croxis

Nothing like writing a long post, hitting back by accident, and losing it. Sort version (I originally credited people for their posts, I assume you know who you are ) This all comes down to manipulating light, be it heat, radar, visual, but it is all light. 1) Visual cloak (look ma a romulan warbird!). Lots of energy needed to do this -- it takes the gravitational pull of a singularity to bend light like that. 2) Active sensor cloak. This is hull shape and material to reduce the profile of the object from things like radar. A massive ship could be made to reflect like a small meteor, but someone watching their sensors might notice a meteor isn't going in a strait line. Newtonian physics would help here as a stealth ship could just coast. 3) Passive sensor cloak. Everything emits heat and space is an awesome insulator. The iSS has radiators on it, without it the internal temperatures would cook the astronauts alive. There are a couple of methods to reduce this. Reduce or turn off sources of heat, such as power (photovotaic solar power would still be fine), and heat sinks. In the Expanse books there is some mentions of the martian stealth ships using heat sinks to store the heat generated by the ship and its crew. Eventually that heat has to be radiated out, making it very visible to this sensor type. These heat sinks are also very massive -- this is counter to the quick and lithe trope for stealth ships. If you want and quick ship then you wont have the mass for anything else. To expand on the white noise concept, in the Expanse books ships were also equipt with IR and radar lasers, not to cause direct damage but to blind the other ship sensors.

I like the idea of both -- groups and players actively researching new technology will get access to them (or knowledge to craft them) first, but eventually it becomes "common knowledge" as the technology spreads.

A laser pointed to the moon will spread to about 2ish km diameter. I haven't done the math in a while, but the spread is not insignificant.

That could be a fun very advanced tech level.

The reason why eve (and other mmos) have the lock system is partly from ping times back in the days of dial up modems. It uses much less bandwidth, less server cpu cycles, and better client-side prediction. Ping times become less relevant to player's tactical skill. It also helps solve some some of the issues with seamless gameworlds (what happens to a bullet that crosses from one zone to another, etc). It comes to personal preferences but I prefer more players fitting in one of these dynamic zones over twitch based gameplay. That and I'm bad at twitch games

What if I want my code to be open source?

It can be done serverside. The issue is how often a script is executed, and the execution time of the script. A hard limit will need to be placed to keep poopheads crashing the server with while true do end (psst, there is no lua syntax highlighting in the forums) Most scripts would probably be much more complicated than a mod ai from a regular mmo. I would hope in the script editor it well test the execution time before the code gets published in a live environment.

The currency of space travel is delta-v (change in speed). Fuel and engine efficiency are the tools for that. The reason why celestial orbital mechanics are important in KSP is that the amount of delta-v (fuel) needed to get from one body to another drastically changes depending on the alignment of the planets. The other factor that changes is travel time, but because of time acceleration in KSP it isn't important. Being an mmo time is constant. I would wager that there is plenty of deltav in DU spacecraft, so fuel isn't as much of an issue as is time. I would balance it so that it would be the difference of a couple minutes to a half hour depending on if the planets are in opposition or not. It would make wars between planets much more interesting as you can plan around attack windows

A couple friends and I ran a private ark server for just us and as pve. We also ran into the issue of running out of things to do. When playing solo it seems like one can just maintain themselves with a very slow progress. When I became a tribe of two with my husband our progress increased rapidly. We eventually hit the point of "we can go to this new region and build an outpost, but whats the point?" With DU being an MMO, and hopefully more types of interactions than PVP combat, there is a reason to build an outpost over the next hill/planet. One of the things that I love about city management games like good ol' Caesar 3 or Anno is that there is always something to optimize, to improve, even in the late game.