Personally, I don't think we should have any interstellar communication except by courier. That's the Elite way, and always has been.

My opinion on fuel and propellant is lengthy, and documented at length here. I don't think there's much enthusiasm for conservation of momentum, which is the principle that outlaws reactionless motors in real life. Pioneer's thrusters are completely reactionless; your ship doesn't get any less massive, no matter how long you use them. My suggestions in there try to add interest and fun to the game, not just impose realism.

As for FTL? Well, in Newton's model of gravity there was no limit to speed. Pioneer uses a simplified Newtonian model, so we're not bound by any of the restrictions imposed by relativity. Hyperspace drives exceed the speed of light, as can regular spacecraft thrusters, given time and patience. There's no time dilation, even near black holes or when travelling at extreme velocities. Simultaneous events are meaningful even at a distance. The combat target, when set to a ship that's a long way away, provides real-time feedback of its position. We can request docking clearance instantly, from any distance, and are instantly notified of its expiration.

Might as well take that and run with it; we're not in Einstein's universe, after all. I'm perfectly happy to see instantaneous communication within a system, despite its non-realism. Fun takes precedence over realism any day.

So, after all that, I'm happy with most suggestions, as long as it basically still feels like Frontier did. Frontier really pushed my buttons.

Well when it comes to talking about comms in Frontier, I always imagined they worked the same way as the jump drives did, by way of "tunnelling" through hyperspace just as the ships do. However, due to comm traffic having little or no mass, they travel more or less instantaneously.

Interestingly, one of the competing particle physics theories states that the recent puzzling FTL measurement of neutrinos sent by CERN to the physicists at Opera in Italy, was due to the particles temporally leaving our universe (and Einsteinian physics behind too) and then returning just in time to be picked up by detectors. However, this leaves the door open to the possible occurance of receiving a message before it is actually sent. Crazy stuff indeed! 😯

If this was indeed what happened (and I stress if), it still leaves the golden questions of why and how did the neutrinos manage it. If we could answer those questions, we could very well be on the road to becoming a real space fairing race. Then again it might all be down to a measurement error, which at this stage is more likely.

So anyways, perhaps the Frontier model for comms might just be the correct one?

Perhaps they dipped into Pioneer's universe. It's non-Einsteinian.

Then you wouldn't get paid instantaneously from another system. You'd have to jump back to get paid. It's not quite the Frontier way, but I like it. I imagine courier drones that jump to the next system and back, transmitting and receiving data between systems. There could be robotic post office stations on the edges of systems to refuel them.

I don't like the idea of having to return to origin for payment. It would make the game centralised. I.e. You'd do a job, get back, do another job, get back, etc. Only switching systems when you feel like it. The "do job and find a new one where you are now"-routine makes you see new places pretty mich aitomatically, and forcing a player to mpve around is vastly important for a procedurally generated game, otherwise the whole unlimitted size is completely lost.

The automated courrier drones would make sense, and could be simulated by a delay between mission accomplishement and payment, but if that takes several days or even weeks it would break the gameflow too much i'm afraid. Planet based ftl com and inersystem ship ftl com though would mean that it would be very easy to relay messages as long as there is a colony in the system, making interstellar communication again accesible from on board...

As fa as i can see, the immediate landing clearence request is the only hint for shipnoard ftl com, though. If the range for landing clearence would be limited, we would have pretty sound grounds to say that ftl coms are only available on planets, which would be the best way to go game mechanics wise, imho.

I always sort of imagined that interstellar comms was possible between stations (that have some kind of magical hyperspace radio), but ships only have enough power/magic to communicate within the same system. I don't know what the technology for all this looks like though. And nothing explains "Right on, commander."

😆 😆

As you do for assassinations. For deliveries, though, there's a recipient. They can pay you. Alternatively, the package could contain a chip, with a cryptographically signed instruction to the local bank to pay you. Anything's possible, and little of it relies on contacting the station of origin. You could even be given the name of the recipient, so that you must actually give it to the right person, rather than the one who's trying to steal deliveries.

oh, right... totally forgott about that little detail. 😆

I never got the impression that Elite didn't have FTL comms, after-all your delivering packages and people which require FTL teleportation not communication 🙂 So even with FTL comms there is still a market for one-man delivery ships...

In FFE you also have the books/journals which are updated with some psuedo FTL mechanism. If the distress call comm option had actually worked, that would have been FTL too...

Or perhaps it did work but was Lightspeed, which is why no-one ever got picked up hehe 😉

I suppose Frontier and FFE are newtonian, which also means no Light-speed barrier.. Therefor no limit to how quickly messages can travel I presume. ❓

Really all the strongest evidence for FTL comms lies with FFE, perhaps there is some with Frontier but I played that far less and dont recall any evidence of it at all.

I'm not against a lack of FTL communications at all, I'm just saying it was in FFE... sort of 😉

There's an interesting set of books by Peter F Hamilton where there is no FTL communication (I think its the Reality Dysfunction), everything is sent VIA ships. Brian I bet thats why your sweet on this idea hehe, they are bloody good books and IIRC you told me you were reading them..

But theres something else very cool from those books... Planets had unique resources which opens up interesting trade opportunities. 🙂 Like Ironwood (or whatever it was called) from Lalonde 😉

Thats a nice idea.

Also wrt assassination missions, how would the Contract issuer know that you had in-fact completed the mission?

Gun camera footage perhaps? But then the police should be able to perform a random search and check the camera 🙂

s20dan: I am reading them, but no - the real reason is (are) the various novellas set in the Elite and Frontier universes. Stock prices couldn't be broadcast - you had to fly to another star system to find them out. It was, as I said, the way.

Frontier might not have had a light speed barrier, but even in a Newtonian universe, light travels at... the speed of light. It's tautological, really.

Ah yes but in our Pioneer newtonian universe, light travels instantly as you said before 😉

So yes light travels at the 'speed of light' its just that it is infinitely faster than it should be 😉

Pedant! 😛 Awesome though you are 😀

My own 2p opinion; Comms are instantaneous, there's plenty of instant comms in Sci-Fi and we already take great liberties with the tech' so lets not get bogged down with pedantry and correctness over this one. Especially as in Frontier it was always physical packages that had to be delivered and yet the confirmation messages were always from the original sender (I may be inaccurate on this by 1 bottle of wine and am hereby exempt from criticism! 😛).

This does limit mission possibilities, recon missons for example, or stealth nukings where the enemy can't be allowed to warn anyone that sort of thing. Let them be big complicated structures on planets/stations so the player can destroy them on scripted missions et voila, you have a relatively plausible system that most people will be happy with.

That's my slightly pissed opinion anyway. Check back tomorrow to see what I think with a hangover! 😆

Well, in a nod to our galactic map, let's call light years light years and say that light takes a year to travel one of them. In-system, though, sure - instant communications seem to be possible. I would recommend, though, that we don't draw attention to this fact. Space is nice because it's quiet.

Hehe, tbh I'm happy either way 🙂

Actually I quite like this idea as it gets around a few problems.. like crime ect that the player commits.

Problem I see with destructible environment is that it has to go a long way... If important installations are destroyed, they have to get rebuilt. Since installations currently are "fixed assets" produced by the generator, it will need referencing which stations have been destroyed and when, so it doesn't generate them when it shouldn't. Once a station is rebuilt this reference could be removed to keep savefiles clean, however, so unless someone goes on an insane station destruction rampage savefile bloat should not be a problem.

However, in the context of the game, destroying a spacestation with a single ship seems not very credible. These installations are gigantic, and unless we have flyable capital ships, I couldn't quite imagine what ship could take one out, even with Huge Plasma Accelerators(TM).

Plus, taking out a station to solve your legal problems with the assasination you just carried out doesn't seem to be an adequate way to solve the problem. Some ships would be bound to get away, and you should pretty fast end up with a galactic warrant for mass murder, FTL communications or not. Especially if the station is not the only installation in the system, you'd have to go genocidal maniac to insure that no word gets out. These aren't King David's times anymore... 😆

When factions get implemented, destruction runs could get a potentially very profitable way of income, but as long as there's no CapShips or squadron management I just don't buy it. And those aren't really things I would expect too fast. I also cannot think of what I would need the cash for if I already have a ship that can blow away a station...

Frontier let you blow away installations with nuclear missiles. They were generated specially, but they weren't exactly small. Of course, nuclear ordnance isn't on general sale, and in any case Frontier rendered all system stations invulnerable even to nukes.

Saved game bloat isn't an issue when it comes to tracking destroyed stations; it just requires an extra bit per station. They can be rebuilt or replaced after a few years when the player is elsewhere; perhaps they could remain unavailable for docking for some time after that, too, to simulate the interior construction period.

It's all doable. It just needs planning out.

ah yes, the good old nukes. How could i forgett about those.

When they get impleeted, we should find another name for them, though. Since my drive seems able to handle a few mega-hiroshimas per second in luminosity and radiation, high yield warheads in the pioneer verse should probably use some other destructive force than these two, since we seem capable of handling them quite expertly...

Your drive uses applied phlebotinum. As we've already stated, your thrusters are reactionless drives. Your ship doesn't get any lighter; nothing's actually coming out. This is further evidenced by the lack of scorch marks and hurricanes left all over the planet after a spacecraft takes off.

Ah. I wasn't quite sure wheather they were reactionless drives with exhausts or rocket engines without fuel consumption. Most of the ships have some kind of nozzle, though, so It seems kind of weird to declare them as reactionless. Although their power output would be more practical to handle when they don't throw ravening particle streams of death around, but if they don't throw anything out, where do they go with the heat? I get a feeling that I'm too much nitpicking here... Consistancy is kinda hard to establish afterwards. 😕

The heat comes out of the back of your PC. It's why the fan blows warm air.

The difference between reactionless drives with exhausts or rocket engines without fuel consumption is entirely semantic. Our ships will stop being reactionless when they accelerate by ejecting mass. This would mean getting lighter as they do so, and it might well never happen. Almost all space games use reactionless thrusters; one notable exception is Orbiter.

How on Earth could you forget Frontier/FFE 😉

So that's why my CPU overheats while playing Pioneer 😆

Yes it is. But the whole consistency question in Space Opera is more or less semantic, but it's still important for the immersion.

While they technically had fuel consumption, they had constant weight. Even regardless of how much you loaded. Oh, and FFE had a nice Bug that would half gravity when the display switched from AU to km... 😯

Oh yeah of course I forgot ship's mass was constant 🙂 But thats probably down to simple limitations of the engine, I mean cargo and other goods had a mass of 1ton per unit, its just the ship didn't take that into account...

I think how I'd like to see it done is to seperate engines and power systems out. You fuel the power system with hydrogen or whatever, which in turn will fuel the hyperdrive and other systems or charge a capacitor which feeds the systems.

With actual thrusters we could either drain the power/fuel reserve of the power plant, or actually provide a seperate propellant which uses the heat from the powerplant to expand the gasses ect.

Having a seperate propellant is the most plausible of the two but it might be unnecessarily complicated.. But to me it seems the better option for added depth... 🙂