Reasons for space legs

[Friedrich Engel]

Many other people have suggested implementing space legs and I wanted to give my take on it, namely some gameplay mechanics to go along with it. Just being able to walk around your ship would be cool, but it would lack substance. We need a reason to get up and walk around our ships.

-I always found the galaxy view and this system view to be a little out of place in the cockpit. When you enter either of these views it just takes you out of the cockpit and changes up the music and sounds etc. I want my own dedicated mapping room in larger ships, or a separate console in cockpit that you walk to change your course (or perhaps the pilot's seat swivels around to mapping terminal in smaller ships?). In a ship with a co-pilots seat he can man the guns as well as a terminal for mapping and plotting.

-I am a huge explorer and I love to surf the neutron highway. I also love the fact that after a while the FSD starts to malfunction. I then think about how Han solo goes to maintenance cubbie to whack the damn thing with a crescent wrench and it starts working again. We have that reboot/repair option, but I think its a little bit too convenient. I want to actually see and fix the problem right in front of me. I want my own crescent wrench to bang stuff with to make things work. It could either take an instant to fix or a couple whacks, but you have to leave your cockpit which leaves you vulnerable to attacks. If I was playing with a couple of friends, I could be flying the ship, one friend on a turret, another in a fighter, and yet another tending to any internal fixes via wrench whacking.

-To add to the internal module fixing but probably a little bit too hardcore is whacking a very specific section of the module to fix the issue involved. I would be able to look at my FSD and see what the problem is. Let's say that a power coupler is spewing sparks and using the engineer parts as well as a thorough whacking return it operational status. If you don't have the right part or material for the fix you have to wait to get to a station fix it entirely. Though I am aware that engineering parts are tedious to get right now, it would be all the more reason to keep some spare parts handy on those long haul trips. Perhaps maybe sell the more common parts in manufacturing systems?

The bottom line is I think these space legs mechanics would mesh perfectly with Frontiers' vision on how they want multicrew to function as well as pants-tingly awesome to play in game. Now I love immersion so I realize for the average player these suggestions would be tedious and time consuming, but I believe that it makes up tenfold as a gameplay element. This game doesn't necessarily appeal to the average player so I think it would work out just nicely. Let me know what you guys think and critique to your hearts content.

Edit: Not related to space legs, but on multicrew exploration ships I would like to see a scanner that you can point to any object even when the object is behind you.

 

[MK Regular]

You do make some good suggestions (I would love to run around a ship smacking things with a wrench), but I don't think that space legs features should automatically override currently in game features.

One of the examples you gave was the galaxy map. As of right now, I can start plotting a 20kLy route and get back to scanning planets in ~30 seconds. if I were to use a plotting console in my ship to do the same thing, it would take me 1-2 minutes depending on how far I need to walk. This would just serve to be another time sink in a game that already has more than a few time sinks. Heaven forbid I need to do this for the system map every time I jump into a new system. If there was some genuine reason why using the plotting console was better than the pop-up map, I might consider using it depending on the benefits and the situation.

The example you gave for maintenance seems like it could work, taking into consideration that we already have AFMUs. The way I see space legs maintenance working is as a more effective solution to damaged broken modules than AFMs, which would be more of a 'OMG everything is on fire and I need to fix it NOW' solution. This could be done by giving modules that were repaired manually an integrity bonus to compensate for the time investment to fix said module. Again, there needs to be a good reason for the player to consider manually repairing a module depending on the benefits of doing so and the situation they are in.

TL;DR If doing something is going to take longer using a new method than using the current method, make the choice worth/not worth the player's time depending on the situation.