I had a bunch of multiquotes lined up, then somehow by trying to answer Darkfyre99 separately, it all apparently got lost. *headdesk*
On the topic of Autopilot:
NO. You add autopilot, you reduce the scale of the galaxy from being as massive as it is, more than Engineer blueprints and "neutron highways" already have. It's supposed to be huge, massive, mindnumbingly expansive.
The fact is the ingame representation of the Milky Way Galaxy is still a hugely watered down version of how big & densely populated with stars it is in real life.
I'm steadfastly against anything that takes a long, grand journey of epic proportions, and trivializes it for the sake of convenience.
Think about it for a minute: if a 9-to-5'er can just autopilot his way across the galaxy in a day, those of us who *do* have too much time on our hands could hop back and forth across the galaxy many times over in a week without hardly lifting a finger.
Hence, in capital letters, NO.
What is much more important - and would make autopilot superfluous - is targeting the time we spend staring at timers ticking down, and stuck at the arbitrary acceleration limit in supercruise. If Fdev reduced or even removed those timers & also removed the acceleration limits in supercruise, we would save *massive* amounts of time. (All of this is stuff I went over in my thread here:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/354015-The-Thread-To-Save-Time)
I get kind of tired of the farming argument. Points and counterpoints have already been made over that, and it's lead to very good concepts that would allow a player to use an autopilot, but still require their presence and input. A few people who hated the idea of autopilot in this thread have started having more of an open mind about it, and rather than simply saying NO, have started thinking about ways to keep it balanced, and prevent it from being abused as a farming method, and they have come up with some very good ideas about it. It wouldn't be difficult AT ALL to introduce an autopilot system that a player couldn't reasonably walk away from for 8 hours. I encourage you to read those points and counterpoints. These include things like adding serious drawbacks, random events that require player input, distance limits, and other things the for the player to do while an autopilot is running (such as messing with scan data, or crafting of some kind. I even suggested it be used as an opportunity to beta test space legs in a limited capacity, by giving players the ability to walk around their ship). Point is, there's ways to go about it even you might find reasonable. I encourage you to stop thinking about it as a black and white situation in which autopilot literally renders the player pointless.
And quite frankly, if the player IS present, then I fail to see how the universe suddenly becomes "smaller" if you use the autopilot. This also seems to be a fallacious argument. The literal distances between stars, and the time it takes to near INSTANTLY jump from one to the next doesn't magically change if you start using autopilot. Quite the opposite in fact, one of the drawbacks I recommended for using it is that, when combined with more interesting interstellar flight mechanics, using an autopilot could in fact result in a higher chance of jump failure, and a significantly increased time to complete a jump. If the player is present and sitting through this, if anything, the universe would actually appear SMALLER if they put in the effort to fly the ship, thanks to the time savings.
I do however agree that the timers aren't really necessary, at least, outside of doing something wrong and being punished for it. For jumps it's not necessary. Maybe to go INTO super-cruise, it's there just to give opponents one last chance to kill you, and prevent you from instantaneously jumping away from danger.
As for the current super cruise mechanic... I don't know really how that can be improved upon. It's a logarithmic scale. This is an actual mathematical concept. Your speed increases in MAGNITUDE as your distance from a target increases linearly (I think. That's how it appears to me. And it would make sense to do this in this game). This is specifically to account for the vastness of space. Believe it or not, but geometrically speaking, the logarithmic throttle scale in this game is probably far faster than any linear throttle scale they could ever implement. Your speed scales to the distance you are from gravity wells and points of interest. If it didn't do this, you would not have the fine control necessary in any linear throttle (capable of not stupid slow speeds and travel times) to accurately drop on a target. I'm not even sure your computer can handle it either, as game engines use physics frames per second. If you're travelling fast enough, then you would be, say, 1 LS away from your target in one frame, and 1 LS past it in the next. Both you AND your computer would miss the target in the blink of an eye. And a throttle that follows a logarithmic scale is probably better at handling this kind of navigation than either you or your computer ever could on a linear one. So whether you realize it or not, the super cruise throttle in game is probably better at saving you more time than you realize... It MIGHT be able to be improved upon by changing the values of the logarithmic scale, or by making it more extreme, but honestly, it might already be near the most optimized for speed it could possibly be. I could be wrong of course, maybe they could push the current logarithmic scale throttle even farther than the way it works currently... But my point is, don't hold your breath on that, because it might literally be a software and hardware limitation with the distances they're using.
I also find it funny that you're criticizing the autopilot idea as something that would "reduce the scale of the universe" in one hand, but stating that you want to get to your destination FASTER in super-cruise in the other. For one thing, physical distance is already meaningless in this game. You can near instantly travel up to 50 light years, and even in super-cruise, you're travelling at super luminal speeds... That's INSANE. The physical distances don't change no matter how you change the way you get there. What you're doing is measuring distances (and vastness) in travel time. I'm not saying that's a wrong way to look at it, in fact, I tend to agree that this is what "vastness" is connected to. But, if you were to measure the scale of the universe in travel time rather than physical distance, as you seem to be, then I would argue that making super-cruise faster would reduce the vastness of space too. In fact, by this metric, using autopilot would be made to be slower than a real pilot, thus making it a bigger universe by using one... Essentially, what YOU want for the game, is just as superfluous as an autopilot by your own logic. The only way I could see your logic working is the idea that a player could literally walk away and go to work for 8 hours, essentially not even experiencing that flight time... But as I previously mentioned, there's ways to make sure a player's presence is practically required and even manual flight encouraged, to effectively make a person unable to turn this into a farming game.
