Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Introduction
I'm very excited about the future of Eve. Player built stargates and a new region of space to explore will be the most exciting thing to happen since wormholes were introduced back in the Apocrypha expansion. My biggest fear regarding player built stargates is that they will be boring. They need to be much more than just normal stargates that you have to build yourself. I wanted to share my vision for the future of Eve, to make sure that more interesting alternatives to "standard stargates" are out there.

Overview
Artificial wormholes. I would like to see the new player built stargates not be stargates at all, but rather some structure that creates a wormhole. To clarify, "wormhole" refers to the blurry thing in space that you jump through and not to the solar system on the other side. A wormhole has two ends; one would be "contained" by the player built gate and the other would appear somewhere in the target solar system. The player gates would be upgradable. That is to say, the properties of the wormhole it creates would be determined by upgrades to the basic gate structure. More on that later. Finally, building a second gate at the other end of the artificial wormhole would stabilise it. This would fix both ends of the wormhole, basically making it into a normal stargate.

Why Wormholes?
A stargate network creates bottlenecks and fixed routes through space. Wormholes are much more exciting
For those not familiar with wormholes, some of their features are listed below:

Wormholes are temporary links between solar systems. They expire and despawn after 24 hours.

They do not appear on overviews like a stargate does.

They can be found as cosmic signatures in the scanner. This means you need probes to find them.

Each wormhole has a "per jump mass limit". Ships with a mass greater than this limit cannot jump through them.

Each wormhole has a "total mass limit".

After every jump, the mass of the transiting ship is deducted from the total mass limit of the wormhole.

If the total mass is reduced to zero or less, the wormhole collapses immediately.

If the total mass has been reduced to 1Kg, any ship with a mass less than the "per jump limit" can still jump through.

The total mass will become negative and the wormhole will collapse, but that ship will make it through first.

An artificial wormhole would share almost all of these properties. The key differences are listed below:

Artificial wormholes would not expire after 24 hours due to one end being stabilised by the player gate.

When an artificial wormhole collapses, the player gate would create a new one after a brief spool up period.

One end will always be at the player gate.

The other end will be in a new location, somewhere within the target system.

Stargate Upgrades
Wormholes have a long list of properties to be customised according to the needs and desires of people who build the new player gates. In my vision, gates would have a certain amount of PG and CPU that gets used up by upgrades. There would be a few different types of upgrade, each with several levels of effectiveness that cost a proportional amount of fitting resources. Upgrades would include:

"Per jump mass limit" upgrade. Basic gate could only send frigates. This upgrade would be required to increase the mass limit to allow the passage of Destroyers (level 1), Cruisers (level 2), Battlecruisers (level 3), Battleships (level 4) and even capital ships (level 5). No supercaps. They can't use natural wormholes so they shouldn't be able to use artificial ones either.

"Total mass limit" upgrade. Basic gate creates wormholes with a 1 billion Kg total mass limit. Each level of this upgrade increases that by a further 1 billion Kg. That's a maximum of 6 billion Kg which equates to approximately 50-60 battleships or 4-5 capitals.

"Target deviation" upgrade. Basic gate creates subsequent wormholes at a random location in the target system. Each level of this upgrade causes new wormholes to spawn slightly closer to where the previous one was. At level 5, the new wormhole would be guaranteed to spawn on the same grid as the previous one.

"Navigation Beacon" upgrade. A standalone upgrade that transmits a signal through the wormhole. This signal is strong enough to be detected from anywhere within the target system, causing the wormhole to appear on overviews like a traditional stargate. The name of the system on the other side would be contained within the signal and thus the wormhole would appear on the overview with a name such as "Wormhole (Polaris)", but no other details about the wormhole would be included.

"Mass regeneration" upgrade. Basic gate creates wormholes that do not regenerate mass. Each level of this upgrade increases the rate at which the "total mass limit" regenerates per hour.

"Maximum range" upgrade. Pretty self explanatory. Each level increases the range a wormhole can reach in LY.

Stabilising Wormholes
It should be possible to create a stable wormhole by building two gates at opposite ends of the same wormhole. This would be difficult to achieve as an enemy would only need to collapse the wormhole in order to move the unstable end to a new location. A stable wormhole would work just like a stargate, but would collapse every now and then. It would respawn as soon as the gates spool up to create a new one. With two gates working together, the spool up time would be much less than for one gate working alone.


Redirecting Wormholes
Finally, it should be possible to change the destination of a stargate. A lengthy calculation like this should probably take several days to prevent ridiculously rapid deployment, but if Sansha's Nation can do it then so can capsuleers.

I would much rather the gates disallowed cap ships all together . . .

Picture finding all the information to put down a gate that goes to a wandering star 40 LY away. This system may actually be part of a wandering constellation which are all within a few LY of each other, but the gate is a regular gate, so any cap ships you want to use in your newly found private constellation have to be built there, and they can never leave.

Some of these wandering stars may be just that, wandering stars, and building cap ships there dooms them to only ever be in that system.

Fear not! Balance is everything.

It may well be that there are some systems so far away that they require a gate which has been upgraded for maximum range. A substantial upgrade like that would take up a lot of fitting resources, potentially making it impossible to install a "cap ship upgrade".

I have deliberately avoided using hard numbers because I'm not remotely qualified to suggest any. This is all purely qualitative.