These drives only work in normal space, they are mass effect thrusters, why would or should they have any effect during SC?
Please reduce travel times in the bubble
- Thread starter Chrizaim
- Start date
These drives only work in normal space, they are mass effect thrusters, why would or should they have any effect during SC?
You don't, well not unless it's attached to some sort of drone that has a frameshift drive.
The interdiction tunnel game is one of the most binary and boring mechanisms we've got.
Always winning vs. NPCs, and it nearly always being more advantageous to submit vs. CMDR interdiction, renders it's very existence nigh pointless.
Don't knock it till you try it.
I see a great deal more potential gameplay in mechanisms for pulling ships out of SC than the tunnel game could ever provide, even if it were correctly balanced.
'Gankers' can already interdict you, you just have few gameplay mechanisms to avoid it once they've maneuvered to be in a position to engage that tether than you would in any system I'd envision or propose.[/QUOTE]
That's primarily because NPCs try to interdict you at ridiculous angles (i.e. they'll fire the interdictor as soon as they have a target, but due to angles it is easy for the target to then move out of range). Humans tend to ensure they have a good position first, and then it is very difficult (usually impossible) for the target to escape. The mechanic is the same either way. NPCs need to git gud.
That's primarily because NPCs try to interdict you at ridiculous angles (i.e. they'll fire the interdictor as soon as they have a target, but due to angles it is easy for the target to then move out of range). Humans tend to ensure they have a good position first, and then it is very difficult (usually impossible) for the target to escape. The mechanic is the same either way. NPCs need to git gud.
Even if I manuver to allow an NPC to line up the perfect tether, they will almost invariably fail to interdict almost any ship I'm flying, if I fight the interdiction.
In the case of CMDR interdictions, I have two choices, fight it and risk a long cooldown, or sumbit and virtually guarantee escape because of the short cooldown. Even if I could win 99% of CMDR interdictions it would still be safer to sumbit, because a 45 second cooldown one time in one-hundred would be more risky than a million eight second cooldowns.
I've only ever had a handful of CMDR interdictions so I've never been entirely sure of the mechanism but isn't it a quick cooldown as long as you submit before it ends? Seems to be for me - may as well try to fight it, if it's going badly then submit. The risk is then just dodgy instancing (I lost an interdiction to a CMDR once that the game was telling me I was winning).
It's kinda like trying to separate the eggs from the cake, though. Without the Kickstarter it's unlikely ED would exist at all, and even if it had come to market independently it may not have found or grown its audience if legacy players had tried it, declared "This isn't Elite" due to instantaneous travel, and abandoned it. I guess with hindsight the best outcome might have been a Kickstarter but without the DDF pledge level, so feedback could have been taken without any sense (no matter how diluted it became) of obligation to listen.
Would it have crossed the line without the DDF level? My instinct (and that's all it is, based on the numbers at the time) is that it would have, but then it's impossible to quantify what promotional effect it had in terms of generating new pledges at levels both at and not at DDF level. I'm certainly aware of a number of players who widely discussed how they'd increased their pledges to DDF when the infamous "god-like powers" were mentioned (and I can only imagine how peed off many of those particular players will have been, given how that turned out).
Untrue.
Err... eee... aaa... a distorted interpretation at best, I feel. The original proposal was 100% for jumps between systems and micro-jumps between bodies. As far as I remember it was always the intent for interstellar jumps to arrive at the largest mass, and for micro-jumps to take place from there. There is a chance that arrivals at the fringes of the system were also discussed, a la original Elite and Frontier, but the threads aren't available in the archive for me to check. Either way you were looking at jumping to a fixed point, then micro-jumping to a destination. No jumping straight from Tattooine to Aldreaan without some sort of navigation in between.
Interdiction of some sort was always part of the design, but for micro-jumps would have taken the form of witchspace "nets" deployed along common vectors between bodies, or near to orbital arrival points. Combat was always intended to take place in "real" space.
The backlash against this idea from the DDF was strong and, while not unanimous, unusually unified. As to be expected from a group composed largely of former Elite and (especially) Frontier players, the fear was that micro-jumping with occasional interdictions would reduce the scale of the inhabited galaxy to the degree where there would be little point in rendering it 1:1 in the first place. And for deep space exploration with no ability to accelerate time like in FE2 and FFE, cruising through space at FTL speeds was seen by many as the only way to capture some of the freedom available in the earlier games.
The frameshift drive was FD's answer to this. While not a true analogue to the two 90s games (supercruise is not Newtonian) it struck a middle ground with which most of the DDF was happy. Frameshift interdiction was also a new mechanic, introduced alongside the FSD. So while it was wholly FD's idea and implementation, it would definitely not have been implemented in this way without the then community's response to the earlier proposal.
FWIW I've always liked the notion of using nav beacons to speed up travel within the bubble. An original proposal back in the day (possibly CMDR Cosmic Spacehead's; his was certainly the last post I read to mention it) was to allow ships' hyperdrives to use nav beacon data to increase effective jump ranges. But the idea of using planetary beacons to facilitate in-system jumps works for me too. In non-anarchy systems there may be a need for some equivalent of the interdiction mechanic to prevent ships from only travelling between "safe" locations (maybe some sort of wake destabiliser that forces a ship to abort a jump midway?) but since the end result is a combat instance in "normal" space I don't see any reason why this would fundamentally break the game.
As community requests go this one is quite unusual in that the fundamental question here -- can we have fast(er) travel within the bubble and/or well-travelled routes while keeping the sense of scale for fringe exploration? -- can be answered with a qualified "yes" in a way that doesn't actually break the game for anyone who likes the status quo. Of all the "FD give us xxx" threads, this is the subject most likely to be doable IMO.
Whether FD are savvy enough to spot this and put it on the wishlist is entirely up to them, of course, but given how many recent design decisions seem to have be aimed at opening up or simplifying access to the game for jaded and/or latecomer players, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if something along these lines has at least been discussed.
No, it really wasn't. When this part was discussed, FD asked backers how long they thought it should take to travel between planets in Sol (e.g. how long to Pluto?). The responses were used to essentially calibrate supercruise speed. There was never any intention for instant travel. Ever.
I like your contradiction with the whole “FD asked backers”... followed by “nothing to do with crowd funding”
I’ve heard reference from multiple credible sources that direct jumping to destinations was the original design. Backers (those are the people who paid into the crowd funding campaign) didn’t like this because they wanted space to feel big and they thought this could only be accomplished by wasting the player’s time. So, they convince the introduction of this stupid mechanic.
Obsidian Ant has has referenced this multiple times and I’d be more likely to believe him than some random no name reply on the forums.
I remember when I first started playing ED and I was on a mission or carrying cargo and the dread I felt when that yellow square appeared behind me on the radar, and then the terror when it started getting closer! That was before I watched the video on gitting gud @ trading. After that getting interdicted became fun, no longer terrifying! Now of course I'm in an engineered anaconda so if I get interdicted it's just a bonus: drop out of supercruise, wait for the pirate to drop out, kill the thieving scum, pick up his/her mats, continue mission
So you prefer easy mode. Gotcha
Seeing a lot of these kinds of threads lately, and I'm still new here and haven't read much of anything of these forums.
You know what I want? The game to completely play itself for me. How's that for a request.
I'm out in the black and I think I'm going to stay there.
Respecting real world time for players = game plays itself... ok...
What is there to fear if we didn’t have to spend long amounts of time staring and doing nothing? That FDev would have to put something meaningful to do in the game? I played for 2 hours last night and started falling asleep while jumping from system to system to system to system to system... it’s so god damn boring. I said F this and stopped playing. The game has so much potential but it’s wasted on morons who think staring at their screen for long periods of time doing nothing is good gameplay.
Yep, but now they can just say no... like they did with the scanner. Good on them for doing that by the way.
Also, I don’t want to hear that crowd funding allowed them to make the game. They were a successful game developer by the time they started this project. No man’s sky was not crowd funded and they made their space game and have continue dumping years of development time and money into updating it for free. If FDev wanted to make this game, they could have no matter what.
While there is an element of truth to this, the situation is far from being universally applicable. The main deciding factor seems to be related to what ship you are flying and it's agility in super cruise. Proximity and angle of approach to gravity wells can also be a factor. Interdictions by NPCs in general are anything but a guaranteed win/lose but an experienced pilot in the right ship(s) can typically evade an interdiction.
Interdictions on the whole have been rebalanced multiple times over the past 4 years - some of those rebalancing attempts resulted in a near guaranteed win for the interdicting NPCs and that creating a fair amount of uproar at the time.
Except the Engines are only used for attitude correction in Super Cruise, the FSD is the key operating component for Super Cruise operation and so only engineering of the FSD should affect Super Cruise acceleration/deceleration curves.
Ah, pedantry...
Alright then (and also in response to the post above) if your FSD is engineered, that should give you slightly faster SC.
To this day I'm not sure why supercruise flight works the way it does. It has a maximum speed limit, a minimum speed limit, a "braking" effect that kicks in around gravity wells and, perhaps most bizarrely, a sort of automatic acceleration limiter that seems to depend mostly on the distance to the targeted object.
The maximum (2001c?) is so rarely attained that can be more or less ignored in all but the edgiest of edge cases.
The minimum (30km/s) is, I suspect, mainly to prevent people "creeping up" on space stations and other POIs and thereby shattering the already fragile illusion of seamlessness between supercruise and normal space instances.
The gravity "braking" is an odd choice. It seems to be there to provide a sort of analogue to the gravity interactions that were possible in the two previous games when time acceleration was used, and skilled players can indeed use it as a navigation tool when approaching space stations and other targets close to planetary masses. But it's also something of a frustration when all you want to do is pass through or near to a cluster of bodies. In many cases there's so little correlation between what's "there" on screen and the response of the spacecraft that to me it feels more like an arbitrary thickening of the space soup than anything based on physics, real or imagined.
Which leaves the automatic acceleration and deceleration based on target distance, which to me are the biggest and most obviously artificial obstacles to fast and efficient in-system travel.
In Frontier and FFE you could move through a system at an arbitrarily high speed by giving the ship some delta-v and then manipulating the time acceleration controls. Between the initial thrust and the acceleration factor some really fast and accurate travel could be achieved, even without using the "instant stop" autopilot cheat. The most obvious risk, aside from not having enough fuel to counter the delta-v when you got where you were going, was in misjudging the acceleration and either overshooting the target altogether or fatally smashing into it.
When supercruise was posited I was hoping for something broadly similar. It was already clear from other design decisions that ED was never going to go "full Newtonian" but the arbitrary caps on acceleration rates, and especially the auto-modulation based on destination selection, make it feel less as though I'm flying an FTL ship in realtime and more as though I'm tweaking the parameters of a temperamental machine that can "get away" from me at any time. Perhaps that's the whole point, but it has always felt a bit odd. The most obvious example of this is the "7/6 second rule" and all its variants. The final stages of my approaches are based on a 4 second rule, achieved by completely ignoring the SLOW DOWN warnings. It doesn't feel like flying a ship at all, aside from the visuals. It feels more like determining the envelope of an algorithm, and balancing its inputs for maximum efficiency.
I'm pretty certain this has been asked before, but why can't we simply point the ship in a particular direction and just accelerate and decelerate to and from arbitrary speeds governed by a highly responsive throttle setting? Low settings and we crawl, full throttle and we're going like bat out of hell. We can already achieve this to some degree with USS; if you deselect a USS as the navigation target but keep it in visual range (and you have good throttle control or low-value presets) you can fly around it with some panache at 30km/s, albeit with lots of overshoots and loops. It's only when you target it that the rate of acceleration change becomes limited again.
Sure, if this was done it would hugely increase the likelihood of overshooting the target at first, but this community of virtual pilots has proven itself very adept at accommodating and maximising new mechanics and I reckon we'd be flying like pros in no time at all, saving loads of time travelling between planets. I suspect players would even develop a sort of muscle memory, a mental map of the more regularly visited systems ("From Sol to Earth it's ten seconds at 80% throttle followed by ten seconds at 0%" etc.).
As a potential downside, perhaps there could be a hard speed limit above which collisions with planetary bodies would result not in an emergency drop and a bit of module damage but in catastrophic damage including permanent module loss or even ship destruction? That might minimise a lot of regular speed freakery, and certainly sort out the good pilots from the great pilots.
Are there technical reasons why this was never done, or are the limits there to allow time and space for interdiction? If it's the latter, what about removing the acceleration caps but increasing the gravity well braking effects? Pilots would be more likely to fly parabolic courses to minimise the slowdown (some already do this) while interdictors would be forced to operate nearer to planets and stars, where it's arguably a more interesting place to fight anyway. Alternatively, make the maximum rate of change for acceleration dependent upon FSD size and/or engineering, so fast interceptors would still be able to catch slower ships even in systems with few bodies.
The maximum (2001c?) is so rarely attained that can be more or less ignored in all but the edgiest of edge cases.
The minimum (30km/s) is, I suspect, mainly to prevent people "creeping up" on space stations and other POIs and thereby shattering the already fragile illusion of seamlessness between supercruise and normal space instances.
The gravity "braking" is an odd choice. It seems to be there to provide a sort of analogue to the gravity interactions that were possible in the two previous games when time acceleration was used, and skilled players can indeed use it as a navigation tool when approaching space stations and other targets close to planetary masses. But it's also something of a frustration when all you want to do is pass through or near to a cluster of bodies. In many cases there's so little correlation between what's "there" on screen and the response of the spacecraft that to me it feels more like an arbitrary thickening of the space soup than anything based on physics, real or imagined.
Which leaves the automatic acceleration and deceleration based on target distance, which to me are the biggest and most obviously artificial obstacles to fast and efficient in-system travel.
In Frontier and FFE you could move through a system at an arbitrarily high speed by giving the ship some delta-v and then manipulating the time acceleration controls. Between the initial thrust and the acceleration factor some really fast and accurate travel could be achieved, even without using the "instant stop" autopilot cheat. The most obvious risk, aside from not having enough fuel to counter the delta-v when you got where you were going, was in misjudging the acceleration and either overshooting the target altogether or fatally smashing into it.
When supercruise was posited I was hoping for something broadly similar. It was already clear from other design decisions that ED was never going to go "full Newtonian" but the arbitrary caps on acceleration rates, and especially the auto-modulation based on destination selection, make it feel less as though I'm flying an FTL ship in realtime and more as though I'm tweaking the parameters of a temperamental machine that can "get away" from me at any time. Perhaps that's the whole point, but it has always felt a bit odd. The most obvious example of this is the "7/6 second rule" and all its variants. The final stages of my approaches are based on a 4 second rule, achieved by completely ignoring the SLOW DOWN warnings. It doesn't feel like flying a ship at all, aside from the visuals. It feels more like determining the envelope of an algorithm, and balancing its inputs for maximum efficiency.
I'm pretty certain this has been asked before, but why can't we simply point the ship in a particular direction and just accelerate and decelerate to and from arbitrary speeds governed by a highly responsive throttle setting? Low settings and we crawl, full throttle and we're going like bat out of hell. We can already achieve this to some degree with USS; if you deselect a USS as the navigation target but keep it in visual range (and you have good throttle control or low-value presets) you can fly around it with some panache at 30km/s, albeit with lots of overshoots and loops. It's only when you target it that the rate of acceleration change becomes limited again.
Sure, if this was done it would hugely increase the likelihood of overshooting the target at first, but this community of virtual pilots has proven itself very adept at accommodating and maximising new mechanics and I reckon we'd be flying like pros in no time at all, saving loads of time travelling between planets. I suspect players would even develop a sort of muscle memory, a mental map of the more regularly visited systems ("From Sol to Earth it's ten seconds at 80% throttle followed by ten seconds at 0%" etc.).
As a potential downside, perhaps there could be a hard speed limit above which collisions with planetary bodies would result not in an emergency drop and a bit of module damage but in catastrophic damage including permanent module loss or even ship destruction? That might minimise a lot of regular speed freakery, and certainly sort out the good pilots from the great pilots.
Are there technical reasons why this was never done, or are the limits there to allow time and space for interdiction? If it's the latter, what about removing the acceleration caps but increasing the gravity well braking effects? Pilots would be more likely to fly parabolic courses to minimise the slowdown (some already do this) while interdictors would be forced to operate nearer to planets and stars, where it's arguably a more interesting place to fight anyway. Alternatively, make the maximum rate of change for acceleration dependent upon FSD size and/or engineering, so fast interceptors would still be able to catch slower ships even in systems with few bodies.
Edit: in case anyone's tempted to interpret this as a "hater" post (which does happen), as a mostly passive single-player exploration-oriented pilot I'm more than happy for things to continue the way they currently are, even though they're not quite what I had envisioned back in the day. But as with many things ED, being happy with what we've got doesn't mean there isn't the potential for improvement. As with the micro-jumps solution to fast travel talked about earlier, this is one of those things where there would appear from a purely player perspective to be a reasonable amount of wiggle room available should FD decide to re-think their strategy on in-system flight. The fact that they so rarely even talk of such things these days -- even to offer a categorical "no" -- is where much of the frustration lies.
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I played the first 6 months without Horizons i.e. no engineering, that was NOT the easy mode! But I had to learn to git gud, and run when an engineered npc proved to be more than I could handle. Of course now I've got some engineering I don't have to run unless I'm outnumbered, which is nice
Tho I do play in solo mode, so I guess I'm still in easy mode!
There is a post in another thread that kind of explains this... short version... quantum friction has something to do with the "braking" effect. On this basis there must also be essentially some kind of concept of quantum inertia too which is where the acceleration side of things comes in to play.
The FSD is some form of spatial manipulation drive (i.e. it manipulates local space around the ship In order to bypass the notional limits that prevent FTL using Newtonian principles). Going from in-game stats, mass is a major limiting factor with regards to the FSD technology - go above optimal mass and performance degrades, go above maximum mass and the drive won't work. Below optimum mass, performance improves to at least a point.
The notional speed limit of the FSD could be for any of a number of reasons, but ultimately in most science fiction there is an upper multiplier on FTL travel. The upper limit of the FSD for super-cruise (2001c) is essentially inline with the mainstream maximum warp speeds of popular sci-fi like Star Trek (c/f approx. Warp 9 - though there are some inconsistencies in what speed Warp 9 is considered to be depending on various sources). IME the maximum we will normally achieve is c. 300c or about Warp 6 in Star Trek terms.
Ultimately, the main thing I can see being tweaked by FD in the case of FSD engineering is the extent and/or positioning of the optimal/safe throttle zone. I do not think there is likely to be nor do I believe there should be any changes to the acceleration/deceleration curve behaviours.
Why can't we engineer the SC times?
get there 10, 20, 50 or 90% faster?
SC to Hutton in 9 minutes with a 90% reduced SC cruise.