Jump Driver Overhaul
Submitted
I would like to propose an overhaul of the jump drive system as I feel the current iteration is too simplistic. There should be a cost other than power consumption to teleporting across the map. The jump drive is an over powered "get out of jail free" card that needs to be tamed. But also offers the opportunity to bring far more to game play than it currently does.
- The jumpdrive should jump all players and blocks contained within a field rather than just jumping everything attached to the grid.
The size of the field would be determined by the power available, the number of jump drives in the network and a maximum field size for each drive.Jump drives should be networked together simply by placing them in a group.Non-grouped drives should act independently and should not contribute to the jump field of grouped drives.Jump drives should be able to communicate via a dedicated antenna assigned to the group and thus be groupable in this way. This would allow multiple grids to combine their jump capability and create a jump field around an object.Keeping the above in mind, should a jump drive network be setup on a station, then the network would act as a jump gate rather than a jump drive. This would be far more preferable to small ship jump drives. Obviously only free floating players, objects, grids and their subgrids within the jump field would jump. Anything attached to the station would be ignored or perhaps receive some stress damage if they were within the jump field but could not jump as part of a station.A jump gate would require an exit gate at the far end.The exit gate would need to be part of the same jump drive network as the entry gate via an antenna link.Multiple exit gates could be accommodated by targeting the dedicated antenna at the exit gate. - Jump drives should be usable in gravity.The higher the gravity environment, the more stress damage a ship should receive.Jumping into a planet, as in, beneath the voxels, should result in instant destruction and death to the player.The only possible exception to the rule would be the use of a jump gate within a pre-prepared cavern. Clearly the cavern and gate would need to be large enough to accomodate the grid in transit.
- Using a jump drive should apply stress damage to all grids contained within the jump field and perhaps to the player as well. Meat bags are not that durable after all.Damage would be calculated based on the total mass of everything contained within the jump field, the distance being jumped, the strength of individual blocks/player characters and the strength of gravity.It should not matter if the gravity is natural or artificial and in fact, gravity sources layered on top of each other should be accumulative in this instance or at least add some element of random chance of greater damage than normal to the mix.Any jump drive allowed to degrade to a non-functional state should fail explosively. At random.The reason to apply damage to both players and grids is to discourage jump spamming or over reliance on jump drive capability. It also creates a non-combat need for players to maintain their ships and characters.Stress damage to grids would manifest in the loss of components from all blocks.Stress damage to a player character would manifest in the loss of character health.Stress damage to other floating objects would manifest in a percentage of that object being reduced to scrap.
- If a ship has an active antenna, the jump drive should be able to use that to target any broadcasting antenna or beacon in place of a GPS marker.The standard 1k deviation from the target coordinates should still apply except in the case where a ship is traveling through a jump gate.In the case of ships travelling through a jump gate, the ship must be able to fly cleanly through the gate under sub-light propulsion.In the event the ship is too large, travel should still be permitted. However the player character, the ship and entire gate network should receive massive damage as a result.
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