Better Jump Drive animations and non-instant jumps

What do you mean by "Intermediate step"?

If you mean build the "Alcubierre style drive," you unlock the "Original flavor jump drive" then there would be no point in having Alcubierre style, because you would immediately grind it down and build the superior, instant original jump drive.

Choices, my friend. Some people might just see it as a stepping stone to the jump drive, others might like to use it - I think it sounds quite cool, being able to mooch around your ship while travelling at relativistic speeds.

To provide a reason to ensure it's continued usefulness - it could have a longer range than a jump drive (or requires less energy or does not require stacking multiple blocks). I'm assuming it'd basically operate the same as a jump drive - either point and go a set distance or aims toward a gps point (in other words, no manual control whilst in the warp bubble!).

I think the reason they added the jump drive and not a warp drive is because making ships go at speeds faster than 1000 ms in base game is a recipe for physics related disaster. Yes you can install a speed mod but these things still have issues at very high speeds.

How about locking rotors and pistons while in warp?

Its not just subgrids, the basic collision detection at these speeds and the simulation become far less robust. Ships that collide at this speed could easily merge before the Collision and destruction system catches up.

The physics overhaul basically tweaked the game to be sensible with its forces. Multiplying ship speed by more than 10 might completely upset this balance.

Disabling collisions between the warping grid and other grids/voxels for the duration of the jump would solve that, right?

Well eve-online does something similar with its warp system when you pass through a planet.

But here is also no actual modeled collision damage in EVE.

The question would be about how much of the simulation do you want to turn off in order to go really really fast in Space Engineers.

But, lets say we do turn off every form of collision and go at super high speeds and follow EVE online's example by using a warp tunnel effect to mask that we are flying through stuff. Or we simply don't load in that stuff... What benefit does it provide ?

If the ship is actually still in space and not just in some kind of warp tunnel transition effect and we turn physics off for as long as we use the warp drive, what would still still do ?

Best case, we get to control where we exit.

But we have to keep in mind reality the game only renders about 50 km distance at a time (and that is with the setting to max) on many servers you only play with 10-20km distance at a time. So we'd see asteroids pop into existence, grids need to be loaded into memory and unloaded in a matter of seconds depending on our speed. From experience playing on a server as an admin, I can say the game has trouble quickly loading and unloading grids and Voxel grids.

You can try it yourself if you ever try to use space master and scroll through the entity list in a complex enough world (or simply use the respawn list and flip though entities) you'll find the game usually needs a few seconds to load in new data.

While most of space is empty, the slow pace in the game actually allows for the world to load and unload gracefully when it isn't.

I'd imagine it work by disabling all physics for that grid (and sub-grids) while in motion. Effectively you'd be on a separate layer from the rest of the universe, phasing through matter like it ain't no thing.

Lots of balance considerations. IN a PVP environment, you'd not want people effectively living in warp, so some usage limits would need to be implemented, even so far as having limited warp tunnels to use (eg. direct line from planet to planet) so you could always estimate where someone would be while they're warping. Then we get on to the idea of warp disruption nets or other devious implements to veer enemy ships off course >:) But this is probably jumping the gun somewhat - just throwing random ideas out now :)

(Ignore this, accidentally double commented lol)

Perhaps while warping, your location is exposed to everyone?

And we could actually not load anything in along the warp path, (you wouldn't be able to move around in warp, you follow a straight line to your target) and use the warp effect to mask the fact that nothing around you exists.