Originally by: Drusus Rensus

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Edited by: Drusus Rensus on 31/10/2006 01:51:28
I think that there are a few things that need to be done together:

1) Forget about timers, I think it would be good if you ship never just "poofed". If you log off in a station, you're in the station. If you log off in space, then your ship just sits there until you log back in. Having it just go "poof" is pretty unrealistic. I generally like realism if there isn't a good faith reason why it would break the game play. Which brings me to my second point:

2) You should be able to "opt out" of local, or at least drop out when you log even if your ship stays in space. You can't really do the above until you do this, since local provides a cheap system wide scanner that alerts hostiles of your ships' presence. If you could opt out of local (meaning you wouldn't be able to see who's in the system, but they wouldn't be able to see you either, you wouldn't really need to have your ship go "poof" when you log in a safe spot.

3) Allow a ship to remain "cloaked" while you're logged off, if it has a cloaking device fitted.

The result of the above would be that if you were going to take a ship deep into hostile territory for an extended period, you'd have to fit a cloaking device, or run the risk of being found by probes while you were logged off. Hostiles could still find you if they happened to see you come into the system, they'd just have to do a laborious grid-wise seek-and-destroy to spot you visually.

There's probably a hole in my reasoning here, since I'm new. Would this work?

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