Travel time....?

Just throwing this out there - What would all of you say about some sort of system that required, say, five, or ten minutes between each hyperjump? Or an overall amount of time you have to wait from the time you jump to the time you arrive at your destination?

The last game I was on that had this suffered badly from it. People simply stopped using spaceships and the entire population congregated on a single planet and that was with maybe five to ten minutes to cross the greatest distance between worlds.

Our preferred compromise looks like this:

You can travel between worlds in your private shuttle or freighter almost instantaneously; space travel time kicks in when you're traveling through appreciable distances in sublight space.

It takes but a few minutes to take off of a planet, fly up out of the gravity well, and hyperjump to a neighboring world. It takes longer to fly to a cluster of mining stations or trading posts that are a ways out of the gravity well, affording plenty of opportunity for the kind of RP in space it's not so easy to get if people can zip by each other instantaneously.

It might be nice if there was some small trivial time after a jump that a ship could not jump again, just to help combat situations but also to make the distance have a bit of meaning. You might only be talking about a minute jump. or perhaps a spooling up time before the jump? Dependent upon the class of drive and jump itself?

Here is a scenario from DH1 that worries me.

Player X attacks player Y in space, both in a shuttle. Player Y pages their friend who mobilizes a huge fleet . Player Y says they go idle for 5 minutes. Before they return, their friend has jumped in with a disproportionate amount of capships and wants to join the turn order to fry player X.

Maybe we could compromise and say that fleets would require travel time whereas single ships would not. Or perhaps there is another way to fix this.

Paging IC communications has always been against policy and will continue to be.

Fuel costs to bring a huge amount of ships to who knows where to capture a single shuttle?

The shuttle is probably going to be faster than a lot of capships, too. So that means chasing for a while. If I were that shuttle pilot, I'd be pretty proud of how I caused the enemy fleet to waste a bunch of fuel to try to catch me or destroy me.

Also: Space turn order isn't the same. Distances matter. Especially in subspace. You aren't all in the same area just because you hyperjumped in. You may be out of laser range. Do you fire off missiles at an even higher cost and no guarantee to hit?

I think we can make it ICly costly to commit large amounts of ships to the capture/destruction of a single ship. Not to mention that it would raise questions about how they knew the pilot of the ship or how they communicated to bring an entire fleet out.

Remember the NPCs in higher positions? They can chew out a PC Captain or Major who uses a fleet stupidly. If it's a chance to capture or kill the Sith Prince: Bravo! If it's just some PFC and they brought a massive fleet? They're probably not going to be in charge of the fleet anymore.

I think IC Consequences in the right places (such as losing command and respect of the military) plus some Costs (fuel, ammo) will make people play more IC rather than "aha! I keel you!"

Does that sound like a system that would deter that sort of behavior?

I'd still rather space have some form of time involved, even if trivial, just so that crossing the entire galaxy isn't a case of slamming in the same command a few times.

... So they show up with a huge fleet. If it's on the normal space lanes, where this is feasible and it doesn't take serious sublight cruising to get to where you are, that's not a big problem. You're in combat, and the space room you're in is running on turn order rather than in realtime; it will take a certain number of turns to cross it, and this will be built into the new space system's code. In the time it takes megafleet to reach you, you can skedaddle. If you want to live dangerously, you can try to blow up the other guy's shuttle, then skedaddle.

It does beg the question why a huge fleet is cruising around hunting for shuttles, but the cost of the action -- in fuel, in WTF-were-you-thinking points with the admiralty -- is probably fair.

Now, if it's NOT on the normal space lanes but deeper in space, it takes time to cruise around and find the warring shuttles -- and it's still no harder for the shuttles to flee. Running away is pretty easy. If they want to kill a lone shuttle they should send fighters.

PS - FoghornLeghorn, the goal is serious traveltime in space when you're straying off the beaten interplanetary path, i.e. when you're going for SPACE RP rather than just trying to hit up the bar on Rienna.

IC communication via OOC means is illegal on DH1 and will continue to be....

Yet it's rampant on DH1 amongst bad players, good players, staff, and wizards.

Rules are not enough, people will always find a way to get around them and break them.

I'm just saying a bit of coded aid to keep people from doing this may be a good idea.. Or may not. Im just throwing it out there for discussion.

Say these people arent in the Republic or Sith and somehow have a personal taskforce. Say it's the Hutts. Or say it's someone from the Rim like, say, the massive fleet Bespin currently enjoys. Who comes down on these people for doing it?

To clarify, the fleet was just an example of what currently occurs. My issue is the same even if they show up with 12 fighters after being paged 60 seconds earlier. On DH1 the IC reason is usually "I was in the area" and judges/staff accepts this.

Fleet travel time is an idea I'd advocated for DH1. On DH2, moving a fleet has a cost already without us building anything in. Will it be enough? Maybe. Some will realize that shooting a mosquito with heavy artillery hurts them more than it helps. Some wont ever get the point and will try it anyway.

I'd also like to see a general travel time. The "big fleet ambush" has happened several times on DH1 but what is more common is a combat PC racing all the way across the galaxy in minutes to help a friend who is under attack or who wants to attack another player.

Even if it is a scene on Coruscant, a person really should fight a delaying action until help can arrive. And help shouldnt get from the Guard HQ or Jedi Retreat to the Industrial Sector in thirty seconds.

We pretty much have to depend on player maturity and the occasional judge ruling for travel times across a planet but we can probably make trans-galactic traveltime a factor. The hard part is balancing things so that a player doesn't have to travel for 10-20 minutes to get to an RP. I too have seen that kind of system kill a MUSH.

Yeah, T's example about ground combat is the same. And the +hangouts code prevents anyone from complaining when this happens, if it occurs in a hangout. Same issue.. I'd like to see some way to police this beyond relying on the maturity of players, because history has proven time after time that we cannot rely on that.

The +hangouts code does not and never has given a loophole for that kind of abuse. Either you are mistaken, the person who told you was mistaken, or somebody made a major screwup.

My point about hangouts was that the code says anyone can show up at any time and attack you and you are not allowed to question their IC motive for being there, does it not?

No, it does not.

Then this is another case of improper rulings. I was told several times that if you are in a hangout, anyone can show up and attack you at any time - They do not need to know that you were there, they do not need any IC info.

You can be attacked at any time while in a +hangout, yes. You are vulnerable there. That doesn't mean every other common sense rule is out the window.

They still have to travel to get there. They still have to have a reason to attack-- it isn't a Halo FFA in blood gulch.

I think we're in danger of having two threads in one here. It's probably a good idea to add a thread to discuss hangouts and hangout policy--and since I intend to discuss "safer zones" and "no-police zones" soon anyway, that would be a good thread to field those ideas in.

On the subject of fleets and travel time, travel time will be built in, and will be significant for any fleets that aren't literally hanging out over a planet's hyperjump vectors with the intention of immediately hopping to a nearby one. In other words, if you're pretty deep in space having an epic dogfight, and someone wants to come jump you, they may have to be in transit for 20-30 minutes to get there. It's not something they can just hop in on and say 'I was in the neighborhood' -- unless they actually were flying through the area anyway, taking travel time to do so.

My experience with games where space has travel time is that it kills RP on any other planets than a few central ones...

... in other words, might it not be worth considering to have zero travel-time for individuals (without armies), who just want to arrange RP on some distant planet with their friends/enemies? Without having to wait twenty minutes' worth of transit time?

I'm proposing pretty much instant travel between planets. Imagine it like the Old West. Stay on the railroad, and you get from Bison Gulch to Fatmans Butte in no time. But ride on horseback through the desert, or take a stagecoach, and you'll take some time. But that's where all the gold and scalps and Indian campgrounds are.

I actually really like the idea when Gulp puts it that way - I think that type of structuring will help quite a bit.


Will we be able to reach Yuma?

Only if you make the 3:10 train.

Flying through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy. You might fly right through a Russell Crowe, or bounce too close to a Christian Bale, and that'd end your trip real quick.

You and me are done professionally, bro.

As I've endorsed on DH1, my ideal scheme for travel time would be to have no travel time for individual, poorly armed shuttles that are unable to transport more than a few PCs, but to have code enforced travel time for ships over a certain size, class, or a grouping of ships (fleet).

This would allow players to go wherever they want for RP but also add in a strategic element regarding positioning of military forces.

I'm with Bo.