Zende Partners has revealed plans to establish a ferry service between the core systems and Guardian space. - Why? Anyone with a ship can get there in 15 mins!
As I said above, this bit is not for the benefit of experienced players, but for those who still think the Pleiades is a long way away.
In story terms, it also provides opportunities for bulk transport of materials well above what you could move with a couple of cheap Anacondas, and the ability to move a few player ships about as well is incidental.
“Five systems have been highlighted as potential destinations, and we’d like to invite the galactic community to decide which of these should serve as the termination point for the megaship. We will then build an outpost in the chosen system, and the megaship will enter service.” Outpost would hardly make any difference as we still have to fly to the bubble to cash in the blueprints
Well, if the outpost had a Guardian Tech Broker, that would make quite a difference! But even if not, having a respawn point, a place to buy fresh SRVs, maybe that cargo rack you forgot to pack, a cheap pulse laser to activate orbital structures, etc. is probably also a pretty major improvement and convenience for people interacting with them for the first time without following some "how to min-max the Guardian sites" guide.
On the social side, it also provides an obvious place for people investigating Guardian sites to meet up and perhaps make some friends, or cooperate on unlocking a site, etc.
“We hope that this initiative will stimulate new innovations in the field of Guardian-human technology.” You Hope? Like what
They're a transportation and logistics company. What research institutions do with the things they bring back isn't going to be their field.
It's just a story hint that there may be more point to this ship than a convenience ferry for newer players. Obviously, metagaming the story, there will in fact definitely be some new hybrid modules becoming available at some point. But it's clearly too early in the story to announce what they are because in-universe no-one knows that yet, and it might depend on what other NPCs are able to do with player assistance.
But, as above, I think you're thinking of this in the wrong terms. Here's how this story would have played out in 3.3:
- vague intro Galnet article about Zende Corp
- Galnet article about Zende Corp planning to investigate Guardians
- some sort of CG connected to this (trade? research?)
- a couple more Galnet articles
- new Tech Broker recipes appear a few weeks later
It looks at the moment that they're giving players the opportunity to interact with all the stages of the story, so it's actually something that happens in the same universe, rather than the slightly offset Galnet reality. (i.e. basically what everyone's been asking for since they started running regular Galnet articles at all in 3.0)
Sure, it's still got room for improvement
- it'd have been nicer to be able to vote in-game
- the masscode naming convention gives really poor system names for doing anything in-game with, and they should have quietly renamed them something more useful in the 3.4 release
- more information on the benefits of each system should have been presented (again, ideally in-game) before the voting opened (though we can change our vote, so it's not too big a deal), just to make clear why it's worth voting on at all
...but on the other hand it's already looking a fair bit more interesting than the last six months of CGs + Galnet were, and likely to involve larger changes to the galaxy than any of those did.
