How do you build a jump ship to permit fast galactic travel, without chain drives?

[Gasboy]

I fully expect some kind of nerf in the future for jump drives. not a out right removal of them but something that caps the distance they travel in order to still make them useful. if I had to guess it would be something like 25-30% of a warp gates distance per jump maybe more.

The easiest solution is to limit ships to one jump drive computer each, and make it so docked jump computers do not function. Allow logic driven jump drives for automatic charge and jump for lazy people who don't want to hold down their mouse button for the next hour, and simply make it so that the fastest a jump drive charges is about 10 seconds. And since it appears to be a need, with your suggestion of 25% to 30% the distance of a warp gate, this would give people longer jump drive distances and shorter charging times while avoiding server choking lag.

 

[Edymnion]

AFAIK the real problem is the read/write speed of the server hardware once the sectors reah the "unload and save" part of the cooldown. Every time you "dip back" into normal space, all 27 sectors around the point you jumped to load in. I think the default "unload" lifetime of sectors is 40 seconds? So if you chain-jump for more than 40 seconds at a time, you're causing simultaneous loading(read from disk) of one 27 sector chunk, and unloading(write to disk, even if nothing changed) of the "oldest" 27 sector chunk. Meanwhile, 40 seconds/~4 sec between jumps*27 sectors = ~270 loaded sectors checking simulation. All that added onto everything every other person is doing in just memory read/write cycles....

That's one of those "optimizations" the core game has to get a handle on by the beta version; not writing if nothing changed.

Yikes...