It would still be a vast galaxy. You would not be able to go anywhere that you hadn't already travelled to before in a ship.
.... however, once one had left a Sidewinder at any chosen location, one could travel to that location instantly.
The scale is retained because you still need to jump somewhere in a ship in order to be able to access that location at a later date.
The scale is lost, in my opinion, when the CMDR can teleport instantly between predefined positions (over 200, given the number of ships that can be owned by a single CMDR - and a stripped Sidewinder only costs 12,570 Cr. - so there's no large investment required when procuring "bookmark" ships).
The flexibility is that you don't have to come back in order to do something else.
As someone who opposed instant ship transfer and somewhat regrets the doubling of base FSD ranges, I firmly believe in retaining the scale and do not feel that it is lost by the proposal.
Not everyone shares that opinion.
This is not going to get your ship to Colonia or Beagle Point any faster.
Not the first time, to any location with a Station, no. Every single time thereafter - absolutely, simply log out, log in to ship that was transferred to Colonia, play on - no travelling, no cost, no delay - instant....
This is not going to allow you to teleport to the latest CG without taking a ship there first.
A few strategically placed ships in the bubble could ensure that one's required distance to any CG located in the bubbly was not very far at all.
That is not going to help you counter the Thargoid menace or repair stations without taking those ships to where they're needed.
It would permit players to pick and choose, on a whim, whether they wanted to log in to a ship ready to repair a nearby station or a ship in a completely different location.
Now that's out of the way, let's look at potential exploits.
Not really out of the way. However, lets....
We've already dealt with the cargo exploit.
If you log out with cargo in your ship, that's the only ship available to log back in to.
The current system is simpler.
The materials exploit.
Well, this is a magic macguffin as it stands so we can make it work however we want.
My suggestion would be to split materials storage into two parts.
You'd have the current version of materials but you can only access that when you are docked - that storage is permanent and cannot be lost. If you prefer, we can make that storage only accessible at the brokers and at engineers, although remote engineering would require access from all docks.
Then you'd have materials storage on each ship.
The materials you gather with that ship stay with that ship until you dock and transfer it to the shared storage.
If you lose the ship before you do that, you lose the materials on the ship.
You won't get instant unlocks from special materials like Guardian parts without bringing them back to the bubble first.
You won't be able to instantly use that Technetium you just hoovered up without docking somewhere first.
All raw or manufactured materials and encoded data travel with the player's avatar, i.e. the CMDR. They cannot be lost on destruction and are available anywhere the CMDR is.
I very much doubt that the introduction of the potential loss of newly acquired materials would be well received, nor the stipulation that one must dock before one can use them (I would expect that Explorers would be particularly affected by that).
Missions, and anything else on the Transactions tab are linked to the ship in the same way as bounties.
Missions are linked to the player avatar, i.e. the CMDR - as changing ship is possible when holding missions.
You can only perform and complete those tasks in the same ship you took the mission with.
A quite unreasonable restriction.
And finally, exploration data. That is stored with the ship until you hand it in from that ship.
Another quite unreasonable restriction.
Any other exploits to deal with or are we solely falling back on the feel of the game and immersion?
Space is big. We need to travel to where we want to do something. Not all players agree with that. However, given the lack of teleportation for multi-crew, i.e. the use of the handwavium of unlimited range telepresence to facilitate new multi-player gameplay, I don't see that Frontier would introduce it now.
As for parking Sidewinders everywhere, how exactly does that help anything?
In order to truly take advantage of the proposal, you'd need a lot of ships. Specialized ships for each type of gameplay that you like to engage in, quite possibly more than one of each. Likely engineered to get the most out of them.
That is a significant investment of time and effort.
Those specialized ships can then maximise your time doing what they were built for instead of shlepping back and forth whenever you decide to switch gameplay style.
The ability to instantly relocate to the dock in which any ship is stored, plus the ability to transfer ships, would mean that, with a little pre-planning, the player could log in to one bookmark ship, summon desired ship, log out, log in to previously deployed ship of choice for the particular use case then play on. In short, the proposal could remove all but trivial travel distances for any player that had been playing long enough.
