Hey, I was thinking about this Non-Warp Hole movement idea. It would be excellent to have STL travel for ships, and I don't see any real reason why it can't be implemented as long as you make one assumption:notably that you can only issue orders to ships or communicate with them when they are at a location with warp points.
If you make that assumption, then the rest of the pieces are already there in SE4 pretty much.
The main obstacle is a line-of-sight distance determinination for traveling between stars - and it is already resident in SE4 used for opening WPs to a distant star.
The other stuff that you would need - how far apart stars are, the assumption that stars are on a 2D space, and so forth are present too.
All you would need to add to SE5 to allow such star-to-star non-WP travel is a separate ship screen, or a highlighting for ships in the current screen, that displays ships in "deep space" or as "enroute between stars" or "out of communication" and they would simply be that way until they arrived at their destination - then you could give them new orders.
You might have to also assume that ships in "deep space" don't need or get maintenance - but they're on autopilot, with their crews in deep sleep anyways, so that's not a stretch to me.
Now, when sending your ships into deep space you'd want to give them LOTS of supplies so they can make it there, but that's part of the game.
We can also calculate how long it would take to get from one star to the distant star by using the current movement system - we know that a standard SE4 Ion drive powered ship can cross a typical solar system in two months, and we can carry that out to calculate how long it would take such a ship to travel 10, 50 or 100 LY, right? It might take years in game time, but, it would still be a very cool addition to the game.
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Originally posted by Timstone:
- The possibility to give and equation to determine weapon damage (that way you can include various parameters into the damage (ship size, distance from target, etc.)).
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I think this has already been dedicated as going to be in SEV. At least that's the gist of a conversation that occurred in the SE4 thread on Yahoo Groups. The other stuff, not sure,