A thread for the "fast travel" folks....

[Morbad]

So armed with some science from the video above, can you create some enticing yet plausible alternatives to supercruise as the primary means of interplanetary travel?

The whole reason these manifolds are a thing in reality is because the gravitational influences at work have protracted periods of time to act on other bodies and are traveling at significant velocities themselves. Reduce travel times by many orders of magnitude and/or increase acceleration/total delta-v by many orders of magnitude and you radically diminish the relevance of the phenomena described, even if you are obeying the same overarching natural laws.

I was thinking more along the lines of visual cues, but following these gravitational / transport network "routes" could permit faster supercruise travel due to "favourable gravitational conditions"

We already have that, to a degree, with mass shadows. It doesn't apply much to really long SC voyages, and couldn't, without a much longer range of more pronounced gravitational effects and greater SC acceleration. I think this would be very hard to balance to the extent that long SC voyages were potentially shorter and more interactive, without crippling SC travel in closer proximity to sizable collections of mass.

In other threads on fast travel, I've actually suggested supercruise slingshotting, I even made some diagrams for it where the green section fo the gravity well is for slingshotting and the orange section is when you "fall in" and gravity brake

But why would SC behave this way? What causes that cut off between the slingshot and breaking zones?

Even if gravity could act on ships in SC in the same way as it can on real objects in real space, gravity assist could not work, because the relative velocity of most planets--compared to the velocity needed to make interplanetary travel take the same amount of time it currently does--is completely trivial. The system we have now, while also arbitrary, is at least consistent from the perspective of gravity limiting SC velocity.

Not to mention that the current supercruise travel times / speeds aren't grounded on any kind of physics or reality either, they're just some arbitrary values someone at FD came up with, which pretty much invalidates any kind of arguments based on "realism / plausability".

Realism and plausibility are not necessarily the same thing. You can have a high degree of verisimilitude in an overtly fantasy setting...you just need internal consistency. Once the rules of the setting are laid down, anyone that understands them should be able to use them to make predictions on how various phenomena in that setting will interact...unless one is being deliberately surrealistic. Cause and effect, at the micro and macro levels, should be logical, even in distinctly unreal settings.

FTL, especially as it's depicted in this game, is as high-fantasy as an undead dragon with a lightning-bolt breath weapon. That's still no excuse for SC to behave in self-contradictory ways, IMO, unless there is no other alternative. And there are plenty of potential ways to speed and/or introduce more gameplay to travel, while improving consistency, rather than further compromising it.

 

[Schmack]

I've always thought it should be possible to jump back to the nav beacon from anywhere in the system, since you can jump to it from just a few km away into the other system. It should not be faster to go 40LY than .5LY if you're starting in deep space and ending up at the same navigation beacon.

 

[alexzk]

Go tell to Star Citizen players that our cruise is slow They fly 40 mils km for like 5 mins.

To move faster- just fly out of plane:

|plane    |  \

|         |    | u|

|         |  /

 

[Exeider]

Let's open up by stating the cavaet that I'm vehemently opposed to the "decimate travel times / bring in intrasystem jumps because supercsruise is boring", mainly because I believe in maintaining the sense of scale and sensation fo flying a spaceship rather than spamming the jump button. However, I'm also an ardent supporter of that which is scientifically plausible - and here we have science supporting interplanetary highways:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrXHw9Y_VQg


So armed with some science from the video above, can you create some enticing yet plausible alternatives to supercruise as the primary means of interplanetary travel?

The irony here is shipping lanes were supposedly to be a thing where your SC drive would accelerate and decelerate faster vs Deep Space. you can see the vestige of this system by looking at your hud On the left side, youll see it change from shipping lane to deep space. When you move out of the direct paths to planets.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Beam me up, Scotty. This planet thread sucks.

 

[Qualityoflife]

All we need is simple super cruise booster, takes extra fuel and add a space debris dodge mini game to thwart the boredom?
On autopilot I should be able to get up and walk about my ship..........if we had interiors!

 

[Ian Doncaster]

You can already increase SC acceleration by getting to frack out of the orbital plane

Not really. Space is big and empty, so in 90% of cases it makes no difference if you're on the orbital plane or not if you're doing a trip between two bodies, except in the case that they're on opposite sides of the star (or you get unlucky and another planet happens to be directly in the way) ... and in that case following the orbit lines around the star in the plane / heading sideways in the plane around the intermediate planet is just as efficient as doing a vertical arc over/under the plane the majority of the time.

The problem with SC is not the bit at the start or end of the trip, it's the bit in the middle where there is literally nothing you can do to affect the journey time, nothing can interdict you because of the acceleration curves, and you can take a five minute break without consequence.

This is also the bit where SC does an absolutely terrible job of portraying the scale of systems:
- in a planetary system, generally within 3000Ls of the star, it's absolutely great. Not because it takes time, but because it lets you move incredibly quickly between various viewpoints. You can see a gas giant in the distance as a point of light, maybe with a couple of dimmer points next to it, and then you can fly up and around it from various angles as it becomes this huge planet, and still its moons are small dots, and then you can fly up to one of those moons and see it as a body itself, and then you can land on it and get out in the SRV (and soon, on foot) and it's huge - from the ground, the horizon appears flat, you can end up in a small crater or a volcanic valley and just be able to see a few kilometres ... unless you look up, and see the system's star still having a visible diameter, and then you get an idea of just how big it is compared to this moon.
You're also hands-on controls and have options to optimise your trip, things to do (even if it's just scanning an NPC for some free data materials), potential threats to assess, and therefore are more likely to actually be playing the game to notice these scale differences.

- between planetary systems, on the 300,000Ls trip between distant binaries, it's actually pretty terrible for getting that distance across. Sure, it takes a while to get there. But the time it takes is in no way proportional to the distance. It only takes about twice as long to go 300,000Ls as it does to go 30,000Ls, and unless they're giant stars they'll look like points for most of either of those journeys, so it doesn't get across the vastness of the gap between them all that well at all. You certainly don't get the impression that the gap between them is 100x larger than the star-planet distance within them.
You're also completely hands-off controls and certainly don't get a good idea of interplanetary scales from reading the forum.

Being able to jump from an arbitrary planetary body to another would be very bad - there are good reasons that supercruise replaced microjumps in the original design - but being able to pick a top-level star as a hyperspace target would be fine. Maybe even require you to be clear of the local planetary system if you're doing a jump to another star in the same system, and have it drop you at the edge of the other one, so you still get the actual interesting bits of supercruise.

 

[askavir]

I'd much rather have my alt-tabbed supercruise time spent in normal space on all of those signal sources around each system that almost everyone ignores due to the travel times between each one. It would be a far richer experience than browsing the web waiting to arrive at the destination. As for interdictions, it's not something I would miss at all, those 10 second encounters are a very lame excuse for supercruise gameplay, I'd rather drop much further away from destinations in normal space and have things happen there instead, at least in normal space it actually feels like I'm flying a ship, even if in a straight line.

On the other hand I suspect that if all that dead time spent on the forum in supercruise was removed or meaningufully shortened, the forum would then only have a couple posts per day as much more people would be busy playing instead.

 

[Ydiss]

More than happy with the status quo. Any reduction in travel times is pointless because whatever it is people will always complain it's too long.

Nirvana fallacy - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[GunnerBill]

Nirvana fallacy - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Away with your Voltaire quotes!

Either we're playing a game in a 1:1 scale virtual recreation of our Galaxy or you dumb down interstellar travel to a point where it might as well be a Monopoly board.

 

[Maolagin]

The irony here is shipping lanes were supposedly to be a thing where your SC drive would accelerate and decelerate faster vs Deep Space. you can see the vestige of this system by looking at your hud On the left side, youll see it change from shipping lane to deep space. When you move out of the direct paths to planets.

Was that ever actually claimed? I was under the impression that Shipping Lanes were significant because more and different types of USS spawn along them vs in Deep Space.

 

[VR Jay Le Chardon]

Away with your Voltaire quotes!

Either we're playing a game in a 1:1 scale virtual recreation of our Galaxy or you dumb down interstellar travel to a point where it might as well be a Monopoly board.

Interstellar travel is already dumbed down to push button get banana levels, point starship at ring surrounding starsystem throttle up press J - arrive in said star system, can we come up with novel ways to make interplanetary travel more challenging and engaging to prevent the Monopoly board morons such as Obsidian Ant and his acolytes getting their wishes and our nightmares granted?

 

[MadDogMurdock]

Interstellar travel is already dumbed down to push button get banana levels, point starship at ring surrounding starsystem throttle up press J - arrive in said star system, can we come up with novel ways to make interplanetary travel more challenging and engaging to prevent the Monopoly board morons such as Obsidian Ant and his acolytes getting their wishes and our nightmares granted?

I think all the pieces are already in place to make this happen.
FC jumps already enable selection of any known body.

It probably wouldn’t take much to extend that to normal jumps.
Not where the game needs to go but FD usually give in to the whining eventually - unless it’s me wanting the ADS back

 

[VR Jay Le Chardon]

I think all the pieces are already in place to make this happen.
FC jumps already enable selection of any known body.

It probably wouldn’t take much to extend that to normal jumps.
Not where the game needs to go but FD usually give in to the whining eventually - unless it’s me wanting the ADS back

I really really do not want to be able to jump to selected body, that's my worst case scenario, the cookie clicker scenario, advocated by "Ant and the Acolytes" that I'm trying to avoid. To preemptively head off the intrasystem jump campaign I'm trying to find interesting ways to spice up longer supercruise transits and get encourage others to discuss them to keep the alternatives in the limelight as much as 'Ant is bleating on about intra system jumps.

 

[MadDogMurdock]

I really really do not want to be able to jump to selected body, that's my worst case scenario, the cookie clicker scenario, advocated by "Ant and the Acolytes" that I'm trying to avoid. To preemptively head off the intrasystem jump campaign I'm trying to find interesting ways to spice up longer supercruise transits and get encourage others to discuss them to keep the alternatives in the limelight as much as 'Ant is bleating on about intra system jumps.

I hear you but I think the noise about ‘getting to the action faster’ will only get louder when Odyssey comes out.
I’d prefer more imaginative solutions to it as well.

Improving SC with some form of piloted boost is one way as discussed in this thread, but I’m not sure that really addresses the on-foot travel problem.

Another way would be to allow login to any location where you have already have a ship.
That gets shot down by the naysayers as ‘teleportation’ and ‘muh immershun’ but I honestly think FD are going to have to do something.

Odyssey just isn’t going to be viable if the on-foot taxi service requires long wait times as you travel between systems.

 

[Ydiss]

Away with your Voltaire quotes!

Either we're playing a game in a 1:1 scale virtual recreation of our Galaxy or you dumb down interstellar travel to a point where it might as well be a Monopoly board.

That's a better argument

Still a little slippery slope and definitely...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

There are more outcomes in between that could satisfy 1:1, enhance the things we do in supercruise and reduce the excessively long travel times where nothing happens, yet still retain the scale of the galaxy. Likely, elaborating on the process of supercruise could do the opposite of "dumbing down", by filling it with more interaction and less sitting around doing nothing.

The status quo cannot empirically be said to be the opposite of "dumbed down" from a proposed change that adds additional interaction points.

 

[askavir]

even those pretending it is cool will stop the second there is any kind of alternative

This is pretty much the only thing that is worth saying about this matter.

 

[Exeider]

Was that ever actually claimed? I was under the impression that Shipping Lanes were significant because more and different types of USS spawn along them vs in Deep Space.

it was one of the many things that were never implemented and relegated to the dust bin in the Design Doc. If it has an effect on USS spawns that's something that's been designed after those docs were written.