Cornflakes

Since when do GM's have to fit into the art style, they arent regular players nor ships :V I'd be all for TARDIS like GM ships if it could be arranged legal problems wise lol

Do you mean in terms of block shapes? if yes then i agree with you, i also often ran into situations where i couldnt build what i want in the possibilities games gave me.

respect, killing people in a game thats far from being available to anyone :V

Well, for example limited emergence positions would be one limitations. From a certain location you can only reach a certain hard limited set of positions (for example hyperlanes from stellaris, node drives from sword of the stars, hyperdrives from independence war 2) interstellar FTL could also be limited to "domains". Every star would be part of 1-4 domains, each domain contains 2-5ish solar systems. And one can only use FTL drives to travel between stars inside one domain. when a star is part of a domain your starting system isnt part of you have to go sublight and pass the domain border with the interplanetary drives. Domains would only border on each other or domain walls can only be passed inside of solar systems Forcing you into detectability and into an interceptable state. It would also impose some structure onto the universe without removing the general freedom of movement. As an exploring player doesnt have much problem with domain borders, but systems with high connectivity (being part of a large amount of large domains) would emerge as trade hubs due to them being easily reachable from many systems. I'd also make stargates obey those limitations, for simplicity, unification and not to subvert the whole domain system. Another way would be something similar to EVE onlines cynosural field generators or the proposed stargate probes. You have to have something already there to make a manned jump to that location. The problem with that in DU is that there is no other way to get from star to star. So there has to be another way to get from star to star. Thats a few examples i can give you. The range/fuel limitations are a small problem in my eyes (not no factor, mind you!) But limitations in terms of connectivity are important to keep strategy in the game, to keep fleets from jumping freely through interstellar space undetected/uninterceptable.

"you cant possibly enjoy this camping trip without the six hour car travel to our camping location!" and i dont say that jumpdrives are bad, i say that freeform drives without any limitations on arrival point are bad. when you can fly around without any limitations (and you explicitly said it doesnt need limitations....) every semblance of strategy goes out the window. with the difference that having to get something thats interceptable to the target before you can jump in your whole fleet changes the whole game. its not "suddenly, fleet" its a possible entryway for the fleet you can plug without having to engage the attacking combat fleet with a more-than-equal defense fleet. shifting some of the advantage back to the defender, leading to more stability for the non-fighting population. other pretty simple additions could be spool up and spool down times for any variation of jumpgate/drive tech. the stargate probes are lighting up for a while until they are ready to be used (preferrably with some time of standstill) and jumpgates couldnt just be switched off when someone you dont like comes in sight, but have to be slowly wound down during which the wormhole/whatever connection stays active. and what "interceptable" FTL? you said yourself that that is not needed

searching the forums for a thread that already discusses what you are asking for is hard. https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/1022-mod-support/

aaaand that doesnt work with instant jumping/ stargates .... how? build a jump capable ship, follow the wake of jump probes and build gates in the systems which are interesting for other people as well or where some leave the ship to stay in the system. first: they are going to be in the game so there is no point arguing if they are easier to implement than something else. they already have to be balanced. second: stargates have much less ways of breaking the whole strategic game than go-anywhere-from-anywhere FTL drives. with stargates you have limited ways to get somewhere, instead of being able to walk around any kind of defenses but the ones at the installation you are attacking. why should i stop somewhere but my intended target? gives the attacker huuuuuuge advantages in terms of target choice and (strategic) focus fire ability. with basically no way for the defender to be there in time unless they are in range before the strike, which would be a bad intel situation for the attacker and not planning on the defender side. without the "strike anywhere" capability of freeform FTL drives the universe loses its "war anywhere anytime" characteristic which gives /stability/ to the world which is protected by the ones who fight for the players who arent involved in fighting (yet). giving players the peace they need for actually building cool stuff instead of having something thats worse than EVE nullsec everywhere. my point is that NQ would basically have to replicate any sensor and movement impairment capabilities that are likely to be in the game for interstellar engagement. but with completely different balancing constraints (and logical inconsistencies if done as you suggest...) doubling balancing and game design work for those elements for not much extra gain over discrete jump mechanics. focus instead on the gameplay that concerns /everyone/ not only the people that avoid Stargates. the guy with the FTL drive who wants to stomp your mining facilities agrees. theres definitely no need for deep space interdiction that could keep him from jumping on top of your factilities and nuking them out of existence and jumping out of the system again before you can react. [sarcasm]sounds like a very balanced and fun approach for everyone[/sarcasm]

Ich kanns auch lassen auf englisch zu schreiben wenns dir lieber is. (I can stop writing in english as well if you are fine with that )

And what possibilities open up compared to stargates? And how do stargates break the game more? Give them a more or less hard range limitation and maybe some spool up time when opening up the connection. Doesnt need different forms of interactions nor different illogical sensor rules compared to normal flight. And i just can place a ship a bit outside a star system and monitor everything in it with your weird only-long-distance sensors. (hell! how would those make sense? >.> )

English speaking forum mate, google translate at least shows good will :V

Why would stargates be the end-all of strategy if they were the only(useful) way to travel between stars? environmental conditions apply without freeform interstellar travel as well. A nebula or radiation cloud affects you the same when you are in orbit around a star as it does when you are in deep space. (And the effects of black holes and asteroid fields make more sense in interplanetar ranges as well lol) And without freeform travel NQ doesnt have to design a second balancing framework around detection and movement impairment whichs constraints are completely different than the ones for in-system gameplay. For effective deep space interdiction you need sensors with light hours to light months or even years. But for in system gameplay you definitely dont want sensors that can keep an eye over the whole system on its own. Same for FTL disruptors and the like. I personally dont see a way to reconcile one of those problems without completely breaking the other thing. And honestly also see no reason to open that can of worms in the first place. Why bother with building all those extra systems to prevent freeform interstellar travel from breaking the rest of the game when most of the gameplay works the same without it? I know its cool and would be a nice thing to have (i actually want it myself). But it opens up such a huge can of worms that i'd rather have it not in the game (at release) than to make the rest of the game suffer for it because of the diverted resources.

Hence why i said "if he has a sensor capable of giving him the data". Its unlikely that he can carry a sensor that gives him 200+km detection range vs people, but when he has a networked sensor that relays the data to him? Let him lock on, he likely wont be able to do anything anyway :shrug:

thats more like a no-go zone as opposed to a choke point. (assuming the nebula isnt torodial or anything)

Eh, why build different systems/constraints for that? Its only extra work and creates inconsistencies. If you have a sensor(network) that gives you data on that person, why shouldnt you be able to lock onto him?

im not disagreeing with that at all, but Klatu Satori claims that they would create choke points. which i disagree with.

you guys saw the video where they showed the freakin /8 kilometer/ long station? when an automatic turret cant even cover the whole length of my ship i'd be very concerned. just from the maximum size of player made constructs i'd guess maximum (automatic) targetting range is more in the range of 50-250km and not in the single digit range.

i dont disagree that terrain effects create gameplay, they can create a lot of gameplay. but i dont think that nebula and asteroid fields could consistently create choke points which arent just statistical oddities but influence the game as a whole. if the system creates one choke point and then doesnt for long distances. making the choke point an oddity thats mostly circumventable and not something you always have to think about strategically.

why would cargo boxes remove the mass balancing dance? cant boxes have mass dependent on their contents?

And 30 AU are very very very narrow over interstellar distances. Thats about 0.0005 lightyears. I dont think that any structures stretching over 5+ lightyears would somewhat consistently form 3D choke points. Because its so incredibly unlikely that multiple such structures would come so close and not overlap some distance, forming even denser hazards

im not saying that those things arent navigational hazards, im saying they arent capable of consistently creating choke points where people have to get through to get fom A to B. because at least three or more such structures have to form a canal thats existent and not too wide to be an effective choke point (without opening other balancing cans full of worms) 3D environments make much more unlikely that something is an actual choke point compared to the 2d surfaces of earth. and even then those constrictions have to be small enough to matter for any interception/blockading gameplay. anything thats physically allowed to exist could exist somewhere, its just very very unlikely to encounter it as its either never formed or collapsed long before humanity existed.

and how would any of this create any navigational problems that would matter? unless they are artificially placed in ways that theres /always/ only a couple kilometers of space between those things they wont create any choke points that matter. because interstellar distances are huge. plus minus a thousanth of a lightyear, a number one probably wouldnt waste a second thought on, is still the orbital radius of pluto, and i highly doubt that a whole solar systems cross section counts as "choke" point. unless theres a method of preventing volumes the size of a solar system to use their FTL drives (which is a balancing nightmare waiting to happen) interstellar sized clouds and effects wont create any choke points. (well, they could, but only if "free" FTL drives could only go along very specific routes between stars and your effects block those routes. but then, why bother with a "free" FTL drive when its again only jumpgates with a different name?) and even if, why should i go sublight there when theres the remote possiblity that someone is waiting there? erm... thats not how gravity works. not even for black holes. gravity doesnt work differently for black holes than it does for the stars they are born out of. lets do a calculation how unlikely it is that such formations exist on scales that would matter to interstellar travel. lets assume a modest 1 one-gram-pebble in every cubic kilometer of space. (1e-12kg/m³) in a volume equivalent to a cube with 1 lightyear edge length (9.4607e15 m) (equal to a sphere with about two thirds of a lightyear radius) makes 846e33kg of rubble in that volume. our sun has a mass of ~2e30kg. so that 1ly cube has the mass of 400000 suns. unlikely that it hasnt collapsed into a sun/black hole by the time of the game :V

http://hpashkov.deviantart.com/art/SARACEN-pipeline-328807128

honestly, i'd actually make that an automatic function of shield emitters.

yeah, because /active/ detection gets annoying over a bit over a light second distance squared inverse square law and stuff 1/(r^4) gets very small very fast, but you are comparing the distance between your outstretched hand's fingertips with a 15km trip 4 orders of magnitude arent nothing, you know and also considering that radar in modern /fightercraft/ has detection ranges of ~200km against 1m² targets, im pretty sure that that sky filling ship isnt exactly invisible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/APG-77 so, the radar has a peak power output of ~20kw (P) that makes 500*10^-9 watt that actually arrive at the 1m² (A) target at 200km ( r ), makes 12.5*10^-18 watt (Pd) that make it back to the aircrafts radar dish. (detecting that probably involves a lot of signal processing and classified trickery, but lets assume thats the irradiance of its own radar beam it can detect) P/(r^4)*A=Pd so, for simplicity i'll assume a spherical/circular spacecraft to detect with 8km diameter. the area thats towards the radar has 4km radius which gives us (4*10^3)^2 * pi/4 = 12.5 million square meters of area to radiate against. putting the new number for A into our formula above we get a range of about 12000km at which the radar could detect the ship. thats about the diameter of earth nothing from a physics point of view prevents you from detecting such a large ship at anything way beyond what would be visual range and the framework i outlined in the post i linked earlier already includes optical detection in it, optical detection is just a small sliver in the total available EM spectrum.

you seen the moon at some point, when you looked up to the skies at night, right? the moon is about 0.5° in "size" in your field of view. an 8km ship would be 9° in size. EIGHTEEN times the visual size of the moon. and you want to tell me that your radar couldnt spot that mofo earlier? (to put it in more human understandable terms: go out at night and put your fingers around the moon that your fingertips are "touching" the upper and lower side of the moon and hold your hand as far from your eye that your fingers are roughly 1cm apart. and now imagine something that appears to be 18cm long for the same hand-face distance ) ) to put the radar range in a different perspective. say your fighter is 20 meters long (roughly the size of a modern fighter jet) its radar would have a range of about 130 meters if its radar had the same relative range as the "maximum size" one you propose there. its ridicolous. radar would be literally useless to use anywhere in the game also, when you look closer i never said "radar" in what i described, only sensors, which includes passive sensors. and passive sensors have no hard maximum range, only their watt/m² sensitivity and whatever radiation actually reaches the detector surface a gigawatt fusion torch isnt stealthy in any way, and is detectable with your naked eye probably through half a solar system for further reading i suggest this also: are you trying to tell me that a radar can spot a coin over the same distance as it can spot an airliner and that until a very very hard range border? smaller target -> less area to reflect the radio waves from the radar -> less effective range.