Gateway Speed Comparison
A lot of people are noticing that gateway trips are taking longer than FTL flights to the same destination. This seems to be the case for all but the slowest ship types. We expect very fast ships to be faster without a gateway, but we’re seeing gateways perform worse on speed, damage, and sometimes fuel consumption. I understand the design might be for: “gateways are only situationally good”, but right now we have “gateways are rarely good”.
There seems to be a few contributors:
- Long DEP times from gateways when they are used as part of a longer flight.
- The way STL fuel is distributed among segements when using a gateway
- Long TRA times from a CX to a gateway
A flight Razenpok shared demonstrates a common poor performing flight from ANT to MOR that takes 3d 8hr.
The highlight here is a particularly terrible time on the ANT to Heph TRA (9.5 hr) and also very long DEP times of 6hr 23m. I believe this is an FSE HCB, so it’s a relatively slow ship (and should be one to benefit the most from gateways).
Here’s an apples-to-apples comparison of a WCB flying ANT to BEN with the default fuel sliders:
With gates:
- 20hr 20m,
- 197 STL, 496 FTL
- 0.431% damage
Without gates:
- 16 hr
- 157 STL 754 FTL
- 0.356% damage
Note how the Ant to Heph TRA is 165m km and is allocated 54 STL fuel to create a 3hr segement. With gateways off, the DEP from ant only takes 18m and is allocated 78 fuel. Despite that, the gateway version uses more fuel in total. I assume this is partly because of the static fuel consumption of LOCK, DCAY, and TRA (is that all intended?)
The DEP from the Griff gate (segment #6) looks like a planetary takeoff.. but it must also be a CHRG because it uses STL and FTL? Honestly sort of fuzzy on these segment types. How much of this can be fixed by adjusting DEP? Why is the STL distance so much longer before jumping from a CX station vs. a gateway- both pieces of space-based infrastructure?
I also note that TakeOff TO from a surface doesn’t have damage associated with it (for a normal planet) but DEP does? Maybe shift most of that damage from DEP to TO since orbital departures should be less damaging than atmospheric take offs?
For 2k ships with poor FTL performance (flying at a mere 1.8 parsecs per hour), most of the gateway time savings from ANT to BEN are eaten up by the TRA and DEP stages:
These should be some of the best candidates for gateway improvements, but only save 1 hour by using a gate at default flight settings. The gateway usage also increases damage by 60%. 100 FF is saved, but an extra 50 SF is needed.
Increasing SF usage equally in this situation can slightly improve the situation in favor of the gateways, as can reducing FF. But if you run minimum fuel, the poor STL behavior dominates and the Gateway route takes 9hrs longer.
At max fuel, the gateway route can be faster, but due to the extra STL segments, SF fuel usage is doubled while using gates.
This image specifically shows how a DEP from ANT is much shorter in duration and distance than a DEP from the Griffonstone gate (traveling through the gate towards BEN).
Generally, planet to planet performance is great, but the gates won’t really be used that way:
Also, we believe longer chained gateways will perform somewhat better (for ships with poor FTL speed) because you only need to enter and exit the gateway network once.
I think this demonstrates gateway performance is worse in more situations than was originally intended. There are a couple possible rebalances that might help. Gateways might suck in ships, reducing the TRA time to the gate. This could happen if ships don’t need to spend half their time slowing down before entering a gate.
The DEP distance could be reduced to be similar to departure from a CX.
Increasing gateway speed above 3pc/hr could help, although it’s not my preferred solution since that’s not the source of the delay. 3pc/hr isn’t terribly high, so there are a lot of engines and fuel settings that exceed that, but the performance failure of the gates is certainly related to STL flights.
Reducing or eliminating SF consumption in TRA, DCAY, and LOCK might help a bit- at least it would make SF usage a bit more comparable.
I’m sure the dev team can also come up with other solutions. I’m looking forward to opinions from other players- including sharing situations where gateway flight performance didn’t meet your expectations.
). The discussion we had on Discord seems to make clear that in many situations GTW travel is only a small improvement over FTL only flight (sometimes worse than FTL flight). For ships with HPR/HYR engines GTWs are rarely a better option. I don’t think it is right that people who spent extra money outfitting their ships with powerful engines are unable to enjoy any benfits from gateways.
