vanBuskirk
Caldari
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Posted - 2008.01.06 08:04:00 -
[1]
Sapharen, I like that idea. It was actually used before, in a pen and paper RPG called Traveller 2300 (no real relation to Traveller) and in that setting the drive was called stutterwarp.
However, there are a few problems with it, mostly to do with such things as docking. A real spaceship, whether it had some sort of pseudospeed drive or not, would still need thrusters to match velocities with the station. In addition to this, without some sort of thrusters you might well come through a jump portal moving at tens of kilometres per second relative to the entire solar system you were jumping into - stars move relative to each other, after all, and so therefore do all objects in that solar system - and nowhere in the backstory does it state that the jumpgate sets up a velocity match.
There are all sorts of physics holes in EVE if you look for them - for example, no guns except lasers should hit instantly. Typical artillery projectile speeds in RL are maybe a kilometre per second. OK, maybe increase that by an order of magnitude to 10km/s - at fleet sniping ranges that still means that the shells take maybe 20 seconds to travel the distance. Not much faster than a missile, really! Railgun rounds could possibly be 10 times faster than that again, but again at sniping ranges the round takes a couple of seconds.
The point is that various features that don't sit well with real physics are there to make for better and/or more balanced gameplay. I would like to see a game based on real-world physics (essentially no weapons except beams of various sorts and guided missiles, engagement ranges of anything from thousands of kilometres to several AU, combat being a battle of ECM, ECCM and computers and you never see your enemy with your eyes except maybe as an exhaust flare) but it would neither look nor play anything like EVE.
It might be quite interesting, though - with combat in some cases being a battle of wits, perhaps with clouds of ball bearings or other junk being left in the projected path of an enemy ship, missiles being left all over the place like a minefield, and so on. Frankly, this would work better as a strategy game than an MMORPG, however. ---------------------------------------------- "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."
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