Transporters: no transport on same entity

[Edymnion]

Fine, I'll fall back on my previous entry then.

File the entire damned grav tube with blast doors that only open when you press the button. Same effect, the grav tube is now sealed and forcing your way through it is every bit as difficult as cutting through the rest of the ship, if not more so.

You are niggling over details when my point still stands.

There is nothing site to site transport can do that needs limiting that you can't already do with simple blast doors/force fields and a single button.

 

[Jumper11550]

No I asked why *every* gain needs to have a trade off?

I mean what's the trade off to using a gravity lift vs. just floating up the tube?

what's the trade-off to using rails instead of walking down the corridor?

Correct me if I"m wrong, but your point about tradeoffs is that "a worse form of transportation exists so you have nothing to lose by choosing the one that lets you be point to point without using the intervening space and a slower form of locomotion" is bad because well you lose nothing by choosing the better one.

That applies to both of the above situations I proposed. You lose nothing by adding a gravity tube verses just a tube to float along. You gain time and a oh cool I can just fall up effect, by doing it the other way with no real downside for installing the area trigger (or button) and gravity block.

The rails require an entire line lain out so you lose a line of blocks in the wall of the tube you already had to leave open for the car to move through. You're still gaining something for nothing in return.

I don't really see why your argument should be valid for transporters and not the other forms.

 

[Ithirahad]

Fine, I'll fall back on my previous entry then.

File the entire damned grav tube with blast doors that only open when you press the button. Same effect, the grav tube is now sealed and forcing your way through it is every bit as difficult as cutting through the rest of the ship, if not more so.

You are niggling over details when my point still stands.

There is nothing site to site transport can do that needs limiting that you can't already do with simple blast doors/force fields and a single button.

Yup... Filled grav tubes (Blast doors, force fields...) as well as horizontal grav tubes are about as hard to beat as a transporter. Only difference is that you know exactly where to cut with grav tubes; not so with transporters.

 

[Edymnion]

Yup... Filled grav tubes (Blast doors, force fields...) as well as horizontal grav tubes are about as hard to beat as a transporter. Only difference is that you know exactly where to cut with grav tubes; not so with transporters.

Not really. Just don't make a straight path to the core/faction block. Make a few side tunnels. Congratulations, you just spent 20 minutes burning a path to the toilet.

Their entire point is that they don't want to cut through half a ship's worth of crap to reach the core/faction block.

 

[Thalanor]

No I asked why *every* gain needs to have a trade off?

Yes, because otherwise you end up with no-brainers. No-brainers are bad in a game.

I mean what's the trade off to using a gravity lift vs. just floating up the tube?

Large single chunk of time invested in design and construction to save small chunks of time frequently when travelling.

what's the trade-off to using rails instead of walking down the corridor?

Large single chunk of time invested in design and construction to save small chunks of time frequently when travelling in style.

Correct me if I"m wrong, but your point about tradeoffs is that "a worse form of transportation exists so you have nothing to lose by choosing the one that lets you be point to point without using the intervening space and a slower form of locomotion" is bad because well you lose nothing by choosing the better one.

Yes, if you invest less time by omitting physical interior connections and also gain convenience by having an instant transportation, then this makes anything but your easymode transportation comparatively unviable. In ship-to-ship transports, this is not the case, because the tradeoff is time vs safety.

That applies to both of the above situations I proposed. You lose nothing by adding a gravity tube verses just a tube to float along. You gain time and a oh cool I can just fall up effect, by doing it the other way with no real downside for installing the area trigger (or button) and gravity block.

I highlighted what the actual tradeoff is in both cases for you in the quotes above.

The rails require an entire line lain out so you lose a line of blocks in the wall of the tube you already had to leave open for the car to move through. You're still gaining something for nothing in return.

Again - you are investing time into the construction of your ship to gradually get investment returns from the added convenience. Rails are easy to setup and don't offer that much gain, gravtubes are more time intensive to setup and offer somewhat more gain. Transporters require no effort at all to set up and top all other means of transport.

I don't really see why your argument should be valid for transporters and not the other forms.

Transporters require no effort at all to set up and top all other means of transport. As for the other forms, see above.

 

[Edymnion]

Transporters require no effort at all to set up and top all other means of transport. As for the other forms, see above.

So your issue is that you don't like that transporters exist at all, and actually has nothing to do with how many of them you can put where.

Gotcha.

 

[Thalanor]

So your issue is that you don't like that transporters exist at all, and actually has nothing to do with how many of them you can put where.

Gotcha.

Do you ever read the full posts?
Ship-to-ship transport: Tradeoff is safety (shields drop when using) vs traveling time (vs a shuttle). This is fine.
Internal transport: There is no tradeoff. This is not fine.

A tradeoff always weights an input cost against an output benefit. The input cost does not always have to be construction time. Transporters require barely construction time. In ship-to-ship transport, the shields drop, so the cost to pay for the convenience is safety. This is a sufficient price to pay for the benefit. In internal transport, no such cost exists, but you get the same benefit - only for free.

Is this finally using sufficiently few words to read in whole? Did you now in retrospect get that the quoted line from me comments on internal transport?

 

[Keptick]

Comr4de made a valid point. It's possible to limit the amount of transporters on a ship by limiting the amount of transporter computers per entity in the server config files. Meaning that everyone can have what they like!

Doesn't really solve the case of boarding but I'm going to wait on the directions the devs decide to take with astronaut combat and boarding before assuming anything, and everyone should do the same.

 

[Edymnion]

Do you ever read the full posts?

Yes, I do. I just don't agree with you, which has a lot to do with the fact that you can't seem to settle on why you are objecting to it.

We've already established that internal transporters do not change the game when it comes to boarding, as was your original post.

You claim that people who like making interiors will suddenly stop making them because of transporters, and we can pretty safely dismiss that since people make lots of RP space currently that serves no purpose at all.

About the only thing I've seen that you're basing it on at this point is "I don't like it that other people will have an option to cross a large station without having to look at all my pretty rail cars!", because apparently they are going to force you to install transporters?

People who don't like making pretty interiors don't want to make pretty interiors. They don't want to walk through them, they don't want to spend all that time making elaborate setups, they just want to get from point A to point B. A transporter is no more egregious here than a grav tube, which is an ugly, cludgy piece of jerryrigging that itself was built to let people avoid having to walk from place to place.

People who do enjoy building that stuff will keep building that stuff, because that is what they like to do.

So what I'm seeing is still boiling down to "You don't play the game like I do, so you are wrong and we have to make the game FORCE YOU to play like me!".

If you don't like transporters, then don't use them. Its that simple.

 

[Jumper11550]

Yes, because otherwise you end up with no-brainers. No-brainers are bad in a game.

While I agree that having a No-brainer be the norm in the game is bad, having some no-brainers that exist is not going to ruin the game. The only thing that transporters offer over the other transportation methods in terms of trade-offs is a smaller amount of time expended in initial construction. That seems like a minuscule trade off, clutching at straws really, particularly with the advanced build tools that can be employed to construct the others. The difference decreases further when transporters become logic enabled and can have some circuitry tied into them. A small one time fixed cost at build time (imo) is not worth mentioning as a trade off (in particular compared to your safety trade off of intership transport).

I guess I just fundamentally disagree with your notion that inside a game (a fake world designed for entertainment and enjoyment) the strict principle of every gain must, by default, also require that you give something else up. If that's your idea of fun that's fine but it's not shared by everyone.

Edit: In good faith I must admit my argument is a little weaker than it first appeared, transporters provide the benefit that you free up that otherwise open space for more systems modules.

 

[Keptick]

Had you guys read my previous post this argument would be over already...

 

[Thalanor]

Yes, I do.

No you don't, as evident from your response. I have nothing against ship-to-ship transporters, but you tried to pull down the debate to me "not liking transporters at all". Alot of your points depend on "not liking" or "hating".

I just don't agree with you, which has a lot to do with the fact that you can't seem to settle on why you are objecting to it.

I have repeated my core points several times now. All of these appeared in the OP.
- Internal transport creating an uncontested travelling method with no investment
- Internal transport creating one of the safest travelling methods w.r.t boarding with no investment
- Internal transport discouraging complex interiors, which are one of the emphasized future directions of the game as per dev post.

We've already established that internal transporters do not change the game when it comes to boarding, as was your original post.

No, you have "estabilished" that.

You claim that people who like making interiors will suddenly stop making them because of transporters, and we can pretty safely dismiss that since people make lots of RP space currently that serves no purpose at all.

And you want them to be even worse off by you having the fastest and most secure means of travel with zero time or risk investment.

About the only thing I've seen that you're basing it on at this point is "I don't like it that other people will have an option to cross a large station without having to look at all my pretty rail cars!", because apparently they are going to force you to install transporters?

How many times do I have to repeat the list of objections again? There are multiple.

People who don't like making pretty interiors don't want to make pretty interiors. They don't want to walk through them, they don't want to spend all that time making elaborate setups, they just want to get from point A to point B. A transporter is no more egregious here than a grav tube, which is an ugly, cludgy piece of jerryrigging that itself was built to let people avoid having to walk from place to place.

If someone doesn't want to make interiors or travel methods, they don't have to, but they won't be covering kilometers worth of travel space without transporters.

If you don't like transporters, then don't use them. Its that simple.

Transporters have excellent utility and justification in inter-entity transport. Stop generalizing them.

Comr4de made a valid point. It's possible to limit the amount of transporters on a ship by limiting the amount of transporter computers per entity in the server config files.

The only setting that makes any sense here would be "1", though. Anything else on whatever happens to be the current go-to PvP server would bring all of these problems.

 

[Edymnion]

I have repeated my core points several times now. All of these appeared in the OP.
- Internal transport creating an uncontested travelling method with no investment
- Internal transport creating one of the safest travelling methods w.r.t boarding with no investment
- Internal transport discouraging complex interiors, which are one of the emphasized future directions of the game as per dev post.

Except that you aren't limiting it to ships, you're wanting it to apply to stations as well.

Its internal travel. There is no cost or risk or investment, its walking down the hall to pee.

And frankly, we already have inner-ship transportation, you can simply dock a core inside the ship and use Up/Down to jump to that core directly. No cost or investment there either, unless you count being frustrated when you accidentally jump into a turret.

Transporters have excellent utility and justification in inter-entity transport. Stop generalizing them.

Except that you want to disable that as well, since apparently docking your ship should instantly disable it's transporter. So leaving your ship undocked and transporting in to the station is fine, because it lets you blow up their ship. Docking the ship, oh man, we can't allow people to do that, we have to make getting out of a docked ship as tedious and time consuming as possible so that they'll just stay undocked so we can sneak in and steal their ship right out from under their noses.

 

[Thalanor]

There is a tradeoff (cost/risk/investment vs benefit) for everything in starmade. Yes, even investing design time to make walking down the hall to pee more convenient is an investment choice.

The arrow method of navigation ceases to be useful when the amount of docked cores exceeds a certain number. Given that crew (including NPC turret crew) will eventually play a part, I suspect this won't be in forever either.

Inter-entity transport is meant to go from one ship to another ship in the middle of space, either to support/battle the crew (if set to public) or to escape to it. Docking a ship to a station wouldn't even need any connecting to the station itself (which is another incentive to map out an usable interior space during ship design that would otherwise go down the drain) if you just beamed down there after the ship is safe. This is again a question of tradeoff - the safety of docking vs the speed of teleporting. People have been industrious and invented standard docking collars for their ships just for this, and using the transporter for that task would just boil it down to touching a rail basic with some floating docking block again.

 

[Mr.Steam]

Maybe there should be some sort of cost or risk associated with transporting so it doesn't become the de facto method of getting around. Like you have a small chance of coming out horribly deformed, or dead. There is probably a reason they still use Turbo Lifts on Star Trek and don't just beam themselves around all the time.

 

[Edymnion]

The amusing thing is I wouldn't have given this whole thing a second glance if you had just admitted up front "This makes it harder for me to kill people who don't want to fight me in the first place".

Because thats what all of this is really about. You don't like the idea that people who don't want to fight you will be able to avoid fights. That someone you ambushed could get to the helm of their own ship to try and fight back, or that people could easily dock to their impervious home bases quickly and easily.

 

[Keptick]

The amusing thing is I wouldn't have given this whole thing a second glance if you had just admitted up front "This makes it harder for me to kill people who don't want to fight me in the first place".

But that is NOT the point. Thalanor doesn't even play on PvP servers. It's just your (very wrong) assumption.

This pretty much proves that you've been ignoring the majority of the stuff written in this thread, or at least not making an effort to understand it.

 

[Awdred]

I disagree with this. I like the idea of being able to transport on the same entity. While I can see your concerns about boarding parties on large stations this would be most helpful. Even on large ships this would be helpful. We should be able to find some way to balance this. I'm not sure what it is off hand though.

I see what you mean. In order to make them useless to boarders, just make them faction members only. They should remain able to be used on the same entity, and there's a way already to stop boarders from using them.

 

[Gunmetalmonk]

I love the transporter system. Saves me a bunch of time moving between ships, stations and bases. Don't really care how hard it might make it for a boarding party. Don't want my ships boarded in the first place. I would rather see it self-destruct then loose a ship plan to another faction.

But for those who want to board ships as part of their PvP game, I agree with Fatcobra...

Seem to me this is a very hot topic with passionate views on both sides of the coin. Why not just meet in the middle and make it configurable in the config files.

Both Teleporters and Boarding. The end mechanic of boarding is to steal the other faction's ship or it's plan. Theft, spoils of war, whatever you want to call it. That needs to be controlled too. Theft is considered immoral by society, and therefore illegal. Making every server boarding friendly is going to upset way more people then it will please. The Devs are just setting the game up to be a griefer paradise.

 

[Edymnion]

But that is NOT the point. Thalanor doesn't even play on PvP servers. It's just your (very wrong) assumption.

So what options does that leave us?

1) He doesn't understand how griefer friendly this is.
2) He does play on PvP servers, just under a different name.
3) He actually believes that every RP builder in the game is going to suddenly throw everything in the trash because they have a method that will save them all of 7 seconds walking down a hall.

I legitimately do not see any other valid place for this to come from. It actively promotes the worst kind of PvP, it actively discourages the PvE builders from playing the game the way they want to play it, what good does it serve?

People who want to build RP spaces will build RP spaces, with or without it. People who don't want RP spaces will continue to not build RP spaces with or without it. The only thing I can see it doing is actively punishing people in PvP by removing their ability to get to their own ships and fight back.