Voted no - ship transfer should take some time. If for no other reason than instant ship transfer totally breaks with any kind of realism. Sure, instant transfer would be more convenient, but also very 'gamey'.
With the delay, you can still go where you want to go in a long-jump ship like say the Asp, and get your big bad but horrendously low jump range combat ship to your location within a reasonable amount of time without breaking the immersion and sense of realism the game have (yes I know Supercruise and Hyperspace isn't possible within our current understanding of physics, but why introduce time-travel as well, which instant transfer in effect would be).
I am totally fine with choosing gameplay over physics. However, when you do it this much, you cannot suddenly turn around use “but realism” or “because it will make the galaxy feel bigger” as an excuse for gameplay. Here are all the times the “Elite: Dangerous” designers chose gameplay over believable realism.
YOUR SHIP HAS A MAXIMUM SPEED. What is your speed even relative to in deep space? The nearest star? The nearest planet? The ether?
YOUR SHIP HAS A MAXIMUM ANGULAR SPEED THAT DEPENDS ON YOUR SPEED (except when a bad interdiction happens, then it spins at up to ten full rotations per second, without apparent ill effect), UNLESS YOU GET IT HIGHER IN FA-OFF, WHEN IT WILL STAY HIGH UNLESS YOU SLOW IT DOWN, BUT YOU CAN’T MAKE IT HIGHER AGAIN
YOUR BOTTOM THRUSTERS CAN SUPPORT YOU ON A 10G PLANET. BUT THEY CAN’T SLOW YOU DOWN MUCH ON A 0.1G PLANET.
IF YOU DISABLE THRUSTERS, YOUR SHIP SLOWS DOWN AND “STOPS” AT ABOUT 1G OF ACCELERATION, SOMETIMES FASTER THAN FULL REVERSE THRUSTERS COULD.
YOUR SHIP CAN HOVER IN VACUUM ABOVE THE SURFACE OF A 10G PLANET FOR SIXTY HOURS AND ONLY BURN TEN PERCENT OF ITS WEIGHT IN FUEL. WITHOUT EVEN SCORCHING THE PLANET’S SURFACE. This is physically impossible.
All ships rattle and glide through the non-existent atmosphere around planets at 2500 m/s. You decelerate at about 100G at the end of a glide. NO MENTION IS MADE OF WHAT PROVIDES THIS THRUST. THIS WOULD DEFINITELY KILL YOU. (Supercruise deceleration is different, “warp bubble” handwaving).
Your pilot will survive a crash at 600m/s (if your shields do). For comparison, that is MACH 1.5 (in Earth’s atmosphere), or 2160 km/hr. That sort of deceleration would SMEAR YOU INTO A THIN ORGANIC PASTE ON THE WINDSCREEN.
A MODDED SHIP CAN BOOST FROM -800m/s to 800m/s in two seconds. That is 80G of acceleration, and would definitely kill you. Pilots in combat can do this continuously. It somehow uses only about 200g of fuel/thrust mass to do this for a HUNDRED TONNE SHIP. The exhaust must be moving at basically c which would obliterate-a-hundred-mile-radius-nuke anything it was pointed at.
YOU CAN FLY SO CLOSE TO A SUN THAT IT FILLS NEARLY HALF YOUR SKY-SPHERE, AND YET A COUPLE OF TINY HEAT RADIATORS THAT ARE FACING THE SUN ARE ENOUGH TO KEEP YOUR SHIP’S COCKPIT AT ROOM TEMPERATURE INDEFINITELY.
If you target a signal source in supercruise, and it is less than six seconds away at your current speed, YOUR SHIP HAS TROUBLE SLOWING DOWN. Untarget it and you can stop almost instantly.
If your ship explodes, you have a 100% reliable escape pod that TRAVELS INSTANTLY RIGHT ACROSS THE GALAXY if that is where you last docked.
THE PILOTS FEDERATION INSURANCE PAYS 95+% OF THE COST OF ALMOST EVERY PLAYER’S SHIP, SOMETIMES SEVERAL TIMES IN ONE DAY. WHERE ARE THEY GETTING SUCH HUGE AMOUNTS OF MONEY? WHO MAKES ALL THE SHIPS? WHY ARE IDIOT PILOTS WHO REPEATEDLY BLOW UP THEIR SHIP GIVEN ANOTHER?
WE HAVE A DOCKING COMPUTER THAT IS GOOD ENOUGH TO FLY THROUGH THE MAIL SLOT AND ALIGN GENTLY WITH A LANDING PAD, BUT NO SHIP FUNCTION THAT POINTS THE SHIP IN THE DIRECTION OF A TARGET AND PRESSES THE HYPERSPACE BUTTON? A TEN-YEAR-OLD COULD WRITE THAT PROGRAM IN LOGO.
PLANET GRAVITY WELLS ARE DEEP, so supercruise takes ages, BUT YOU CAN HYPERSPACE from 2km above the surface. You have to get further away from a TINY LITTLE SPACE STATION to jump than the SURFACE OF A HUGE PLANET. THE SURFACE GRAVITY OF THE PLANET (0.1G OR 10G) DOESN’T MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE.
SUPERCRUISING JUST ABOVE THE PLANET’S SURFACE IS FINE AS LONG AS YOUR SHIP IS POINTING ABOVE THE HORIZON. YOU CAN CRASH INTO OR CLIP THROUGH HIGH MOUNTAINS WITHOUT A PROBLEM, but as soon as the nose dips below the horizon, your ship's computer dumpout of supercruise.
INVISIBLE BARRIERS AROUND PLANETS ARE FINE. Fly to Lave 2 and try to land on it. There is an invisible barrier that will stop you at 218km altitude. You just hang in space with your main engines on full burn.
THERE ARE INVISIBLE BARRIERS ON LANDING PADS. If you dock at an outpost just after another ship leaves then you cannot fly into the space the landing pad leaves while it is rotating.
YOU CAN HYPERSPACE TO A BROWN DWARF, BUT NOT A CLASS G STAR IF IT IS NOT THE CENTRE OF THE SYSTEM.
EVERYTHING LOOKS TOTALLY NORMAL AT 100x THE SPEED OF LIGHT. THERE IS NO BLUESHIFT, NO REDSHIFT, NO DISTORTION. What I’m saying is that SUPERCRUISE IS MADE UP and THERE’S NO “REALISM” ARGUMENT FOR IT TO BE SO STUPIDLY SLOW.
A SINGLE STATION IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE OFFERS NEARLY A 50% INCREASE TO THE MOST IMPORTANT SHIP STAT IN THE GAME AND THE MAJOR POWERS AND COMMERCIAL VENTURES SEEM OBLIVIOUS TO THIS. THIS STATION MUST GET BILLIONS OF (NPC) VISITORS A DAY BECAUSE LOTS OF SHIPS HAVE THESE UPGRADES, AND YET IT ONLY GETS ONE OR TWO ARRIVALS PER MINUTE.
THERE ARE ABOUT FIVE HUNDRED TRILLION PIRATES AND MINERS IN EVERY RING SYSTEM IN INHABITED SPACE
THERE IS NO TORQUE DURING COLLISIONS. If the edge of my ship clips a tower or something, I just slow down! I should go spinning like a top. Same for hitting other ships.
THERE IS NO MOMENTUM CONSERVATION DURING COLLISIONS. When a big ship hits a small one, the momentum behaviour is really dumb.
INSTANT REPAIR. INSTANT REFUEL. INSTANT SHIP BUYING. INSTANT OUTFITTING. INSTANT ENGINEERING. INSTANT REBUY ON DEATH. INSTANT CARGO LOADING. EVERYTHING IS INSTANT.
Materials weigh nothing. But you can generate more than 100 tonnes worth of SRV refuels from them.
The “Regeneration Sequence” mod on a beam laser allows you to recharge another player’s shield so fast as to make them effectively invulnerable. You do this by firing your laser at their shield. However, there is no way to dump that energy into your OWN shield, even though much more effective means for transferring that energy should exist than a “laser beam”. Most of the weapon mods are like this.
Basically what I’m saying is, “realism” went out the window a long time ago, so don’t use that as an excuse for bad gameplay.
