System to system travel using SC rather than Hyperspace = Hypercruise?

It would be like super cruise, which has no loading screens.

When engaging the FSD to jump to super-cruise there is a countdown and a jump animation and it loads the SC instance - it's a loading screen and it looks like a loading screen. A good and very unobtrusive one, but it's a loading screen.

… I would go even further and remove all transitions from the game: Seamlessly leave a station, accelerate to ludicrous speed, navigate, decelerate, navigate some more and arrive at the next station in a different system. If you can't agree that this would be awesome I don't know what else I could say.

Sure, it would be nice and awesome at first glance.
But: How would you accelerate form normal space to super-cruise or hyper-cruise? Without it taking a lot of time, without completely breaking the current normal space flight mechanic (fixed max speed instead of fixed max acceleration) and without making the acceleration so quick that it looks like a transition screen?


It would also be more interesting than super cruise because of the gravity wells of other stars. You are right that space is big and stars are sparse, but with increasing speeds it gets more likely that you pass them closely, requiring you to navigate around them. …

There are gravity wells in super-cruise.
And unless the hyper-cruise inhibiting/affecting/disturbing gravity-well effect covers a huge area of space (up to light years) it will be something that is most of the time ignorable.
Space is big and no matter how much we can imagine how cool something would be if space wasn't that big.

I would like a traveling system without load screens and transition between flight modes and with interesting things happening while traveling and with having control over the movement of the ship all the time and with the the option to travel to uncharted "lands" and add beacons in newly discovered systems and…
It's just that I don't think that it's possible without fundamentally changing the game and without massively increasing the time travel would require.
 
Ignoring the technical limitations, imagine you could seamlessly accelerate to Hypercruise speeds and travel from system to system directly, manoeuver around stars, etc. You get the idea. Hyperspace jumps would be removed from the game. Route plotting would give you a vector that you can follow, if you navigate yourself you could find potentially faster but more dangerous routes. Would you prefer that over the current system?
Maybe, if there also was something like a "mass effect" gate that we could build when we got there. Basically the expansion being a s low progress based on players actually going in SC to the other system and working on the gate. And when the gate was finished, everyone could enjoy the instant travel there. This way, the exploration and expansion of the actual bubble would be a slow progression.
 
I think all Elite fans had hoped that this would be the way things worked in Elite 4 - it's simply a logical progression of the game, insofar as being a seamless 3D environment..


What ED offers instead is the same old system all previous versions of the game used - "hyperspace" = curtain fall, the stage hands re-arrange the set, the curtains rise and et voila, you've "Hyperspaced", magically transporting to distant realms..

..which is all very well, until you begin to realise that this is how things are working, that you've never actually gone anywhere, and the props have simply been redrawn around you. That however accurately rendered the star positions around you, they're not actually there; they're not even "stars" at all but 2D pixels on a bitmap, a fake background behind an invisible wall you cannot cross, just like the background scenery in Half Life et al that you can never actually reach.. a fake sky behind a glass wall.

Considering that games like Noctis and apps like Celestia and Space Engine all have had real 3D environments for over a decade, it's just one more disappointment in the litany of baffling compromises and squandered potential that define ED..

LOL, Noctis is probably getting on for 20 years old now, yet every star in the sky is real, and you can click to select any one, and then fly to it, whilst watching all the intervening stars stream by...

...so i don't think any canvasing of opinion on the issue is even necessary - all of those players who seriously prefer the canned "hyperspace" loading animations are the reason why we've been fobbed off with such a retrograde "sequel", if you can even call it that, in the first place.. so a big thanks to all of you low-expectations muddy funsters..!
 
When engaging the FSD to jump to super-cruise there is a countdown and a jump animation and it loads the SC instance - it's a loading screen and it looks like a loading screen. A good and very unobtrusive one, but it's a loading screen.



Sure, it would be nice and awesome at first glance.
But: How would you accelerate form normal space to super-cruise or hyper-cruise? Without it taking a lot of time, without completely breaking the current normal space flight mechanic (fixed max speed instead of fixed max acceleration) and without making the acceleration so quick that it looks like a transition screen?




There are gravity wells in super-cruise.
And unless the hyper-cruise inhibiting/affecting/disturbing gravity-well effect covers a huge area of space (up to light years) it will be something that is most of the time ignorable.
Space is big and no matter how much we can imagine how cool something would be if space wasn't that big.

I would like a traveling system without load screens and transition between flight modes and with interesting things happening while traveling and with having control over the movement of the ship all the time and with the the option to travel to uncharted "lands" and add beacons in newly discovered systems and…
It's just that I don't think that it's possible without fundamentally changing the game and without massively increasing the time travel would require.

Simple: Acceleration depends on selected destination.

I think you are a man without visions. I suggest you take some onionhead.
 
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In the core with systems so close together it's feasible. And there is no reason why FD could not do it, they could do a loading screen half way between the systems to jump stars...

But as a use case it would be used very infrequently so why waste Dev time implementing it.. that's the real reason .
 
In the core with systems so close together it's feasible. And there is no reason why FD could not do it, they could do a loading screen half way between the systems to jump stars...

But as a use case it would be used very infrequently so why waste Dev time implementing it.. that's the real reason .

I recommend reading some of my posts here. It's useless in the core systems (you can jump past hundreds of systems faster), but very useful in sparse areas (skipping lots of system jumps - travelling faster due to not loading them).
 
Zadian Lichtfrost - instead of having a circular argument with babelfisch, why not critique my suggested implementation:

There is so much potential gameplay benefits in unlocking a new more interactive mode of interstellar travel that it would be a crying shame if it never gets implemented. What we have just now is effectively analoguous to star treks warp drive for moving around systems in supercruise and akin to star wars hyper jump for moving between systems, what the OP is proposing is something akin to andromeda's slipstream method of travel and IMHO that could knit nicely with the current game.

Gameplay wise, it would be more interactive having to spend 30 minutes of flying dodging rapidly approaching stars following an onscreen vector indication (like interdiction minigame), rather than: [jump via loading screen, stare at witchspace animation for thirty seconds, blue tunnel into system, supercruise around star, blue tunnel into witchspace, rinse and repeat 30 times]

Furthermore, there could be a tie in with the design decision forum concept of hyperjump beacons that cosmicspacehead refers to, where we could only "hypercruise" into systems with a nav beacon, but players could witchspace into the unexplored systems, scan the system, and deploy a nav beacon loaded with all its cartographic data enabling future visitors to hypercruise to it. I think this could be used to create a new wave of exploration of our galaxy and could be tied into the exploration buff coming in the q4 update.

Hypercruise cannot be all milk and honey though, so there'd need to be penalties, I'd suggest if we used somethign like the interdiction minigame screen to control the heading, and had star sytems hurling towards the player, "deviation from the vector" ie losing the hypercruise minigame would pick up ship heat, and would destabilise the "hypercruise conduit" as indicated by the right hand progress bar moving upwards; if the right hand bar tops out the player would do an emergency stop with lots of heat plus hull and module damage, in essence they fluffed their hypercruise into a misjump. But if they were good at it, and kept on the vector indicated their left hand progress bar would climb, and they would be making progress faster than repeated witchspace/supercruise movements. So starting off they would be travelling at the same sort of pace in hypercruise as via witchspace jumps, roughly one kylie an hour, as they kept their ship on vector and their left hand progress bar went up that speed would increase, say maxing out at for a hypothetical value 5 kylies an hour. However if they fluff it they would lose speed and when they end up with only the bottom notch on their progress bar they would be travelling slower than witchspacing at say 0.1 kylies per hour.

Using those values above it would bring hypercruise potential speeds and therefore hypercruise journey times roughly in line with neutron highwaying, thus colonia which has been done in a matter of hours but only if the pilot is good based on colonia at twenty two kylies and five kylies per hour top speed giving it four and a bit hours theoretical minimum journey time...
https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/5l16tt/whats_your_speed_record_from_the_bubble_to/

Lore wise, we could twist it into the game that we borrowed / acquired technologies that enabled us to go from witchspace hyper jumps to hyper cruising long distances from the guardians or thargoids during the future narrative unfolding regarding the other two civilisations we know of in the galaxy.

The above is something I think could genuinely be fun gameplay for longer journeys compared to jump jump jump jump and I'm prepared to take some constructive criticism on it and make modifications to my suggestion to address any short fallings you or others may highlight.
 
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I'd really expect that 99.9% of the Commander's workload in <when-ever> is carried out by the 'flight management computer'. Punch in the start, end and way points, flight level, and press 'go'. Call it sling-shot, hyperspace, or mega drive, I don't care, just call me when we're close to landing.
 
Ignoring the technical limitations, imagine you could seamlessly accelerate to Hypercruise speeds and travel from system to system directly, manoeuver around stars, etc. You get the idea. Hyperspace jumps would be removed from the game. Route plotting would give you a vector that you can follow, if you navigate yourself you could find potentially faster but more dangerous routes. Would you prefer that over the current system?

Absolutely. This would open up the option for stuff like rogue planets; shipwrecks drifting in the interstellar void; ancient generation ships still in transit between systems.
 
The distance a ship can jump is part of the game balance in the current implementation (whether it is well-balanced is another question entirely). What would be done to encourage players to buy a DBX with the best cruise drive available over a T9 with a 1E drive and lots of fuel tanks? Limit the amount of time in hypercruise? Cut down the max speed based on drive quality? Affect the size of mass interference bubbles?

If this is also supposed to be available beside the current system (as you suggest) rather than a replacement, then it also needs to be balanced against that. Which is a tall order. I don’t think you can have both.

This kind of system also seems to be the most use to traders and/or combatants trying to quickly get from point A to point B, as it encourages avoiding systems rather than flying in and seeing what there is to be found. I’m afraid exploration in particular would negatively affected by such a change, especially when everyone starts complaining that they can’t ever find anything.
 
😂😂😂

This is actually an interesting thread.. and I get where you're coming from on the idea.

I just suddenly got cracked up thinking about a star dodging mini-game at speeds thousands of times beyond the speed of light... 😂

Constant state of wide-eyed panic. LOL
 
The distance a ship can jump is part of the game balance in the current implementation (whether it is well-balanced is another question entirely). What would be done to encourage players to buy a DBX with the best cruise drive available over a T9 with a 1E drive and lots of fuel tanks? Limit the amount of time in hypercruise? Cut down the max speed based on drive quality? Affect the size of mass interference bubbles?
Good question.

If this is also supposed to be available beside the current system (as you suggest) rather than a replacement, then it also needs to be balanced against that. Which is a tall order. I don’t think you can have both.
I currently don't care if it would be a replacement or not.

This kind of system also seems to be the most use to traders and/or combatants trying to quickly get from point A to point B, as it encourages avoiding systems rather than flying in and seeing what there is to be found. I’m afraid exploration in particular would negatively affected by such a change, especially when everyone starts complaining that they can’t ever find anything.

I am afraid that you are completely wrong with that.
 
Who cares how it's balanced?
This thread is no proposition of changing the game - it is an exercise in imagination.
Sit back, relax, imagine how cool it would be. Release your inner child.

Don't overthink it like every sad adult - just indulge yourself in a fantasy that doesn't require justification, balancing and what the hell not you sad sobs.
 
Who cares how it's balanced?
This thread is no proposition of changing the game - it is an exercise in imagination.
Sit back, relax, imagine how cool it would be. Release your inner child.

Don't overthink it like every sad adult - just indulge yourself in a fantasy that doesn't require justification, balancing and what the hell not you sad sobs.

Exactly. It's not wrong to point out potential flaws and problems though, maybe I'd like to start a serious suggestion thread at some point... :)
 
Who cares how it's balanced?

I do and I've talked about it, but threads don't get read in their entirety before questions are asked again.

Also this is part of exercising my imagination. I don't know how cool it would be if I don't consider the details.
 
Wouldn't it be a bit dull? I think we're imagining whizzing through a starfield when realistically we'd barely see any movement at all.
 
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