[Suggestion] Carrier-based Jumpgates

[Tividar]

A Carrier optional service that repurposes one of the landing pads to create one end of a Jumpgate between two Carriers.

Like all carrier optional services, installing the Jumpgate module takes up cargo and has an initial installation cost. Maintenance/upkeep costs would be based on how the Jumpgate was used. Each day the gate was active would create Wear and Tear on the Carrier equal to 400 Cr per light year per day, so a Jumpgate from Sol to Colonia would cost about 9,500,000 Cr per day to maintain.

Maintaining the Gate would consume Cargo (Tritium or Hydrogen?) at a rate-per-day dependent on the size of the Gate and distance traveled. A medium Gate would consume three-times as much fuel as a small Gate, and Large Gate would consume ten-times as much fuel as a small Gate. The amounts are negotiable, but I figure maintaining a Large Gate for one week ought to consume around 700 tons of fuel (one full cargo load for a Type-9 / Imperial Cutter) 1 ton of Cargo per Lightyear per Week. The fuel consumption should happen consistently over time (perhaps on the 10min. server update).

The Gate takes 24 hours for a Gate to stabilize, and lasts as long at Credits and Fuel are available to maintain it. When the Gate shuts down, it can't be reactivated for 2 hours.

To use the Jumpgate, you request access much like you would for docking and fly "through" the designated landing pad-turned Jumpgate. Transiting the Gate gives a mini-game like Interdiction. If you fail the mini-game you're spit out of hyperspace to a random system between the source wormhole and the destination wormhole (or just a random system?). You get the same result if the destination Carrier fails to maintain its end of the Gate.

Transiting the Gate subjects to the CMDR to the Carrier's Tariff, based on the Ship Transfer Cost for an equivalent distance. (e.g. if the Tariff is set to 10%, you'd pay to the carrier owner 10% of the Ship Transfer Cost).

The Lore reason for the rarity of the gates is their high expense and lack of reliability. Note that all of the associated costs are effectively doubled since they get applied to/from both Carriers making up the Gate.

Comments:

• The credit cost serves the same purpose as upkeep, but also places soft limits on just how robust a Jumpgate network one could create. Yes, you could set up a Gate to Colonia, but doing so would eat 19,000,000 Cr per week plus the cost of the Carriers and the fuel. While the Tariff can mitigate some of that cost for the owner, its just shifting the expense to other players who are actively using the Gates.
• The Fuel requirement serves a similar purpose, but it also puts a minimum activity requirement on the Gates: someone has to run cargo on a minimally regular basis to keep the Gate running. More importantly, it also creates additional demand for Cargo to encourage player-driven economic activity.
• The Gate-Transit mini-game is there to inject some chance of failure. The chance is relatively small, but its enough to frustrate most botting activity, its more engaging than a loading screen, and it helps explain why the gates aren't more prevalent.
• The Tariff creates a disincentive for new players to make heavy use of the Gates. While it would be easy and convenient to take a Jumpgate from Deciat to Maia to satisfy F. Farseer's hunger for Meta-Alloys, the Gate would need to be used by at least one 67 A-rated Kraits a day for both Carrier owners to break even(with a 5% Tarrif). Both Carrier owners would be out the active use of their Carriers, and it'd cost the new CMDR several about a hundred thousand Credits (which the new commander could easily afford once he starts getting familiar with the various game loops that are much more interesting than 30+ FSD loading screens).
• Gates would inject some interesting choices for Trading CGs as right now the Carrier-owner dominates for trade-routes greater than roughly 200 ly. Two commanders willing to set up Jumpgates would effectively break that advantage as far as CG placement goes.

 

[Kzak]

Jumpgates have been talked over many, many times on these forums, and have never had any lore support. Highly unlikely that FDev will implement this.

 

[Tividar]

Jumpgates have been talked over many, many times on these forums, and have never had any lore support. Highly unlikely that FDev will implement this.

Yup, I've followed a fair number of the threads. This was mostly to get my idea/response down in one place and get feedback on game-play issues. Generally the negative responses tend towards concerns about reducing the feeling of "space is big," and making travel too "easy." I think the costs associated with this iteration of a Jumpgate would mitigate those concerns while encouraging social play. Lore is a rather fluid concept for ED - I don't recall system-wide Deathray pulses being part of the Lore either, but here we are... In any event, Jumpgates are simply artifice creating stable wormholes through hyperspace - essentially what existing FSDs already do. the difference is persistence bought at the cost of the need for (a lot) more equipment and higher maintenance costs. For "most" individual pilots, the trade-off isn't worth it. For highly travelled routes and for special events (e.g. CGs) it would be.

 

[varonica]

No.

 

[Tividar]

No.

Thanks V. Always appreciate your cogent responses.

 

[varonica]

Thanks V. Always appreciate your cogent responses.

You already know my arguments due to this;

Yup, I've followed a fair number of the threads.

Why should I repeat it all again for you on THIS thread when you have apparantly already read them? Or didn't you actually follow those threads because I posted in many of them. I see no reason to keep repeating the same thing over and over and over again because the same request comes up over and over and over again....I trust that's clear?

 

[Tividar]

Why should I repeat it all again for you on THIS thread when you have apparently already read them? Or didn't you actually follow those threads because I posted in many of them. I see no reason to keep repeating the same thing over and over and over again because the same request comes up over and over and over again....I trust that's clear?

I don't necessarily agree with them, but yes I'm familiar. There's no reason for you to repeat the same old arguments, but I'm happy to hear new ones if ya gott'em. But why bother replying at all if you've got nothing new to say?

 

[varonica]

I don't necessarily agree with them, but yes I'm familiar. There's no reason for you to repeat the same old arguments, but I'm happy to hear new ones if ya gott'em. But why bother replying at all if you've got nothing new to say?

The reason to reply is a lesson from another thread where a similar thing was brought up, an oft repeated argument for a function that a lot pf players disagreed with. I didn't bother replying at first, nor did a lot of other players who didn't agree with the premise and who must also have been tired of arguing. So what you had was a thread with the only replies agreeing with the position even though it had been strenuously argued against many time before. The OP then said "it looks like everyone agrees so why don't FDEV do it?" completely ignoring the dozens of threads and hundreds of objection that has previously been raised by other players.

So to prevent the appearance that these suggestions have universal support because everyone opposed is just too jaded with the idea being raised over and over again with the same endless arguments and same endless claims to bother replying, I have decided that we should reply, even if it's just the one word, NO, just to show the idea does not have universal support.

These threads aren't polls, and just because 95% of the posters agree with you doesn't mean that 95% of the player base agrees with you. So the answer is NO.

 

[Tividar]

...
So to prevent the appearance that these suggestions have universal support because everyone opposed is just too jaded with the idea being raised over and over again with the same endless arguments and same endless claims to bother replying, I have decided that we should reply, even if it's just the one word, NO, just to show the idea does not have universal support.

These threads aren't polls, and just because 95% of the posters agree with you doesn't mean that 95% of the player base agrees with you. So the answer is NO.

Fair enough. I get your logic. One would have to be crazy to think a forum thread was representative of the player-base, but I think we've both seen that exact argument enough to know the concern is legitimate. I think it would be helpful to have some of these consistently recurring suggestions consigned to their own thread. Bonus points for an occasional devpost on the why/why not's (I know Frontier is positively allergic to that kind of interaction. One can dream...)

 

[varonica]

Fair enough. I get your logic. One would have to be crazy to think a forum thread was representative of the player-base, but I think we've both seen that exact argument enough to know the concern is legitimate. I think it would be helpful to have some of these consistently recurring suggestions consigned to their own thread. Bonus points for an occasional devpost on the why/why not's (I know Frontier is positively allergic to that kind of interaction. One can dream...)

I can see a fair argument for having a meta thread/forum for these sorts of repeated suggestions, reserving the "suggestions" thread for interesting and much less discussed ideas and suggestions, that way the repeated threads wouldn't get buried pages down and would be much easier to find for players new to the game and the forum. I think it would also be helpful for the devs so they can track player opinion on these repeated suggestions.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Yes, you could set up a Gate to Colonia, but doing so would eat 19,000,000 Cr per week plus the cost of the Carriers.

Per-day, but that's still pretty cheap. Here's the exploit ship: https://s.orbis.zone/jjz2

You and your business partner set up a gate pair for the Colonia-Sol jump. Costs you 19M/day between you, which is going to become negligible.
The exploit ship - tariff free - will cost about 13M to transfer each way.
- pick up 5-7 famous explorer passenger missions in the Colonia region to tourist beacons in the Sol bubble at 50M each
- make the jump there and back, hopping around for an hour or so while in the bubble to do the tourist missions

Cost to you: 26M
Earnings: >250M

So you've earned well over 200M in about an hour, which funds the tariff-free operation of your combined gates for over a week, maybe two weeks if you got lucky with the missions.

Then, because it's so cheap, you can offer similar tariff-free jumps to everyone else in the game ... though anyone who has already set up a fleet at both ends can use a Freewinder for the actual transits and get instant free travel between the two regions anyway.

 

[Factabulous]

I can see a fair argument for having a meta thread/forum for these sorts of repeated suggestions, reserving the "suggestions" thread for interesting and much less discussed ideas and suggestions, that way the repeated threads wouldn't get buried pages down and would be much easier to find for players new to the game and the forum. I think it would also be helpful for the devs so they can track player opinion on these repeated suggestions.

No point. The OP didn't use the existing search button to see if it had been discussed before, so they probably wouldn't look for any list of existent requests. This is the problem - it's the people who probably already check and don't post that you serve, not the ones who post

(And to the OP : Another No, for the usual reasons - when fdev talk about the game the first thing they mention is '400,000,000,000 systems'. The scale - and difficulty of traversal - is what they see as one of the defining aspects of the game design. Travel is not supposed to be particularly easy or particularly fast.)

 

[Rat Catcher]

Great idea... It costs over a billion credits to transfer a fully fitted Cutter in either direction between Colonia / bubble - as well as taking 65 hours...

Of course, the transfer through one of these 'jump gates. ought to reflect the time taken to navigate the same distance in a FC, so bubble/Colonia being around 16 hours, and greater distances adjusted accordingly, just to keep 'fast travel' in line with current ability.

Perhaps the 'cost' of having these functions, as suggested by yourself, is a bit low, adjusting it up to around a billion each day for each carrier could more accurately represent the actual cost of implementation - coupled with the risk that either or both 'host' FCs, along with the ship(s) in transit, might be destroyed each time the gate is used. After all, so many 'requests' for greater risk are made by so few here...

Oh, and due to the 'gates' being highly experimental in nature, the insurance is negated, so no rebuy, for any asset, when it is used.

 

[rootsrat]

Jump Gates are a bad idea IMO. Many other threads about this in the past.

Also, please keep the thread civil and on topic.

 

[GroG79]

Imagin the awesome Sound GFX we can get when listening to this Jumpgate/portal....

 

[Tividar]

Per-day, but that's still pretty cheap. Here's the exploit ship: https://s.orbis.zone/jjz2

You and your business partner set up a gate pair for the Colonia-Sol jump. Costs you 19M/day between you, which is going to become negligible.
The exploit ship - tariff free - will cost about 13M to transfer each way.
- pick up 5-7 famous explorer passenger missions in the Colonia region to tourist beacons in the Sol bubble at 50M each
- make the jump there and back, hopping around for an hour or so while in the bubble to do the tourist missions

Cost to you: 26M
Earnings: >250M

So you've earned well over 200M in about an hour, which funds the tariff-free operation of your combined gates for over a week, maybe two weeks if you got lucky with the missions.

Then, because it's so cheap, you can offer similar tariff-free jumps to everyone else in the game ... though anyone who has already set up a fleet at both ends can use a Freewinder for the actual transits and get instant free travel between the two regions anyway.

So clearly costs are too low. I haven’t done many passenger missions as they really aren’t my thing. Is it relatively easy to pick up a 50 mil passenger mission? And how long do you normally have to complete them? Also, appreciate the feedback. I was specifically looking to avoid trivial exploitation.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

So clearly costs are too low. I haven’t done many passenger missions as they really aren’t my thing. Is it relatively easy to pick up a 50 mil passenger mission? And how long do you normally have to complete them?

It's a fairly typical payout for a "famous explorer" mission with a >20,000LY range, if you're Allied with the issuing faction. A little on the high side but you'll still probably find one or two at each port, and a much bigger number in the 35-50M range.

You normally get four weeks to complete, based on having to actually do the flying yourself.

And normally they're not straightforward to stack, as taking five of them probably means being sent to five different tourist beacons across the non-bubble half of the galaxy - a fun trip out, perhaps, but not an efficient earner.

The exception is Colonia, because the majority of tourist beacons are inside the bubble. When in the bubble, they're too close to be used for this mission type ... but when in Colonia, they're at the ideal distance to be paid well and once you've travelled 22kLY to the first one the next one is probably just one or two more jumps.

Without instant travel ... if you were really buckyballing back and forth in an optimised Anaconda for the best combination of jump range and cabin count, you might be able to make a bit over 50M/hour this way, and there are a lot of much easier ways to make that sort of money nowadays, so it's not a big deal. (Even back in 2.3ish when it first became possible, when 50M/hour was an unusually good income, I'm not sure anyone used it)




Looking at it a slightly different way, in terms of costs:
- the Fleet Carrier Owners Club has some members running regular Colonia-Sol ferries, no charge but donations of Tritium appreciated; lots of other people run ad hoc trips on the same basis
- provided your offline time matches up well with the ferry schedule, it can be instant travel from the point of view of the traveller - log out in Sol, log in at Colonia. More likely it means a day "in transit".
- and obviously an infinite number of ships can be transported on a single ferry at no extra cost.

The ferry itself is going to use about 9000t of Tritium for the round trip, at a cost of somewhere around 360 million credits, and can probably make a round trip every two days at maximum practical speed (the ones people actually run are on a more relaxed schedule, but equally there's more than one of them). So call it 200 million credits a day.

So the jumpgate needs to cost at least that much to operate and then quite a bit more to allow for the fact that it's
- not rate-limited
- bi-directional
- near-instant rather than "skip a day"
- not requiring the FC owner to be constantly online for 16 hours managing the jumps every time it's used

Given just how powerful that is and how many people would have an interest in it I suspect an appropriate consortium would be able to arrange 10 billion / day (no typo) in donations to maintain a Sol-Colonia gate. Any cheaper I think would be too straightforward to fund.

 

[BL1P]

No

 

[Chaparral]

Elite Deadly might look at these kinds of innovations at gameplay accessibility.

As space gets explored, and mobile floating cities get parked at distant locations, why wouldn't a growing network of highways make sense?

Railroads, highways, shipping lanes - it's a pretty attractive meme.

A player network of jump points - wow what a wonderful community based innovation. Nah we can't have that...

 

[Old Duck]

I think player-owned mobile jump gates would be exploited, so I don't see it happening. What I would love to see, however, is some sort of limited wormhole travel. Perhaps it's a DS9 style wormhole to the other side of the galaxy, that results in a New Colonia style mini Bubble growing on the other end. Another possibility would be to travel between mapped black holes using a special drive, similar (but obviously different) to original Elite's galactic drive.

But for now, might I recommend X4 Foundations to the OP? Or any X game for that matter. There jump gates are the rule rather than the exception