I think having a fuel system should only be necessary if playtesting determines that not having one is detrimental to gameplay.
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It would be one thing if this was an MMO, but in a round based game i see very limited applications for fuel mechanics. The only things i can consider are some kind of jump fuel recharge mechanics on cap ships to gate the flow of the battles somewhat.
I would not mind some sort of a “cooldown” timer on warp drive, to prohibit people from popping in and out of warp once combat becomes a thing. As it is, just getting from the Sun to Earth takes eight minutes at the speed of light, and five and a half hours to get to Pluto. AFAIK, c is going to be a hard speed limit in game, so trips around the system will already take a healthy enough amount of time with needing to fly there, worrying about possible interceptions (being knocked out of warp drive by an enemy, maybe?), potential cool downs between jumps, potential limits on distance traveled in warp, etc. without adding the consideration of fuel.
The prototype is not a full implementation of the interception mechanic, so don’t worry too much about what you see there.
I’m assuming that they will go with the warp frequency idea from the old forums, which wouldn’t involve a cooldown timer. Instead, if you come near a ship on a different warp frequency, both of your warp drives lose effectiveness. The closer you get, the greater the loss. By the time you’re ready to shoot at each other, your warp drives are inert and you’re maneuvering entirely on thrusters wherever you happen to be. Other ships can then arrive to help out and the furball commences.
I’d also assume that each team would have its own warp frequency, ensuring that if teammates are flying together, they can warp together, but that if different teams meet, they drop out of warp to discuss things.
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Hm…I’m not sure how well that would work without some modification, though. As it currently stands, dropping out of warp causes you to retain your momentum (I think?), so even if you were to force someone else out of warp, if you’re not already travelling at roughly the same vector, conventional thrusters will not allow you to engage in combat.
That would, of course, be remedied by any number of ways: dropping from warp forces you to slow. The “interference” from warp frequencies causes you to slow. My personal favorite, having done very little in the way of fleshing it out (or thinking about it, to be honest) is where the two vectors merge together, forcing both parties along a new, identical route. This would have an added benefit of making it simpler to intercept someone who would use their ship as a kinetic weapon against, say, an orbiting station as the inbound party is redirected away.
That’s what happens right now. Warp is not an afterburner, but another mode of travel. Turn on warp, your speed multiplies. Turn off warp, the multiplier goes away.
Take a look at the warp prototype from 2009. It does something like what you’re talking about, using a mass-averaged vector.
Currently, in the prototype, it is. That’s why people, like Keith, get stuck at 2Mkm/s because they disengaged “warp” and wonder why their engines can’t do a thing to alter their vector.
As Lomsor said, my interpretation of the current prototype has it as an afterburner. You see it when streamers were disabling warp, rather than letting it slow them down as they entered the atmosphere, and they would careen into the planet at tens of thousands of kph.
From the videos it appears that activating warp enables the pilot to accelerate much faster than when using non-warp thrusters.
When approaching a planet at warp it is necessary to use that increased acceleration capability to slow yourself before deactivating the warp drive.
It seems that the mass of planets/moons induces the warp drive to deccelarate rapidly, but when the warp drive is not active this cannot happen.
This suggests that it would be possible to avoid being intercepted by other ships by accelerating using warp, then deactivating the warp drive during the journey (you’d be stuck on a ballistic trajectory) and then activating warp again in order to decelerate at your destination.
Perhaps this can be mitigated by saying the presence of another ship’s active warp field induces your warp drive back into action. Then the original warp interception mechanic takes effect.
It would make for an interesting stealth tactic. Warp-slingshot yourself and then shut everything down until you hit your destination (or impact it, whichever happens first).
You could also force ships to exit warp at the same velocity they entered, with warp interference altering that behavior. This would prevent people from “stealthing” mid jump.
If different moons/planets are actually in orbit around the star this won’t work since different orbits will be at different velocities relative to the host star.
Right, but unless something changes ships can steer in warp. Perhaps the better phrase is to force ships to exit warp at the same speed they entered, but along any vector they can steer. I’m fairly certain the speed indicator for the HUD is absolute, while offering relative velocities as pop ups near the target.
The same point still stands. For example Mars is orbiting slower than the Earth. If I were to enter warp around Earth, under that system, I wouldn’t be able to exit around Mars because It’s moving slower. This example also works for Venus except that Venus is faster.
The one way you could make this work would be absolute speed to nearest oibject, but then that means you need to have an object near you to drop out of warp. Using this concept you’ve basically taken how awesome the Infinity engine is and made it into eve where you can only warp to certain objects.
sigh
Sorry for confusing things.
If we assume that warp is an afterburner and there is an inter-ship disruption system, then you needn’t fear interception because all the two ships will experience is an increasing loss of control. Neither ship will be able to alter their velocities and they’ll just flash right past each other.
If we assume that warp is an afterburner and there is no inter-ship disruption system, then you needn’t fear interception. You will always be able to keep an appreciable velocity relative to the other player’s ship. The accelerations on warp are just too large to manage.
That said, the latter approach holds open the door for an automated interception system, as @Crayfish suggested years ago. One incarnation of such a system has the interceptor targeting another ship, starting the interceptor system, and flying towards the other ship. That task of flying will work because both ships have thrusters and warp active, and the interceptor system just adds the target ship’s maneuvering to the interceptor’s maneuvering. So long as the interceptor’s drive can keep up - and the pilot is competent enough - the interception will happen.
Such an interception system also works for fleet operations. It’s ultimately a station-keeping system.
Regardless of the system involved, the game must provide a way for ships to match velocities. It’s essential if the ships are going to interact.
One only has to look at Elite Dangerous to know that limited fuel is not a fun gameplay element.
IMO, please no.
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It works fine in kerbal space program but imo no need for that here on IBS.
It’s fun losing kerbals on a remote moon or planet, setting up a rescue fleet of tankers and recovery spacecraft to save them and bring em back safe.
Ksp works mainly on earth like chemical rockets.
Ibs will obviously work with exotic, currently non existing propulsion.
Also high pace battles dont need: aaah crap Im dead. Out of fuel…
I:TQFE on the other hand… I may welcome a concept with limited delta-v onboard
All the above is just my opinion…
I’m going to assume that the warp system will likely change. Because “warp as an afterburner” will make lancing attacks very easy and I’m assuming that’s not the kind of game I-Novae wants to make. I think it’s much more likely that warp ends up being a speed/acceleration multiplier that is affected by artificial or natural gravity fields.
The way I imagine it is like this:
You speed up until you reach warp speed. How high warp speed is is dependent on nearby gravity fields, artificial or natural.
Once you reach warp speed, you initiate warp and optionally set a warp level. You rapidly accelerate until you reach a speed dependent on your warp level and the strength of nearby gravity fields, similar to how the prototype works.
If you disengage warp, you rapidly decelerate until you reach the warp speed necessary for your current location (perhaps multiplied by WarpLevel/(MaxWarpLevel/2) or some variation of that, to allow someone to have some control over their exit speed while avoiding things like going ridiculously fast).
If a ship’s speed falls below a certain level, runs out of warp fuel or is affected by a strong gravity field, it could be automatically pulled out of warp. Warp fuel can very slowly recharge but is quicker to recharge at a friendly station or carrier (taking it from a carrier could lower the carrier’s fuel level). Alternatively, warp speed could be restricted to level 1 when out of fuel.
That’s the basics of how I would do it. Then there are things that need to be decided like how team warping or interdiction works without the need to have a specialised “match warp speed to target’s warp speed” button.
Allied ships could have a certain warp “frequency” that allows friendly ships to stay in warp while in the gravity disruption field their warp drive or some sort of special interdiction field creates. That would make team warping possible.
There could also be structures that have an interdiction field that affects all ships, even friendly ones. Perhaps it shouldn’t be possible for interdictors to not affect friendly ships, since that could create a situation where enemy ships cannot escape or be reinforced while friendly ships can constantly receive reinforcements quickly.
Perhaps all ships not currently in warp should have a small safety interdiction field around them, to prevent others in warp crashing on them. That would also mean that once the lead warping ship starts slowing down, its teammates will be affected and pulled out of warp too.
Anyway, just my ideas.
I guess I don’t see the issue with forcing people to have to consider their destination before they make a jump. I assume it’s possible for us to have maps indicating the orbital velocity of all significant objects in the system, considering that we have such knowledge of our own system already. All we need is a “speed relative to star” indicator, where the star is assumed to be zero, and to make it clear during the tutorial that disengaging warp requires being at or below that speed. Don’t dumb something down just to feed the masses, make them learn a unique and interesting mechanic.
Example: Earth orbits at ~67,000 mph. Mercury orbits at ~107,000 mph. If we assume the system I have proposed, I would need to enter warp at 40,000 mph relative to Earth if I fly in the same direction as it orbits, 174,000 mph if I fly the opposite of the orbit, or 83,427 mph if I fly perpendicular to the orbital velocity. All three of these result in 107,000 mph relative to the “stationary” star, and all three of them only require that I read the “absolute speed” indicator, which would say “107,000” in all three cases. Obviously, if I’m looking to get to the proper warp speed quickly, and I started at 0 mph on the ground, the smartest takeoff heading is in the same direction as the orbit, but that is where player skill and intelligence play a factor.
I think I most prefer the idea that two objects in warp will tend to draw each other into a third, different vector as they approach. This allows you to not have to disengage warp at all as either party, allows you to intercept the enemy (as long as you have time to intercept their angle of approach, of course), and offers a simple way to ensure players can force interactions.
The simplest answer I can think of is that it predefines areas of interest as opposed to letting players define them dynamically. In Eve the places you can travel to are all pre-determined. If you wanted to go to a certain spot in the middle of nowhere (not between two points) too bad. You can’t. Maybe I want to do because it offers a great staging point to attack a base or station.
A system that defines two points as the only destinations ignores 99.99999(repeating to infinity)% of the space between them. What’s the point of having a full scale solar system if you only want to be at the planets? May as well have jump gates. It limits all future aspects of travel not just in BS but also in TQFE. Maybe I want to hide in the middle of nowhere so I can’t be found.
I gotta go and I’ll come back to your example later but please use SI in the future along with km/s.
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