EVE General Discussion

I fell asleep for about 20 minutes while doing some math-y stats-y digital signal processing-y stuff as well as keeping half an eye on some capital docking-undocking-grouping-regrouping in a low sec system I had business in, and had this crazy vivid dream about a supercap jump and cyno mechanic that I really want to share, it was neat! Any day is a good day for a badpost! It's basically mostly what I remember from my dream and fiddling with jump mechanics there, and some of it is me filling in the gaps and replacing obvious dream WTF scenarios with more plausible stuff. There's NO TL;DR.

Anyone else randomly come up with entertaining module ideas? I think once I dreamed up a weird mining laser that made holes in EVE's space gel that everything floats in, but it wasn't nearly as detailed as what's here.

-Alternate EVE Reality; lots of questionable and outright bad science ahead-

There's a third type of cynos available, Parametric Cynosural Field Generator II. I suppose it would require Cyno 5 like the covops cyno. Its job is to provide a beacon for supercap jumps. Supercaps have a jump drive system that differs from all other jump-capable ships, and they can only jump to Parametric Cynos (and no other ship can use this cyno, either). Parametric Cynos don't fit on frigates, they need at least a cruiser hull and combat recons get some kind of a bonus for it, can't remember.

Brief description of functionalities as far as I could reconstruct it from lucid dream garbage:

* Parametric Cynosural Field Generator: each module can broadcast a signal. Supercap jump drives are able to work with it to establish the jump parameters (i.e. where to go).
* Supercapital Jump Drive: each jump drive has a property, let's call it "resonance" although it's not really resonance in a conventional sense (just a decent analogy). Dunno the pseudo-physics basis behind it is, never came up in the dream. This resonance varies from ship to ship and for each individual ship it can change as often as hourly, or stay the same for several days, not possible to tell until the jump drive is activated. Let's say that this is because supercap jump drives are complicated systems that are susceptible to influence from external factors (e.g. levels of electromagnetic radiation, proximity to other supercaps, proximity to a station, the time since its last dusting, how many lights are turned on in the ship, etc.). A useful effect of this is that it's possible to manually alter the resonant frequency when the jump drive is active, presumably keeping it stable for some brief but meaningful period of time somehow.

How is jumpy made?

The cyno pilot activates the cyno and selects the fleeted supercaps it wants to broadcast it to ( I guess one by one or as a group; let's pretend like the UI for this is sensible and not irritating, lololol). The more targets you select during a single cyno cycle, the "weaker" the signal, and the harder it will be for the pilots to deal with, and multiple cynos on grid can't be lit for some reason (let's say that it's because it increases the chances of signals interfering with each other and getting corrupted). The Parametric Cyno sends a signal to the waiting supercaps, and each supercap must use this signal to get information from the cyno. To do that, the supercap pilot must tune the jump drive to the incoming signal. This is done modifying its "resonant frequency", seeking to have that frequency match the incoming signal so the drive "resonates" at that frequency. Voila, it's now possible to get at the information carried by the signal from the cyno, and jump.

This is what's happening in the background, but in reality the player has some kind of a mini-game type thing to "solve". In my dream it was Minesweeper for some reason But I can see it being anything, might have something to do with waves or moving some pieces or mechanical parts around, connecting something, etc, idk. Well, something with the same idea as the probing interface, minus the whole probing and system map part, ah-hah. And somehow not dull or irritating, something fun to quickly fiddle with (again, lololol). It shouldn't take long at all to solve, on average less than a minute perhaps, but with a possibility that somehow your jump drive might be in some unfortunate configuration and it might take you longer than that to sort it out.

Additional mechanics

The data transmitted may be corrupted as it can happen, or you may have a problem with tuning where something wasn't what you thought it was, etc, idk what exactly sounds plausible, but sometimes you will end up jumping to the wrong coordinates. There's a small, small chance of that happening, but it's possible. Out of these bad jumps, most will land you in the same system but not on grid with the cyno, but a small portion will result in larger errors. You'll never end up more than your max jump range away from the cyno you tried jumping too, so it's possible to try again. Also, jumping using the fickle and unstable system that is the supercap jump drive carries a small risk of damage to the ship and its modules, like you might land at your destination with HP damage to a module, or having it go offline, or losing a pet or two from the drone bay

This is the best of what I found there. Things such as mini-games suck and I am hopeful that they never see the light of day in Eve.

However, I like the idea of jumps going "wrong" and dropping you in system, but not on grid.

Couple that limitations on the number of ships that can jump per cyno, and you'll introduce the "hot flop" mechanic into the game, which would be quite entertaining.

Oscilloscope type of matching game where you have to tune the frequency, phase shift, and amplitude to the signal you are interpreting in two side by side windows sounds like it would be a neat option for a mini-game style puzzle for this kind of thing. Also gives it a lot more of a sciencey spacey feel to the whole thing.

Would definitely kill hot dropping, as people would almost always have time to retreat when they see the cyno go up, but a very neat idea. I like it, though I doubt you'll get much support.

Heh, this wasn't exactly posted to gather support signatures, far from it. I just shared something neat that my brain made up in 20 minutes while I was passed out napping head down on my desk I was impressed with how fairly reasonable some of these things it came up with while in a daze were (but I'm obviously omitting dream stuff that made no sense, like there was a spider crawling down the very edge of my "vision" but whenever I looked straight at it it turned into musical notes, or EVE-related, there was a big wreck with a sign "Raven" above the roof of my apartment building). Lucid dreams are sweet.