For all intents and purposes, I will be using a 100 and a 1000 block ship in the examples for simplicity.
Implementation: Upon activating your warp drive a menu appears that allows you to enter an x, y, and z for the sector you wish to warp to. After the drive charges up it will teleport your ship along with all other docked ships as close as possible to the center of that sector while making adjustments to avoid collision damage.
Charge Speed:
Charge speed is directly related to the percentage of blocks that are warp blocks.
100 block ship: 20 warp blocks=0.5s charge per km, 10=1s/km, 5=2s/km
1000 block ship: 200 warp blocks=0.5s charge per km, 100=1s/km, 50=2s/km
This makes it so a ship needs to be properly equipped to handle warp drive in a given situation and make it cheaper for smaller ships to be outfitted with warp drives.
Cooldown Speed:
Cooldown speed is directly dependent on how many warp blocks are on the ship.
100 block ship: 10 warp blocks=5 second cooldown before the ship allows another warp to be input.
1000 block ship: 100 warp blocks=50 second cooldown before the ship allows another warp to be input.
This would encourage people not to build ships out of thousands of warp blocks which would allow for near instant flee from battle and would also encourage large ships to be careful about using warps.
Maximum DIstance:
Maximum distance would also be determined by how many warp blocks are on the ship.
100 block ship: 10 warp blocks=2.5km in the direction of target sector.
1000 block ship: 100 warp blocks=25km in the direction of target sector.
This would make it possible to be short of arriving at your destination, a feature that would mainly be used to add excitement to the game. It would also make carrier ships a viable option for transporting a large number of small ships that have inferior warp drives or none at all. Small warp drives could be mainly used for escaping battle while large ones would be for interplanetary travel. This would also force the shipbuilder to decide whether they want to sacrifice distance or cooldown time for a small or large warp engine.
Power Consumption:
Power consumption would not take a certain amount of power, but rather decrease the maximum power of the ship for the duration of the warp charge-time, eventually reaching zero at the moment of warp.
100 block ship: 10 warp blocks=-10%max power per second for 10 seconds.
1000 block ship: 100 warp blocks=-10%max power per second for 10 seconds.
This would make warps unadvisable for battle, but still capable of being done in battle while balancing between both large and small ships. With your maximum power decreasing at a steady rate your systems would still be useful while becoming weaker until the point of warp. After warp, your maximum power level would immediately return to normal while your current power stored would remain zero and need to be charged back up. While this happened to a large ship the pilot would likely stop firing weapons and moving so all the power could be diverted to the shield systems. When happening to a small ship the ship will likely fly around and perhaps continue to attack, focusing more on evasion to avoid damage rather than shields. This allows it to be balanced between big and small ships while not completely dropping an entire ship system instantly.
Final Notes:
I think ships should release an effect when a warp drive begins to charge such as a yellow shimmer across the entire ship rather than the usual blue ripple of shields to let enemies know that a warp is about to occur. Perhaps the shimmer would grow brighter as the drive charged and at the moment of warp becomes a bright white across the entire ship. Any player within the gravity field of the ship that is warping would be warped with the ship, but could possibly be teleported out of the ship, warranting a rescue of overboarded passengers.
A radar block should also be added. Without a radar block, upon warp the ship will arrive either in the sector they typed in or in a sector directly adjacent to it. With a radar block the ship would always warp to the correct sector (unless the entire sector has collision errors, in which case it would be warped to the nearest possible sector that didn\'t). Any ship with a radar block would also recieve coordinates of any warps out of their current sector in their chat window. This would allow for chases, but would not encourage them as a ship that warps second will spend more time with it\'s shields, engines, and weapons down than one that warps first. A radar block also could be used in the hotbar to lock on to a ship that is charging their warp drive to try and get the coordinates earlier.
All-in-all, I believe this idea allows for an appropriate and balanced use of warp drives in both big and small ships with big ships relying on it for long distance travel and small ships using to zip in and out of battle while relying on larger docking platforms for long-distance travel.
Opinions on my idea?