Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Phoebe: An Idea for Travel


Time to get caught up on looking over the features (and/or changes) coming in Phoebe. Don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with a rehash of things that have been rehashed to death the last few weeks.
But I do want to resurrect an old idea of mine. An idea that fits in really well, considering what they’re doing in Phoebe. An idea that the more I think of it, the more badly I want CCP to do it, considering the jump drive changes.

And that is the idea of ‘stable’ wormholes. That is, wormholes from known, to known space that are stable enough to last a few days, or even a few weeks, without getting destabilized or etc.

Basically, rare ‘temporary’ gates that are not permanent like regular stargates, but last a bit longer than current wormholes. We don’t even have to call them wormholes, if we don’t want to.


I think it would be interesting, that while CCP is nerfing the entire travel thing, to give us some interesting tools for travel as well. To not just nerf it, but also change how people think about it. Imagine the ability to find ‘secret’ trade routes out to deep null-sec? Imagine the pirates trying to ensnare people along these ‘routes’? Or, perhaps these ‘gates’ could be used as secret highways into hostile territory. Or, used as some sort of secret, backdoor escape route.

And they’d never get boring, or too ‘mapped’ or too camped because they’re still temporary. They’d still disappear after a time and crop up somewhere else, creating a completely new, and different kind of content by connecting people who previously would have never run across each other before.

5 comments:

  1. I would like the idea if it came with 2 caveats. 1. A mass limit per ship, but not an advertised one. You try and jump through. If you fits, you jumps, if you doesn't fits, you sits. 2. No advertisement on how long it will live. Maybe a day, maybe an hour, maybe a week......no guarantees it will even be there after you jump through it.....you might make it and your mates all get left behind, staring at blank space.

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  2. Interesting idea. I always wished instead of gates Eve had wormholes like those in David Weber's Honorverse series. Or alternately that gates in Eve behaved more like wormholes in that universe.

    In the Honorverse wormholes (the useful ones anyhow) are stable. They don't move and connect normal space to normal space. The further apart the connected systems are the more valuable (both strategically and economically) the wormhole is. Most valuable are junctions were multiple wormholes all have termini in the same system, especially if one or more connect with far distant systems.

    Another key point that ties in with wormholes and faster than light travel in the Honorverse is the hyper limit. Basically the hyperlimit means that due to gravitational stress caused by the stars gravity well faster than light travel (warp) is not possible within a certain distance of the star. Exactly what that distance is depends the size and mass of star.

    There's no reason why a similar system of stable wormholes couldn't co-exist with the existing network of unstable wormholes connecting to otherwise inaccessible pocket systems.

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  3. I think you mentioned this idea before and I liked it just as much then as I do now. It's simple in it's elegance and it creates opportunities for all kinds of fun shenanigans. Especially, when you take into account the new jump limitations. Something like this would allow CCP to decrease the null sec sprawl while still allowing GFs. Sure you could use these as part of a strategic attack but you couldn't count on them. And it just makes sense that wormholes would connect to not just wormhole space.

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  4. So i geuss you don't like scanning.
    This proposal is just an excuse to get easier traveling.
    You can do that now already with the current wormholes.

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  5. Agreed - I suggested this on the forums a while back, too. It would also help to shake things up in null sec, which desperately needs shaking up.

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