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Not sure if this has been proposed because I am disinclined to wade through all of the existing topics on this.
Here is my simple proposal. It uses existing game mechanics and shouldn't be too hard to implement, I think from a programming perspective.
Requirements:
An FTL drive block and accompanying UI element to use a trigger and a data input respectively. Data input is simple, requiring only sector coordinates. UI elements can be a new UI panel entirely or simply a "warp" button of some sort on the existing navigation panel.
Functionality:
By attaching an FTL drive block to a ship, the player can access the FTL UI elements. The player will manually input a set of co-ordinates and activate the FTL drive. Activation of the FTL drive warps the player to the center of the designated sector.
For balance reasons, it seems necessary to make certain that the drive is not instantaneous, nor is it unlimited in range. To that end, I suggest three mechanical limitations on use.
The first limitation is to require it to "spin up" before warping the ship over to the inputted co-ordinates. Ideally, this start at something like half the time to manually fly out that far and becoming more time-efficient the further out one goes. Tentatively, something like 10 seconds for the first sector, 15 for two, 18 for three, and so on, until you reach a point where it's 1 second for each additional sector.
The second limitation is that it requires a certain amount of power be diverted to it every second that it is spooling up, say 10x the ship's mass. The idea is simply to give attacking players a way to disable a defending player's FTL ability, either by severly damaging its power grid or by using power drain beams
The third limitation is less certain and is intended to limit the potential range of the FTL drive. Either by limiting its use to sectors that have already been explored or by limiting its range based on some sort of power storage/mass ratio.
The point of the FTL system is to remove some amount of tedium from moving back and forth to familiar places rather than to act as a lazy method of exploring new areas. This methodology is also easy to adapt to new waypointing schemes, I hope, simply by replacing the manually input coordinates with a list of player-placed nav becons or whatever system you choose to go with.
I hope that makes sense and wasn't a huge wast of anyone's time.
Here is my simple proposal. It uses existing game mechanics and shouldn't be too hard to implement, I think from a programming perspective.
Requirements:
An FTL drive block and accompanying UI element to use a trigger and a data input respectively. Data input is simple, requiring only sector coordinates. UI elements can be a new UI panel entirely or simply a "warp" button of some sort on the existing navigation panel.
Functionality:
By attaching an FTL drive block to a ship, the player can access the FTL UI elements. The player will manually input a set of co-ordinates and activate the FTL drive. Activation of the FTL drive warps the player to the center of the designated sector.
For balance reasons, it seems necessary to make certain that the drive is not instantaneous, nor is it unlimited in range. To that end, I suggest three mechanical limitations on use.
The first limitation is to require it to "spin up" before warping the ship over to the inputted co-ordinates. Ideally, this start at something like half the time to manually fly out that far and becoming more time-efficient the further out one goes. Tentatively, something like 10 seconds for the first sector, 15 for two, 18 for three, and so on, until you reach a point where it's 1 second for each additional sector.
The second limitation is that it requires a certain amount of power be diverted to it every second that it is spooling up, say 10x the ship's mass. The idea is simply to give attacking players a way to disable a defending player's FTL ability, either by severly damaging its power grid or by using power drain beams
The third limitation is less certain and is intended to limit the potential range of the FTL drive. Either by limiting its use to sectors that have already been explored or by limiting its range based on some sort of power storage/mass ratio.
The point of the FTL system is to remove some amount of tedium from moving back and forth to familiar places rather than to act as a lazy method of exploring new areas. This methodology is also easy to adapt to new waypointing schemes, I hope, simply by replacing the manually input coordinates with a list of player-placed nav becons or whatever system you choose to go with.
I hope that makes sense and wasn't a huge wast of anyone's time.
