Egosoft! Maybe it's time to retcon the Gates?

[spankahontis]

The gate design was more or less the same since X-BTF, but back then only small ships were traveling via gate (plus lone TL employed by player to carry station build).

Ever since then the size of traffic as well as the size of ships increased, but gate gesign remained the same.


https://i.imgur.com/p9kRJq1.png

The base design (1) is very suboptimal for effective traffic, not to mention any capship passing via gate will at best obstruct the traffic and at worse will splat any tiny ship like a fly.

Why not to make gate to split the inbound and outbound traffic?
(2)- I messed the red arrow, it should be towards the gate - basically ships that leave the system come to one side of the gate and ships that come into the system appaer at the other side of the gate.
I'm not sure how the gate spawn system works, but this still might make a collision occur (one big capship goes into the gate close to the wormhole, when other ship is spawned when incoming - if ship is spawned in center of the gate then engine section of incoming ship might "phase into" departing ship.
(3) - making gate more like a cylinder would fix this issue as inbound and outbound wortex are in some distance from eachother.
(4) - alternatively we could mimic the "highway system" where there is one lane for inbound and one lane for outbound - this design is good that you can set-up blockade/defense only on one side of the gate, while other two design require defending both front and back of the gate.


{Images posted directly to the forums should not be greater than 640x480 or 100kb, oversize image now linked - Terre}

I feel the only way you could pull that off is if the lore was altered that the Argon Navy or similar big faction get their Hands on the Terrans Jumpgate Technology and tweak it to make an In - Out System for Ships.
That could Work?

But you would still have Ancient Jumpgates on the Borders, Maybe if they put in place Special Missions to replace them with this New Terran Jumpgate System?
Would entail 2 totally different ways of travelling through the Gate and being able to replace one with the other?

I strongly oppose this idea. The gate's design is pretty much what determines the X series. If you see a spacegate like this somewhere, you know that you are in the X universe. Changing it would pretty much destroy the last design remnant of the original X.

Or the Stargate Universe? Or Star Trek Wormholes. I think other games used the gateway/Wormhole way of travel.
Creating a Gateway Super Highway would be something innovative.

The highways and super highways in X:R definitely attempted an improvement upon the gate system, and in my eyes they worked a lot more fluidly. One-way traffic makes a LOT more sense in these situations, having one single 'sphincter' where objects are trying to leave and exit at the same time is just asking for a headache (or a sphincter ache? ) and I had WAY less trouble navigating around in X:R than I have in previous X games where there were only gates.

When they eventually got the Ships to go through them. Took about 2.0 until they travelled through without any obstacles. And when Home of Light came out, they had to fix the traffic jams that were building up between Cold Star and HoL.
Ships really need to have the ability to move in all directions of the Axis Pivot.

Personally Mr. Who's fourth option looks to be the most efficient of the options.

[Honved]

In TC, you ideally entered the gate near the bottom to avoid incoming traffic, and exited near the top. The problem was that in a 3D environment with no "down" reference (like gravity), it was difficult to distinguish top from bottom at times without realigning your ship to match stations, asteroid placement, or other references in the sector.

A far simpler approach would be to have a green light along the rim at the bottom of the gate and a red one on the rim at the top. In cases where a really BIG ship was about to come through (like a DECA mothership), the bottom light would also turn red, in addition to the pulsing direction lights whenever a capital ship was in its final approach to the gate.

Flying a fighter, you'd just check for the green light. Flying a large capital ship (a corvette won't cause a problem with it overlapping between top and bottom of the gate opening, but the descending "foot" on a Hercules TL certainly will), you'd need to watch out for the pulsing direction lights as well.

[Miniding]

I believe they are colored, or at least they were in X2/X3 (though they aren't very deeply colored, so, easy to see them as white)

However, amusingly, they'll only start pulsing red at the moment something actually exits the gate. Which, if you're trying to create a signaling system that will warn you to stay out of the way because something is coming out of the gate... that's like... maaaaybe a little too late.

In X3 yes it was too late but it was because when you were in a sector, the other sectors were just calulated, not really render IMO, so that when a cap came at a gate, it only "hit the point of jump" without actually flying to enter the gate. In XR, it's totally different, even when you weren't in a sector, the way that cap ships approached the gate were similar that when you were there (approach, turning/spinning, aligning and finally go throu)
This kind of behaviour permitt to warn the other side of jumpgate that Something is coming…

I Don't know if ES thougt about that… But XR was a huge step forward in what you're asking for OP.