Lucky I found you... Pirates, Flight Logs, and Jump Range Boosts

[Ziljan]

It's a bit strange that NPCs can find you in the middle of empty space, and it got me thinking. How do they know?? In real life, pilots have to schedule a flight plan before they even leave an airport. If pirates got a hold of this info, then of course they would know where to find you! However we often plot our routes after leaving the station, or from empty space. So pirates should have no way of knowing where to find you.

Well, what if we could turn this into an actual fun game mechanic? :

What if plotting a route while docked at a station (ie logging your flight plan) gave you access to special witchspace routes that acted like jumponium, increasing your jump range. Staying on this route would make travel faster, but would open you up to non-random targeted attacks by pirates. Plotting a route from low security would increase the chances of corruption, and therefore pirates, but at an increased profit margin (due to the pricing of goods at the station). And deviating from the route, or plotting after leaving the station would decrease the odds of pirates, but increase the travel time.

This would explain how "magically prescient" NPCs know where to find you, and would allow for more interesting trade options


What do you think ?

 

[Otherwhere]

Having no flight plan logged could also delay your being given a landing pad, or deviating from your flight plan might cause a delay, since - you know - good/legal pilots always file a flight plan and should be expected at the destination station. Since time = credits to a trader, that might become a factor.

 

[Arkadi]

Awesome idea for complex gameplay.

Maybe this could also be used to help player pirates find theire targets. If a pilot in open uses this fast-track feature inside of a station his waypoints could show up in another players Gal-Map as possibel raid-spot increasing the chance of instancing at this point and extanding the duration of "quit to menu timer" to lets say 2 minutes.

 

[Flavourless]

...In real life, pilots have to schedule a flight plan before they even leave an airport...

Only for IFR. The greatest majority of flights are conducted with no flight plan outside controlled airspace. Probably smugglers also do this?