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Janson wrote:

The dev's mentioned something about having Nav Buoy's interspersed around the planets, not far away from the atmosphere. They said you can either go to the edge of the zone and hyperspace out (probably with a dialogue, choosing where to go) or use those nav bouys and select your destination in range of those. It was in an interview somewheres...

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I'm hoping that the system for entering and exiting hyperspace allows for some Navigation skill to play a role.

For one thing,themovies make it clear thatcareful navigation isimportant in space travel. ("Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dustin' crops, boy! Without precise calculations, we'd fly right through a star, or bounce too close to a supernova, and that would end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?") So an interesting Navigation feature would be fun for having that "Star Wars" feel.But it could also be an exciting featurepurely on its own merits.

Assume that there's some base accuracy involved intrying to arrive at a particular destination by jumping through hyperspace.If a Navigation skill modifies the accuracy of your jumps, orthe speed with which you can make accurate jumps, then this opens upsome interestingpossibilities:

1. You have onlythe most basic Navigation skill, and your ship has no droid and no additional navigation hardware beyond the basic navicomp. Given a reasonable amount of time (a minute or so), you should be able to plot a course through hyperspace that takes you within, say, 2kilometers of your desired hyperspace exit point.

2.Just before makingyour next jump, you get attacked by NPC pirates. You want to bug out in a hurry, so you select the option for a "Hasty" jump, and about ten seconds later the stars go *whoosh*. Since your Navigation skill is minimal, you're taking a big risk. When you exit hyperspace, you couldexit hyperspace up to50 kilometersaway fromyour desired exit point... including inside a nebula, or an asteroid field, ora star, etc. Oops.

3. Assuming you survived your previous adventure, next time you figure you'll play it safe. When you're ready to jump, you select the option for a "Careful" jump. This winds up taking five minutes (at your current Navigation skill level), but when you exit hyperspace the odds are very good that you'll wind up within a kilometer of your destination, and in a safe position near that location.

4.Eventually youpick up enough XP to train in the fourth skillbox for the Navigation discipline. You're now able to make Hasty jumps without much risk, and Careful jumps only take you a minute while putting you within a few meters of your intended destination. Congratulations! You're now a Navigator that even Chewbacca could respect.

Note that just asMaster-level crafters always have some risk of a critical failure, no matter how good your Navigation skills becomethere's alwayssome smallchance thatyour navicomp cango briefly insane and completely foul up your hyperspace calculations. You might wind up hundreds of kilometers from your intended exit point, or in the middle of a factioned attack fleet, or even in a completely different sector from the one you wanted to go to!

Sound exciting enough?

If the hyperspace system in JtL is something like this, or at least allows it to be something like this in a future patch, I'll be happy.

--Flatfingers

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Randonb wrote:

I'm pretty sure we've heard that you simply travel to the edge of the space zone, but I can't be certain. What do you do when you get there? Select your destination in a pop up window? What if you get there accidentally? Surely you can turn the ship around...

X-Wing Alliance did it in a pretty cool way. There were "nav buoys" in strategic locations, and you had to get into range (pretty darn close,500 meters I think) and just punch the gas. They were preprogrammed with the trajectory calculations for the jump to hyperspace.

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TulasiKid wrote:

The thing that concerns me about hyperspace nav buoys is that they will be camped by people in factional craft who will pick off opposing factional or overt craft as they exit hyperspace. The JTL equivalent of load kills.

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This is something that's concerned me as well; it could be a significant issue.

The one thing that might make it less of a problem is that -- if I remember correctly -- I believe the developers said there'd be multiple hyperspace points to get to different places. If the frequency with which people use specific entry/exit points can be spread out evenly, then camping the exit points might not be too useful.

Otherwise, if certain exit points get used a lot, that could be a problem. We'll just have to see how it works in practice, I guess.

--Flatfingers

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Flatfingers wrote:

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Janson wrote:

The dev's mentioned something about having Nav Buoy's interspersed around the planets, not far away from the atmosphere. They said you can either go to the edge of the zone and hyperspace out (probably with a dialogue, choosing where to go) or use those nav bouys and select your destination in range of those. It was in an interview somewheres...

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I'm hoping that the system for entering and exiting hyperspace allows for some Navigation skill to play a role.

For one thing,themovies make it clear thatcareful navigation isimportant in space travel. ("Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dustin' crops, boy! Without precise calculations, we'd fly right through a star, or bounce too close to a supernova, and that would end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?") So an interesting Navigation feature would be fun for having that "Star Wars" feel.But it could also be an exciting featurepurely on its own merits.

Assume that there's some base accuracy involved intrying to arrive at a particular destination by jumping through hyperspace.If a Navigation skill modifies the accuracy of your jumps, orthe speed with which you can make accurate jumps, then this opens upsome interestingpossibilities:

1. You have onlythe most basic Navigation skill, and your ship has no droid and no additional navigation hardware beyond the basic navicomp. Given a reasonable amount of time (a minute or so), you should be able to plot a course through hyperspace that takes you within, say, 2kilometers of your desired hyperspace exit point.

2.Just before makingyour next jump, you get attacked by NPC pirates. You want to bug out in a hurry, so you select the option for a "Hasty" jump, and about ten seconds later the stars go *whoosh*. Since your Navigation skill is minimal, you're taking a big risk. When you exit hyperspace, you couldexit hyperspace up to50 kilometersaway fromyour desired exit point... including inside a nebula, or an asteroid field, ora star, etc. Oops.

3. Assuming you survived your previous adventure, next time you figure you'll play it safe. When you're ready to jump, you select the option for a "Careful" jump. This winds up taking five minutes (at your current Navigation skill level), but when you exit hyperspace the odds are very good that you'll wind up within a kilometer of your destination, and in a safe position near that location.

4.Eventually youpick up enough XP to train in the fourth skillbox for the Navigation discipline. You're now able to make Hasty jumps without much risk, and Careful jumps only take you a minute while putting you within a few meters of your intended destination. Congratulations! You're now a Navigator that even Chewbacca could respect.

Note that just asMaster-level crafters always have some risk of a critical failure, no matter how good your Navigation skills becomethere's alwayssome smallchance thatyour navicomp cango briefly insane and completely foul up your hyperspace calculations. You might wind up hundreds of kilometers from your intended exit point, or in the middle of a factioned attack fleet, or even in a completely different sector from the one you wanted to go to!

Sound exciting enough?

If the hyperspace system in JtL is something like this, or at least allows it to be something like this in a future patch, I'll be happy.

--Flatfingers

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I like these ideas, Flatfingers. It's similar to what I've been thinking about hyperspace navigation.There should be some element of skill and luck and technological support to it. So, if you have Navigation 4, let's say, you can plot a hyperspace course faster and with a greater degree of accuracy to exit hyperspace as close or as far from a point as you want. If you have a better, undamaged hyperdrive, that should count for something, too.I think it would be cool if we could enter strict three-axis waypoint coordinates to jump from any point to any point, but I know this would create serious issues for the devs as far as deciding what happens when you exit into a solid mass like an asteroid, space station or another ship. The thing that concerns me about hyperspace nav buoys is that they will be camped by people in factional craft who will pick off opposing factional or overt craft as they exit hyperspace. The JTL equivalent of load kills. I also like the idea of critical failures on hyperdrives, and I think it would be cool if Interdictor class destroyers with gravity wells could pull ships out of hyperspace or at least keep them from entering hyperspace within a certain range of the gravity wells.

Tulasi Kid