I originally posted this on Reddit, and was told to post here as well.
One of my biggest problems with E
is the travel system. Say you're taking your Corvette a few hundred ly across the Bubble for some engineering. Apart from occasional delays/distractions like NPC pirates and signal sources, you're going to be doing the same thing the entire time; jumping, scooping, and honking if you have an ADS fit. People have suggested comets and other astronomical phenomena to spice up space travel, and while these would be amazing additions for exploration gameplay, they wouldn't really do much to improve the soul-crushing repetition of A to B travel. Neutron stars, the only stellar object that can help speed travel up, are nice but unfortunately rare. But with the arrival of Thargoids, a race that appears to have vastly more efficient space travel technology than our own, we have an opportunity to make travel a lot more painless and engaging.
Part I: The idea
Basically, you would be able to find USS-like POIs called Unstable Thargoid Wakes. They would be like the wakes left over after the currently in-game Thargoid Interceptors leave normal space. But unlike the current wakes, they wouldn't have closed entirely; you would be able to fly through them for a not-insignificant boost in a direction of your choice. These wakes would be visible from the supercruise navigation screen, and would spawn close to stars so as to keep them from being yet another USS that you need to fly around and scan for (in fact, I would argue that making all USS's behave this way would be a nice QoL change, but I'll save that for another post). Once you dropped into the signal you would find yourself next to the wake, as well as maybe some materials/wreckage. I can think of two ways that the actual use of the wake might be implemented:
1-RNG) You fly into the wake in the direction of your destination, and the wake would fling you to a random star any distance between a few dozen or, rarely a few hundred light years in the general direction of your angle of approach. Obviously this wouldn't be a reliable method of getting to a specific destination, but it could save you a bunch of jumps.
2-Minigame) You fly into the wake from any direction (though preferably in the direction of your destination) and your ship enters witchspace. However, you can still control your direction. You have no control over your speed, and your ship begins to accelerate exponentially as soon as you come through the wake. You can see your target destination marker still, and you will likely be trying to get to this. However, scattered all around you will be witchspace anomalies; shadows of objects in realspace, à la Star Wars. If you hit one of these anomalies your ship will be thrown out of witchspace like if you had hit a planet while in supercruise, and you may take some hull damage. Avoiding anomalies will be easy at first, but the faster your ship goes the harder it will be to see them coming. Eventually you will exit witchspace, either by hitting something or by double tapping "jump" to emergency drop. When you drop from witchspace, you will be in real space next to the star that the closest witchspace anomaly represented.
Part II: Miscellaneous features that may or may not be good ideas
Regardless of the implementation of the wake mechanics, either option would put you next to a star and spawn a regular non-jumpable Thargoid Wake at your position. This wake would be visible to players and NPC pirates in supercruise, so getting away from it would be recommended. When scanned, it would transmit the name of the system that the original wake was in to the scanning player's ship.
As for the original wake, as soon as it was jumped through a five minute timer would begin to tick down. After the five minutes were up, the wake would become a regular unjumpable Thargoid wake. If scanned, it would transmit the name(s) of the system(s) that it had been used to jump to. There would also be a Wake Stabilization module, which would fit in a mid-sized internal compartment (size 5, perhaps) and could be used similarly to a regular wake scanner on Thargoid Wakes. However, instead of giving info on where people had gone who jumped through the wake, the Wake Stabilizer could be used to turn Thargoid Wakes into jumpable Unstable Thargoid Wakes, or to return UTW's to their original non-decaying condition. This would work on any Thargoid Wake, even ones from encounters with actual 'Goids.
But why stop at just being able to restore wakes to working condition when you can create them yourself? For the price of one huge hardpoint, you could fit a Wake Generation module. This would use expensive (250k a piece, at least) charges to open up your very own Unstable Wake.
Other random ideas include different classes of Wakes/Wake related modules for different sized ships, and witchspace encounters.
C&C are very much appreciated. I'm excited to hear what you think about this!
One of my biggest problems with E
is the travel system. Say you're taking your Corvette a few hundred ly across the Bubble for some engineering. Apart from occasional delays/distractions like NPC pirates and signal sources, you're going to be doing the same thing the entire time; jumping, scooping, and honking if you have an ADS fit. People have suggested comets and other astronomical phenomena to spice up space travel, and while these would be amazing additions for exploration gameplay, they wouldn't really do much to improve the soul-crushing repetition of A to B travel. Neutron stars, the only stellar object that can help speed travel up, are nice but unfortunately rare. But with the arrival of Thargoids, a race that appears to have vastly more efficient space travel technology than our own, we have an opportunity to make travel a lot more painless and engaging.Part I: The idea
Basically, you would be able to find USS-like POIs called Unstable Thargoid Wakes. They would be like the wakes left over after the currently in-game Thargoid Interceptors leave normal space. But unlike the current wakes, they wouldn't have closed entirely; you would be able to fly through them for a not-insignificant boost in a direction of your choice. These wakes would be visible from the supercruise navigation screen, and would spawn close to stars so as to keep them from being yet another USS that you need to fly around and scan for (in fact, I would argue that making all USS's behave this way would be a nice QoL change, but I'll save that for another post). Once you dropped into the signal you would find yourself next to the wake, as well as maybe some materials/wreckage. I can think of two ways that the actual use of the wake might be implemented:
1-RNG) You fly into the wake in the direction of your destination, and the wake would fling you to a random star any distance between a few dozen or, rarely a few hundred light years in the general direction of your angle of approach. Obviously this wouldn't be a reliable method of getting to a specific destination, but it could save you a bunch of jumps.
2-Minigame) You fly into the wake from any direction (though preferably in the direction of your destination) and your ship enters witchspace. However, you can still control your direction. You have no control over your speed, and your ship begins to accelerate exponentially as soon as you come through the wake. You can see your target destination marker still, and you will likely be trying to get to this. However, scattered all around you will be witchspace anomalies; shadows of objects in realspace, à la Star Wars. If you hit one of these anomalies your ship will be thrown out of witchspace like if you had hit a planet while in supercruise, and you may take some hull damage. Avoiding anomalies will be easy at first, but the faster your ship goes the harder it will be to see them coming. Eventually you will exit witchspace, either by hitting something or by double tapping "jump" to emergency drop. When you drop from witchspace, you will be in real space next to the star that the closest witchspace anomaly represented.
Part II: Miscellaneous features that may or may not be good ideas
Regardless of the implementation of the wake mechanics, either option would put you next to a star and spawn a regular non-jumpable Thargoid Wake at your position. This wake would be visible to players and NPC pirates in supercruise, so getting away from it would be recommended. When scanned, it would transmit the name of the system that the original wake was in to the scanning player's ship.
As for the original wake, as soon as it was jumped through a five minute timer would begin to tick down. After the five minutes were up, the wake would become a regular unjumpable Thargoid wake. If scanned, it would transmit the name(s) of the system(s) that it had been used to jump to. There would also be a Wake Stabilization module, which would fit in a mid-sized internal compartment (size 5, perhaps) and could be used similarly to a regular wake scanner on Thargoid Wakes. However, instead of giving info on where people had gone who jumped through the wake, the Wake Stabilizer could be used to turn Thargoid Wakes into jumpable Unstable Thargoid Wakes, or to return UTW's to their original non-decaying condition. This would work on any Thargoid Wake, even ones from encounters with actual 'Goids.
But why stop at just being able to restore wakes to working condition when you can create them yourself? For the price of one huge hardpoint, you could fit a Wake Generation module. This would use expensive (250k a piece, at least) charges to open up your very own Unstable Wake.
Other random ideas include different classes of Wakes/Wake related modules for different sized ships, and witchspace encounters.
C&C are very much appreciated. I'm excited to hear what you think about this!