The issue is with the death penalty in the game.
If you die you respawn at the station you we last docked at. So in the Merlin fighter loaded with military fuel and a 25ly range on each jump you can get 125ly without docking. If you do that series of jumps some how through hand waving your escape capsule makes it back to your original location instantly. This, in my opinion, sucks but I didn't have a reasonable fix.
However over the weekend I think I came up with a plausible solution.
An explorer crashes into an asteroid in an uninhabited system but his escape capsule makes it back X light years is unrealistic. Escape capsules do not have hyper drives. Think about the function of an escape capsule. It's to ensure the survival of the occupant(s) and that is it. So the amount of propulsion should be to ensure that it doesn't crash into planets, suns, and other fatal objects. Your hope in this situation is to hope someone picks up your pod while you are put on ice.
However you need to simulate this fact - you can't expect the player to wait months or years in real time. So you add time to their account. They are now months or years in the future. They take the penalty from this - they still have to pay storage fees, insurance payments, etc.
But now they are in the 'future' and need to be brought back into line. This can be done by slewing the time small amount whilst online and a larger (but still comparatively small). The game still runs at normal speed but the apparent elapsed time is different. Scripted events would run at server time and not player time.
It's not the correct place for this and I will tidy it up when I am not on my phone.
Any issues people can see?
If you die you respawn at the station you we last docked at. So in the Merlin fighter loaded with military fuel and a 25ly range on each jump you can get 125ly without docking. If you do that series of jumps some how through hand waving your escape capsule makes it back to your original location instantly. This, in my opinion, sucks but I didn't have a reasonable fix.
However over the weekend I think I came up with a plausible solution.
An explorer crashes into an asteroid in an uninhabited system but his escape capsule makes it back X light years is unrealistic. Escape capsules do not have hyper drives. Think about the function of an escape capsule. It's to ensure the survival of the occupant(s) and that is it. So the amount of propulsion should be to ensure that it doesn't crash into planets, suns, and other fatal objects. Your hope in this situation is to hope someone picks up your pod while you are put on ice.
However you need to simulate this fact - you can't expect the player to wait months or years in real time. So you add time to their account. They are now months or years in the future. They take the penalty from this - they still have to pay storage fees, insurance payments, etc.
But now they are in the 'future' and need to be brought back into line. This can be done by slewing the time small amount whilst online and a larger (but still comparatively small). The game still runs at normal speed but the apparent elapsed time is different. Scripted events would run at server time and not player time.
It's not the correct place for this and I will tidy it up when I am not on my phone.
Any issues people can see?
