Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Reading the various Archon articles on TM.C, complaints about bridging and force projection, the supposed blue donut, etc. got me thinking.

What if CCP implemented a non-linear restriction on mass-per-unit-time for all system transfers, similar to the jump mechanics described in the Honor Harrington books by David Weber?

In those stories, ships can be instantly moved between two points, but the ability to jump has a cooldown based on the amount of mass that went through the jump. Two navies can choose to stream small ships in continuously, but if they want to instantly project hundreds of dreadnaughts, there's an 18+ hour cooldown (in the books) where no ships can transit the junction in either direction.

An initial lockout table might look something like this (these numbers are from the cuff, haven't actually put them in excel) so :
256 frigates: 1s cooldown (effectively not measurable)
256 cruisers: 10s cooldown
256 battleships: 3m cooldown
256 carriers: 15m cooldown
256 supers/titans: 1h cooldown

An individual archon is ~1.1B kg, while a dominix is 100M kg, so 25 archons (same mass as a fleet of domis) at a time can move around with 3m cooldowns. If you want to move 256 archons at once, you can choose to do 10 jumps of 25 archons over the course of 30 minutes, or you can jump them all at once, but lockout transits both in-or-out of the system for the next hour (which may block your own escape).

Normal gates and bridges/jumps would share a single mass pool, so whether you're jumping in or bridging into a fight, you have the same rules.


This would have several effects:

Lower mass fleets could jump/bridge without regard for this cooldown, thus no impact to all normal roaming/gang sizes.

Force projection of caps/supercapitals has a built-in lag that scales depending on the size of the fleet.

Fleets responding to aggression can't N+1 the aggressor as easily.

When moving thousands of ships, large supercap groups would have to have multiple transit routes along the way, or spread their full-fleet transfers over slightly longer windows.

This rewards people who plan better and set traps, which may help create content.

Thoughts?

Correct. If 200BS get ambushed by 200 slowcats, then the BS have to evade until the mass timer expires.

I figure 75-man super fleet would have 10-15 minutes of no other jumps. Gives them freedom to cause some damage, but means they have to survive on their own if there is an ambush.

Maybe each direction needs its own "mass timer" but maybe not. Getting away needs to be possible at some level.

Ultimately this is trying to restrict the extremely quick ability to move supers across the map, in such a way that it either takes way more planning, or else trickles in the supers more slowly than having 2-3 fleets all land at once.

Obviously TIDI makes something like this wierd, so you'd need the mass timer run in real time instead of TIDI.

So a 2v1 only does 1.8 people worth of damage? That seems silly.

Plus, it makes ships with damage bonuses but fewer turrets too valuable relative to their peers.

The point is to limit the projection of power across space, not to limit the power of a fleet once it has arrived at the fight.

If you have planned and logged out hundreds of pilots in a system, you should be able to use them.

And so, battles are decided simply by who gets onto the field first?