ThymineC wrote:There's actually a very simple and potentially interesting way of combining trade lane mechanics with orbital dynamics. You just have trade lane terminals that orbit the planets, and if a clear path exists between any two of these terminals, you can travel between them. Because the planets are orbiting the star and the terminals are orbiting the planets, this means that whether a clear path exists or not between any two terminals can very much depend on the time, so that you have a dynamically-changing trade-lane network. For example:

Spoiler:      SHOW

this is what i ment with big cannons, shooting starships ^^
when we assume that they do not project some h-field along the whole lenght of the lane, then this would still be very slow for a realtime game with realistic distances

Cornflakes_91 wrote:when we assume that they do not project some h-field along the whole lenght of the lane, then this would still be very slow for a realtime game with realistic distances

Check my edit.

OK, that's absolutely mental... and excellent. If you said that the player ship itself is unaffected by gravity, such that combat didn't need to take orbits etc into account, then that could make for a really interesting game. Put it on the LT 2 list.

ThymineC wrote:

Cornflakes_91 wrote:when we assume that they do not project some h-field along the whole lenght of the lane, then this would still be very slow for a realtime game with realistic distances

Check my edit.

checked and critique withdrawn.

another critique: this things would get as big as interstellar jumpgates when they are capable of creating h-fields over such distances.
when they are not: why cant my spaceship generate such powerful TU-beams?

mcsven wrote:OK, that's absolutely mental... and excellent. If you said that the player ship itself is unaffected by gravity, such that combat didn't need to take orbits etc into account, then that could make for a really interesting game. Put it on the LT 2 list.

What are you referring to?

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

ThymineC wrote:

Cornflakes_91 wrote:when we assume that they do not project some h-field along the whole lenght of the lane, then this would still be very slow for a realtime game with realistic distances

Check my edit.

checked and critique withdrawn.

another critique: this things would get as big as interstellar jumpgates when they are capable of creating h-fields over such distances.
when they are not: why cant my spaceship generate such powerful TU-beams?

Yeah, these are really, really big structures I'm imagining.

With big-ass fusion reactors and a healthy appetite for hydrogen isotopes.

mcsven wrote:OK, that's absolutely mental... and excellent. If you said that the player ship itself is unaffected by gravity, such that combat didn't need to take orbits etc into account, then that could make for a really interesting game. Put it on the LT 2 list.

not necessary, as we move interplanetar distances in minutes any gravitational effects can be neglected


also: how do we match orbital velocity? with the TU-Beam? why cant we accelerate conventional to gamebreaking speeds with this capability?

I might have made myself unclear in my past posts. When I said that the warp lanes, should be parallel to the orbit of the planet I meant that it should be parallel to the orbit of the planet around the sun. That is to say that if a system had 3 planets than there should be 3 orbital lanes around that star, each lane being very close to the orbital path of a planet and two extra lanes to connect the three orbital lanes between them. But the idea stated by ThymineC is also an excellent one, especially adding to the fact that it would add in an economic variable that would generate price fluctuations, which in turn would make the economy of the universe feel very reactive and thus real. Especially when you think that the logistics of building such structures at solar system scale (that is to say lanes crossing a solar system interconnecting many points) would probably consume the resources of that system in the process of building them.

Cornflakes_91 wrote:also: how do we match orbital velocity? with the TU-Beam? why cant we accelerate conventional to gamebreaking speeds with this capability?

Because transfer units are based on H-tech, meaning they just cause particles to "jump" within their field of effect. Think of an H-drive, but imagine stretching the spherical field into a really long cylinder instead.

And yeah, you can't match orbital velocity within this, unless we adopt your earlier suggestion in the H-drive thread that the H-drive can change momentum as well as apparent velocity, but much less efficiently.

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

mcsven wrote:OK, that's absolutely mental... and excellent. If you said that the player ship itself is unaffected by gravity, such that combat didn't need to take orbits etc into account, then that could make for a really interesting game. Put it on the LT 2 list.

not necessary, as we move interplanetar distances in minutes any gravitational effects can be neglected


also: how do we match orbital velocity? with the TU-Beam? why cant we accelerate conventional to gamebreaking speeds with this capability?

I would imagine that such generators would be too heavy or too large to carry on a ship

Hadrianus wrote: I would imagine that such generators would be too heavy or too large to carry on a ship

they are basically the same technology as tractor beams and drive systems, they are not too large

Hadrianus wrote:I would imagine that such generators would be too heavy or too large to carry on a ship

Actually, I think that there should be the possibility at the late game of building some really big ships that are mounted with heavy-duty transfer units. Their purpose? To act as mobile trade lane terminals, allowing the player to separate two of these ships by a large distance within the same system and then send smaller ships from one of the big ships to the other so long as a clear path exists between them. This would serve a similar logistics function as ships in EVE Online that fit cyno generators or jump portal generators.

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

Hadrianus wrote: I would imagine that such generators would be too heavy or too large to carry on a ship

they are basically the same technology as tractor beams and drive systems, they are not too large

For transferring ships? They'd have to be, and they'd need a beefy power supply too. Industrial-scale transfer units.

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

Hadrianus wrote: I would imagine that such generators would be too heavy or too large to carry on a ship

they are basically the same technology as tractor beams and drive systems, they are not too large

But at a larger scale

I’m going to have to disagree since the same device could transport both a fighter and a capital ship. Obviously if it can transport a capital ship it can’t be placed on a fighter, also add to that the energy draw and you see why only large ships could carry it and why it would be implausible and impractical for small ships to do so.

Hadrianus wrote:

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

Hadrianus wrote: I would imagine that such generators would be too heavy or too large to carry on a ship

they are basically the same technology as tractor beams and drive systems, they are not too large

But at a larger scale

I’m going to have to disagree since the same device could transport both a fighter and a capital ship. Obviously if it can transport a capital ship it can’t be placed on a fighter, also add to that the energy draw and you see why only large ships could carry it and why it would be implausible and impractical for small ships to do so.

i thought you ment that the technology as a whole is too large to mount on something mobile, not only this size class