Warp Module

[DaWuomLumSao]

Waing is a neccessary add to all scifi space games. I believe that warp cores should be a very expensive bock that is either crafted or bought dfrom a shop. now these warp cores should be very similar tothe computers already found in the game. but instead of using power as a limitation one canuse warp enhancers. essentially the bigger the ship the more enhancers much like thrusters nd power

 

[Newt24]

While I think warp gates are a great option for small ships, I think they would really be limited by the size of the gate itself. Several people have touched on this issue, and some have stated it could just be a \"feature\" which would require the use of a warp drive on larger ships. But when I think of a warp gate, I think of something like the ones in the X universe; at the edges of sectors are large gates that jump you to the next sector when you pass through them (although here it would obviously work a bit differently). But in those games, the ships are pretty standard and aren\'t really customizable (save in some cases and excluding mods). So the devs could easily make sure they all are able to fit in the gate. However, clearly in StarMade people are making massive ships of titanic proportions and making their frame rates sink (haha, sorry bad pun.) My point is that I don\'t know how well warp gates could work. There would probably have to be a standard size, that would be the \"cutoff\" for a warp-GATE-capable ship and a warp-DRIVE-capable ship, even then, my ship could be quite small vertically and lengthwise, but just be too wide to fit in the gate.

Thoughts?

 

[The Great Chilli Pepper]

I\'m still against the use of gates as a primary source of travel due to their restriction to a network. As I have read the latest comments from my own, I thought perhaps there could be some kind of rare special warp gate that can be found somewhere in a few systems that warp you to some kind of ancient space or area.

 

[thedarkhunter94]

I think that having both warp gates and warp drives will make the whole system actually work better as a whole.

For warp gates, construction would be required, larger gates and more power for each ship. I can\'t decide if the warp gate should only connect to one other one or if it should connect to any you have built (something to think about). So warp gates are going to require scouting first since you have to build it. I also think that building a warp gate should cost money much like building a space station does.

On the warp drive side, I think that the only way to get warp drives should be like through development using the factory machines and lots of expensive components (maybe even a new tech-research system?). Then, there should be different requirements of power for the size of the ship and distance travelling as well as some sort of fuel that is consumed by the drive. Maybe if there is a research system, the requirements for power would start out so large that only big ships can have drives, but then through research you can lower the power costs (again an interesting thing to think about).

Oh, and p.s. In real life, we are actually pretty close to figuring out the basics behing FTL (faster than light) travel. Scientists have successfuly created small warp bubbles in the laboratory, and the possibility of traveling to other stars increases (though it may be another 100 years because of issues of power and controlling direction).

 

[toneo]

• Warp drive should need enough \"warp blocks\" to generate a warp field the same size as the ship.
• Warp drive requires a spool-up time (i.e. 10-30 seconds depending on ship size) to reduce OP hit-and-run attacks
• Shields take damage and don\'t regenerate during warp.
• Warp drive needs a cooldown period after being used, depending on the size of the ship
• The warp drive can become unstable:
  
  If shields collapse during warp, or there are no shields
• If the drive is damaged (depending how much damage was sustained)
• If the warp field isn\'t balanced (i.e. warp drive is twice as big on one side of the ship)

[*]How unstable?

• 
  Travelling with collapsed or no shields counts as very unstable
• Scorched drive parts make the field slightly unstable
• Minor drive damage makes the field highly unstable
• Major drive damage makes the field extremely unstable

[*]Effects of instability:

• 
  Slight instability causes shields to take damage at a greater rate
• High instability causes difficulty navigating and severe damage to the hull
• Extreme instability is lethal and causes the hull to buckle very quickly
• All levels of instability cause varying levels of damage to the warp drive and adjacent blocks

[*]Warp itself:

• 
  Your ship needs to reach a minimum speed before it can jump to warp
• You cannot drop out of warp instantly, you need to reduce speed first
• Requires much more power for larger ships due to increased size of the warp field

[*]Technical limitations (probably)

• 
  Interacting with other ships will only be possible with other ships that are also at warp.
• Collisions with planets - seems possible
• Collisions with asteroids, space stations, shops - probably very expensive

 

[AnIronGolem]

Ok, Heres what i think would be nice.

*For smaller ships, You need a warp dock, like the ones in starwars, so it would be a new docking module and docking enhancers, Could also do this with larger ships, but it would be annoying to build a big one.

*Warp docks would need to have 2 power for each \"ship mass\" and would also need to be able to have it fully regened every sector your warping thru.

*For larger ships, with huge mass, you could use \"Warp drives\" and \"Warp accellerators\". Warp drives would act as a weapons computer, you would need to equip it in your hotbar to charge it, you would connect the Warp Accellerators, or whatever you wanna call them, like antimatter cannons or missiles.

*For every 1k mass, you would need a warp accellerator, You will need to construct these, building recipe would be like, a bobbi AI, build block, 100 L5 of some varity and whatever else you wanna put in there.

*For every Warp accellerator, you would need a large amount of power.

 

[Ludovsky]

On the subject of FTL and warp drive my though would be possibly both simple and complex.

Why have only one \"special travel\" method, and not take a leaf from Sword of the Stars and have multiple FTLs system instead(the game using a setting where all races developped their own system of FTL).

I.e.: you could have ye old \"you go faster\" warp drive, to stuff like gates or hyperspace \"jumps\"(I\'ve always been fond of Homeworld\'s hyperspace effect, which would fit in a \"blocky\" game like this).

 

[Charlie_]

I\'m in the both camp. Someone named Mass Effect as a \"everything has gates\" point. That is false.

Mass Effect\'s lore featured the Relays for long distance travel. They are necessary as even if your ship travels at the speed of light, reaching the other side of the galaxy would take more years than your specie will probably last from its birth to extinction. Well, maybe I\'m exagerating a bit much.

Anyways, that\'s for long distance. As for jumping from neighbor system to the next, they used a warp drive you could effectively use on any ship, from anywhere, at any time. Charge up and poof, you\'re gone. Hello new place!

That\'s why I think, to avoid abuse and get the best of both worlds, a ship warp-wtr-drive should be limited to maybe 15-20 sectors per jump charge, and for anything greater than that, you\'d need the exterior help of a gate or relay.

That\'s the way that makes most sense to me.

On an unrelated note, @darkhunter94:
I think so far that only applied to the atomic scale. We\'re still a very long way from space ship travel. Hell. We don\'t even have much space ships as it is. Let\'s start with that and make a trip to Mars back and forth before getting too excited about jumping to other stars.

 

[LoLzboi]

First time I tried wrighting this the lovely internet disconnected and I lost it all, here goes fingers crossed.

I believe a mixture of the ideas (all of them) with a bit of reworking is what people want to see added to the game. So I will try to come up with the best reworked ideas and place them below.

Jump/Warp Drive:

*note* I will revert to a warp drive during my explanation even though I feel that it is more of a jump drive.

-The Warp Drive depletes all power in the ship for 15 seconds before/after use. This way you must think long and hard about where, when, and who might be there. This would keep titan, and capital ships from making blind jumps as they are bringing millions of dollars worth of ship into a potentially dangerous, and devastating scenario for themselves without a scout. This also makes sure that you don\'t just warp away when the player feels like they will lose a fight, or as I like to call it the \"scum-bag that likes to cocktease all the other players who try to take them out\".

-The warp drive will be expensive. I propose for the drive to be made out of level 5 ores along with warp drive cores that are equal in price to faction HQ\'s, and yes I do support the idea of being able to find/buy what you are too lazy to make. The cost and time it would take to make a warp drive that does not function if your power supply is not large enough would keep small fighters from buying them. This means that no, not everyone can get them and those that can must have a large ship to activate it (although bringing along any docked vessel(s) would be fine).

-Bigger is better. The larger your warp core the furthur you may go, but there should be a limit (32 sectors does sound about right) to the distance you may warp to stop people from making absolutely massive star sized warp drives then hopping across the galaxy in one swoop.

-Warp drives must remain undamaged. I think that a damaged warp core should have a timer (like that of a ships core) before it bursts into nothing but burnt circuits and sparks. Along with this the core may be used but it can stop warp randomly in any sector, it can explode upon use (doing about a missiles worth of damage to your ship, and it may also \"melt\" other systems causing them to become inactive until the core is repaired or removed. This will give a little more fun to fighting a capital ship as you could cause the warp core to explode damaging the ship, and then board that ship through the hole or continue to blow up its insides.

-Upon entry into a sector all players for 2 sectors have a ping on screen (the same as the destination marker) pointing to the newly warped ship. Remember it will take them more then 15 seconds to get there so your shields will be up before any ships enter your sector (unless your unlucky of course). This keeps players from feeling like ships are just spawning around them.

-Sectors can be blocked with warp jammers (or something along those lines), preventing any ship from warping into them. This keeps bases more safe (even though the attackers will be disabeled for 15 seconds upon entry) and requires them to have scouts around them to watch for any incoming warp signatures (which I believe will add to gameplay for factions).

Relays:

-A relay may not be built in a sector with any faction structures (bases, ships, turrets, etc.). This way you don\'t simply build one beside your base for easy defense, and a faction would have to send out an unmarked fleet for construction adding to the difficulty.

-A relay must be built in a circular formation, and it must be complete to be useable (meaning the circle cannot be severed into a \"c\" shape).

-Relays can be destroyed by any enemy type (be it player or pirate), so factions must monitor their relays carefully as to keep their network functioning.

-Relay blocks require 1 power supply each to keep these things hard to build. This way space won\'t be littered with relays, since they are hard to build.

-Relays operate as the Mass Effect relays do. They simply launch your ship to the desired destination rather than having to fly through it. (this makes sure any ship may use it, since older capital ships may not have the space to insert a warp core)

-Relays must be powered before use. This is exactly how it sounds, this way it will be more difficult to move large fleets quickly. The relays require massive amounts of electricity to work so it should take 2-3 minutes to power up if you use a 5 block big power supplier ship (this time will improve based on blocks added)

-Relays remain functional until electricity is used up. The larger the ship the more it will take to fire it across the system, thus you will need to charge it inbetween large ships while smaller ships can continue to be launched fairly close together.

-Any faction may use a powered relay, but may not power other factions. This way if multiple allied factions wish to move together they do not need to build seperate relays, along with the idea that an enemy could follow you if you do not pay attention.

-Relays do not send things back, both sides do not need to be powered just one for it is doing the \"heavy lifting\" so to speak. The powered relay shoots you, the second relay catches you.

-Relays must have a base power before use. This means that if a players ship is so huge the other relay does not have the power to \"catch\" it, then it will not function for that ship. This makes sure that relays must be a minimum size for factions wanting to send large ships through. The power capacities of both relays will be given in the relay menu, along with the energy your ship takes to be launched to x-relay.

-Relay menu will be accessed the same as the shop to give ease of use to players.

These are just some of my ideas, but I know they are not perfect for everybody. Thanks for reading.

 

[The Great Chilli Pepper]

I really like your ideas on the relays and jump drives. Perhaps we could tweak the range of jump drives to 32 sectors instead of 20 as this is the size of 2 star systems (I believe), more would be a bit of a stretch. I would say lower the charging of relays to 1 min 30 secs and make em 2 way, I can see people building em secretly in enemy turf and invading with no consequences (of course other than losing loads of ships if the raid fails). What I\'m saying is a one way relay system could lead to one way attacks meaning the defending faction will always be on the defense and can\'t retaliate. If this was 2 way then the builder must think strategically about where they build this or enemies can take advantage of the other node. Other than this I really like your idea as previously stated. Enough to say and I think I speak for chilli peppers across the world when I say \"The Great Chilli Pepper approves of this idea\". 8D

 

[LoLzboi]

Yeah 32 sectors does seem a bit better then 20 (thought star systems were about 10), so that would really be better. I also see where you are coming from with the one sided attacks, but really if your faction doesn\'t bother destroying the relay when found you kinda deserve it (forgot to include relays could be destroyed by enemy). The charge time was for 5 charge beam blocks (again forgot to add the measurement) and would be improved based on the number of charge blocks on the charging ship. I find it would really be more fun if you are waiting for the relay to power up in an enemy controlled sector as their fleet is coming for you, or on the flip side discovering a partially complete/ complete relay on your borders that has the begginings of a fleet around it. Thanks for your feedback though, it really helps when people start talking.

 

[The Great Chilli Pepper]

No probs, and I now approve even more. Personally I wasn\'t expecting a response at this time in the morning.

 

[LoLzboi]

Time zones are fun are they not?

 

[The Great Chilli Pepper]

Yeah my posts are exactly as says on GMT but since the 90s vamp horror (quite funny) just finished I\'m hittin the hay, night man.

 

[Ludovsky]

Like I said(and others as well), a pluralist system to FTL travel would be interesting.

For example, in Sword of the Stars, all playable races actually had their own drive system.
Notable ones below:
Humans travelled very quickly through \"node lanes\" naturally formed between stars which created a stretch of \"nodespace\" which human FTL technology could travel through. A sort of natural artery through the fabric of the univserse.
Tarkas had a warp drive which formed a bubble around a ship, greatly accelerating it\'s speed as the ship escaped the constraint of normal space.
Hivers actually used STL ships... but had the knowledge(and physiology to support the strain of the process) to develop what were more or less teleportation gates. This meant that a hiver ship encountering a gate could then teleport to -any- other gate in the empire.
Loas, a race of AIs, on their own end used a system which could be best described as \"highways\" of acceleration gates, lanes of rings which accelerated to FTL speed ships passing through accross the lane\'s lenght.

This said, a system I could see for Starmade would be in order of interest this way`:

Acceleration gates or beacons, which like the above loa example would give a speed boost to ships passing through/near them. Used by ships of most classes but more probably the lighter ones. May or may not require a form of drive component or \"beacon interface computer\" though effects would be less dependent than other drives.
A \"warp\" drive, which accelerate a ship to extremely high speed at the cost of high power consumption and perhaps the effect of locking down weapons. This could be used by medium to large ships since the speed boost might be too small in smaller ships.
A \"jump\" drive, which would allow a ship to \"jump\" a certain distance in space, determined by drive generator size. This would more or less work by bringing up the map, and then clicking with a certain radius to initiate jump if there is enough power available. The jumping procedure might take some moment before the jump complete. This would work best with capital ships, which could act as carriers for smaller ships unable to function with such a drive.
Finally would be \"teleportation gates\" which would be large gate like structures allowing instatenous travel with a linked gate. Linking could be done from an interface computer. Such gates might need to be spawned like stations and could only be linked to one other gate at a time(but could still have their destination changed via computer).

 

[LoLzboi]

I understand that you want there to be a difference between \"jump\" and \"warp\" but in the context of what everyone has been saying, a \"warp\" drive that accelerates you to x speed would break the max speed on the server (this could cause some problems). So people have been leaning toward a \"jump\" drive so that those problems don\'t happen, simply click on a map where you want to go or insert cords and BOOM you appear. Although there has been talk of going into \"hyperspace\" on other posts (basically a \"nether\" world like in minecraft that transports you x number of blocks in \"real space\" depending on x number of blocks traveled in \"hyperspace\"), this \"hyperspace\" would have dangers such as planets, asteroids, stars, etc. to dodge or die from. So really it would be stupid (in my opinion) to have 2 ways to do virtually the same thing, Schema has already said that FTL is planned we just don\'t know what form it will take.

As for your \"gates\" a \"teleportation gate\" is the same type of gate I proposed in my earlier post, just renamed and having that \"link\" thing added. I do see the gate speeding you up to x speed before it spawns you in the new sector ,as it would be slightly more believable then in Mass Effect where I swear the crew gets smushed from the rather quick acceleration. The main problem I see with linking gates is having to scroll through a massive archive of sector codes (or whatever will be used to tell apart gates) finding the right number and then linking them... I don\'t know about you, but thats not as fun as it sounds. Instead it would make more sense that any \"gate\" that is part of a faction can link to any other \"gate\" that is under the same factions control, thus they are pre-linked with eachother. No fiddling around in digits trying to find sector 12,5,3 admist 20 other sector codes. On the other side, would you really want to have to remember routes of travel when you are at the \"gate\" hub? Having 6 \"gates\" leading in 6 different directions would make it more like a minecraft cave network. Sure you\'d find your way out eventually, although it would most likely end up with you flying back rather than using the \"gates\".

Finally your point on seperate species coming up with their own way of travel doesn\'t really make much sense since every player in the game is of the same species (just like in minecraft, the only difference is their skin). I understand that it would be cool, but it would just be a useless and rather bulky addition since players would gravitate toward the best one (\"teleportation\" or in other words \"jumping\"). So why not come up with a backstory behind the way your particular drive core works, and make a fan fic.

 

[Ludovsky]

I didn\'t neccessarily use the different species as an example of how things -should- be, and not one where different in game \"species\" -should- have different drive.
That is, I did not mean to sound like I even wanted different species in the game.

What I just meant was how different technologies could be, in time, developped toward a same goal(travelling faster) but achieving it in different ways.


I.e.: how there is more than one options that could be fun to explore(in time) without neccessarily excluding each others if one is introduced before the others.
And acceleration drive could also simply work on a percentage basis to avoid less conflict with servers. ... though I have always used the game\'s default values for speed myself as I do not like using too much \"custom\" elements which in time might detract from the \"official\" gameplay the developper might wish to develop in due time.

 

[TheFireRodan]

Make a compact ship design so you can have lots of thrust. my battleshpere goes 800km/h easy which makes it travel 1 sector every second or two.



The more you know: go to your starmade folder, open server.cfg, change the value that says THRUST_SPEED_LIMIT to 1000000 so ships can all have independant speeds. so one ship can have a max of 400km/h and another a mere 180km/h. this allows small unarmored ships to be able to escape.

 

[Ludovsky]

The problem is that by default max speed is normally capped so you normally can\'t go above a certain level of speed unless playing on a server with custom setting.

Which, again, bring the fact that argument using custom setting have difficulties applying when it comes to talk about the default game which make no use of these settings.

 

[TheFireRodan]

I gave everyone perfect instructions on how to do it on my prior post