Warps

[Minenine1255]

now i know this was suggested a million times and i also know its been conformed but this is an idea for how i think it would work that would be cool and balanced

so my idea is that their is a warp drive block that can be connected to increase the distance you can jump so that small fighter Class ships can still have a use like to quickly jump out of a sticky situation but still give big ships a reason of being by having them be a carrier and once fighters are docked it can jump dozens of sectors at a time and you cant do it instantly the longer the jump and the bigger the ship or ships if docked the more power needed so when you activated it will suck all your energy vary rapidly (like 10000000 a second or something) and when your out it will just continue leeching on the power tell the power needed is reached then BOOM and according to the distance and the # of drive blocks the faster the ship travels but like the power the bigger the more you need to go fast so say your jumping 100 sectors to your ally base to help them fend of a attack its going to take you 1-4 minutes if you have the right amount of drives or it could take 4-10 minutes and as your in warp if you look out the window all you see is a large amount of space dust or whatever the streams of light are when your going fast enough anyway once you are out of jump it takes a few second to recharge weapons you can move but weapons will be disabled for a few seconds and the warp (depending on the #of blocks you have) will have a longer cool down so people cant warp into enemy factions and Leroy Jenkins "run in guns blazing" the shit out of everything and the others have time to react

that is my idea

 

[EpicFailLord123]

Permanent warp gates are the best idea for many reasons.

1. They require money and power to build and maintain.

2. People won\'t run around killing peoples warp gates until they know whats on the other side.

3. Warp gates have to be made very big to let all the capships through, meaning more money spent to upgrade them.

 

[Xylomain]

I\'m fond of both systems mentioned above. Perhaps only ships up to a certain size can use a Warp Drive. Capital Ship(or anyone else, not size dependent) would need to use the Warp Gate system as \"Warping\" space around bigger ships could require many thousands of times more energy than smaller ships. Warp Gates would need to be more or less a Station. With generators, a crew to maintain/upgrade, and a squad of fighter pilots to defend it, et cetera.

Warp, in the system above, wouldn\'t be instant travel, just really fast(relatively). Warp Gates(Transwarp Conduit) would be instant, but have massive energy requirements and a charge up time of quite possibly many minutes.

In Star Trek Voyager, I believe they ended up getting back to the alpha quadrant by using a system of \"Warp Gates\"(Transwarp Conduit) that the Borg were using to have a presence in all four quadrants of the galaxy. They had Warp capabilities but the galaxy was just too big. At maximum Warp for Voyager, which had a Class-9 Warp Drive and a maximum sustainable speed of Warp 9.975(appx 4364c), it was going to take 70 years to get back to the alpha quadrant.

For added balance, why not also have different tiers of Warp Drives. Like above, Voyager had a Class-9 drive indicating previous models.



Edit: If Warp Drives are the only thing used, and this is my opinion, I thought it would be cool if the Warp System of the ships had to be assembled. One block for each component of the system(more info here scroll down to \"Parts of the System\"). For bigger ships like a Capital Ship, the system could be scaled up using more of each block. Just thought it would be cool so I added this in an edit.

 

[omelet]

Just like in scifi, the gates themselves would only be there for the benefit they provide. The way they behave should be in line with that. Thinking about a few scifi tv shows:

babylon 5 had gates, they didnt build they just used them. In that show, warp required a big enough ship to have a warp drive, below some size they needed the gates. the gates got them to hyper space and then they flew around in that. They destroyed one of the gates by opening a warp while it was being activated. The purpose in this show I think was to give some explanation for why humans and others were able to become more advanced, give some plot devices, and explain how we could traverse vastness of space.

in stargate, they also did not build them. In that each gate had unique addresses to dial associated with planets. They were able to move the gates around though. Im not sure they destroyed any in that show except for the dialing device got destroyed several times. the gate is integral to the plot in this show/movie. In the moviethe purpose was it exposed humans to alien culture, in the show it provided a plot device so the story could go into any direction. One cool thing in this show was that they were able to prevent travel through the gate by shutting an iris device.

In farscape, the leviathan ship had a lengthy pre-charging and then did an instantaneous jump to a random location. The purpose in this show was for plot device and escape mechanism.

As discussed above, in star trek, mostly except for the trans warp conduit voyager series ending copout, the warp was not instantaneous and as better tech progressed the max warp ceiling increased slightly. The purpose and behavior in star trek is similar to for B5 except for how it looked.

So...in these fictional stories, this tech has been usually to explain backstory, provide a plot device, or rationalize being able to move long distances in space. None of these things are really necessary in this video game. However, as a escape or attack mechanism or just to save time it might be useful.

I think the simplest thing would be the gate idea. They could be randomly generated in space and randomly linked so you can explore more mostly without it being a battle strategy or too over powered.