This is part of a series of proposals to improve PowerPlay in various ways. The goal is to make PowerPlay a more interesting, dynamic, and rewarding experience, without needing to scrap the whole thing and rebuild from the ground up - evolution rather than revolution. Each proposal is intended to be relatively straightforward to implement (though of course we have no special insight into the specifics of the Elite codebase), and most of them (except where mentioned) stand alone and do not need a lot of other changes to make them work.
Please limit discussions to the specific topic at hand - pros, cons, tweaks, etc. If you have alternative proposals, by all means make a separate topic! The parent thread for this series is here: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...out-incrementally-improving-powerplay.551571/ Although the authors are Winters/FLC commanders, these proposals have been made and discussed by pilots from many Powers.
Remove commander from instance as soon as landed
Instead of being able to park the ship on the pad, but not in the hanger, this proposal automatically moves the ship to the hanger as soon as landed, and then removes the ship from the instance, so the pad cannot be blocked.
Discussion:
Currently a landed ship can be either on the pad, or in the hanger, and functionally there’s no real difference - the ship is still invulnerable, and is still blocking the pad. It’s not clear why this functionality is present - it seems to serve no purpose to have the ship be “in the world” when the commander is just interacting with the station UI.
This proposal changes it so that as soon as the ship lands, it plays the “enter hanger” animation, and then the ship is removed from the instance (aside from communications), which frees the pad for use by others. There is no option to return to the surface - the only option is to launch, and then the ship returns to the instance (or a different one if the pad is full, just as if they had logged in), plays the usual launch sequence, at which point the ship is vulnerable again.
This solves two problems. The first is that there are many intermittent bugs around the sequence. NPCs sometimes land inside each other or other players, a pad can be assigned to dock even though there is an invulnerable NPC already docked, and there’s generally a lot of strange corner cases. This proposal would remove (most of) those.
The second problem is deliberate pad-blocking by enemy commanders to prevent hauling cargo to/from a system. Currently if they do that, there is no remedy - the pad cannot be used, and the commander cannot be destroyed. The only solution is to switch to Solo, or to block the commander, jump out, and jump back in. Both these are very much against the spirit of PowerPlay, but pad-blocking is very powerful (two commanders leaving their machines running overnight can completely prevent preparation or expansion of a system) and has no other remedy. This proposal would solve that problem.
Please limit discussions to the specific topic at hand - pros, cons, tweaks, etc. If you have alternative proposals, by all means make a separate topic! The parent thread for this series is here: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...out-incrementally-improving-powerplay.551571/ Although the authors are Winters/FLC commanders, these proposals have been made and discussed by pilots from many Powers.
Remove commander from instance as soon as landed
Instead of being able to park the ship on the pad, but not in the hanger, this proposal automatically moves the ship to the hanger as soon as landed, and then removes the ship from the instance, so the pad cannot be blocked.
Discussion:
Currently a landed ship can be either on the pad, or in the hanger, and functionally there’s no real difference - the ship is still invulnerable, and is still blocking the pad. It’s not clear why this functionality is present - it seems to serve no purpose to have the ship be “in the world” when the commander is just interacting with the station UI.
This proposal changes it so that as soon as the ship lands, it plays the “enter hanger” animation, and then the ship is removed from the instance (aside from communications), which frees the pad for use by others. There is no option to return to the surface - the only option is to launch, and then the ship returns to the instance (or a different one if the pad is full, just as if they had logged in), plays the usual launch sequence, at which point the ship is vulnerable again.
This solves two problems. The first is that there are many intermittent bugs around the sequence. NPCs sometimes land inside each other or other players, a pad can be assigned to dock even though there is an invulnerable NPC already docked, and there’s generally a lot of strange corner cases. This proposal would remove (most of) those.
The second problem is deliberate pad-blocking by enemy commanders to prevent hauling cargo to/from a system. Currently if they do that, there is no remedy - the pad cannot be used, and the commander cannot be destroyed. The only solution is to switch to Solo, or to block the commander, jump out, and jump back in. Both these are very much against the spirit of PowerPlay, but pad-blocking is very powerful (two commanders leaving their machines running overnight can completely prevent preparation or expansion of a system) and has no other remedy. This proposal would solve that problem.