There should be a pay to travel superwormhole from somewhere in gray to the Denab area. You could charge per trip, suck some money out of the game, and make it a little easier for people to get to the two largest people gathering places in the game.

I would have it go into guiera rather than denab. Serco's already have to jump a WH to get to the BP area, so making the Itani run a Serco WH would make things more balanced and a little exciting for the Itani.

-tm

I like this idea... there are so few players in the game these days it would definitely help to have some kind of pay-to-devwarp option from Geira-Deneb to grey and back again. I know I would probably BP more often if this were implemented.

Once the population is bigger and and the border war becomes more dynamic, it could always be taken out again if needed.

As long as you give me some new eye candy.

/me loves this idea!!! Saves lots of time and makes traveling much less tedious. Half the time I choose not to do BP just because its so far away from sedina.

Perhaps there could even be a BP "event" once every 4 hours declared in a special channel that gives the option of warping in from anywhere in the universe on command. That way we could get more of our modest playerbase involved at the same time, and we might even get some large scale battles going.

How about a gray-space troll-way?
You can bypass all the creepy girly fighters and the crazy vigelantes with wild double standards, but have to pay a goat for every trip.

Oh come ON.
It's a 10-minute trip from Sedina. Pfft. You slowpokes!

I find death inconvenient. It sucks how when I'm homed in Edras then die in Sedina I have to fly all the way back to Sedina. I think I should be devwarped to where I was last killed...

I agree with Genka...

I think that we simply have a universe too large for the playerbase. If we were to eliminate a few systems here and there, things would be much more fun. However, that would involve changing all the trade routes, wormhole patterns, deleting people's stuff in systems that get deleted too, etc..

So, as much as I would like a smaller universe, I don't think it's in the realm of possibility.

It could be a teleportation system similar to what is used when our ships explode and we are back in our home station. And it should be a hefty fee maybe 500k.

That's a thought! Hired transport. Could be as easy as paying to change your home station. That would be nice anyway. Heck, it'd be nice to have a little note somewhere as to where your home station is!

Paying to get rehomed someplace else would be nice.

Public Transportation Network. You can hitch a ride on a passanger liner heading in x direction, Serco/Itani/UIT space. You can dock your personal craft in it's hanger. It lets people off at certain wh points along the specific route (see image).



Where the purple is the route they take, the full red circles are disembarking points, and the capitals are starting locations for transports. Obviously a Serco transport won't take you into Itani space and an Itani Transport won't take you into Serco, but the UIT transport can make the complete circle. Each disembarking point would be 25k on your boarding ticket, so if you wanted to fly from Dau to Sol II you would have to pay 75k, but you would get there in a fraction of the time in whatever ship you have with you, including moths (loaded or unloaded).

Would require a new ship design, but this one would have NO effect on balancing of other ships as it'd be an NPC ship. I would not suggest using the current HAC as the model, that's to militaristic.

Thoughts?

mm, hijacking citizen freight liners traveling through ukari... *drools

escort missions from starting nation capital as well

It's a neat idea johnhawl, and might be great once we can walk around in 3d characters on stations and stuff, but I'm thinking at this point it makes things take even longer than they do now. I was thinking of a tollway as a way to get people together faster. Once there are 1000 players it won't matter so much, but right now if you want to get people out to BP, it takes them 20 minutes or more to assemble. Not to mention as a pirate, a people filled transport ship would be a hell of a fun target.

A civilian transport escort mission would be really fun.

If your able to board the transport at any of the circles and the ship bypasses via "magic" every other wormhole, and has an infiboose higher then any ship in game, how would catching the transport from say Ukari and taking it to Geira Rutilus be slow? Or from Jalliks for that matter.

True, this is a long term goal, and I know we would not see anything like that any time soon. I really don't see any feasable way to get people together faster then there ships the way it is now without seriously compromising the integrity of the game, like devwarping etc. The backstory makes no references to "transporters" that I recall.

hmmm... pay-to-activate artificially-constructed hyperspace "gateways" for travel between points of interest... who in Sedina could build one? this would also easily destroy any notion of "balance" in travel... the universe is BIG. it should take effort, if not time, to travel across.

I dunno... I DO like johnhawl's idea with the transport lines... would we be boarding/departing via docking bay like with the cap ships? I would like that... of course, there needs to be a limit as to how many people/how much mass can ride each transport if they're to be reasonably-sized. would give us a chance to throw in some of that elusive CONTENT in the form of escort missions and the like...

okay, I did some brainstorming on the transportation network idea today (I got bored in lit class), and came up with a few ideas which I think have some potential to relly add something to the game.

So here's my idea...

First thing that has to be considered, is the type of transports. They would be capital-class vessels, with a main role of transporting people and goods along designated routes. I actually drew up a sketch of a ship design, but can't seem to find it (or my scanner drivers) at the moment... I'll post it eventually. It's essentially a huge passenger liner with cabin space and cargo bays built around a hollow central drive core and two large engine nacelles. It wouldn't use a standard drive like other ships, which would give it an excuse to move faster, but turn slower than other vessels of comparable size (Hello HAC). It would also need considerable time to speed up after entering a sector (a couple minutes at the least) and would navigate as if it used flight-assist.

It's main defence would be some particularily lethal energy turrets below the bridge, with a limited range. The turrets would only protect the two docking bays (on the inside of the structure, above the central drive tunnel). It would carry a complement of six fighters (and yes, I did a sketch of these too...) which it could slowly replenish if some were destroyed.

The fighters, slightly larger than a vulture, and with downward-angled, thin, flat nacelles, they would be like a smaller, slimmer version of the transport. They would carry one small weapon port on the underside of each nacelle, and one dirctly below the cockpit. They would have an extremely narrow profile from the front, and would present a reasonably large target from any other angle. The working principle to their effectiveness would be speed - about the same agility as the Cent IBG, but highly vulnerable to fire due to the fragile nature of it's design. Light, fast, agile, and with three s-ports, but with virtually no armor to speak of, and a battery incapable of making more than one jump due to no recharge rate. They would depend on the transport to recharge. Their primary weapons ould draw very little power, as would their boost (5/sec boost, but the boost itself wouldn't be very much faster than it can travel without it). The weapons would be similar to Neut IIs, except for the color and energy requirement, and could NOT be equipped on any other ship.

The transport would take extended stops at the capital systems to let boarders arrive, and would announce their scheduled/actual stops on a designated channel. Warning would be given five minutes before their arrival, and (10 minutes later), five minutes before their departure. You could load up and store ships and equipment, as well as cargo on it like a station (within reason - more space allocated per player if fewer players board) If the transport was destroyed by pirates, or razed by the hive, you'd lose all of your stuff - Great incentive to defend it! While on board, you could man one of the turrets or fighters for this task (which only launch when the ship is threatened), or fly your own ship. (if flying one of their fighters, you could 'home' on the transport)

It could be escorted by NPC special ships of it's home nation as well, which it would accrue each time it stops at it's own capitol. (there would be one transport for each nation, which follow the same route, which would alow you to board one friendly to you) Escort missions would be available from nation capitals for protecting the transport, and raiding missions available from Corvus. Both would pay well. Effects of destroying these transports could be felt by the economy on a national scale perhaps (higher prices for manufactured goods and some raw materials)

While they wouldn't be very efficient at moving you quickly from point A to point B, they should be a good way to move a lot of stuff (and charge you by the ton - yay moneysink!) and would add a good deal of gameplay to the universe (Yay 'CONTENT'!)

Heck, you could even add a bar/casino to the ship to give bored tarvellers something fun to do on uneventful runs (until that klaxon sounds warning of an impending pirate attack) (enter a Roleplay opportunity)

you'd need to come up with some kind of faction balance for them, which would prevent transport defenders from taking big faction hits for killing pirate attackers, but that could be worked out...

/givemoney devs 2c

This is just another problem with the universe being too damn big.

And for that matter, too damn linear.

Less systems, more connections between systems.

People need to be able to run into one another, a lot more.

its not the universe thats too big.. its the playerbase thats too small.