Gateway Upkeep

1

Will upkeep for gateways scale with the number of bases on a planet similar to how it works for COGCs? I’m intrigued enough by the new project that I’d be willing to stick one on a sparsely populated planet. But it would be hard to justify spending a large amount of cash on upkeep for something that would only be used once or twice a day.

2

In the first iterations of gateways the upkeep will be fixed.

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3

That’s at least 70k per day (plus however much SPT ends up costing). A pretty hefty fee unless the GTW is being used frequently. This creates a bit of a chicken & egg problem for remote areas. Few people want to create bases out there because of the travel time — can’t build a GTW to incentivize more bases because of the upkeep cost.

4

I only see gateways being planned for the inner core. cx<–>cx. Common routes. The irony is that it won’t be gateways which spur the development of the outer rim of planets, which I feel is the point of gateways, it will be the 5k ships which build the gateways which do. Those 5k ships make resource taps 20+ jumps away more viable as the shipping requirements are cheaper.

To me this says the economics of gateways and ships are imbalanced. IMO, ships are too cheap to operate. Way too cheap. Especially big ones. The repair costs should be significant, and there should be yearly overhauls (less frequent than plates to be noob friendly) where you need to replace major sub-components. LIS, CBL, etc, etc.

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5

Realistically the only upcoming thing that will spur the development of the rim is if the new materials that will drop with the GW release have an abundance bias that increases with the distance from the core. Without a reason to incur increased consumable and upkeep costs people generally won’t.

6

Counterpoint had another look at the gateway upkeep. As it stands right now, we’ll reduce the weekly upkeep to:

Material Ticker Amount Before
Power Cell POW 10 40
Solar Cell SOL 20 60
Space Tether SPT 40 60
Poly-Sulfite Sealant SEA 60 80
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