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Jump Drive Speeds... |
Deleted
Joined: Posts: 0
| Posted: 2002-05-30 19:31  
I personally abhore the long jump times. Staring at the graphic of an FTL jump for 3 minutes just so I get blown out of the sky 10 seconds after I come out of a jump on the other side. So I can pick another ship and stare at another 3 minutes of a jump animation. No thx. This is one of the biggest turnoffs in DS.
So, I'm thumbs up for faster drives. I like acceleration/deceleration phase idea. Perhaps this can be coupled with size of ship idea to give minimum jump size for different sized ships. Small ships due to small mass can accelerate to full jump speed fast, so they can jump in and out real fast (short distance). And big ships will require longer distance to get to jump speeds then exit them.
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Warpath81 Fleet Admiral
Joined: November 13, 2001 Posts: 431
| Posted: 2002-05-30 19:51  
I'm all for better jump drives, but I think 4 times faster is a bit much. 2 sounds good, and maybe 3, but 4 is a little to much I think.
Also, I love the idea for mass and jumping. I always thought it a bit strange that little scouts jumped the same speed that huge dreads did. Maybe scouts and frigs could jump 4 times faster, destroyers cruisers 3, dreads 2, or something like that?
I do'nt like the acceleration idea simply because the idea is that jumping is opening a corridor between to points in space and "jumping" between them. Adding acceleration changes the jump drives more to warp drives or something...think that is kind of strange.
my 2 cents
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Deleted Fleet Admiral
Joined: Posts: 0
| Posted: 2002-05-30 21:10  
Ship mass should be a factor of both drive economy and speed. I suppose to two (economy and speed) are directly linked, or in other words, one in the same. Its as if fuel is consumed per second and not per gu or something *shruggs*.
As for a universal x4 jump drive multiplier in speed, I'm not exactly sure about that. Time to reposition a fleet in this game is part of the strategy on one hand but the extremely long hauls across particularly large systems are boreing in the other.
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SkyLander Admiral Galactic Navy
Joined: August 31, 2001 Posts: 560
| Posted: 2002-05-30 23:07  
Since we have people that want really fast drives and people that think that really fast drives might make the game more fast pased I like the idea of basically the longer the jump time the faster you go. Once again I go back to my afterburner/overjump idea. Basically its like an afterburner you want to get there faster engage this and you get there faster but you use a lot more fuel. Amount of fuel used is dependent on the ship. The bigger the ship the more fuel you need to afterburn.
Either use that or do what was stated before in that the longer the jump time the faster you would go. Basically it makes sense that if you are only going a short distance say a 1000-2000 GU hop you would not want to use a lot of fuel going really fast for such a short distance so it would take longer. But for a really long jump you would want to get there as quickly as possible so you would go faster and use more fuel. Also if you are going to use weight/mass to determine how long a jump is please take into account people that are following or in your group. Basically if you have a dread and assorted destroyers and cruiser follow the dread and they all want to-do a fleet jump make all other ships go down to how long it would take for the dread so all the fleet gets there at the same time. Because if cruisers take half as long to get to a point as a dread does you will basically have a bunch of small waves of ships instead of a big mass of ships.
Well thats my rant.
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Deleted Admiral
Joined: Posts: 0
| Posted: 2002-05-31 02:37  
Just be aware that if you change the speed of jump drives there are other effected areas that will need consideration as well.
-Ejump distance and time, with 4x speed drives a 5-7 second ejump is going to put someone 20k from the fight, waaayy out of sensor range and undoubtedly much harder to follow.
-Jump cancel & dictors are currently fubared somewhat when the point of cancel/dictor is near the target waypoint for the jump. This distance increases with the speed of the drive, and without any further code change, with 4x speed drives players will easily jump far into our through dictor fields.
-Large systems in scenario such as cygnus, procyon, sirius, sol will become more accessible - but it also increases the risk of turning the entire map into a transport spam fest a'la Luyten.
Other than these considerations, I think increasing jump speed is a great idea, especially for fostering play in the MV where travel times can really turn players off.
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Shigernafy Admiral
Joined: May 29, 2001 Posts: 5726 From: The Land of Taxation without Representation
| Posted: 2002-05-31 03:52  
I posted this about 7 months ago...
I had an idea long ago about speeding up those long jumps. My idea was that the further you got from planets and such, the faster you go. The minimum would still be 600, but once you get out into the wide-open plains of space, you get going something like 2500.. or whatever. That way, in-system jumps would seem pretty much the same, but starting at about 10,000 gu out, the gravity from the planets (or something - just trying to give a realistic explanation) reaches a critical number where its effect is basically negligible and you can really get going.
Thus, I like the acceleration one - it makes long system-spanning jumps faster, like in Sol. However, it would keep some of the smaller jumps, within systems where there may be more strategy involved, longer, on par with current speed.
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Dormio Niggling Cadet Agents
Joined: February 15, 2002 Posts: 154 From: Warsaw, Poland
| Posted: 2002-05-31 04:55  
Great idea with this looooong jumps (x4)...
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Deleted Cadet
Joined: Posts: 0
| Posted: 2002-05-31 07:50  
OK what if the speed of the jump is proportional to the distance you are jumping?
For instance any jump that takes 30 seconds or less (18,000gu) stays at 600 gu/sec (just talking Tachyon Drive here.) And then when you set a point beyond that 18,000 mark, the drive increases the speed to reduce the travel time, but never below the 30 sec mark. So for a 36,000 gu jump, it would normally take 1 minute, but now you could set it to take 45 sec, for a 72,000 (120 sec now) make it take 60 sec, and so forth. My numbers here are for an example.
Only trouble with my example is an upper limit should be set because if you assume 255 sec of travel max (easier to calculate real number is 250), you would have a max distance of 589,824,000 gu traveling at 2,313,035.29 per second. So we can't have this without an upper limit.
gu sec gu/sec
18000 30 600
36000 45 800
72000 60 1200
144000 75 1920
288000 90 3200
576000 105 5485.71
1152000 120 9600
2304000 135 17066.67
4608000 150 30720
9216000 165 55854.54
18432000 180 102400
36864000 195 189046.15
73728000 210 351085.71
147456000 225 655360
294912000 240 1228800
589824000 255 2313035.29
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Antra Admiral Agents
Joined: February 16, 2002 Posts: 657 From: Grand Rapids, Michigan
| Posted: 2002-05-31 08:26  
My point with chokepoints is that you can bypass the DS ones with supply ships. And as you very well know , ships *aren't* everywhere in the MV. There's just not enough to patrol every bit and hope you can slow them down.
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Deleted Admiral
Joined: Posts: 0
| Posted: 2002-05-31 09:56  
Variable jump drive speed sounds neat, but if you set the speed based on the initial distance, you'll end up with a lot of people artificially increasing the distance to get faster jump drive speeds, and breaking out of the jump.
What if jump drive speed was a constant increase based on the time in the jump?
Example: Cruiser Crius is wanting to jump. He reduces his speed to 0 like normal, and starts jumping. His jump drive takes over and his ship increases in speed as he is jumping. Always at the same rate, maybe depending on mass of the ship, maybe on the number of jump drives.
In this way, the time to any destination is constant, but the further you actually travel, the more distance you can cover per time interval.
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Darkheyr ={NuKe Squad}= Fleet Admiral
Joined: October 23, 2001 Posts: 805
| Posted: 2002-05-31 17:13  
i like the FTL technics of Perry Rhodan
example
a DISCOVERER battleship needs 30% lightspeed (means it axxelerates for about two and half a minute) to enter hyperspace. when it drops out, its at speed 0
now lets put a look at the small VESTA cruisers it is carrying along
those things also need 30% but they can drop out of FTL at any speed between 0 and 70% lightspeed
if DS hat something similar, the small ships like a VESTA (which IS small, l60m compared to a 1800m discoverer) could fly in, launch their weapons, and escape any big ships with relative ease....
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Kharn Cadet
Joined: August 24, 2001 Posts: 107
| Posted: 2002-06-01 02:09  
I like the idea of new drives but leave the standard drives as they are! They are ok but faster drives wpold be nice but rethink the idea of external fuel tanks in cargo bay! Each with i.e. 5000 fuel or something like that. Or better fuel system in a special slot. Not speed range needs to be increased. Also as adressed a steering possibility while jumping would be nice with some kind of special dirve like a linear drive. or make a jump drive which transports immedeately but only a short distance i.e. for the new fraction?
Just my thoughts on that.
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Banshee Grand Admiral Raven Warriors
Joined: August 28, 2001 Posts: 2181 From: Philadelphia, PA
| Posted: 2002-06-01 13:36  
Quote:
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On 2002-05-30 09:40, Hitman23 wrote:
I like the idea Faustus.
Maybe if the jumps are quicker people might come to the MV.
Anything to get them into the MV.
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If you want people in the MV just remove cross faction Tech, you wouldnt believe how many people are avoiding MV solely for this reason, it shouldnt be there and because it is we want it removed,
Wrong topic i know but this got me thinking about it.
As for the drives, it seems like a good idea but is it practical?
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DOM700 [-IMO-] Fleet Admiral
Joined: July 26, 2001 Posts: 3175 From: Eckental, Germany, Sol-System
| Posted: 2002-06-02 12:55  
I am against it, you can't see ships jumping in the opposite direction and you will more often jump without thinking
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FishGills Cadet
Joined: March 27, 2002 Posts: 26
| Posted: 2002-06-02 15:56  
I like the idea of having to accelerate and slow down for jump speeds. But:
Have it so an ejump does the normal jump that it does now. Hence why it's called an emergency jump and damages the drive.
Also, once you enter a long range jump, people will cancel the jump to get the high speed right? Well, the faster you go the more the jump hurts your ship when you cancel. This should include *all* systems, not just jump drives.
One more thing to keep in mind is that if ships are on follow (maybe this should be a group only feature?) that the fleet stays together.
I really really like this idea though. It'd make long distance less of a chore but with the damage from dropping out of long jumps you couldn't really exploit it without risking your ship.
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