Feature suggestion: Data couriers

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I’m not sure if it’s specifically established how data is transferred between star systems in this universe, but in a few sci-fi universes, FTL drives are faster than any of the communication systems available.

In these cases, it would make sense to create specialized courier vessels designed to arrive in a system, upload its ‘cargo’ (Movies, files, emails, messages, market details, digital products, etc), download whatever ‘cargo’ is being sent to the next system, and so on.

I’m suggesting a new kind of ship. They’re small, cannot be used for cargo, but have specialized features and upgrade paths for the role of a data courier. The same upgrades as apply to other ships can be added, types of engines, fuel tanks, plating, etc. In place of cargo modules, however, there’s 3 types of parts specific to couriers:

Data storage
Transmitter
Communications antennae

You can think of data storage as cargo capacity. It’s just a big bank of hard drives that you store the ‘cargo’ (data) in.

The transmitter determines how quickly you can ‘unload’ the data once you arrive in a system. The relevant stat for this is data transfer speed (in GB/second)

The antennae are how you ‘load’ new information before you leave, and is again limited by data transfer speed.

For even more player interactivity, perhaps this data has to be uploaded via planetside bases run by other players. This could be made as a simple production cue item ‘transfer data’ that takes a certain amount of time and pays out an item called’ ‘downloaded data’ that you can then sell on the CX or something similar.

Another potential option: Digital product transfer
Perhaps this is a better way of delivering software products like BAI and OS?
I think this would add more diversity to shipping and encourage players to interact more.

Basically, couriers would be specialized cargo ships that are very fast, but can only carry data, and takes a long time to load/unload.

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I’m curious to see what other people think of this idea.

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Real data (such as price at CX) trading makes no sense in this game as long as we have public chat channels. You can’t just trust everyone they’d not shout out the same information you just bought for few million quids.

Fictional or NPC data trading would then just be an IDC/EDC chain under the hood, and we already have ultra small cargo ship that’s capable of doing inter-CX travels within 6h, I don’t think it’s necessary to add even faster ships that’s only able to carry just few specific MATs.

Data trading is not difficult to implement but lack a reason to be implemented. The difficulty is simulate demand for various kinds of data. MATs for now are completely identical, no matter whether you made it in Antares space or somewhere out in the corners, they sold and get consumed the same way. Maybe give them a “grade” or “place of origin” would solve this but in my opinion would just overcomplicate things, since it’s equivalent to adding several highly similar MATs which are not natural resources but can only be produced in certain regions.

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