Jump Drives and... Stars?: A proposal to expand the effective size of the universe.

    Ithirahad

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    The Problem: In their current state, jump drives are a largely uninteresting mechanic. They're slow and annoying to use normally, and become entirely too fast and too powerful as chain drives - the end result being that the vastness of space is effectively made obsolete, as players can simply skip over nearly all of it and even cross the vast gulf between galaxies in less time than it would take to walk to the nearby street corner. Directly removing chain drives by some mechanical alteration would simply put us back to where we started, with boring, slow, and short-ranged FTL drives.
    So, how do we fix this? A straight buff to jump drives?
    Nope. If we increase jump range, chain drives become incredibly fast, and normal drives are still uninteresting and will tend to take too long to function on most ships. Buffing jump drives to any meaningful extent also means that dedicated jump ships (light vessels made primarily out of jump modules and power systems) will go incredibly fast, crossing galaxies in the span of minutes with nothing to worry about. This reduces the size of the galaxy significantly; all those star systems and void systems become largely meaningless fluff on a map.

    If we increase charge speed instead, it simply becomes too easy to go too far too fast. Chain drives would no longer require long downtimes to power back up, and it would become quite feasible to build large drive array blocks that can jump infinitely without ever running out of charges and having to stop for a few minutes. (Large warships with smaller non-chain jump drives would also travel faster, even if chain drives were removed outright. This can arguably be considered a good thing, but it seems to go against Schine's intentions for travel speed in the game, and it also means that large assets can move around the galaxy quickly with little difficulty or risk. This seems counterproductive.)

    So, if buffing jump drives makes the galaxy feel smaller, and that's apparently a bad thing, why don't we nerf jump drives, and maybe chain drives, instead? Won't that result in a bigger, more immersive game world?
    No.

    Believe me, it will not, even if chain drives are eliminated from the game. Some of the more RP-oriented players might enjoy the ideal scenario that would come from the resulting balance, where jump drives are used for short-distance travel and long expeditions are required to explore deeper into the galaxy and place down warpgates, but the actual result is that travel just becomes even more boring and takes longer. Everyone will mostly have to stay within a few systems around spawn, which effectively reduces the size of the game area just as much as strong jump drives do. This approach also brings back an old issue of reclusive players simply drifting out into faraway territory and avoiding any and all PvP threats, as few people have the time to hold the left mouse button for an hour just to attack some dude's faction, and fewer still have the patience.

    Okay, then, what if they add a warp drive like Star Trek, or maybe some kind of hyperdrive?
    You could, and I'd love to see something like that introduced into the game, but this would be hard to balance. While the warp drive was awesome on Star Trek, and would be great to have in real life, in a game, creating something like that without some tweaks would leave us with what is essentially a prettier, more polished chain drive, with all the balance issues they bring with them. You'd essentially be able to hit a button and fly anywhere you wanted with minimal difficulty, a short travel time, and no risk. To mitigate this, hyperspace with dangerous properties and strange physics (as seen in Babylon 5 or the Warhammer 40k universe) is another potentially appealing option, but that comes with its own balance challenges - Too much risk or difficulty, and many players will find it too difficult or simply annoying to navigate hyperspace; too little and we are again left with a gold-plated chaindrive once players learn the mechanics.

    You also have to remember that creating a warp/hyperdrive mechanic that is fun, does not cause server performance issues, and does not make interstellar travel too easy... would probably take entirely too much time, with so many other pressing issues around for the devs to handle. A hyperdrive for capital ships would be an interesting thing to see later on, but for now this is beyond the scope of what we really need. Therefore...
    I propose a solution unlike any I've seen yet - one which I hope will be neither too hard to implement, nor too rife with balance-related pitfalls.

    I propose...

    ...drumroll please...

    ...That jump drives use stellar technobabble of some kind - stellar gravity well? Radiation? IDK. - to power their jumps.

    wat? Why and how does this fix anything? What does this even mean?
    It means that jump drives would only work normally within a certain distance from stars, which could be displayed on the map. Outside of that radius, jump drives can't charge up, and jumps would be limited in range to around 10 sectors. Jumping from outside of the radius would also discharge all of the jump drives on a ship at once, so trying to blindly use a chaindrive the way that you used to would likely result in one long jump (away from whatever star you were charging up at), one short jump (from the middle of nowhere), and a long time charging your drives back up at whatever system you arrive in.

    If you jump while within the star's 'jump radius,' any other charged jump drive computers keep their charge, and your jump has a much longer maximum range - around three systems.

    Larger stars have the same jump radius, but charging a jump drive at a large star results in 1.25 times the charging speed, and you jump 1.5 times as far as you would jump from a normal-sized star. Accordingly, you'd go half as far jumping out from a dwarf star, and would have .75x your normal charging speed. Double star systems would allow you to charge twice as fast and jump three times as far as a single normal star would, due to gravitational wave interactions between the two masses.

    But what about my base? Do I have to fly to the sun every time I want to charge up and jump somewhere? Ugh, that sounds boring...
    Yeah, it would be boring, Random Person. To avoid this, I propose the addition of a Jump Field Generator block. This block could only be placed on stations (and eventually capital ships), and it would allow all allied ships in the station's sector to charge up your jump drive at the same speed as a normal star, although your jump range would be only half as far. It would cost something like 660,000 e/s, so it would require a fairly formidable power system to be installed before it could be deployed, but Trading Guild stations would provide a jump field to anyone for free, as long as they aren't an enemy, so jumping around in Trading Guild space is significantly easier.

    Up to three Jump Field Generators could be installed on a station, increasing jump range from the station from 0.5 up to 1x and then 1.5x normal star jump range, and charge time from 1x up to 1.5 then 2x, though of course this would also increase station power consumption.

    Jump Field Generator effects would stack with a star's gravitational field, though the generator's effect would be divided in half. This means that jumping from a station with three Jump Field Generators in range of a normal star would give you (1.5 (station) / 2) = 0.75 + 1 (star) = 1.75x jump range, and a station with two Jump Field Generators in range of a dwarf star would yield (1 (station) / 2) = 0.5 + 0.5 (star) = 1.0x jump range, the same as a normal star with no station. Charge times would stack with no nerf, so a double star with a station that has all three field generators would result in a whopping 4x charge time. Combined with the 3.75x jump range, this makes such a station a great strategic asset, allowing for quick mobilization of a fleet to anywhere within a huge radius. Controlling such a station would be awesome, until you realize that everyone else wants one too, and they don't want to share the system...

    OPTIONAL: When destroyed, Jump Field Generators could produce a 2km-wide pulse, discharging any jump drives within range.
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    I believe that these alterations of StarMade's FTL system would deal with most of the issues people would like to see covered in an FTL revamp - more interesting mechanics, more relevance for warpgates, nerfing of incredibly overpowered chain drives, and removal of easy void crossings - without the two undesirable aspects that often come up in many proposals for FTL rebalances: chain drives being entirely broken, or excessive amounts of coding work. With this system, efficient and effective jumping would require some strategy, warpgates would become the reliable, long-distance mode of travel they were always intended to be, and chain drives would preserve their utility as a very convenient, time-saving logic invention, while losing their incredibly OP ability to effortlessly cross entire galaxies faster than you can say "Schine plz nerf".

    Random Thoughts and After-edits
    • Hm, trans-galactic races would become very interesting under this system. Have a defined start point at one end of the galaxy, and a defined endpoint somewhere far away.
      • May the best stellar navigator win! :D
    • Trying to cross the void between galaxies using FTL under this system would be... interesting. You'd need to drop jump field generator structures every time you land in a system... That would get huge and expensive very fast :P
      • Also, whenever station building is switched over to a shipyard-like mechanic, this would become very long and - likely - very impractical.
      • At that point, you'd likely be better off just slow-boating through the void than trying this, but whenever Saber gets his spooky scary void terrors ingame that won't work so nicely either. It would become, at the very least... nontrivial. The image of an immense and heavily-armed colony ship comes to mind.
    • Theoretically you could also use a "matryoshka doll"/"nesting doll" jump ship with a huge number of jump ships chain-docked, a marker beam, and a warpgate blueprint... You would then charge all the jump drives, then keep jumping until you run out of ships, then place down a warpgate, set the gate to send you back, and then get more ships and repeat the process starting from your new warpgate... But that would probably be inefficient compared to just hauling a ton of huge jump field generators with you.
    • Perhaps charging up a jump drive from within a star's burn radius gives you a very large buff to charge speed, which would make small, heat-shielded jump ships ("sunships") the fastest mode of travel... Heatshielding would preferably have a high power cost, though, and be really heavy, otherwise everyone would use this.
    • A warning message if you're going to jump into a void system might be good. Something similar to the message you get from dealigning or exiting from a ship that is traveling really fast. Otherwise players might do blind jumps and get themselves stuck between spiral arms or something.
     
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    Lone_Puppy

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    lol, I love how you counter your own arguments. :)
     

    nightrune

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    I feel like this is a very inspired response to the jump dynamics of the current game.

    I can be looked at a debuff to current jump mechanics. It doesn't remove chain drives it just renders them useful but highly inefficient since the fastest way is no longer a straight line between points or you could find your self doing lots of small jumps.

    I think in this scenario the UI becomes very important to teach users intuitively how to navigate, but jumps in this form sound way more fun. That's something I would love to have in starmade.
     
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    Ithirahad

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    It doesn't remove chain drives it just renders them useful but highly inefficient
    Yep, though as I see it, they're just as 'efficient' as they are now if scaled for the possible levels of efficiency under this system. You could completely avoid ever having to actually manually charge up if you use a chain drive properly and don't try to go too far.
     

    Lone_Puppy

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    I like where you are going with this. It requires more skill to your travel, at the same time allowing people to keep their chain drive.

    Personally I kinda like the jump drive the way it is and chain drives the way they are. Purely for convenience.
    However, I would welcome a challenge and this looks like a good one. Kind of reminds me of the hyperspace drive in Elite where you had to refuel it. Either by buying fuel or using fuel scoops to scoop plasma from a star.

    Something else I wish we had, is something the older versions of Elite had. The Torus jump. It wasn't FTL, it was more like an afterburner or overdrive for standard engines.
     
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    What about station jump gates? perhaps those should be rethought out: where instead of acting like a jump drive, they act like a worm hole.

    you link one gate to another, and a sector is limited to only one gate. this will be very important for both balance and give players a reason to fight over stations.

    it also gives you a reason to build and claim stations in single player. I find myself salvaging 2/3s of the stations for scrap bits and refining those back into mesh and crystal.

    The longer the distance + the bigger the size will make the gate require more power to operate.

    The thing is, i love the current jump drive system. You can lose a ship, and if it is not part of a fleet, then it is lost. So if you hear of a "lost ship" on a server, guess what, you have something to look for. If you are a server admin, you can seed great ships into the server right after restart by turning on a chain drive and letting it do it's work. Gives the scrubs a reason to explore rather than eat up all the asteroids.

    You also need that emergency 8 sector jump in case of pirate attack when you are starting out.

    There are so many shops in the game, that i can see all of them having these fields too.....
     

    Ithirahad

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    What about station jump gates? perhaps those should be rethought out: where instead of acting like a jump drive, they act like a worm hole.
    What exactly are you talking about? Jump Field Generators or Jump Gates? Jump Field Generators exist mostly so that factions can operate in their territory more easily, and to create strategic uses for certain star systems. Jump Gates should remain unchanged; IMO they're a good form of simple, straightforward FTL travel that requires getting somewhere first and it's intended to work for things like void expeditions or crossing between spiral arms that Jump Drives would not allow for under my system.
     
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    kiddan

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    Add skill into just plain travel? Heck yea! This would give warp gates more of a special purpose if they (warpgates) didn't require nearby stars; Making them useful for travelling through void systems and between galaxies.

    Anything that makes you think -at least a tiny bit- when doing an otherwise boring task has my vote!
     
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    This is perhaps not so great on servers with expanded sector sizes.

    Probably like most people on servers where getting materials is not a question of simply voting for the server, I spend a lot of time mining. This is already tedious enough. Worse I do this on a server with substantially increased sector sizes. My miner is not small, and after giving it sufficient armament to survive nearby pirate stations and raiders (beefed up), it has no more than a 2 to 1 thrust to mass ratio. Thrusting to get to a nearby cluster of asteroids is a massive pain, let alone if there are no such decent asteroids nearby and I have to move several sectors just to find something worth mining. (I'll leave aside the also massive pain of having to spend 30 seconds just turning to face asteroids as not relevant to this thread.)

    My solution to this massive pain in the ass has been to give my battleminer a 10%+ jump drive. I do not thrust towards the next asteroid clump or a few sectors away to scan for more, I jump there. It takes me about 10 seconds to recharge, a time I can live with. This is SO much less of a pain in the ass that I can suffer with the otherwise mindless tedium of mining.

    Your existing proposal would take this away. It would remove any incentive on my part to have such a large jump drive, and leave me with suffering through a MASSIVELY increased degree of tedium while mining. And so I would suggest a slight modification to your suggestion.

    Your jump field generators should be able to stack somehow in such a way as to allow their effect to extend through the entirety of a system. This could perhaps affect the faction owner only. While perhaps not trivially easy to build such a system wide jump field, it should also not be so prohibitive as to require a player getting established to mine out their system before being able to build it. Eating just a handful or two nearby asteroids should result in adequate materials to extend a station's jump field through the whole system.
     

    Ithirahad

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    This is perhaps not so great on servers with expanded sector sizes.

    Probably like most people on servers where getting materials is not a question of simply voting for the server, I spend a lot of time mining. This is already tedious enough. Worse I do this on a server with substantially increased sector sizes. My miner is not small, and after giving it sufficient armament to survive nearby pirate stations and raiders (beefed up), it has no more than a 2 to 1 thrust to mass ratio. Thrusting to get to a nearby cluster of asteroids is a massive pain, let alone if there are no such decent asteroids nearby and I have to move several sectors just to find something worth mining. (I'll leave aside the also massive pain of having to spend 30 seconds just turning to face asteroids as not relevant to this thread.)

    My solution to this massive pain in the ass has been to give my battleminer a 10%+ jump drive. I do not thrust towards the next asteroid clump or a few sectors away to scan for more, I jump there. It takes me about 10 seconds to recharge, a time I can live with. This is SO much less of a pain in the ass that I can suffer with the otherwise mindless tedium of mining.

    Your existing proposal would take this away. It would remove any incentive on my part to have such a large jump drive, and leave me with suffering through a MASSIVELY increased degree of tedium while mining. And so I would suggest a slight modification to your suggestion.

    Your jump field generators should be able to stack somehow in such a way as to allow their effect to extend through the entirety of a system. This could perhaps affect the faction owner only. While perhaps not trivially easy to build such a system wide jump field, it should also not be so prohibitive as to require a player getting established to mine out their system before being able to build it. Eating just a handful or two nearby asteroids should result in adequate materials to extend a station's jump field through the whole system.
    If asteroids were in actual belts, this would not be a problem. I suspect that that change will come with the universe update. When it does, you wouldn't be able to just jump between asteroids anyway.
     
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    It doesn't remove chain drives it just renders them useful but highly inefficient since the fastest way is no longer a straight line between points or you could find your self doing lots of small jumps.
    Personally, I feel like jump drives were already sufficiently debuffed when inhibitors were introduced, because they affect all jump drives within range at once and can completely cripple jump drives more easily than it can a single powerful jump drive. Of course this doesn't often become an issue as it should, but I know of at least one server (Light vs Dark) where AI pirate mobs could effectively employ inhibitors. That made chain drives a dangerous gamble because if your route passed by such a random mob, you would be dead in the water... perhaps while AFK getting a snack! :eek:

    Could we just add inhibitors to some of the standard pirate station models and mobs and call chaindrives nerfed? :-p

    Probably like most people on servers where getting materials is not a question of simply voting for the server, I spend a lot of time mining. This is already tedious enough. Worse I do this on a server with substantially increased sector sizes. My miner is not small, and after giving it sufficient armament to survive nearby pirate stations and raiders (beefed up), it has no more than a 2 to 1 thrust to mass ratio. Thrusting to get to a nearby cluster of asteroids is a massive pain, let alone if there are no such decent asteroids nearby and I have to move several sectors just to find something worth mining. (I'll leave aside the also massive pain of having to spend 30 seconds just turning to face asteroids as not relevant to this thread.)
    I hear that. I used to hate this aspect of mining. Now though, I keep even my huge miners at 3:1 or better thrust:mass, with 50% overdrive (up to about 200K cargo mass, then OD starts to decline) to resolve this. It's cheaper than quick jumps on a miner, less massive, and miners are inherently short-range anyway. My miner can eat whole rocks in 30-60 seconds, burn through a cluster, then zip to the next cluster at 150% server speed with good turns.

    The difference may be in how I handle pirates; I consider my miners to be semi-disposable pure civilian vessels, so I build them cheap, light and fast. Eschewing jump drives, armor, heavy shields, and large weapon systems makes them cheap and easy to replace on the rare occasion I lose one. I don't armor them, I use lighter, hull-alternatives where possible (carved mineral, motherboard, etc), I eliminate non-essential systems and keep decor spartan, the way a RL bulldozer keeps keeps decor spartan. Miners are often the fastest ships I have on a server, and using OD instead of jumps makes them inhibitor-proof. They can range 2-3 systems radius in short time, and being so light they can stably perma-jam. I only arm them with 1-2 light anti-fighter turrets, some point defense, and usually only 100K-500K shields because with a radar jammer the pirates rarely bother me and if they do (rarely) I just speed away to safety.

    Been mining like that for over a year now and it's been great - I zip from cluster to cluster crunching away and almost never being disturbed by anyone. I've never once completely lost a miner of this kind to AI or player pirates and I play on busy MP servers, though I've had 3-4 lose shields and take some damage that required me to scrap and respawn them on returning to base.
     
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    Personally, I feel like jump drives were already sufficiently debuffed when inhibitors were introduced, because they affect all jump drives within range at once and can completely cripple jump drives more easily than it can a single powerful jump drive. Of course this doesn't often become an issue as it should, but I know of at least one server (Light vs Dark) where AI pirate mobs could effectively employ inhibitors. That made chain drives a dangerous gamble because if your route passed by such a random mob, you would be dead in the water... perhaps while AFK getting a snack! :eek:
    Yea, I put jump inhibitors on the pirates on the FreaksRUs server, and not even particularly optimised ones (two block clock turning them off then on once per second). People do indeed every once in a while get ambushed by those pirates when using chain drives. It probably would be best though if pirate stations came equipped with always on inhibitors.
     

    Ithirahad

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    Could we just add inhibitors to some of the standard pirate station models and mobs and call chaindrives nerfed? :-p
    Nope. Chaindrives are already almost balanced with respect to combat, and putting them on current pirate stations would be a bit annoying. If they intercepted jumps going across them, rather than just draining jump drives in the sector, that would be nice, though, and if Scavenger stations only spawn within their own territory then having them then I suppose it'd be alright for them to have inhibitors so it's not as easy to travel around in their territory.
    Sounds very BattleTech-y.

    Sorry, I don't actually have anything constructive to contribute.
    I know literally nothing about BattleTech, lol...
     
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    I know literally nothing about BattleTech, lol...
    Lol. So Jump Drives in BattleTech only work between certain positions relative to a star and are very unpredictable if used outside an accepted jump point. They're limited in range to at most 30 light-years per jump, all jumps are star-to-star, and Jump Ships must sit and recharge at a star for a while (days, sometimes weeks) before they can jump again.

    (For the uninitiated, MechWarrior takes place in the BattleTech universe.)
     
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    Because traveling to the star the way the shield system works and the time is dumb