Make travel more interesting

In other words, warp drive instead of jump drive? Yes! Like the FSD mod in SE1. I like this idea best by far personally, as I've always been a huge fan of Star Trek. A serious of instantaneous jumps is so much less fun than continuous high-speed travel. That being said... having both, and jump gates as well, with different benefits to each would be extremely interesting.

I think that in SE2, we want to be in Almagest so no reason to go back home. Trying to make a connection is a different matter though but that might not be very easy to achieve for various reasons.

As for the gates themselves, you can stretch the definition of what they are quite a bit and still end up with the same or very similar functionality. Basically you end up with a set of fixed points where each of them allows you to quickly move to a single, distant location. It's not supposed to be the most convenient way to move around (because that would obviously be teleportation like in SE1) but I think that it's limitations are good for gameplay.

As far as I know, most jump gates in games are basically stabilized or completely artificial wormholes, which is a tricky and very expensive technology that isn't viable to be put into every ship (which is also why they are obsolete in very high-tech setting) so that's why it's built as a permanent installation. You could obviously say that about other jump-gate tech as well like the railgun considering the tech level that the game is going for. Not saying they shouldn't be buildable but it should be a real treat to get the construction right.

Also I'm not a big fan of having a mass-relay simply for the experience of flying through the gate in first-person. Just getting near something and getting launched doesn't cut it. You need to be able interact with it in a more physical way.

So yeah, it's up to discussion what the gate technology should look like but I think it should always have the same, fairly limited functionality because after all, it is a predecessor to readily available warp drive and jump drive tech.

Given that the engineers didn't just FTL strait to Almagest and had to spend 10,000 years in cryo, it would be safe to assume that the system is well beyond the range of any FTL known to the exploring engineers, and even if fixed FTL-structures were the exception they may not have a way to communicate back and forth to safely setup such a travel-route.

Also having a much larger structure do FTL things in place of giving every ship FTL is very practical. The USA spends a huge amount of money paving and maintaining its roads, we could just make everyone that wants to travel buy/rent helicopters, but expensive roads paired with much cheaper cars is a bit more efficient in the grand scheme of things. Ships that need a gate/relay to go FTL and ships capable of independent FTL can easily coexist simply by virtue of resource efficiency.

As for mass-relays vs stargates... the mass-relays would probably be easier to use and code in to the game, but stargates would be so much cooler.

-Gates would of course have to probably be built to be the exact same opening-size on both ends to avoid issues with ships passing through only to collide with the exit.

-Gate sizing is a feature and not a problem. Someone expecting guests or needing to mobilize huge ships builds a huge gate to accommodate them, someone wanting to be sneaky and/or avoid being pursued through their gate-network builds tiny gates they only just fit through so that nothing bigger can follow.

-Gates would probably need to be some kind of directional to prevent the game from having to figure out what happens when a ship on one end intersects with a ship at the other end because neither could tell the other was trying to pass through.

-Mass relays don't care about size beyond what's needed to function, you could jump a from a huge one to a tiny one and back in a ship of any size without needing to match their sizes to anything more than their operational power-requirements.

-Mass relays could simply spit travelers in to the nearest unoccupied space around the target instead of having to worry about collisions happening at a specific point.

We can fix the Gate size limitation quite easily with a little code magic/animation

say perhaps the gate works by the ship lining up with one of the entrances of the gate and then when it gets close to the gate (this being entirely dependent on both the ships and gates physical size (the bigger relative to the gate, the farther out it pulls you in)) is sucked into the gate while being compressed to a singular point. anything between the point at which the ship enters the gate and the event horizon of the gate is obliterated if in the way (no damage to the jumping ship as during that process its immediately unloaded and the vessels visual model is pulled in while being shrunk down to fit the gate event horizon.). Also to note, anything/anyone close enough to the vessel would probably also be pulled in with it.

of course, I do also like the idea of different sized gates. so, to play with that part too, I'd say that the power requirements of the gateway are directly proportional to the size of the ship relative to the gateway + the power requirements of opening the gateway with its destination (additional gateways along the travel path that are linked with the origin gateway can greatly reduce the travel costs). This means a tiny ship using a large gateway can use only a tiny fraction of the power a larger ship would, to travel. this means oversized gates can be useful for highly traveled routes, both because they can take much larger ships from point A to B but, also because they can transport the more typical sized ships at a much smaller cost (big=efficient).

I think to make things interesting i think "size" of target should be determined by the gate itself. the gate makes two pairs of cone casts along its two faces. One being the maximum size that fits, the other being slightly smaller then the max size cone and being the trigger for jumping. (the cones could be cylinders where one end is the same size as the gate and the other expands with distance). the ship is jumped when one of two conditions is met, either if exceeds the jump trigger cone while not exceeding the size of the max size cone or it gets close enough to the event horizon that the jump is forced as long as it fits.

this means ship orientation can affect both jump cost and how close you need to get before you can jump. which could bring some interesting gameplay and design considerations for the ship using the gate.

when it comes to the gate receiving the jumped ship. power costs should be a fraction of that used by the origin gate, and be calculated logarithmically rather then exponentially (though both sides should be able to reach massive distances before being too expensive) gates acting as relay stations between the origin and destination expend power amounts equal to a fraction of the average between the origin points power draw and destinations power draw for the full distance jump this sum is then dived between all the replay points equally (generally this is pretty cheap for each relay point, if a relaying gate can't afford the power costs, then 50% of the remainder is given to the origin gate and destination gate). when relaying gates are added to the mix the power cost for the origin/destination gate is calculated based on the distance between the start / each relay point / and destination. (note the discounted range cost due to the relay gates is used to calculate the power cost for the relay points)

for a 50,000km jump with 4 relay gates 10,000km away from the next gate, the cost of the jump would be essentially the cost of 5, 10,000km jumps instead of of the full cost 50,000km jump

This means even relay gates that have nowhere near enough power to jump a ship themselves can still save the origin/destination gates a large sum of power by dampening the exponential costs over distance. Additionally relay gate size is not a factor, meaning relay gates can easily be tiny lower power gates meant only to reduce jump costs of the main gates (while still being capable of potentially jumping very small vessels if they have stored enough power to do so.)

(i hope someone finds this novel of an idea both entertaining and useful)

I said in the begining that I would like the prebuilt gates to all be the same size so that there are no issues with not being able to fit somewhere in the middle of a journey. Also the gates should be direct point-to-point connections only. No branching

As for what the gates should look like, assuming they will have a wormhole, I think there should be a separator in the middle of the gate that separates the entry and exit direction. The split should probably be vertical (entry at the top and exit at the bottom) due to horizontal ship designs being more popular than vertical designs but that's the general idea. Of course nothing is stopping a large, vertical ship from flying in sideways.

As for player-built gates, it's obvious to allow for varying sizes with various tradeoffs but again, point-to-point connections only. Unless you want to shut down the gate and re-connect it with another one that isn't already being used.