An alternative to hyperspace mini-jump, which may be better and easier to introduce.

[2000gmod]

I present the idea of Hypercruise (name can be changed, don't worry)

The idea is, when you lock on a far star or massive planet (tens or hundreds of lightseconds away), blue circles pop-up around your destination while the ship displays a message saying "GRAVITY SOURCE LOCK", now there will be 2 blue circles, if you point your ship inside the bigger one, your supercruise speed gets multiplied by a number between 1 and 5 (depending on how well you maintain your ship inside the circle), if you point your ship inside the smaller circle, your supercruise speed gets multiplied by a number between 5 and 10, for example, if you are going at 150c and you activate hypercruise to a far-away star in the system,if you stay in the inner circle you should accelerate to 1500c, you should get ready to pop out of hypercruise because you will be going fast.

The logic behind this is that when the ship detects an isolated, and far-away gravity source, it can go faster than normal due to having a better lock on the gravity source.
If there's a planet 500ls away, and behind that planet there's another star 500.000ls away, you will not be able to hypercruise, due to the gravity of the planet, so your line of sight should be more or less clear of planet sized celestial bodies.

Here's an image of the concept, in this case, the ship locks on the gravity of Proxima Centauri to hypercruise to Hutton orbital.

What do you think?

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

Sounds good.
Oddly enough, I was toying around with an idea like that last night.

Then I fell asleep and forgot about it lol
Your idea is much better thought out than mine though!

+1 from me

 

[Lianachan]

*deleted - I was indeed missing something*

Although, I'm not keen on introducing another manual minigame.

 

[2000gmod]

*deleted - I was indeed missing something*

Although, I'm not keen on introducing another manual minigame.

Although this one won't be necessary for nearby targets, only far-away ones due to the speeds involved (you really don't need a x10 speed boost if your target is only 2k ls away, trust me).

 

[satrycus]

There must be something to this idea as it, albeit with slight differences, keeps coming up:

- 'Hypercruise' - Allows a ship to travel to a body of significant mass through a targeting tunnel in a frame shift interdiction type 'mini-game'. Deviate from the correct path and the ship will drop from Hypercruise taking significant damage to hull and systems.

I think that when FDev do introduce their new 'inter-system' form of travel you'll be limited to stellar mass size objects and it might not be as exciting as this.

 

[kpmop]

No. The Alpha Centauri system / Hutton Orbital is unique (?) because of the huge distance - this would take that away. Most of the time stations are usually only a few kls at worst, genrally < 1kls. It'd also spoil exploration - it'd make going for that ELW looking planet orbiting that star 300kls away too easy, and spoil that special sense of disappointment when it turns out it was a HMC and you knew it all along but just had to check...

Also, i gues it would limit the possibility to interdict ships if they're travelling at those speeds...

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

I think I'd much prefer this method over yet another transition animation.
This way also seems far easier to implement, and quite frankly, would look and feel amazing, compared to another hyperspace transition, and pop, you're there....
Especially if the external view of this happening resulted in some sort of massive streak across the star system.
Although, emergency stop would be near catastrophic. And fuel usage should be quite harsh.

 

[2000gmod]

There must be something to this idea as it, albeit with slight differences, keeps coming up:




I think that when FDev do introduce their new 'inter-system' form of travel you'll be limited to stellar mass size objects and it might not be as exciting as this.

Although it could share some of the code with orbital cruise, which works similar to this. (when you point in a particular direction, you get speed boost).

 

[Koren]

love love love love this.

I would also like to see inter-system travel using cruise at some point, like an alternative FSD that doesn't jump, it just flies at 1-3 LY/sec.

Could make Hutton an exception. Maybe part of the legend is that there is something hazardous about Proximal Centauri that makes hypercruise unusable in that system.

Or just a bug in the Galaxy Map that Universal Cartographics is too lazy to fix.

 

[Deadspin]

"Other opinion"

Do away with super cruise outright and implement this as the fast travel function for system traversal.

Increase instance size and adjust object spawn distances accordingly.

Establish "lanes" of travel in high traffic systems, introduce a new visual animation to denote ships in "hyper cruise" between nav beacon entry point and destination of their choice.

Re-tool interdiction devices to temporarily disable FSD, evasion mini-game could remain the same with perhaps some maneuverability tweaks for high speed interdictions.

 

[Jypson]

No. The Alpha Centauri system / Hutton Orbital is unique (?) because of the huge distance - this would take that away. Most of the time stations are usually only a few kls at worst, genrally < 1kls. It'd also spoil exploration - it'd make going for that ELW looking planet orbiting that star 300kls away too easy, and spoil that special sense of disappointment when it turns out it was a HMC and you knew it all along but just had to check...

Also, i gues it would limit the possibility to interdict ships if they're travelling at those speeds...

> I was under the impression that this form of travel would be optional. You would still be free to enjoy your cruise if you wanted to

 

[Sapient6]

I like this idea, for the most part. I do think it should require activation rather than just happening because of your alignment. Also:

• There should be increased fuel consumption as well.
• Intervening gravity wells should disrupt it, to a point. Any intervening gravity well of a greater mass than your target should make the gravity lock impossible. Intervening gravity wells of lower mass than your target can disrupt the effect as well, depending upon how far away they are. The closer they are to your ship, the lower the mass necessary to disrupt (based on a percentage of the target's mass).
• Overshooting your destination should cause an emergency drop, along with potentially massive amounts of damage.
• Avoiding overshoot should be easy as long as you don't mind dropping far from your target. Timing the the deceleration for a perfect drop, on the other hand, should be more complex than having a 75% throttle binding.
• Some method should be available for ships to aggressively disrupt hypercruise. Perhaps an analog of Spike Strips. Sys Auth and Pirates should be able to set up Road Blocks and Ambushes...

 

[TinyPwny]

I've voted no. In my opinion, it's already hard to remember / gauge / appreciate how large star systems really are. In most systems, you travel from one side to the other in a matter of minutes, while these systems are actually mindbogglingly huge. In some systems, it takes longer. So what? Why change that? The last thing ED needs in my opinion is further dumbing down of distances. It already takes less time to fly many lightseconds in ED than it takes in real life to drive to work or even walk to the neighbour's house. Please don't make the universe smaller!

(For pretty much the same reason I'm against the possible introduction of much larger hyper jumps in future updates).

 

[Sapient6]

No. The Alpha Centauri system / Hutton Orbital is unique (?) because of the huge distance - this would take that away.

Probably, but I'm not convinced that would be a bad thing.

Long travel times are a Thing in ED, but not really a well designed thing. Most people making trips like this open browsers, pick up books or watch TV. I understand the appeal of the long travel times, but game design that encourages people to step away for extended periods while the game does its thing isn't really impressive game design. If we're going to keep long travel times like that then we need something more, something that we can do in game during that travel.

On the other hand, Hypercruise might actually be a better solution than just hyperspace mini-jumps. Mini-jumps would likely be a near-instantaneous transition. Under that system a trip to Hutton Orbital becomes as trivial as a trip to any other station in the game. However, the system proposed by the OP would preserve some of that travel time.

How much it would shorten that trip is still up for grabs. Perhaps in hypercruise Hutton Orbital takes 10 minutes to reach. That's quicker, sure, but at least it isn't instant. Also, for that 10 minutes you'd have to keep your hand on the controls instead of walking away from the game. Finally, how much is fuel consumption going to go up? It might take a special build to be able to Hypercruise all the way to HO, while ordinary ships can only Hypercruise part of the way, then travel the remainder in Supercruise.

Really, this system offers a lot more interesting possibilities than just straight up being able to click a button and instantly arrive.

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

I like this idea, for the most part. I do think it should require activation rather than just happening because of your alignment. Also:

• There should be increased fuel consumption as well.
• Intervening gravity wells should disrupt it, to a point. Any intervening gravity well of a greater mass than your target should make the gravity lock impossible. Intervening gravity wells of lower mass than your target can disrupt the effect as well, depending upon how far away they are. The closer they are to your ship, the lower the mass necessary to disrupt (based on a percentage of the target's mass).
• Overshooting your destination should cause an emergency drop, along with potentially massive amounts of damage.
• Avoiding overshoot should be easy as long as you don't mind dropping far from your target. Timing the the deceleration for a perfect drop, on the other hand, should be more complex than having a 75% throttle binding.
• Some method should be available for ships to aggressively disrupt hypercruise. Perhaps an analog of Spike Strips. Sys Auth and Pirates should be able to set up Road Blocks and Ambushes...

All good ideas!

As for the last one, parking up with a huge gravity well generator, right in their path would be fun.
Easily avoided by not flying in a dead straight line, but if you hit it, you only get a few precious moments to do something* or it'll rip you out of SC entirely with a large amount of damage, mostly to your FSD, and a lengthy cool down.

*not sure what you could do, but it needs a avoidance.
Maybe a warning like "WARNING - artificial gravity well detected"
And you immediately start slowing down, and heat building up. So you have to turn out and manually throttle out of hypercruise, or something.

 

[MickyG1982]

Why not just utilize nav beacons to do the job for you. It would make them serve a purpose other than to just go in to & kill wanted NPC's.

Exploration is then left alone (no nav points in the void), traders have the choice of either using SC or the nav points. Pirates are happy because they can hang around at nav points & try to pick off traders or catch them in SC. Nav points could be made the focus of jumps into or out of populated systems and the choice could be made within the galaxy map itself.

Community goals can be introduced to allow the setup & maintenance of the Nav points i.e. ensuring security, adding additional nav points to the system.

Faction goals to take over, defend nav points in a system prior to invasion (which would give a tactical bonus to the holding faction).

Pirates could also have goals - destabilize the Nav points, which would mean that any ships travelling through that point will not be protected by security.

There is a lot that could be done if nav points were used properly as, well nav points!

 

[kpmop]

> I was under the impression that this form of travel would be optional. You would still be free to enjoy your cruise if you wanted to

Of course you'd use it - you'd need be a little insane to do that kind of distance in SC if you had a choice!

 

[MickyG1982]

A Nav point based option would make it optional, a real risk / reward scenario, might make the supercruise lanes safer to travel for traders too.

 

[2000gmod]

I like this idea, for the most part. I do think it should require activation rather than just happening because of your alignment. Also:

• There should be increased fuel consumption as well.
• Intervening gravity wells should disrupt it, to a point. Any intervening gravity well of a greater mass than your target should make the gravity lock impossible. Intervening gravity wells of lower mass than your target can disrupt the effect as well, depending upon how far away they are. The closer they are to your ship, the lower the mass necessary to disrupt (based on a percentage of the target's mass).
• Overshooting your destination should cause an emergency drop, along with potentially massive amounts of damage.
• Avoiding overshoot should be easy as long as you don't mind dropping far from your target. Timing the the deceleration for a perfect drop, on the other hand, should be more complex than having a 75% throttle binding.
• Some method should be available for ships to aggressively disrupt hypercruise. Perhaps an analog of Spike Strips. Sys Auth and Pirates should be able to set up Road Blocks and Ambushes...

Excellent ideas! +1 rep.

 

[Siobhan]

Next thing, people will be asking for station to station teleport... why even have ships at all?

Even Hutton Orbital is only between 80 and 90 minutes depending on how quickly you accelerate... It's not like it takes all day to get there, and unless you're a trucker, how often do you go there anyway?