Action Relay: Use Text for Channels instead of Numbers

With the new Action Relay block now released, the possibilities of interactions between grids without use of scripts has opened up massively, which is a great feature.

It is thus very surprising to see that the amount of channels available for Action Relays is handicapped to only the numbers 1-100.

This is a severely limiting factor for anyone wanting to do complex systems, especially when considering the issues identified below:

• It is difficult to keep track of channel usage between players/grids/factions without external means or standardisation (which is made even more difficult when you only have 100 channels to work with).
• People will inevitably run out of channels at some point, especially in large factions. This will result in a need for overlapping channels, which can cause all kinds of problems.
• With this low channel count, ships from different players will inherently conflict with each-other when used by the same owning faction/person. This is especially prevalent in Creative Mode. (Example: Someone may use Channel 1 for opening a station hangar door, whilst someone else uses it to detonate warheads).
• New players will have a tendency to leave the default settings and channel selected, which could also lead to the problems described above.
• Channels can be hijacked by a rogue player or faction member using a grid with many relay blocks to rapidly trigger all relays nearby and "jam" the action relay system. This would especially cause problems on grids designed to be "public".

A good solution for this problem would be to let players use text/string input, instead of only just the numbers 1-100, for use as Action Relay channels.

It should also be noted that this is technically already the case for the Inter-Grid-Communication (IGC) API accessible to Programmable Block scripts, so the choice of using just the numbers 1-100 for the Action Relays strikes me (and many other community members) as odd.

In any case, the advantages of using a text string as the Channel ID are very evident:

• Capacity: Text strings allow for a larger number of unique channels to be available (just with a-z, A-Z and 0-9, the amount of channels is increased substantially).
• Ease of use: Text strings can be more intuitive to understand at a glance, especially in the context of Action Relays (a Channel named "Hangar" is easier to share, understand and remember than just the number "73").
• Identification: Players can prefix their channels with a unique tag to prevent potential conflicts, but could then also agree to "universal" identifiers for actions that should take place on any applicable grid.
• Security: Its more difficult to "brute-force" and guess a text string than it is to guess the numbers 1-100.
• Troubleshooting: Its easier to troubleshoot problems with relay systems if you can just use text channels, and don't need to overlap channels.

I am aware that the problems mentioned earlier could be solved using the aforementioned IGC API within a Programmable Block Script. However, having this kind of flexibility as part of a script-less feature would be a huge step forward in allowing players to further unleash and expand their need to create.

In any case, I hope this feedback can be taken into consideration and perhaps implemented, as I'm sure many players would agree with the points made above.