Icarus Starkiller
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Posted - 2005.06.01 23:39:00 -
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Edited by: Icarus Starkiller on 02/06/2005 02:02:15
Having not bothered to read 9 pages of response to this thread, here I am sounding off with 'my pair'...
Instabookmarks are the lifeblood of travel, both within Empire and outside of it. In Empire it's to save time (usually), and in 0.0 it's to save your ass plus a little time. I've got over 1000 of them, for gates & stations & belts & complexes... the list of what I have BMs for is almost as long as the number of them I have... NOT just for 'insta(whatever)'.
Now, an easy way (both logical and one that can be incorporated in game with storyline logic and mechanics), would be for CONCORD to put the royal slapdown on ships caroaming out of warp and right into the gate (or station).
In the story this could be rationalized with a 'catastrophe' - a BS running from a fight damaged and with little control warps (using an insta-nav-point) into another battle that has already damaged a gate (or, perhaps, saboteurs have rigged it). In any case, the gate has lost it's collision avoidance 'shield' (that quantum state that allows matter to pass harmlessly through it as it is 'out of phaze' with the physical space around it). The battleship has likewise lost its navigational collision avoidance... You can easily imagine the devastation when a ship moving 1000+ km/sec collides with a large, immovable, HIGH ENERGY target like a stargate...
... resulting in a huge explosion that wipes out everything within X radius, slaughtering thousands, perhaps even damaging all spacelanes in the area for a time. Needless to say, that jumplane is quite gone.
So CONCORD installs safe-guards to prevent ships getting that close at speed: Warp dissipators around stargates that bring a ship completely out of warp 5km from the gate. Initially deployed in Empire, and working outward toward the fringes over time.
Now, 5km is not so far from the gate - the 'time' factor that makes instas convenient remains, but also ships are not 'landing and jumping' so quickly that pursuit cannot catch up, tackle, or whatnot.
As for gategankers...
... CONCORD's second response to the high occurance of unrestrained combat near very expensive resources like stargates is to add a second 'field' - energy dissipation. In a 25km radius all 'large' guns/missiles loose 70% of their 'energy' when used (even from beyond the 25k event horizon). 'Medium' guns/missile loose 40% of their energy, while small guns are not affected.
This will make the ubiquitous BS gank squad much less an instant killer to ships that enter their cone of aggression around gates (even ships without instas coming in at 15km), but it will not completely eliminate gate combat... just slow it down. Make it more real combat and not just see:target:gank.
Well, there are 'my two', sounding off.
edit: WTF is with the stupid word filter?? It edits out some of the most nonsensical letter combinations imaginable.
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