Here's my 2 pence-worth...
I did the Hutton run once. Once.
It took 90 minutes (or there-abouts) to complete, and after 15 minutes I was thinking "Howay, how long is this taking?"
I didn't (and still don't) want to be spending vast amounts of time staring at the screen when I could have been doing shorter runs for cargo, doing missions, etc. If I wanted to watch Netflix or whatever, I would do so. The fact that I want to play the game is why I'm playing the game. I'm not knocking anyone who chooses to do so - that is their choice, and I wouldn't want to knacker anyone else's gameplay for something that doesn't really affect me anyway.
The Hutton run taught me a very valuable lesson that evening - Check the station distance on the mission board!
It's still something I do every time before accepting any mission. That 'mechanic' already exists within the game to be used.
Do I want quicker intra-system flight times? Not unless it followed some sort of real-world concept.
Why? Because (and people keep using this argument, but it IS true... insert over-used Douglas Adams quote...)
Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the street to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. Listen... and so on.
I don't like the 'fast-travel' type scenario, and certainly don't like the whole 'teleportation' thing (but that's certainly NOT being argued in this thread). The 'power-creep' that exists within the game would mean that an 'intra-system Acceleration gate' would eventually give way to some form of inter-stellar version whereby folks could jump from here to Colonia in a few minutes, and that's not something I want to see happen. Huge distances SHOULD take a long time to travel. I WOULD advocate the use of wormhole travel, as long as that was to a random destination, and not a fixed point-to-point, which has been discussed in other threads. I quite like the idea of taking myself off and hoying myself into a wormhole without the slightest idea of where I'd end up. The exploration on the way back would be amazing (and I'm not that much of an explorer, but with the new FSS/DSS mechanic I'm quite enjoying it).
The ONLY thing I would say with regards to quicker travelling within the system is that it COULD work if players had the ability to use a slingshot manoeuver. Currently when our boffins are on about lobbing stuff at other planets (probes, etc) they use complex calculations to determine how they can chuck something within the range of Mars (other planets are available), so that it's caught in its gravity and slingshot around it. This means that the particular item that is being thrown can reach a greater speed without using so much fuel (admittedly, more fuel has to then be used to slow the object down again when within range of its destination).
Such a mechanic COULD be introduced without breaking any lore because of the real-world physics, and also could add gameplay. Your nav system could have a facility where you'd enter a destination within system, and navi-comp would make the necessary calcs to slingshot you, as long as you held to a particular course (this is where the gameplay comes in). The further off this course you get, the further from your destination you'd end up. It could even take multiple slingshots into account, and it could also take the navi-comp a few minutes to make the calcs, leaving you vulnerable to attack whilst waiting (though this could get tedious if the calcs were wiped during every interdiction, and you were doing this in a busy system, but then there'd be nowt to stop you moving away from the main sequence star before starting the calcs, leaving you perhaps less likely to be attacked).
Like I said, just my two pence worth...
Regards,
o7
