Jump Drive Recharge Rate Should Scale With Power Grid Capacity.

My idea essentially stems from the fact that I find it obnoxious that jump drives take so long to recharge especially on larger ships with stronger power grids. My solution is to have the jump drives recharge rate adjust dynamically based on the power grid of the ship. The jump drive will have a percentage slider that will set the max recharge of the jump drive as a percentage of the ships total power grid. If you have a single small reactor the jump drive recharge will be throttled to a percentage of the reactor's maximum output so even setting the jump drive to use 100% of the power grid will only allow it to charge at a rate of 15MW actually throttling the jump further due to the week power grid. On the other hand if you have a ship with large numbers of large reactors the jump drives can be charged a lot faster and setting the charge slider to high percentage values allows you to perform emergency jumps in short amounts of time. Additionally if your playing with modded reactors that operate in the multi gigawatt range you could charge the drives in seconds rather than the current time of around 10 minutes

 

@mikeloeven Get more Jump Drives, turn them on and off so you can jump more rapidly.

 

why do people feel the need to argue in support of bad game mechanics by posting a convoluted and counter intuitive workaround that while solving the issue does so in the worst possible way and adds additional complications... The problem with your idea is two fold the first issue is your idea generally ends up multiplying total power consumption as you will have multiple drives charging at the same time. Unlike my scaling idea you have two states On and Off and banks of recharging jump drives increase power consumption by increments of 32MW whereas the scaling idea lets you not only increase the charge rate but also throttle it . The second problem is their size and the way stacking a bunch of jump drives consumes a lot of space and impacts the aesthetics of smaller ships not everyone builds mega capital ships some of us would like small but very vast ships that maintain certain aesthetics. My concept completely eliminates most of the problems with jump drives by scaling the performance of the jump drive to match the capabilities of the ships overall power grid and enabling fine control over the drain on said powergrid. Your argument epitomizes the cancerous mindset of "lets work around the problem instead of fixing it" That has resulted in the stagnation of this games development. Seriously when was the last major quality of life improvement?

 

@mikeloeven
My suggestion has scalability as well, you don't have to charge all jump drives at the same time... You can basically automate this system with timer control.

The point about size... THAT'S THE ENTIRE POINT. If you want your ship to be better/worse you have to design around it. I mean we could just boil ships down to a single reactor as well... "Because reactor output should be based on amount of fuel" No... I do not want smaller Jump Drives. They are there to scale up and down, if you want your ship to avoid the limitations of the jump drives and that they can't jump until fully charged, you design your ship around it.

The current mechanics is not "Bad game mechanics" in my mind, it is absolutely genious mechanic. If you have a basic ship, don't want to have tons of jump drives to support long jumps in succession, then you have to live with the wait time. On the other hand, if you do mind the wait time, you can stsack up more and more jump drives either to reduce the energy cost per jump drive (meaning charge happens faster) or by cycling them. That gives actual meaningful choices to the game.
--- Automerge ---
@mikeloeven
Actually...
To the last point... "Let's work around the problem instead of fixing it"... That is not necessarily a "cancerous mindset"... Especially in an Engineering game... If there isn't any problems to design around, then Space Engineers becomes a full on lego simulator.

If you want additional jump drive capabilities, then you can have additional jump drives. If your problem is "Muh aesthetics" then I will say that is an equally "cancerous mindset" because I have seen some amazing designers (and I have designed some extraordinarily compact ships myself) do compact, functional and properly designed ships with some actually amazing capabilities.

So essentially: If you want small and compact, your ship simply wont have the capabilities or utility of a larger ship. Welcome to the world of cost/size/efficiency... Or you find a way to incorporate multiple jump drives into your compact design in an aesthetic way. You can't just sit there and yell: "OMG OMG OMG!!! AESTHETICS JUST RUINED NOW!" you'll get nothing out of that, you will solve zero issues.

If Aesthetics is really that big of a problem, I can make you a Jump drive mod that reduces the charge power to like 1kw and set charge time to 1 second... If not, then design around it, find a balance.

 

Actually I believe the point of his suggestion is the ability to make pinpoint specifics in how much power of the ships generators, batteries, and solar panels (collectively) is actually used to recharge the FTL drive.

If you want a trickle-charge that recharges the FTL drive slowly but not using the full 35mw's that comes with it, you slide the recharge value lower. It would take longer to charge, but you will have ample power left for your thrusters and other more vital ship systems at the time. The thing is, it will still be charging, NOT just sitting there "off".

The other part of his suggestion does seem to remove the limiter of 35mw's in that if you can throw more power into it, then you should be allowed to. At least with this one, though I have no problem with it either, it might need to be scrutinized further to prevent any possible OP builds. <Though if the cost of power is multiplied in increments past the default 35mw's to the point that it just doesn't pay to increase it further or having the recharge value set higher than normal starts to cause the FTL drive block damage incrementally, It can be easily made to prevent such things.

 

Completely agree.

 

If you build a ship that can jump every second that's not really OP because of the cost of building the reactors required to sustain that kind of power input not to mention fuel consumption. can you realistically refine the quantity of uranium required to keep jumping constantly would you need to keep jumping that frequently? If your building a ship capable of doing this than you are probably also running mods such as Arc Reactors, Tiered thrusters, and Weapon packs which kinda throw the concept of balance out the window any way. One can also make the argument that in SE the concept of balance doesn't matter at all because of the creative nature of the game. In SE PVP is a thing but its not really the core of players

 

There is a point to balance for Pvp no matter what. You cannot go about ruining pvp with a feature that would ultimately make combat impossible when a target simply vanishes 2 seconds into combat; especially right after he/she shows up. And simple, rapid-fire jumping around doesn't help overall gameplay at all. There are good reasons and solutions to problems in allowing someone to control just how much power is sent to the FTL block, but there are quite a few problems to consider when messing with just how quickly the FTL block can re/charge.

Without a limiter, you could simply strap nothing but large reactors to a FTL drive and jump from one planet to the other (one side of the game-world to the other) in less than a minute.

And keep in mind, that (as it currently stands) material including fuel cost and the cost to create reactors is largely inconsequential. There is no such thing as material shortage in SE. One asteroid has the potential to provide a near infinite amount of material to build with. <though I do personally hope that this changes eventually/slightly.

 

We need a power management overhaul

 

We need a hyperspace portal concept, so you always can jump fast and far justified by a pre-builded portal.

 

Jump gates is still on the top of my list of things that I would like to see added to the game. It would give you something to build; with a practical reason to build it, a focal point both for interacting with peacefully and as a military/combat chokepoint, a reason to go out and explore without having to go through the drudgery of the whole return trip, would tie nicely with normal FTL blocks by giving them a boost while under the gates effect for an initial boost towards a destination, and simply because there is very little current incentive for building any actual static structure in the game.

But mostly for that whole "return trip". Setup a gate at your base, use it to jump halfway to another planet, get to the other planet and start building up a gate there, now you can jump back and forth from where you are and back to your previous base. All too often, when you leave one base behind to go adventuring to another planet, it just sits there abandoned from then on.

 

I would love to see a replacement of the current jump drive system with a jump gate system.

• The current jump drive simply becomes the ship-board device to allow jumps, but you need a jump gate to jump.
  
  
• Gates needs to be anchored, can't move, but there's no recharge time.
  
  
• Having gates on both sides allow for perfectly accurate jumps. A one-sided jump is highly inaccurate, potentially placing you a few kilometers away from your desired target, and obviously you'll need to build a new gate to get back any time soon.
  
  
• You can have a gate inside an asteroid if you want, just make sure there's enough room. Unless jump gates also requires a minimum entry speed, I wouldn't be opposed to that either - you'd pop out on the other side at the same speed you got in.

A clear disadvantage with the jump gate system is the vanilla max speed, which is one reason we won't see anything like this outside by a mod...

 

I figure a gate would still be viable as a game feature even with jump drives still capable of being used. Again, I know better than to actually expect it to be implemented, but there is that off chance that the Devs could consider it.

I mean it's got a lot of perks and almost no cons (ok, except for the time and effort to actually implement the thing). It works well in the grand scheme of things with and without the jump-drive (I like the idea of giving ships equipped with a jump-drive a range boost when using a gate that does not have a end point), gives a legitimate reason to create a static structure (which ultimately gives people a greater reason to build a static structure rather than a mobile base all the time), and fits with both combat gameplay and civilian/non-combat cooperative gameplay. And it would allow you to transport ships that do not have FTL and access bases from one place to another (<which again are often left behind if not scrapped when relocating).

I get that they want people to travel over distances but... even with the jump drive that's a heck of a distance to travel and massive time sink going from one planet to another.

 

Gates are versatile, it can be tiny for a astronaut, big for a fleet, adjusted from a capital ship to a base with antennas, power needed can be (P ^[distance*size].
So you can contact your base from a little ship with a astronaut sized gate for align the space bend inside the ship portal and spending 99% Base power / 1% ship power.
Jump drives can be distance nerfed for be useful in combat assaults. So you will need a lot of jump drives for use it only for travel, making it only viable for specialized ships.
Fairer than this impossible!
I see a lot of ideas borning with it:

• Explorer jumper ships, (Most of ship are jump drives).
  
• Gate carriers, (Bring the 2 carriers, protect your ships assault and retreat)
  
• Solar space highways, (You do not need to have a ocean of uranium)
  
• Full isolated bases, (Drill with a finger, build a base and pass a elephant)

 

@Levits I disagree with the PVP balance aspect as any player on a PVP server will A probably be willing to fight or B have several jump-drives kept on standby for emergency blind jumps. Also, recharging a jump drive in 2 seconds does not mitigate the 10 second spool up countdown. Also a large capital ship with say 20 jump drives will be very hard to cripple anyway.

@Malware
The Supergate from the Stargate modpack is basically what your describing but minus the need for the ship to have it's own jump drive. But as you stated unless we can achieve relativistic speeds the need for blind jumps will always be a requirement

 

Willing to fight sure, but it will also allow unrestricted evasion. Anyone wanting to leave will be able to do so immediately (10 seconds is near enough to immediate as there is nothing in the game that can be done in 10 seconds). A guy can show up, unload all of his rockets into you, and jump out in those 10 seconds; all the while you don't even have enough time to get to your cockpit. Then, 10 seconds later, he shows back up to repeat the process. <This is the broken, one-sided gameplay that can occur if you leave jumping unrestricted.

Or if you are attacked, you can jump instantly in 10 seconds minutes before anyone can even reach you and you can keep doing this indefinitely until you run out of uranium (which is likely never unless the fuel cost jumps up to an entire Large Cargo Container worth of fuel per jump).

At least (as far as point B is concerned) he will only ever have a set limit to how many times he can jump. Unless someone has dedicated an enormous amount of space on their ship just for multiple, seperate FTL blocks, time to re/charge each and every single one of those FTL drives, and resources to build each one of them, he will only ever manage to get in and get out once or a handful of times. If he manages to do that more than 2 times, then he/she has worked pretty darn hard for that achievement.

With at least one half of your suggestion, It takes nothing to strap a couple large reactors to a FTL drive and speed charge the thing instantly. It would make combat completely irrelevant as jumping in and then jumping out would be the most viable and simple way to engage someone. Or having the target just jump away the moment you show up. It simply throws long-term engagements out the window without restricting just how quickly FTL blocks can re/charge.

 

@Levits
I'd actually like to see Jump Drives be unable to be pre-charged, and they can only hold a charge for like a minute before automatically discharging.
Charge time should be something like a full minute.
--- Automerge ---
Just to iterate on that.
It would lead to more PvP engagements unlike the current: You are always safe.
As long as you are in a ship with a Jump Drive you can be 100% safe if you so desire.
The minimum distance you can jump to a ship is so far you can never reach it in under 10 seconds anyway.
Right now it is essentially a risk free game unless you do something to risky like not having an uncharged Jump Drive.

So what I would like to see...
A jump Drive cannot be pre-charged, and when you wish to use it, it takes a minute to charge it and it can hold that charge for at most 1 minute, after which it discharges.
If it discharges the Jump Drive gets a 30 minute cooldown. If it is used it gets a 15 minute cooldown (similar to now and can be mitigated by having multiple like you can currently), reduced based on percentage of maximum distance that you jumped (down to a minimum of 5 minutes of cooldown.) All Jump Drives used gets the same length of cooldown.
Jump Drive still requires large amount of power to charge, and charge times can be more than a minute if you do not have enough power available.
The idea for the cooldowns is essentially penalize charging a Jump Drive and not using it. The timer of 15 minutes is like jumping to full discharge like now, but the minimum cooldown is to alleviate the constant micro jump issue of now.
The energy cost would be the same for EVERY single jump, but the cooldowns would be the thing distinguishing one jump from another. Cooldown should require a significant amount of power as well, and while unpowered wont actually stop the cooldown. Jump Drive components should not be salvageable either.

Also, all players within 5km of a jump will receive the coordinates of the Jump as a GPS Coordinate.

 

Well, I build a jumpship that consisted of 26 jumpdrives. You connected to the ship and could jump from one planet to the next in a single jump. Or you could do a lot of fast following jumps. The only proposal that I find interesting here is that you get the GPS coordinates of a jump, if you're nearby. I imagine that something like if your at 5 km or least from the start point you get the target point coordinates.

 

@Lord Grey
Depending on size of the ship you don't even need that many Jump Drives to do that jump. Two or three jump drives can do it on a smaller build.

And yes that is the entire point, so you can actually pursue people in jumps. The current system is so silly it's not even funny.

 

The whole jump drive system needs to be worked on a bit. It was mostly thrown into the game to solve a problem that could not otherwise be resolved. Like the weapons, there is little balance going on right now. Not sure what else they are working on, but the list for combat-based gameplay balance is noticeable. More weapons are needed to fill the gap between rockets and Gatling guns, finding and tracking targets needs to be addressed, and 1 engaging those targets or actually getting into range before they escape or reach max speed (<once that's done there is no catching up to them). Plus 2 being able to evade threats or escape an attack is also something that would need to be taken into account. Jump drive can cover 2 of those at least, though I'm sure there are other methods to improve upon them.

Civilian/peaceful gameplay simply needs the FTL drive to get you from point A to point B.

 

That had to be a massive ship, and the power consumption... I would hate to pay that bill!!

 

Actually the game mechanic we have now isn't a bad game mechanic and it is also quite realistic. You can't instantly charge your phone's battery or a capacitor because the maximum current is limited and this is exactly how jump drives work in game. Or you could try that, but who knows. It might work, but it might also explode violently. It might be a cool option or an idea for a mod to have an option to force fast charge of hyper drives.

This is what a capacitor explosion looks like:

Now imagine what an explosion of a jump drive that stores a few MWh of energy would look like.

 

Yes, it was. I orientated me somewhat on the Battletech jump ships, dedicated ships that transport cargo and warships from system to system. It had at least 4 big reactors for power generation. I think it had a 5th one in the living section for normal ship operations. I had "Fuel stations" at each planet to provide the uran pellets needed to operate the ship

 

but on the other hand if you have a 100 gigawatt power system would you even need to store the energy or could the grid handle the jump drives power draw in real time ?

also while you do have a point the fact remains that there is only One jump drive block and this does not scale with different sized ships other than to be stacked and run in parallel. we can also handwave the capacitor issue by assuming futuristic technologies we have super conductor conduits so it stands to reason we would also have solid state superconducting capacitors capable of charging much faster.

The fundamental problem with space engineers has always been scaling because you have a specific set of machine blocks and realistically if you were making a larger ship you would not stack tons of machines running in parallel but rather install smaller numbers of scaled up devices to fit the size of the ship so this is where your argument breaks down in that there is no alternative version of the JD to enable better performance on ships with a stronger power grid.

So to say lets make the recharge rate scale with the power grid and add manual adjustment for fine turning power consumption makes a lot more sense

 

So, how quickly would you say you should be able to jump?

 

If you want faster jumps - just grind down 2 large nuclear reactors and build 3 jump drives, it's an engineering solution.
People already pointed out to the balance issues that your proposed idea would cause.

You can assume currently jump drives use supercapacitors or ultracapacitors which charge at the rate they charge now and you can't pull any more power through them. The only scaling issue I had yet in Space Engineers are vanilla thrusters, but there are mods for more powerful thrusters.

 

At some point you run into issues where there aren't enough electrons in a cable of appropriate size to reach that capacity, even with zero resistance.
Moving electrons also create electromagnetic fields. Enough of them moving fast enough could make GPS signals unreadable and mess with the jump drive's computers.

 

Except for the fact that there is no such thing as balance in SE and even if you have the power grid for instant jumps you still have the spool up times additionally a large ship with a large number of drives would have the same capability so balance is not a factor and this scaling only opens the door for smaller more compact ship designs. not everyone wants to build large super capitals and how can you argue balance in a game that has arguably no such concept. SE in it's vanilla incarnation is basically dead and the devs should really focus on doing everything they can to make the engine more supporting of modded environments because that's where the games future lies. And as i said before the whole ballance issue of instant recharge ONLY comes into effect when you have modded reactors so in Vanilla it would not cause any noticeable problems unless you made your entire ship out of large reactors. But in the grand scheme of things its mostly that SE needs scalability in terms of the vanilla blocks because it clear they are not planning to add things like large JD or Capital thrusters or even just larger gyroscopes so in order to make the game somewhat playable a scaling mechanism needs to be introduced into most if not all blocks.

As for the whole infinite evasion issue that is a fundamental flaw in the game design that there exists no way to generate an interdiction field. In most scifi and alot of games this issue of just running away is usually addressed by a device that creates a artificial gravity well preventing an opponent from safely activating their FTL devise. but once again the whole evasion argument is completely invalid in relation to this topic because the same effect can be gained by multiple jump drives

 

Yes... And that IS the balance... You have to make a LARGER ship for it.
The only balancing factor in sandbox games like SE is size in the end. You can always smack more modules on stuff until it does what you want, but will it stay as small as you wanted?

You keep mentioning SUPER CAPITAL ships like smaller ships can't have multiple jump drives? You keep saying there is no balance? YEs there is... You may not see it.
Why use large thrusters vs. Small Thrusters? Small Thrusters have better block to power ratio, while large thrusters have better power to energy/fuel ratio. I mean, there i s no balance there?
The size and weight of cargo, refineries and assemblers doesn't discourage a full on combat ship from containing such modules? Oh wait, it does... That's balance.

A ship with 1 Jump Drive can only do one max distance jump every 15 minutes. A ship with 2 Jump Drives can either increase the Jump Distance or do 2 separate jumps. You can have many Jump Drives but only enough power to charge one at a time. You can also have tons of power and charge all 5, and if staggered means you can jump every 3 minutes... Wow... Design decisions.

You are actually arguing for REMOVING actual choice from the game. You are limiting design decisions, and making meaningful choice less meaningful. All you need to do with your system is: "How many Jump Drives do I need to jump the X distance", "How many reactors should I build" and you still get the "Should I get a backup Drive?"
That is the entirety of choice in your system.

I like the other system quite a bit. It is simple, and with the simplicity comes a lot of emergent choices based around it.

You also talk about extending modding... You can do exactly what you want with modding, except you can't decide exact power drain, but you can make Jump Drives have infinite power drain, and if you do they will just always grab all excess power if you also change the power priority system.

And no, instant recharge would NOT only be based on modded reactors.... There is a LOT of juice in a large reactor, they are 3x3x3, they are easily stackable and you only need a few to reduce the charge time to a couple of minutes, a few more and it will be near instant.

 

Ok you do have a point regarding the vanilla large reactors. If you are using mods that allow for overpowered ships than you have already tossed vanilla balance out the window but you can stack large reactors. But honestly the most important part of this suggestion is the slider to adjust power draw. But I still do not see any real reason not to implement this power grid scaling mechanism because you can always have a server variable to enable / disable the feature