2.2's Instant Ship and Module Transport - Yay or Nay?

[K M Butler]

Restrict destination to large-pop full-service starports you have a friendly or better relationship with.
1% chance per jump ship will be lost to piracy, catastrophy, Thargoids, pilot error or whatever.
1 minute delay per jump.
Ships that cant make it on their own, 1 minute delay per LY, with costs 10X.
That should help keep things balanced and non-absurd.

 

[bitstorm]

Probably a stupid question but presumably transfer requires a shipyard at both ends?

 

[2plex]

It comes to my mind that with these new 3D (quantum) printers practically all you need to transfer is the complete quantum state of your old ship, which could be done in pretty much an instant, and then have it printed out in the hangar, which would take some time ofc.

Giving it some further thought I may have an explanation why we can have instant ship teleportation but still need hyperspace travel.
Mind you, I'm just trying to wrap my head around the fact of Frontier's instant transfer mechanism and though I'd prefer a more conventional ingame solution, I think we are stuck with it.

So, say there is quantum scanner/3D printer at every Shipyard/Outfitting facility, then the above method would be used to transfer your ship.
Why isn't there every kind of ship available at every shipyard then?
Because ships still have to be manufactured and the quantum teleportation method is only used to move them about.
More particularily, the quantum scanner would extract the quantum state of your ship, which destroys the original ship and leaves behind an entropic cloud of particles only.
This unstructured particle cloud would be claimed by the respecticve transfer organisation to make up for the use of the same amount of particles at the receiving end.

The actual transmission of the extracted quantum state to the 3D quantum printer at the target location is pretty much instantaneously (quantum entanglement) and the ship is fully reprinted after some amount of time.

The license to extract the quantum state of a ship has to be bought from the ship manufacturer. The use of it entails a certain fee depending on the ship model and any misuse is rigidly prosecuted and severely punished.
As ships, though containing quite a large number of particles, are fairly homogenous, one could even imagine the use of some clever 'compression' algorithms to reduce the inforamtion amount and complexity of the transmitted quantum state, thus making the use fairly cheap and quite commonplace in 3302.
These 'compression' algorithms would also safeguard the manufacturer against any piracy, as they are known only to them and any 3rd party meddling with the transfer signal is immediately detectable due to the nature of quantum entanglement.

This could also provide an answer why we still have hyperspace transport at all, because due to the rather homogenous and simplistic composition of your average ship/module etc., the respective quantum state is in large parts redundant and thus 'compressible', whereas the quantum state of any animated matter such as a human beings(human brains) is unique and uncompressible.
Such a unique quantum state could only be transmitted as a 1:1 copy and the required information signal would be orders of magnitude larger and more complex than that of your average Anaconda, even tough far less particles are involved.
The quantum transfer technology used in 3302 simply isn't up to that task yet.

 

[bitstorm]

"Sorry your ship was blown up by pirates during transfer. Pay insurance costs (y/n)?"

 

[Maruun]

"Sorry you ship was blown up by pirates during transfer"

I hear already the RNG crys....

 

[Sealurk]

I would be okay with ship transfer being faster than it actually takes to fly there, say 75% of the usual travel time, but I wouldn't like to see instantaneous transfer - somehow that just feels cheap and rushed. If the ship is flying on remote, it will presumably use the most efficient flight plan and has the advantage of not needing to keep a squishy, fragile human alive, and won't be stopping to honk, scoop, shoot or investigate everything it comes across. If it's NPCs, then... eh, it's what they do for a living, they're good at their job.

 

[Asapo]

ship transport and modul transport is realy great but please only with a delay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
the immersion will be destroyed when the transfer ist instant... and immersion is almost everything in elite dangerous

please think about it until release

 

[[DOOK] Droogie]

You're comparing dying instantly to voiding the jump range on all ships and incentivizing Taxicondas everywhere? Seriously? These are not remotely the same thing.

When you're in your escape pod, you're unconscious and don't experience the passage of time. Also there is no benefit to dying! Whereas Taxicondas and suicideys can be abused in a number of gamebreaking ways.

It is exactly the same thing. New ship is rebuilt instantly. No in game time passes. The game clock doesn't skip ahead. Just like all modules are instantly added to your ship, all cargo instantly loaded and offloaded, you are instantly refueled and restocked.

SRV is instantly fixed, refueled, and rearmed by clicking a button using materials in your magic storage that somehow travels with you.

I understand the concerns, but not with immersion. This is common in the game already. In fact, the game kind of revolves around it.

 

[xAurora]

Why would giving it a delay like 5m-10m of delivery make more sence than a instant delivery ?

"Transfer should take at least as long as it would take manually." What sence would it make to pay and wait for something which I could have done for free (excluding fuel cost) ?

This is game, right ? We are supposed to have fun, not to limit ourselves like somekind of sadists, making us pay for a service is enough of a fee for getting access to ship I have purchased already.

To all of you saying that its immersion breaking: Why dont we start from the beggining when we die ? Why are we allowed to travel speed of light ?
+

New ship is rebuilt instantly. No in game time passes. The game clock doesn't skip ahead. Just like all modules are instantly added to your ship, all cargo instantly loaded and offloaded, you are instantly refueled and restocked.

SRV is instantly fixed, refueled, and rearmed by clicking a button using materials in your magic storage that somehow travels with you.

I understand the concerns, but not with immersion. This is common in the game already. In fact, the game kind of revolves around it.

 

[nathdixon92]

Why would giving it a delay like 5m-10m of delivery make more sence than a instant delivery ?

"Transfer should take at least as long as it would take manually." What sence would it make to pay and wait for something which I could have done for free (excluding fuel cost) ?

This is game, right ? We are supposed to have fun, not to limit ourselves like somekind of sadists, making us pay for a service is enough of a fee for getting access to ship I have purchased already.

To all of you saying that its immersion breaking: Why dont we start from the beggining when we die ? Why are we allowed to travel speed of light ?

This.

Why would I bother having to wait and pay to have my ships moved for the same amount of time it would taken me to start of with?

 

[[DOOK] Droogie]

I would like to see giant transport ships parked outside of stations. They don't actually go anywhere in game, but they're what supposedly moves your ship. Perhaps they have extremely large jump ranges, allowing them to arrive much faster than us.

 

[Bambi]

You have to remember the actual travel time for retrieving a stored ship is twice. Once there in a sidewinder taxi, then back in whatever ship it was, probably a big one to be worth bothering. It also occupies your time with travel. A delay would be a one-way trip, potentially it could be faster than this without breaking immersion? And it would still let you do other things while it was underway.

I do want there to be a sense of scale to the galaxy, instant transfer even over the full distance from one end of the bubble to the other destroys that. But managing your ships completely manually flying one at a time is very tedious. A delayed but automatic transfer is clearly the answer. It should probably also not be free. A fee could be based on how far and how valuable the ship is.

Having your ships damaged or destroyed in transit would be awful and random though.

It is exactly the same thing. New ship is rebuilt instantly. No in game time passes. The game clock doesn't skip ahead. Just like all modules are instantly added to your ship, all cargo instantly loaded and offloaded, you are instantly refueled and restocked.

SRV is instantly fixed, refueled, and rearmed by clicking a button using materials in your magic storage that somehow travels with you.

I understand the concerns, but not with immersion. This is common in the game already. In fact, the game kind of revolves around it.

Remember that canonically, there are no FTL comms. All interstellar communications must be carried with trade ships or couriers. The friend chat is a concession to the real world, as without it, you would just be forced to use steam or irc or something else to chat with your friends.

 

[Retrograde]

For gameplay reasons, I feel that any duration of waiting above a few seconds would feel arbitrary and tedious. Waiting for your ship to arrive is not fun. And we do need ship transfer and module transfer, so some sort of handwavium is unfortunately inevitable.

To make it semi-plausible, there could be a mega-corporation that stores every type of ship and loadout at certain stations (massive population, wealthy). This corporation provides a replacement ship for you, so you're not getting your old ship back but a similar one (which just happens to be identical every time). If your old ship were not at full health, the company would charge you for its repairs in addition to the high replacement fee.

A ship replacement service could make the switching operation seem a bit less magical, I think. As a drawback, you'd need to travel to the nearest place which offers this - perhaps 2-3 jumps - if we limit it to a few hundred places in the bubble.

 

[PavelKCZ]

Wow what a long rant

I did not saw a stream, but if they explicitly said that they want to have STATELESS transfer (which really does make sense from the programmer/developer/resources/financial point of view), we will have instant ship transfer and no one will not change it by some rants on forum.

Better get used to it and try to adapt. At least, there will be some new opportunities, some challenges and some funny moments.
For some players, it will be hard, but it is a life. For me personally, it is really hard to accept the existence of Open, the existence of UA griefing at stations or the existence of players group trying to manipulate BGS. But it is a game mechanic and I can't do anything with it. So, the insta-delivery of ships will be another game mechanic which I will accept. At least, I can avoid this part of game, which is not the case of for example the BGS manipulations or UA griefing.

 

[[DOOK] Droogie]

Why would giving it a delay like 5m-10m of delivery make more sence than a instant delivery ?

"Transfer should take at least as long as it would take manually." What sence would it make to pay and wait for something which I could have done for free (excluding fuel cost) ?

This is game, right ? We are supposed to have fun, not to limit ourselves like somekind of sadists, making us pay for a service is enough of a fee for getting access to ship I have purchased already.

To all of you saying that its immersion breaking: Why dont we start from the beggining when we die ? Why are we allowed to travel speed of light ?
+

Nitpick. I'm sorry, but it is scratching at my brain. That would be a masochist.

Carry on

 

[bitstorm]

This.

Why would I bother having to wait and pay to have my ships moved for the same amount of time it would taken me to start of with?

Loads of reasons.

- Because you can only move one ship at a time
- Because you can go do something else, run a mission or something
- Because bringing a ship to you is half the distance that it would be for you to fetch and retrieve and so twice as quick
- Because there's less risk due to you having some valuable cargo with you
- Because you really don't want to sit there and run 40 consecutive jumps
- Because the ship you are in has God awful jump range

etc...

 

[Bambi]

For gameplay reasons, I feel that any duration of waiting above a few seconds would feel arbitrary and tedious. Waiting for your ship to arrive is not fun.

Why not? You're not forced to sit and stare at the hangar until it arrives. It would be a way to collect your wayward ships from across space easily, as you need them, not some kind of fast travel. Just go do something in the ship you have until it arrives then switch.

 

[[DOOK] Droogie]

You have to remember the actual travel time for retrieving a stored ship is twice. Once there in a sidewinder taxi, then back in whatever ship it was, probably a big one to be worth bothering. It also occupies your time with travel. A delay would be a one-way trip, potentially it could be faster than this without breaking immersion? And it would still let you do other things while it was underway.

I do want there to be a sense of scale to the galaxy, instant transfer even over the full distance from one end of the bubble to the other destroys that. But managing your ships completely manually flying one at a time is very tedious. A delayed but automatic transfer is clearly the answer. It should probably also not be free. A fee could be based on how far and how valuable the ship is.

Having your ships damaged or destroyed in transit would be awful and random though.



Remember that canonically, there are no FTL comms. All interstellar communications must be carried with trade ships or couriers. The friend chat is a concession to the real world, as without it, you would just be forced to use steam or irc or something else to chat with your friends.

Then how do I get messages mid mission from the origin system redirecting me to another station when I'm 45ly away?

 

[ahwala]

It is exactly the same thing. New ship is rebuilt instantly. No in game time passes. The game clock doesn't skip ahead. Just like all modules are instantly added to your ship, all cargo instantly loaded and offloaded, you are instantly refueled and restocked.

I understand the concerns, but not with immersion. This is common in the game already. In fact, the game kind of revolves around it.

I agree, immersion is the least of the problems that come with instantaneous ship transfer. It's more the impacts on gameplay that I find worrying, to put it kindly. Where before you had to travel the distances with the ship you want engineered for example, or travel the distances with another ship and carry the modules back to where your, say FDL or Vulture, were docked and swap the modules, you can now take your Conda from engineer's system to engineer's system and summon your FDL or Vulture at every stop. Noone will ever travel more than a couple dozen ly in any other ship than the Conda, DBX or AspX again, unless the costs of transfer are so prohibitively high that the feature doesn't help much in the first place.

I think all of this could be solved if transfer would take some amount of time, optimally scaling with distance. It's not even that important how much time it would take, I'd personally prefer something close to what it would take a player to fly the ship there himself, but there must be at least some sort of delay to prevent this feature from hurting the game.

 

[bitstorm]

you can now take your Conda from engineer's system to engineer's system

Won't a transfer require a shipyard at both endpoints?