"Never efficient to fly analogue". Well, duh. Even with FTL travel time, it still wouldn't be more efficient to fly analogue. People will fly analogue because you need to for battles, moving around in shorter areas, mining, ect.
Lol
Couldn't have said it better myself...
The problem that I have with nodes is that it makes you fly there first, you should be able to go there using FTL, maybe nodes make it easier to jump? Sub-light would still have a use at your destination, and in smaller/(capital?) ships that don't have a drive fitted. I'd almost rather fly 30 min over waiting 5, even 2 min. Station based portals can work for sub-light ships, and maybe you can set up FTL jammers to make jumps... interesting.
I think so far everyone's expressed that feeling, (if they wanted a delay between jumps). You put it quite well though
indeed.I think so far everyone's expressed that feeling, (if they wanted a delay between jumps). You put it quite well though
Well, for jammers... You can "jam" a station by using a powerdrain beam to drain it of it's power, which it needs to make jumps, and if you attempt to jump to a destroyed station using a safe warp, things do get "interesting", though I think the idea of a weapon specifically designed to screw with the station FTL is interesting (there's no way to easily apply it to an aria of space, rather than a station).
You could make a FTL drive need to be large to work efficiently, if you want to make a small array, you could end up with a very long cooldown for example. It could be mass based, like the cloak, so the larger ships need larger arrays to run well. Other than cooldowns, you could have slower hyperspace speeds or charge ups, to improve these requires more energy. Perhaps thrusters are a better analog to this idea. In order to promote node/station based FTL, make it easier to travel to such nodes/stations (By stations I mean fixed portals/acceleration gates/stargates/mass relays, nodes are targets for ships that have an FTL drive) I was thinking of *expensive* passive jammers that alliances can set up to block/delay transit, as they have to be avoided/destroyed/bypassed in sub-light, perhaps a semi-passive system that must be maintained would work. On the other hand, I would love to intercept/decelerate people in hyperspace, maybe even in-slipspace battles or going ahead of your opponent with a better drive and ambushing him. Soft limits should go on most aspects of travel, they make it a bit harder to travel but balance combat/trade/whatever else you do. I think that your "surprises" would make such travel impractical, unless they are rare and you can get an idea of the risk. Powerdrain beams cannot disable a station for a significant period of time/at all, but shooting it would, perhaps that tachyon field thing would be disrupted, disabling the station, you could also use that for cooldowns/de-warping and such, dissipating the field with drive modifiers to shorten cooldowns and disrupting it to destroy/prevent warp fields with standard weapons and/or anti-warp cannons. I liked that post BTW, it looks like we have ideas being discussed/invented here, which I like to see happen.
I don't actually know how powerdrain beams work, I just figured they stole power from the target.
I have no problem with warp being an escape if people can chase you and you can't just go forever, giving opponents a chance to leave. If FTL drives can be bigger, it has to scale with the ship to make the decision relevant in a corvette and a titan, and specialized ships would be very good at FTL naturally. Powerdrain beams are so underpowered because you can only do anything if you hit the generators, and the drain beam has to be bigger than the target last time I checked.I don't actually know how powerdrain beams work, I just figured they stole power from the target.
I think that would be an interesting mechanic (larger systems draw more power, speed things up)
Yeah, you could also break it by shooting things
Surprises?
I designed it to be easier to get to node, with bookmarked jumps, but you have to be careful to not make it too easy to use as an escape route.
That defeats the point, FTL is more of a fast-travel idea. I have to go 7 sectors to get to the nearest shop to my base, I'd rather take the 5 minutes of travel than sit in one place and do nothing. If you have a way to make the charge up not be tedious, please mention it.
I'd rather not have FTL be like cloaking, in that if you want to be able to use it, you need to make your ship ugly and made of power bricks.
Have you ever watched BSG? They cannot move too far because their computers have to find a path to the other endpoint without hitting anything.
