Geoff the Medio wrote:I'd be more inclined to add a ship part that lets a ship transfer up to some amount of PP per turn from one supply group to another, which does not consume the ship, or which can generate PP indefinitely (though which will be a bit tricky to balance). These should be less micromanagement-prone than a one-shot injection of PP from a ship which would then be destroyed or require refilling at a different location...
* I definitly agree that refilling an empty supply ship (send it back to origin, refill, send it back to target) would add a lot of micromanagement. I made the ships one-time use because I wanted to prevent that.
* The supply group transfer could be emulated with supply ships, though i agree the interface is klunky
** need to have an auto-unload beacon at the target system in the target supply group
** need to somewhere build supply ships
** set the supply ship production to be recurring
** set the supply ship production to rally the ship to the target system
Maybe the following blueprint for supply-group-transfer would work:
* 'Entangled Nonlocality Teleporter'
* When produced, two ships are created, a sender and a receiver. If both are in your own empire and not supply connected, they transfer PP from the sending ship's supply group to the receiving ship's supply group.
* You can set one of those Focus: 5 PP transfer, 50 PP transfer, 500 PP transfer, which would transfer PP up to minimum of 5/50/500 and the PP available in sending supply group .
* Fluff: By using quantum entanglement, a gateway for energy manipulation can be created. Together with uncertainty correction, this can be used to reconstruct a transformed object at the receiving site. Correction is less than perfect and can only be used for objects with a low complexity (aka PP). Experiments to transfer more complex forms like ship parts or life-forms yield only distorted, unusable objects.
* Pondering the idea of the supply-group-transfer ships in difference to supply ships
** they are less realistic (I know this is is not a design goal), but they are maybe less intuitive
** they can't be stopped by military ships in the way between the source and the target after the connection is established (but maybe that is less micro management and the gain in drama is not high)
** supply ships can be used to store PP for later use
Supply ships and Supply-group-transfer ships both do not address the issue of how many PP should be transferred to production per round in a great way. As much as necessary, but no more? This probably impossible to script.
Would it be possible and beneficial to program something like PP use-on-demand? If yes, such a feature could also be nicely combined with automatically storing excess PP.
Any code or patches in anything posted here is released under the CC and GPL licences in use for the FO project.
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