TL;DR : VOTED FOR THE DELAY.
I love Elite Dangerous. I am in my ship, amongst the stars, and against its incomprehensible vastness. A challenge Frontier undertook to give people the ability to gage the immensity of the void surrounding us. So much detail put into giving us the tools to cross cataclismic distances and yet preserve our appreciation of their intimidating sizes.
This is a core design element of Elite. There are reasons why ships can't jump 10k LY. Why not 25k LY straight to the galactic core ? So much work done by Frontier to achieve this. From Ship design to module balance, from seamless transitions between Orbital flight, Super cruise, into Hyper Jumps. A fine tuning of FSDs making some ships great for traveling, others for trading, others for fighting. Giving us other fine layers of customizations with engineers to further tweek those stats and adjust our ships to their perfect role. Not to the perfect ship. Perfect role. Explorer ship will always travel faster and further than a combat ship. Doesn't that make complete sense ?
So with all due respect I want to adress those of you who have totally oversaw this great issue and think that instant ship transfer will bring more fun out of your time in Elite : it will not.
It will not because it will WIPE all sense of vastness that was meticulously crafted at Frontier since they first started thinking about making Elite Dangerous, years ago. You will only travel in a single ship with all lightest modules and boosted FSD, magically summoning your war machines at CGs. Where in the heck of everything is there any g SENSE in this ? Please David tell me you were NEVER in favor for this.
Now, on the flip side, year 3000+ we got hyperspace but no shipping services ? Ridiculous. Obviously, we should be able to hire some company to transport our ships around. Ultimately it should be another layer of the Galaxy Map. But that's for another patch maybe. Obviously not 2.2. For now, a transport with appropriate delay and cost is good enough.
And to answer the final arguments I've read around :
- You don't have to "wait" for your ship. Please plan in advance your trips and be creative. Do a mission with your current ship ? Read Galnet ? Have a look at a few Engineer Blueprints you are tackling ? Check how your Power is doing this week ? Maybe take a needed break to refill your drink ? The list goes on.
- Yes some other elements of the game don't make sense even in the sci-fi setting of an intergalactic travel being possible. Such as Instant refuel, instant repair, instant rebirth with ship fully rebuilt. While indeed I would have liked some smart implementation of those elements for instance cloning your body like EVE did for rebirth and maybe selected "super" stations that have all ships and all modules for respawning only, these instant elements do not UNDERMINE THE CORE DESIGN OF ELITE DANGEROUS WHICH IS TO RECREATE THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE VASTNESS OF OUR GALAXY.
Thanks Frontier for givinge a chance to express my opinion.
Regards to all CMDRs.