Jump drives for L and XL ships

[Ezarkal]

From a "trade" point fo view, travel drives and the highway ring already makes most of the stuff happen to fast. Most stations are saturated with wares. There's no "high reward for longer trade runs" if you can make a trade between Antigone Memorial and Hewa's Twin in a a dozen minutes or so. There's very little risks trading anywhere near the ring as long as you're friend with the major factions.
The lack of jumpdrive actually makes you have to think a bit if you want to use L traders. They are very good, but you have to keep them short range, thus you have to plan a bit. I fear JD would remove that and saturate the economy even more.

From a "fight" point of view, then yeah. Carriers could use jump (and repair, and re-arm) capacity so they could really support their wings. It would make a new path towards invading a system, too. But they would have to be heavily defended, AND you should have the option to set your ships so they use their JD or the gates.


All in all, I voted no. Carriers can still be improved without jump capacity.

[Shepp]

From a "trade" point fo view, travel drives and the highway ring already makes most of the stuff happen to fast. Most stations are saturated with wares. There's no "high reward for longer trade runs" if you can make a trade between Antigone Memorial and Hewa's Twin in a a dozen minutes or so. There's very little risks trading anywhere near the ring as long as you're friend with the major factions.
The lack of jumpdrive actually makes you have to think a bit if you want to use L traders. They are very good, but you have to keep them short range, thus you have to plan a bit. I fear JD would remove that and saturate the economy even more.

That just isn't true. If jumping required and expensive fuel source that became more expensive the farther you jumped then your profits by jumping to distant trade destination would be reduced. If you want the big profit you make the long standard run. If the maximum profit isn't so important then you jump. If you want want to find the sweet spot, you standard travel to a point, and then jump the rest. If you ask me, a well balanced jumping mechanic gives the player many more options and meaningful choices than simply slow boating it across the map.

[kobayashimaru]

Bring back jump drives, but make them expensive to obtain and expensive to use. Make it's fuel expensive, rare, produced in special factories (that you could possibly eventually build and earn a lot by selling jump drive fuel maybe).

Maybe even tweak them a bit so that ships after jumping have disabled shields and engines for some time, so you can't just jump your entire fleet to the middle of enemy territory and bypass their border sectors etc.