Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I don't find it strange that a commercial vessel has inferior jump range to a combat ship.

lol, both valid points, but for the cost of a JF compared to the cost of a Carrier, they can afford to put the military grade jump drive in the JF :), they might even end up making the JF cheaper, lol

First about GPS you get what you pay for, a GPS who professional surveyor use have a accurate in 1-3 cm, but its cost a large fortune.

So if you are ready to pay up it should exist a T3 JF who have military jump engines.... but CCP can always say military jump drives are still a military secret and off limits to player as concords death rays.....

Balance > "realism".

Except that you are wrong, Jump Freighters do not use a different commercial grade jump drive, they use the exact same jump drive component as the other capital ships. However it may be the other systems on the combat/military ships that allow it to run at a higher efficiency.

Here's one for nine thousand dollars that advertises "centimeter accuracy," though I don't see exact specifications.

High-accuracy GPS is not all that uncommon--a friend of mine works for a start-up that uses it (plus electrical fields and magnets) to map groundwater flow, e.g. to find where water is leaking out of a reservoir. It is a tad out of the price range of your average hobbyist.

It used to be that consumer GPS accuracy was artifically limited by regulations, but those restrictions have since been lifted in the US.

nice ... found the tech specs in the linked PDF (not sure this'll actually link tho ... yay eve forums).

Real-time accuracy is listed at 3-5 meters, with post-processing able to get that down to 5cm (with several footnotes that I didn't bother to read).

That said, my point (that people seem to be missing ... so guess it wasn't that clear) is that a military craft has a better drive for nothing more than the fact that it's military. I suppose a better RL analogy would be jet engines -- where (AFAIK) they're the same engines on commercial airliners and military fighters ... but as there are regulations that commercial airlines have to follow (such as noise levels, pollution, etc), the engines end up performing worse than the un-regulated ones in a fighter jet.

HOWEVER -- that's a lolrp reasoning, and at the end of the day "Game Balance" (as pointed out by Freya and others) trumps anything else.

So wait, one ship has OP jump range, so your idea of a fix is to make another ship jump even farther? And add more cargo space to a ship which already has bunches? Come on...

The solution here is to nerf carrier jump range, which is something being discussed in CSM summits.

The problem with that is that there is pretty significant variation caused by the shifting volume of the atmosphere (which affects the time it takes for the clock signals to arrive at your device, and affects the signals from each satellite differently, inducing errors). If you leave a high end GPS in one spot (and turn off any inertial features it may have), it will record a significant amount of "movement" over the course of a day (which isn't that hard to correct for), as well as recording more random "movement" actually caused by changes in the atmosphere due to changes in the solar wind.

All in all, you're talking about ~+/-5m deviation caused by things that a solo GPS reciever, no matter how good it is at reading the signals, can't really fix. That can certainly be mitigated by comparisons made with maps and fixed ground stations, but that requires access to... well, highly accurate maps and fixed ground stations in radio range.

It actually turns into an interesting challenge if you're doing something where you really, really need to know exactly where your site is. Luckily, the people that I know of that need that kind of precision and accuracy are astronomers, who are also the best equipped to deal with it.