General Interplanetary drive.

[BartTP]

Hello.
Since carriers are a thing now, it would be great to have an option of buyng light, cheap and economic FSD that allows only supercruise, no high wakes. With carriers there are ships that don't need to jump to another systems like landers and transporters, miners possibly.
In previous games there was something called interplanetary drive that allowed to move inside the system but no hyperspace jump. It was rather useless back then but now that would have sense.
What do you think?

 

[Arsen Cross]

What you want is called equipping a d rated class 1 fsd. It used to be a pvp meta for awhile.

 

[BartTP]

What you want is called equipping a d rated class 1 fsd. It used to be a pvp meta for awhile.

The smallest FSD in the game is 2D FSD. It still allows smaller ships to jump out of he system.

 

[Arsen Cross]

The smallest FSD in the game is 2D FSD. It still allows smaller ships to jump out of he system.

True; but for the rest of the ships you are essentially sacrificing jump capability for a small amount of power and mass returned to your builds capability.

personally though I don’t see much point in adding a second drive that does nothing other than reduce the features of it. If you have a compelling argument I’d be interested in hearing it but it’d need to be damn good to convince me.

 

[BartTP]

True; but for the rest of the ships you are essentially sacrificing jump capability for a small amount of power and mass returned to your builds capability.

personally though I don’t see much point in adding a second drive that does nothing other than reduce the features of it. If you have a compelling argument I’d be interested in hearing it but it’d need to be damn good to convince me.

It would save power and weight plus would allow to build little fleets bound to the carrier (mostly for RPG reasons, I admit that). Like I said there's a precedence in form of an interplanetary drive.

 

[varonica]

It would save power and weight plus would allow to build little fleets bound to the carrier (mostly for RPG reasons, I admit that). Like I said there's a precedence in form of an interplanetary drive.

Not really, it would have to have use at least the same power as a regular FSD to get up to the same velocity in SC, the hyperspace jump is a completely separate feature of our FSD drives, they are dual purpose, to allow FTL travel in system and hyperspace jumps between systems, I'm also not sure where your precedence argument comes from in the ED universe.

 

[BartTP]

I'm also not sure where your precedence argument comes from in the ED universe.

Frontier: Elite II and Frontier: First Encounters games.

 

[CMDR Yates]

Sure, why not.

In any case, I'd also like to see little single-system shuttles, orbital lifters, maintenance craft and whatnot buzzing around near planets and starports.

Most of the flyable ships are huge, but it's easy to lose that impression with the prevalence of medium and large interstellar ships.

Smaller vehicles exist in lore (previous games and Galnet mentions), FSD-capable ships are supposed to be the domain of a small "elite". There should be a huge demand for smaller interplanetary-only vehicles among the majority of the galaxy's population who don't have access to millions of credits, and don't need to fly to another star system.

Like, people pay a big company to fly them on a foreign holiday in an airliner, but they have a little runaround car for driving around their own local area.

Even if we can't fly them (and why would we), it would be nice just to see more variety and life in systems.

 

[Linnunrata]

In any case, I'd also like to see little single-system shuttles, orbital lifters, maintenance craft and whatnot buzzing around near planets and starports

It's not a bad idea as such, really, but seems a bit of a waste of resources in the modeling department.

 

[Ydiss]

I'd love this exclusively on the basis of Frontier.

The fact that it's now supported by Fcs just further adds to that.

Wasn't one of the three starting points in Frontier where you were given an interplanetary shuttle to start with? Haha. Hardcore.

 

[BartTP]

I'd love this exclusively on the basis of Frontier.

The fact that it's now supported by Fcs just further adds to that.

Wasn't one of the three starting points in Frontier where you were given an interplanetary shuttle to start with? Haha. Hardcore.

Yes it was. In Frontier: Elite II (in FFE too if you knew about it) you could choose Mars as a starting point with Long Range Eagle ship equipped with interplanetary drive.

 

[varonica]

Yes it was. In Frontier: Elite II (in FFE too if you knew about it) you could choose Mars as a starting point with Long Range Eagle ship equipped with interplanetary drive.

In FFE and Frontier: Elite II interplanetary shuttle the drives were not FTL, you used time compression to reduce the travel time, in FFE it had a max thrust of 5g in normal space so could never exceed the speed of light and was constrained by all the limitation thereof, you could do that now if you want, your ship under normal drive will indeed fly directly from the Earth to Mars so in all points apart from continuous acceleration it is indeed an interplanetary shuttle, good luck with that. In ED they don't do that because time compression to reduce the amount of time it takes to get places isn't possible due to it being a multiplayer game so interplanetary shuttle using standard continuous 5g thrust simply isn't workable. So we are not talking about the same thing here at all, what you have as a interplanetary shuttle in the earlier elites was simply a ship without FTL capability and a large fuel supply for continuous thrust, not a workable thing in current ED.

Instead we use the FSD for interplanetary travel that can get us up to an effective many multiples of the speed of light, this takes a lot of energy but it does remove the need for time compression to make the game playable.

 

[MPL3D]

I already see convoy signals of ships travelling in normal space. I don't see a reason why shuttles shouldn't exist.

 

[varonica]

I already see convoy signals of ships travelling in normal space. I don't see a reason why shuttles shouldn't exist.

Because it would take you a year to reach Mars? Look you are fine to fly there in normal space, I'm not going to stop you, but there's a reason we use FTL drives.

I also see these ships "assembling" In normal space, they almost all jump out when they are ready because ordering a frozen pizza and waiting several years for it to get delivered isn't going to work.

 

[Hooplah]

There's lots of previous equipment that was not implemented in Elite Dangerous. Maybe someday...

 

[Jmanis]

Here's a thought. Interplanetary drive allows those microjumps everyone wants, disallows jumping out of system, doesn't run out of fuel. Can't fit a fuel scoop, and consumes market sourced hydrogen fuel on jump.

 

[MPL3D]

Because it would take you a year to reach Mars? Look you are fine to fly there in normal space, I'm not going to stop you, but there's a reason we use FTL drives.

I also see these ships "assembling" In normal space, they almost all jump out when they are ready because ordering a frozen pizza and waiting several years for it to get delivered isn't going to work.

The common function of a shuttle is to travel from a station to its planet or as a taxi between nearby stations of course.

 

[Jmanis]

Because it would take you a year to reach Mars?

interplanetary drives in FE2 and FFE would disagree.

 

[BartTP]

In FFE and Frontier: Elite II interplanetary shuttle the drives were not FTL, you used time compression to reduce the travel time, in FFE it had a max thrust of 5g in normal space so could never exceed the speed of light and was constrained by all the limitation thereof, you could do that now if you want, your ship under normal drive will indeed fly directly from the Earth to Mars so in all points apart from continuous acceleration it is indeed an interplanetary shuttle, good luck with that. In ED they don't do that because time compression to reduce the amount of time it takes to get places isn't possible due to it being a multiplayer game so interplanetary shuttle using standard continuous 5g thrust simply isn't workable. So we are not talking about the same thing here at all, what you have as a interplanetary shuttle in the earlier elites was simply a ship without FTL capability and a large fuel supply for continuous thrust, not a workable thing in current ED.

Instead we use the FSD for interplanetary travel that can get us up to an effective many multiples of the speed of light, this takes a lot of energy but it does remove the need for time compression to make the game playable.

I played those games, ma'am and I know exactly what interplanetary drive was or how time speed up worked. This is why I didn't say we need exactly interplanetary drive but something LIKE it. Back in the day (for example) military drive was in fact thrusters + hyperjump device.

 

[Linnunrata]

ordering a frozen pizza and waiting several years for it to get delivered isn't going to work.

Unless you order it from Chris Roberts!