In films where jump drives and the like take days to spool up, it's generally because it's an impressive feat to just hop to the nearest star system. In this game, everything occurs across multiple systems by design, so naturally it should be easy to move across two or three systems
Naturally it is - currently - easy. Very,
very easy.
I can currently travel 7 star systems -
without jumping once - in the time it takes for me to walk to the corner store in real life. With standard jumps I can cross an entire galaxy in that time.
That is...
extremely easy.
I know of
no fictional setting where space travel is as fast and efficient as it is in Starmade, and grant little credence to talk of "
needing" faster travel. People will always
want what they want though, regardless of the forethought they've put into it, and one of the downsides of this being an "Alpha" stage game is that some players seem consider everything challenging in the game to somehow be a flaw, or incomplete implementation rather than accepting that some things are simply intended regardless of development status label.
The farther afield players range in MP, the less interaction they have regardless of travel time/speed, because the volume of empty space in the interim between meaningful locations increases with travel ease. The faster and more efficient travel, the emptier the galaxy feels (this may, superficially, change a bit with the advent of NPC factions). This is not because travel speed needs to be increased, it's because players deliberately choose to base themselves far from each other under the expectation that "it should be so easy" to fly across the galaxy and do things in different places despite the experience of it actually being rather time consuming.
I can sympathize with
Panpiper and not
wanting to spend... well, any time, really, in transit between mining and refining. It isn't that simple though, because temporal overhead is one of the few checks that exist within Starmade against hyperscale building (i.e. the titan issue). I think that too many players see temporal overhead - in travel or in acquiring a certain volume of resources - as a problem, mistake, or flaw in the game, rather than a deliberate part of the game design. I am still actually hoping that at some point fleet miners can be sent to unloaded sectors to mine and return resources without ever doing it directly, for those players who can organize their faction well enough, but in that scenario as with the current situation, temporal overhead for automated miners to deliver
x amount of resource
y is of vital importance, and relative ease or difficulty with which a collection of systems are mined forms the basis of differential values for resources and in turn components. That is no different from the role of temporal overhead in mining manually, and making it any easier than a trip to the store to go and mine enough resources to build a large, space-faring vessel would
not improve gameplay.
Requiring players to access to multiple systems is part of the design, as you say. The temporal overhead to achieve this is also a calculated part of the design though, which is very clearly evidenced by jump drives having a charge time (one more value edge for warp gates). Slash that temporal overhead, and materials - already too easily stockpiled in planetary quantities - lose real value, so ships and stations lose value. Everyone "should" be able to have a huge station and battleship... and does. Nothing is left to strive for.
Ennui sets in, and players either lash out to relieve the boredom or drop the game for a while again. Personally, I find this game is most engaging when starting a new server or after a reset, when we can't easily spawn whatever we want, when everything takes extra effort and caution.
That is why we even bother with MP at all, rather than eternally hanging out in SP in creative mode - making everything too easy is a sure recipe for boredom and lackluster gameplay.
If travel time between systems to acquire necessary resources for construction
seems excessive, perhaps it is because the standard of play some people are seeking is excessive for a single person or pair of friends. Perhaps it's not
designed to be a reasonable task for a single player to mine, refine and assemble an entire battleship in MP (as opposed to in SP creative mode or SP with custom config or a niche, munchkin server). That would not be a game flaw, regardless of the Greek character we label the game with, that would be a deliberately set standard. Such massive scale war machines are meant to be epic co-operative projects - wonders of the galaxy, even - not something players churn out solo in a day or two or three, and certainly not something every player "
deserves" to have. In MP, anyway.
Travel time and ease ties in deeply with
every other major dynamic in the game. Your proposal is good because it adds character and complexity to space, but I firmly believe that the current travel dynamics are sufficient and players will eventually have to learn to accept certain temporal expenses in playing on MP servers at least.