oliverjanda wrote:@w.evans
I had an idea last night:
Ships jump to jumpbeacons to avoid jumping into something (hypothesis).
So if you can see the spot where you want to jump, jumping without beacon is ok (IZ jumps).
Yeah, I figured that too. It's probably much more difficult to calculate so fine a jump, however, hence the rather extreme crew requirements.
What I would really like to add is fuel expenditure. Not using fuel to jump -- that's the bit that I find rather fantastic at the moment. But not having found a way to change the amount of fuel used in a jump, it's going to still always use 100 fuel cells per jump. Come to think of it, that makes sense. A jump is a jump. Doesn't matter if you're jumping a few meters away or to the next sector. Imagining that the pseudo-physics of the thing make distance irrelevant. Expensive, though. (which might be ok since this is presumably a mid-to-late game thing?)
oliverjanda wrote:If someone else (yisha) tells you the coordinates where you should jump you wont jump into something either! That's ok als well! (except the one telling you the coordinates is an ****
).
That does make sense!
oliverjanda wrote:That said, I think you should keep 1) the IZ jumping (if it does not happen too fast/ too often) AND 2) I'd also enable jumps from OOZ to the skunk after yisha says: "sending new coordinates to following ships" or 3) even jumps from ooz to the target of an attack order.
I'll mod 2) myself if you don't like the idea, because one of the most annoying things in x:r is your fleet showing up to late at the party.
Hm. 2 is easy enough. 3 will probably require doing minor tweaks to a movement script or two. Haven't been playing much this past couple of days though. Been busy with work. Feel free to do both yourself, if you feel up to it. You really needn't ask, although I do appreciate it.
Trick with both 2 and 3 is limiting it. Is it from
anywhere to the Skunk/target? So if the Skunk is in Maelstrom and the fleet is refitting in Gemstone Manufacture, should they be able to jump to Maelstrom in one bound? (That would actually be easiest to implement.) Gemstone Manufacture to Auspicious Excavation? Should this be limited to in-sector jumps only, and let the standard scripts handle getting to the sector?
If distance truly is irrelevant, then jumping from anywhere to anywhere makes in-game sense. However, that begs the question: why did the jump gates failing isolate the various systems in the first place? Does the jump mechanism need absolute coordinates, and since the whole galaxy is always in motion, are these impossible to get? (Maybe that's what jump beacons do -- sense their absolute coordinates in real time, and send them when queried?) While it's possible that some systems' coordinates were never documented, the coordinates of some well-known and well-established systems like Argon Prime should certainly be known to Argon military. And that was apparently not enough since they got stranded along with everybody else in Albion.
Maybe distance is only irrelevant to an extent, and that extent is defined by the Clusters?
In any case, I think you're right. And I think that
in-sector jumps to the Skunk (which can send precise coordinates) can make sense,
line-of-sight jumps as well (where jump parameters can be precisely calculated if the crew's good enough), and that
distance-irrelevant-point-to-point jumps from far far away are arguable but rather shaky.
In-system point-to-point jumps (skipping intermediate sectors) are, hm, plausible?
Sorry for blabbering. I really really like science fiction.
........
ps. Not saying that there is such a thing as "absolute coordinates," but apparently more is needed than "1.03 AU that way relative to DeVries' star."
........
edit: just realized that 2 and 3 here
I wrote:Hm. 2 is easy enough. 3 will probably require doing minor tweaks to a movement script or two. Haven't been playing much this past couple of days though. Been busy with work. Feel free to do both yourself, if you feel up to it. You really needn't ask, although I do appreciate it.
are reversed. 3 is easy. 2 will need delving into a couple other aiscripts.