Safe Zone Jumps (Fast Travel)
Introduce Fast Travel, as seen in SE2, to allow players to move quickly between Safe Zones—either their own or discovered economy stations. From a mechanical perspective, this is effectively the same jumping mechanism already used by Jump Drives, just applied to static infrastructure instead of mobile ships. For clarity, the rest of this suggestion will refer to it simply as a jump.
Safe Zones should be reworked around an energy storage model rather than constant extreme power consumption. Charging a Safe Zone would require a large upfront amount of energy, but once charged, it would consume relatively little power to remain active. The maximum stored energy would effectively represent the Safe Zone’s HP.
When performing a jump, the Safe Zone would consume part of its stored charge. The amount used would depend on both the mass of the ship and the distance to the destination Safe Zone. This naturally limits jump range: heavier ships would be able to jump shorter distances. After the jump, the Safe Zone would automatically begin recharging back to full using available grid power.
Incoming fire would also drain the Safe Zone’s stored charge. However, as long as sufficient power is supplied, it would recharge extremely quickly, allowing it to sustain enormous DPS. Disabling a Safe Zone would therefore be less about raw firepower and more about depleting its energy reserves. In practice, the amount of sustained damage required would be prohibitively high even for a full fleet, making such attacks technically possible but extremely unlikely.
Zone Chips could be made more expensive, but consumed only once to activate a Safe Zone, and optionally once per jump.
For economy stations, jumping from within their Safe Zones would consume credits, again scaled by ship mass and distance. To avoid exploits and keep the system simple, economy Safe Zones could always be treated as having infinite or maximum charge.
Hauling contracts could provide cargo items with a substantial mass, making the jump cost roughly proportional to the reward (if not more). This would ensure players need appropriately sized ships and cargo capacity, and to prefer using on board JD to effectively earn any credits.
Overall, this would add a compelling alternative for the "mobile" jump drives, which can be rebalanced too btw. And it would remove the constant pressure to mine tons of just to sustain the constant Safe Zone power draw.
Thx for reading.
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