charge it all over again, they also are quite large, you cannot really put them into a fighter and seeing as (afaik) jump drives are based on ship mass to calculate chargetime, the bigger ship you put it on, the slower the initial spooling time is, and when you arrive or are even in transit, a 2 block inhibitor completely shuts it down, or at the very least significantly decreases its jumping range.

And the only real advantage to them over normal drives is longer travel distance before you need to recharge for another ridiculously long initial spool up time

 

[Benevolent27]

I think chain drives are interesting because they require at least basic knowledge of logic to implement them. I think we should have more types of systems that are put together, because it adds something interesting to the game. There are currently pros and cons to chain drives, and I like those pros and cons.

But, if some people want an alternative system, I'll bounce an idea off you guys here. How about jump drives use a special kind of liquid energy, which can be stored in tanks? You then connect a jump drive to this and it uses a certain amount with each jump, depending on the size of the ship. A separate device would be used to convert energy to the special the liquid warp energy. This way it would allow a person to "charge" it up when it isn't in use, but would also require a person to wait if it's all used up. Perhaps a jump drive could emit a logic signal when left-clicked and display the total charge available on the icon when connected to a warp tank system. Within this system, someone may wish to build multiple tanks for redundency, in case one is damaged. They could also balance the speed of charge and the size of the tank for their ship. If someone wants a ship that can jump 10 times, then need to wait on a recharge, they can. If someone wants to build a small jumpship that charges quickly, they can do that as well. And in addition, there could be some interesting looking tanks that fill up and empty to give some animation to the whole jump drive process within the actual ship. They could also have separate energy converters which stay on all of the time to provide a trickle charge to the warp tanks, so that they refill while parked.

I think this would be a more interesting approach. What do you guys think?

 

[Jaaskinal]

Resident chaindrive person here- Furb pretty much hit on everything.

For the time being, I think they're somewhat necessary, but I feel like there's no significant choice in the engineering of them, which is somewhat of a bummer. All you really do is make the fastest, smallest clock possible, and you have a great chaindrive.

A while back it sounded like people wanted to integrate a hyperdrive system with the jumpdrive system, but tbh it would probably just be best to replace it.

 

[therimmer96]

infinitely, you say? That's an infinitely large claim, with infinitesimal proof %)

Install it on a 400-600m ship. Test it. Report back your results. Calculate drive block count, mass, and cost as well, both absolute numbers and % of the total ship.

When people's servers are crashing from having multiple galaxies loaded due to someone's chain drive...
When the chain driven behemoths arrive so lightning-fast and are crushed in battle...
I will raise my glass of icegrassohol in my lounge chair 1-2 jumps from spawn and cry out, "BALANCE!" and smile.

PS - the only boundary of a sandbox, is how far someone PLAYING IN IT can throw the sand. Think about that.

We installed a Chain Drive on Vengeance (1.5km long). By the time the lag had stopped and we could deactivate it, we was on the other side of the galaxy, in the space of time it would take to charge its normal jump drive.

They're OP as fuck

 

[Benevolent27]

We installed a Chain Drive on Vengeance (1.5km long). By the time the lag had stopped and we could deactivate it, we was on the other side of the galaxy, in the space of time it would take to charge its normal jump drive.

They're OP as fuck

What do you think about using liquid energy for jump drives so a player might balance their ship to allow for more than one jump per drive but which would also require warp energy storage for larger ships in order for them to jump (since jump drives would only have a static amount of capacity)?

If you'd like to see my full idea, I'd like to hear your feedback.

 

[Heillos]

For those of you who aren't a part of the discussions on the topic of emergent tech that take place here I will describe what a 'chain drive' is and what all the hubbub is about.

A chain drive utilizes the (around) 23 second maximum charge time of a jump drive computer by having a large number of computers with one module each and using an automatic logic clock to charge and activate them in sequence. After an initial spool-up time the chain drive will be charged and each jump drive computer will activate one after another.
Due to 'who knows' one jump drive computer won't attempt to jump while another is jumping, instead waiting for the first logic signal after the jump is complete before performing another jump, however non-charged jump drive computers will continue to charge while in jump. This allows large enough chain drives to continuously jump with no wait time in between.

You can see why it is this way when you look in the blockBehaviorConfig.xml within StarMade's data/config folder:

'Charge' Needed For Jump:
230000 + (1200 per jump drive module until 5% 'module to ship block' ratio) + (1 per jump drive module past 5% 'module to ship block' ratio)

'Charge' Provided Per Second:
10000 + (50 per jump drive module)

You can see from the above that until you reach the point of 5% of your vessel being jump drive modules connected to one computer, your charge time is nearly unchanged. Only after that point does the charge time begin diminishing.
On a front line warship with over 500,000 blocks, that is a huge investment in both resources and space; over 25,000 expensive jump drive modules need to be placed before the charge time begins to diminish, and at that point you need over 30,000,000 'charge' to jump, with each additional jump drive module placed giving 50 'charge' a second.

To help illustrate the difference in size and power cost, here is a quick 3 minute chain drive I put together a minute ago and a galaxy away:

(dun yell at me Jaas plz, only meant to show how the parts are set up)

That is why chain drives have proliferated through faction technology to the point they have.
Not to say that they are perfect, though. Since each jump drive computer charges at or slower than manually charging them they are susceptible to even tiny jump inhibitors that drain all of them at the same time.

My own opinion on this matter is that they are a player-made bandage for the problem of poor and expensive jump drive scaling. If the needed charge per jump drive module was lower people could see an improvement in their jump times without needing to hit that 5% ratio of jump drive modules to total ship blocks.

It's me, the other resident jump-drive guy, and I have a few minor corrections to make here.

The maximum charge time of a 1-module jump drive on a ship of any mass (no matter how large, unless said mass is game-breakingly large, which is self-explanatory) is approximately 46 seconds, not 23.

Regarding the formulas which affect charge time, it is worth noting that when below the 5% mark, decrease in charge time per extra module is quite a bit more than after 5%; although this could be what you are saying, and I have simply misinterpreted that. After 5%, diminishing returns kick in and the decrease in charge time per module grows progressively less. To illustrate this point, here's a nice graph.

Besides these quibbles, though, this is assuredly a sound explanation of what a chain drive is, how it works, and why it is such a prominent piece of technology.

Logic Drives are fine, they are (usually) 1 block systems so you have a ridiculously long initial spool up time, during this time 2 block inhibitor can completely shutdown your logic drive, and you have to charge it all over again, they also are quite large, you cannot really put them into a fighter and seeing as (afaik) jump drives are based on ship mass to calculate chargetime, the bigger ship you put it on, the slower the initial spooling time is, and when you arrive or are even in transit, a 2 block inhibitor completely shuts it down, or at the very least significantly decreases its jumping range.

And the only real advantage to them over normal drives is longer travel distance before you need to recharge for another ridiculously long initial spool up time

I'm afraid you rather overstate just how "bad" chain drives are. For a "modern" chain drive (eg: Jaaskinal's publically-available model, linked in my own signature and generally easy to find), charge times are, as far as I'm aware, a minute; 2 on a bad day. This is not very much more than the manual charge time of 46 seconds. It is also worth noting here that the same "modern" chain drive will jump continuously unless acted upon by an outside force (inhibitor, pilot pressing the Stop button, bullets, etc)

You are certainly correct that they are susceptible to inhibitors of literally any size greater than 1 module. This is the primary reason they can be considered balanced.

Initial spooling time is not actually affected greatly by ship mass; this is somewhat counter-intuitive, but is a neat result of the formulas at play. To see this in action, see the graph I linked in my reply to Furb, and play around with the sliders. You'll note that the charge time at x=1 never really moves past ~46 seconds (Although you'll note that the curve rises above 46 for a bit at greater x values and high z values, which is interesting). Because of this, chain drives are applicable to pretty much any size of ship.

 

[Mordrin]

I don't get how chaindrives are considered OP by some players? Any small fighter can halt a titan that is using chaindrive with just activating a few blocks of inhibitors. Inhibitors work a sector away, so just fly by close enough with a fast fighter every 30 sec to completely drain every computer in the chaindrive. And then your fleet of ion-frigates show up and the titan gets annihilated.
If there is a certain faction you're after, travel a few times between their HB and spawn or their allied HB and find out what sectors the jumps usually takes you too and place some inhibitors there, and a fleet perhaps?

Sure, in the future maybe the whole travel system will need a rework, but for now I think it works fine.

 

[Ithirahad]

infinitely, you say? That's an infinitely large claim, with infinitesimal proof %)

Install it on a 400-600m ship. Test it. Report back your results. Calculate drive block count, mass, and cost as well, both absolute numbers and % of the total ship.

Precisely.

When people's servers are crashing from having multiple galaxies loaded due to someone's chain drive...

To be fair, that's a bug. Having five sectors loaded at (4224, 52633, 10242) should ideally be no different from five sectors loaded at (2, 5, 20). It's not like the game has to load the intervening sectors, or even go through them to get the data - the needed data location is already stated.

 

[Comradecolonel]

I don't get how chaindrives are considered OP by some players? Any small fighter can halt a titan that is using chaindrive with just activating a few blocks of inhibitors. Inhibitors work a sector away, so just fly by close enough with a fast fighter every 30 sec to completely drain every computer in the chaindrive. And then your fleet of ion-frigates show up and the titan gets annihilated.
If there is a certain faction you're after, travel a few times between their HB and spawn or their allied HB and find out what sectors the jumps usually takes you too and place some inhibitors there, and a fleet perhaps?

Sure, in the future maybe the whole travel system will need a rework, but for now I think it works fine.

OP is probably not the best way to describe it as it doesn't work too well in combat. I think the point people are making is that it makes having a fast charging single drive for a larger ship pretty pointless.

 

[aRottenKomquat]

Seems to me that chain drives show an obvious flaw in the game's FTL mechanics. If chain drives could be patched out and replaced with a new system that is properly expensive for the benefit, I'd be fine with that.

Still waiting to see what the "hyperdrive" mechanic brings to the game...

 

[Sgtwisky]

I agree with people that have said this "Feature" is a player made band-aid to a larger issue with travel in the game.

At the same time though, I really love those kind of "Tech Advances" or "Workarounds" that the community thinks of. I actually didn't know about chain drives until this thread myself. I hope in the final iteration of the game, we no longer NEED these kind of workarounds, but rather can eek that last 5 or 10 percent efficiency out of player made logic systems. It rewards players for mastering serious game systems and using them creatively. I do agree that it shouldn't feel mandatory for a faction or individual to use those player made solutions to in game problems. Which means the FTL system likely needs a good hard looking at by the Dev's.

I also find it interesting that the system seems oddly balanced atm. It has flaws, but for the moment I say work on more important facets of the game. Then do an FTL overhaul.

my 2 cents on the matter anyway.

 

[Keptick]

It's possible to achieve very good travel times with normal jump drives as well. The trick is to start charging as soon as the ship enters jump. By doing so, the jump drive will be almost charged by the time you come out of the jump animation (assuming the jump drive is large enough). The advantage of this is that it's much harder to block with inhibitors. It's still not nearly as fast as chain drives, though.

In large ships you can just have a normal (large) jump drive and a chain drive, so the vulnerability to inhibitors is inexistant, and you still get chain drive functionality for long travels (so it's better than just a normal drive).

 

[Lecic]

In large ships you can just have a normal (large) jump drive and a chain drive, so the vulnerability to inhibitors is inexistant, and you still get chain drive functionality for long travels (so it's better than just a normal drive).

Or you can have no large JD at all and kill anything that inhibits you (or die trying).

 

[Madman198237]

All you really have to do to avoid chaindrives is to follow keptick's suggestion- make a jump shuttle/cargo vessel with a positively huge jumpdrive and backup JD, and lots of cargo space, to carry around a disassembled fleet with you and set it up wherever you end up. Assuming you even want the fleet.

 

[Sgtwisky]

hum... this thread has made me want to incorporate chain jumping into my drone carrier ships.

 

[Heillos]

All you really have to do to avoid chaindrives is to follow keptick's suggestion- make a jump shuttle/cargo vessel with a positively huge jumpdrive and backup JD, and lots of cargo space, to carry around a disassembled fleet with you and set it up wherever you end up. Assuming you even want the fleet.

I simply can't understand why you'd spend resources and time trying to avoid chaindrives; they serve a useful and balanced purpose, and although they are a player-made reaction to the poor fast-travel mechanic the game offers, they serve their purpose exceedingly well.

As Lecic noted, the only thing to be gained from a large jump drive vs a chain drive is the ability to escape; useful for peaceful vessels like freighters, but undesirable aboard a warship, as this would simply encourage cowardice and a lack of content.

 

[kiraen]

the only thing to be gained from a large jump drive vs a chain drive is the ability to escape; useful for peaceful vessels like freighters, but undesirable aboard a warship, as this would simply encourage cowardice and a lack of content.

Actually, I think it's the other way around.
Civilian ships rely on speed for delivering cargo and passengers.
Military ships go for robust/sturdy systems to give chase and are likely to be carrying the inhibitors.
[DOUBLEPOST=1463547735,1463547585][/DOUBLEPOST]On further thought, it could really go either way.
It depends on the intended role for the ship. Both systems have their pros and cons.
I really don't see a problem.

 

[Winterhome]

Actually, I think it's the other way around.
Civilian ships rely on speed for delivering cargo and passengers.
Military ships go for robust/sturdy systems to give chase and are likely to be carrying the inhibitors.
[DOUBLEPOST=1463547735,1463547585][/DOUBLEPOST]On further thought, it could really go either way.
It depends on the intended role for the ship. Both systems have their pros and cons.
I really don't see a problem.

Big, heavy jumpdrives mean that a ship is militarily relatively weak for its size. It can't put out the firepower needed to effectively fight when a huge portion of the ship is a coward-tier jumpdrive, on account of the massive power consumption taking up what could have been used for thrust, guns, or shields.

Some of us feel that if you're flying a combat ship and you get attacked by another player, you should stand amd fight.

 

[kiraen]

But if someone drops a few inhibitor drones and escapes, no matter what you think of them, you no longer have the ability to chase after them.
If only you had spent a little more space on a robust drive you might have actually won that fight, but it seems today you were not the smart one.
Coward he may be, but you could not defeat him. All is fair....