Let me start by saying this is not a bug more an observation that seems maybe over looked.
As a new player I decided to start out at Deimos (ZV-759c) and I often have to travel to Antares Station (ZV-307). This can take anywhere between 18h and 1d 4h approx. Based on the minimum fuel I want to use and I am guessing the orbital positions of the planets. So far so good. Everything about Travel Time and Fuel Costs make sense. I have to get out of orbit with STL and then I jump to another System with FTL and then because you can’t just exit FTL right at the station their is some last mile STL flying.
Been doing this for weeks, now comes my shock. I decide to pickup a contract to fly a package to ZV-307g. I was like great I will just take that package over and then go fly to Antares Station. So I got to ZV-307g after a wonderful day of transport. The STL cost a bit more than anticipated. Due to planet mass / gravity, oh well. Now I delivered my package and ready to fly from ZV-307g to ZV-307 (Antares Station). Click the Fly button only see STL click minimum.
And then the WTF moment comes. 7 days to get there? and like 300-400 STL or some large amount. I think to myself it would be easier, cheaper, and faster to literally FTL out of the system and then fly back in rather then navigate a solar system.
That is when I realized something is broken with inner solar system flying. No one would STL from Mercury to Neptune, so why is this game taking that tack? Should there not be like a FTL Point I can fly out to and then fly back in so, I do not need to spend so much time and STL Fuel? Also if STL Fuel can barely get you anywhere fast should the ratio of SF to FF be only 1:2?
Ultimately, this whole experience has been a learning lesson for me, but I think we could improve the inner solar system flight mechanics to allow for FTL jumps in the same system if desired. One approach would be to allow the player to decide if he wants to FTL jump in one system or strictly use STL with the cost shown for the two alternatives. It also might make it so you could have really cheap ships with only STL drives that actually do these longer journeys because of maintenance or something.
Well I hope this is of interest to someone and as the new guy, maybe this is already well known and talked about but I did not find anything in my initial search if someone has talked about it can you please direct me there as I am interested in this subject and how it is expected to be fixed in the future.
Pick the shortest jump out of your system, cancel flight once you depart, jump back in after you stop.
When you get to the G or H planets of a system you’re orders of magnitude farther than the B or C to the CX. You have the tools to fly across a solar system STL if you choose, or you can choose to avoid days long flight, just have to do it manually
Although intra-system FTL jumps would be a neat feature, it would be kind of broken from a gameplay perspective.
In real life, the average distance between stars is about 5 light years, whie the distance of Pluto from the sun is about 5 light hours. So Pluto is 7,000 times closer to the sun than Proxima Centauri, our nearest star.
In PrUn, FTL flight between systems usually takes a few hours, which means that intra system FTL would only take a few seconds, and close to zero fuel.
This would almost completely eradicate any differences in planet location within each system. Want to build a base on Avalon? No problem, just blink to and from the CX for free. More or less.
The current situation, where you can kind of work around long STL travel times by FTLing to a neighbouring system and back, as per Cubblakistan’s post, is a good compromise. It takes a bit of planning, but then that’s what this game is all about. Plus any change requires dev time, and I’d prefer to see that spent on other features, where there isn’t currently a work around.
There’s even more to it than fuel. Ship damage is linear with traveled distance and micrometeroid density. By doing these super long STL flights, you’re going to wreck your ship and rack up a nice repair bill. The STL leg in an FTL flight is around 50M-75M km. Going from the center to the end of a solar system can be billions of km. That can reduce your ship condition by 1-2% for a single one-way flight.
It’s more profitable to have 2 planets in 2 systems work with each other than to have 2 planets in the same system, which is completely counterintuitive.
FTL is itself counterintuitive. But if you want an in-universe justification for this situation, then… [waves hands]
FTL travel requires a target and destination star, as paired gravitational beacons, to initiate a hyper-light rebound distortion in cold space. A ship can then travel along within the rebound distortion (or “warp bubble”) as it moves between the two stars. You can get some control over the bubble’s emergence point by using planets as auxiliary beacons, hence why you can target individual objects within the target system for arrival. But you can’t initiate an intra-system FTL jump because you’re already too close to the destination star. So you have to jump out to a neighbouring star, and then back in, if you want to effectively travel via FTL within a single system.
I actually like the in-universe reason, which makes sense. It also makes sense that Starship Captain would understand these problems and adjust their flight mechanics accordingly.
I see the reason that intra system FTL flights would be broken, so maybe a compromise. If you want to go between two planets in the same system you could choose a flight with or without FTL. If you use the FTL option, it would calculate the closest system to you and use it as a jump pad. Having you FTL to it and then turn back around to the planet in question. This would double your FTL fuel between the two systems, so if it normally takes 10 FTL to get between the two systems for X time it would now take 20 FTL for 2X time. But this would also have the added benefit of reducing your STL as you can now get close to your target planet on your FTL jump back into the system. While all of this can be done manually. It would be nice to not have too.
And it could even be made a feature for the PRO License. Because as stated by Ficks this can all be done manually, but it is annoying. I think more than anything the convenience would be much appreciated.
You know that the lore is all just made up stuff, right? It can be whatever we want.
Beacons use a similar hyper-light effect as a jump drive, only the distortion is contained and reflected back upon the same small region of space over and over again. The result will usually stabilize after ~1e13 iterations, creating a rebound attractor equivalent to the mass of a small moon. This is enough to allow ship-sized FTL bubbles to be directed for navigation purposes.
There are ship upgrades that can help with this – but, yes you will need to use a lot more SF. There are some situations where these type of trips might be viable (for instance if you’re travelling from an F planet to a G planet) but most of the time going from the inners (A, B, C) to the outers (G, H, I, J) will take a much longer time {don’t find out the hard way and start the flight before noticing it will take a week since there is no way to cancel an STL flight}. Most people figure out pretty quickly that jumping out then back in is the best option.
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