It's always annoyed me how FTL works. I've always liked long journeys; they've always included a sense of serenity for me.
After FTL came out, I learned to embrace it. I adopted the mechanics and made it crewable, to fit my own play style. I like it, but stopping and starting kind of annoys me. I would like to present my suggestion for making it a little more elegant:
When press "t" And click on the FTL computer, you get two options: Sustained FTL field and momentary FTL field. Momentary FTL field is current mechanics, but sustained FTL keeps you in the FTL stream until you reach your destination. That seems a little overpowered, but it isn't.
Say in momentary FTL, it takes a minute to charge your FTL engines. It jumps 50km each time, and your destination is 400km away. In sustained FTL, divides the distance to your waypoint by the power of your FTL - in this case, that would be eight. Then it multiplies that by the amount it takes to charge your drive - so, eight minutes. You'd be in the FTL stream for eight minutes straight. Also, it would take double the time to charge your FTL.
This still seems a little overpowered, because even a shuttle could stay in the stream for a long time and slip passed FTL lines and never be detected. However, your ship would be drained of power as you traveled through the FTL stream, equivalent to the standard drain from momentary FTL. Every time you had a power outage, 5-30 seconds would be added to your journey, depending on your ship mass. And once you had a power outage, your power bar would automatically reset. So if you had a tiny shuttle with the FTL stats depicted above, and you ran out of power every minute, that would be forty seconds added to your journey. Here is a representation of this hypothetical journey:
Jump 1(1 min) -Power drain (5s)- Jump 2(1 min) -Power drain(5s)- Jump 3(1 min)-PD(5s)-Jump 4(1min)-PD(5s)-J5(1)-PD(5s)-J6(1m)-PD(5s)-J7(1m)-PD(5s)-J8(1m)-(PD5s).
In order to prevent being infinitely stuck in an FTL stream, (Unlikely - your power drain would have to be much faster than your FTL drive) you could exit it at any time and it would deposit you an appropriate distance from your target. Also, if you passed through a system owned by an enemy your FTL drive would automatically stop.
After FTL came out, I learned to embrace it. I adopted the mechanics and made it crewable, to fit my own play style. I like it, but stopping and starting kind of annoys me. I would like to present my suggestion for making it a little more elegant:
When press "t" And click on the FTL computer, you get two options: Sustained FTL field and momentary FTL field. Momentary FTL field is current mechanics, but sustained FTL keeps you in the FTL stream until you reach your destination. That seems a little overpowered, but it isn't.
Say in momentary FTL, it takes a minute to charge your FTL engines. It jumps 50km each time, and your destination is 400km away. In sustained FTL, divides the distance to your waypoint by the power of your FTL - in this case, that would be eight. Then it multiplies that by the amount it takes to charge your drive - so, eight minutes. You'd be in the FTL stream for eight minutes straight. Also, it would take double the time to charge your FTL.
This still seems a little overpowered, because even a shuttle could stay in the stream for a long time and slip passed FTL lines and never be detected. However, your ship would be drained of power as you traveled through the FTL stream, equivalent to the standard drain from momentary FTL. Every time you had a power outage, 5-30 seconds would be added to your journey, depending on your ship mass. And once you had a power outage, your power bar would automatically reset. So if you had a tiny shuttle with the FTL stats depicted above, and you ran out of power every minute, that would be forty seconds added to your journey. Here is a representation of this hypothetical journey:
Jump 1(1 min) -Power drain (5s)- Jump 2(1 min) -Power drain(5s)- Jump 3(1 min)-PD(5s)-Jump 4(1min)-PD(5s)-J5(1)-PD(5s)-J6(1m)-PD(5s)-J7(1m)-PD(5s)-J8(1m)-(PD5s).
In order to prevent being infinitely stuck in an FTL stream, (Unlikely - your power drain would have to be much faster than your FTL drive) you could exit it at any time and it would deposit you an appropriate distance from your target. Also, if you passed through a system owned by an enemy your FTL drive would automatically stop.
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