Suggest addition: "Passenger Terminal" for bulk, faceless airline-style passengers (with GUI Mockup)
This seemed to go down really well on the subreddit (900+ Upvotes, 98% upvoted) so I figured I'd post it here as well. This strikes me as particularly necessary in light of removing board-flipping. Logically, it should ALWAYS be possible to completely fill any size passenger ship given a large enough system. This change would allow that, while also making bulk passengers more realistic. Here's the GUI mock-up for the "Passenger Terminal" screen, followed by the copy-pasted text from my explanatory comment on Reddit:
[IMGUR]https://imgur.com/wiA7qHn[/IMGUR]
DISCLAIMER: this is just a really quick mockup, the prices are not at all accurate. Obviously the 750,000Cr luxury ticket to Risa is insanely unbalanced, since you could make a BILLION credits in just a few hours.
EDIT: I just noticed that the screenshot I was working with is of a Penal Colony. It sure seems to have a lot of Luxury passengers looking to go to a vacation planet.
Passenger missions are basically based on hauling missions, where you're paid to haul a certain number of people from one place to another. 30 refugees want to get from System A to System B? You can only carry 17? Well those other 13 refugees have LOYALTY, dammit! You take them all, or you take NONE of them!
Also, Coriolis Starports have a surface area of roughly 13 square kilometers. At the population density of Manhattan, that houses over 300,000 people. The "cities" on the outside of the starports look considerably denser than that, and that's just the surface. A Coriolis Starport probably houses literal millions of people at a time, and it’s the smallest port. Yet the passenger lounge never has more than a few hundred awaiting transport at a time. In a system of hundreds of millions of people, there really should be constant, huge traffic. JFK serves over 150,000 people per day in a city of millions. How much traffic would you expect from a city-sized starport serving a system of billions?
I feel like the passengers system should really be based on the commodities market, not hauling missions. Different systems will have different popular destinations, with different numbers of people waiting. You should be able to pick a destination, sell tickets to that destination, and board faceless passengers. In a system with very little population, it should be difficult to find passengers. In a huge system, you should always be able to fill pretty much every cabin.
In my ideal world, FDev would split the passenger system into two: the VIP Lounge, where you can find the rich tourists and explorers, and the Passenger Terminal—this screen—where you sell tickets for bulk passengers.
This seemed to go down really well on the subreddit (900+ Upvotes, 98% upvoted) so I figured I'd post it here as well. This strikes me as particularly necessary in light of removing board-flipping. Logically, it should ALWAYS be possible to completely fill any size passenger ship given a large enough system. This change would allow that, while also making bulk passengers more realistic. Here's the GUI mock-up for the "Passenger Terminal" screen, followed by the copy-pasted text from my explanatory comment on Reddit:
[IMGUR]https://imgur.com/wiA7qHn[/IMGUR]
DISCLAIMER: this is just a really quick mockup, the prices are not at all accurate. Obviously the 750,000Cr luxury ticket to Risa is insanely unbalanced, since you could make a BILLION credits in just a few hours.
EDIT: I just noticed that the screenshot I was working with is of a Penal Colony. It sure seems to have a lot of Luxury passengers looking to go to a vacation planet.
Passenger missions are basically based on hauling missions, where you're paid to haul a certain number of people from one place to another. 30 refugees want to get from System A to System B? You can only carry 17? Well those other 13 refugees have LOYALTY, dammit! You take them all, or you take NONE of them!
Also, Coriolis Starports have a surface area of roughly 13 square kilometers. At the population density of Manhattan, that houses over 300,000 people. The "cities" on the outside of the starports look considerably denser than that, and that's just the surface. A Coriolis Starport probably houses literal millions of people at a time, and it’s the smallest port. Yet the passenger lounge never has more than a few hundred awaiting transport at a time. In a system of hundreds of millions of people, there really should be constant, huge traffic. JFK serves over 150,000 people per day in a city of millions. How much traffic would you expect from a city-sized starport serving a system of billions?
I feel like the passengers system should really be based on the commodities market, not hauling missions. Different systems will have different popular destinations, with different numbers of people waiting. You should be able to pick a destination, sell tickets to that destination, and board faceless passengers. In a system with very little population, it should be difficult to find passengers. In a huge system, you should always be able to fill pretty much every cabin.
In my ideal world, FDev would split the passenger system into two: the VIP Lounge, where you can find the rich tourists and explorers, and the Passenger Terminal—this screen—where you sell tickets for bulk passengers.