XD this is what I get for posting from my phone.

The idea behind the daisy chain is that it reduces the wormhole a given jump gate module is attached to, to a point which can be linked with adjacent points, either in the same system or on the other end of the wormhole.

Suppose a system has 2 wormholes. if only one has a DC module, it's useless. if both have a DC module than you can enter one and come out the other in the same system. The idea of space gets a bit wonky though, because a system where the wormholes are fitted with DC modules, for a ship that can use them, the other wormholes are closer than the nearest planet. (I suppose that this intrasystem jump would be just as expensive as an intersystem jump, draining both wormholes by the mass of the ship)

If though you have two DC in one system and an adjacent system has two DCM's, you can enter any of the 4 and come out in any other of the 4, however, if you jump from A to D, you would have made 3 jumps in the time it takes to get through 1. You are gaining speed for additional WH energy. (upgrades to the DC modules could make this expenditure more efficient, perhaps even cheaper than doing it manually)

Does that explain it?

So you basically bind multiple wormholes together to a single any-to-any connection?

Sounds fun ^.^

Provided you can afford the WH energy, yes. I suspect that in the busier systems, the recharge rate would be insufficient to handle the traffic, so they would need to import energy from quiet systems... Which I suppose would in a massive empire place fundamental limits as to how big and productive they could grow, as they will need to import energy from further and further away, or have whole systems dedicated to WHE production. Though maybe with ever increasingly efficient DC modules, the empires could expand that much further.

An additional thought is that the inter-cluster wormholes would be regular wormholes with extremely low recharge rates, fairly prone to collapse

Flatfingers wrote:Oh, lordy. So in addition to all the challenges of managing an expanse of space, I would also have to buy and monitor enough ships to patrol all of my territory to prevent an orphan generator ship from establishing a hole anywhere?

To address this one objection to the idea, since it's the easiest of the lot to resolve, I wrote:

ThymineC wrote:Stations will be stationary and therefore can't just be moved arbitrarily around at the owner's whim. Ships may have to induce pseudo-gravity wells like in EVE (or something similar) for the jump drive to lock onto - this may involve anchoring to generate a sufficient amount of power required to sustain this. This can also cause the ship to light up like a beacon.

So spotting an orphan wormhole ship or station should not be very difficult.

Okay, well I've read through the thread more thoroughly and have a few extra suggestions to throw out. The general idea I want to offer is that the higher the level of gameplay involved, the shorter the distances that jumpdrives can be practically used over.

For the purposes of this discussion, I will be using the terminology Cornflakes established:

Cornflakes wrote: jumpgate: static, artificial connection
jumphole: static, natural connection
jumpdrive: mobile, artificial connection
wormhole: the actual connection, established by either of the 3 possibilities

The major issue right now is that jumpdrives destroy the potential for strategic gameplay. Hyperion's daisychain idea seems like it would exacerbate this. The possibility was suggested earlier that there would be trade-offs involved in the establishment of jumpdrive connections - the longer the distance that the jumpdrive connection (the wormhole) spans across, the lower its capability of transporting matter, and this can be represented by making it require more power to sustain a jumpdrive at a given lavel of charge. This relationship between required power, connection distance and capability of transferring matter is similar to the one I suggest in The Transporter for transfer units.

In addition to this, I would like to continue on with the idea that Josh and I proposed for "orphan wormholes" - in order to utilise a jumpdrive, you need a second endpoint. This can be either a jumpgate, a jumphole or a second ship with a jumpdrive. As I suggested previously, ships with jumpdrives need to "anchor" themselves to generate enough power to sustain a sufficiently-charged wormhole, and this will make them immobile and cause them to show up like beacons.

I very much like Gazz's idea here:

Gazz wrote:IMO, a jumpgate is a wormhole... but a special breed of wormhole.
It's short range (in interstellar terms) and gets you to the next system / sector.
It has always been there but the "construction" that humans add around it stabilises it and keeps it in an "always on" state.

This seems to unify and explain everything nicely: jumpholes are naturally occurring phenomena and wormholes can link between these, but the mouths of wormholes can also be generated artificially - these are the "orphans" generated by jump-drives. Jump-drive modules can be equipped by either ships and stations, and when they are utilised by stations the entire construct becomes a jumpgate. As I wrote above, the orphans generated by jump-drives can be paired with any other types of wormhole mouths, and when this happens a wormhole is formed. As Gazz writes, the wormhole mouth doesn't need to be generated artificially by a jump-drive, and stations can be just as well established around naturally occuring jumpholes to artificially sustain them.

In this sense, agents and corporations can develop the transport infrastructure of a system by building stations around naturally occurring jumpholes, or by artificially generating orphan wormholes using jumpdrive modules which are then sustained using stations as well and pairing them with wormhole mouths in other systems.

Strategic Level
Getting back to the original issue, at the strategic level you're likely going to be dealing with large fleets and therefore will need to transport a great deal of mass across a given distance. If wormhole stability is negatively correlated with connection distance, then you may only be able to sustain a connection between two nearby systems:

1. You send a jumpdrive ship into the next system through conventional means and get it to establish an orphan wormhole mouth.
2. You keep a jumpdrive ship with your fleet and use it to establish an orphan wormhole mouth, and pair it with the other one.
3. You send your ships through the local mouth to the remote mouth in the next system.

If the attacker manages to establish the remote mouth without it being noticed, he has the advantage in that he can circumvent any defences that the defender might have established around the conventional entry/exit points to the system i.e. the already established jumpholes or jumpgates. However, the jumpdrive-equipped ship would have been quite noticeable as it established the remote orphan mouth, and so the defender has a fair chance to notice what's happening. The defender can do a few things in this situation:

• He can attack the jump-drive equipped ship in an attempt to destroy the remote wormhole mouth before you send your own ships through it.
• He can keep his own forces just outside of your JD-equipped ship's sensor range and counter-ambush you when you send your own forces through. Launching explosive and general area-of-effect weaponry centred at the wormhole mouth would be a very useful tactic for the defender in this case.
• He can hack the JD-equipped ship to make it sustain the wormhole mouth and then send his own forces through the wormhole to attack your forces in your own system. Wormholes are bidirectional channels and generating one can make you just as vulnerable as your enemy.

However, the point is that the more ships you plan to send through, the shorter the connection can practically be. A given wormhole can only support so many ships over so long a distance, and to boost either will require more energy. However, we can make the energy requirement exponential so that it takes more energy to boost the capacity of a wormhole from 2X to 3X than it does from X to 2X, or the same but with connection length. This ensures that even at the later stages of play, strategic gameplay is still not compromised.

An obvious objection is then to say, "Why can't your forces simply generate more wormholes using more jump-drive ships?". This issue can be resolved if we make the power cost of sustaining a wormhole dependent upon the number of other active wormholes in the system. In System Population Caps, I suggest the possibility that there is an upper cap on the number of H-Extractors that can be supported within any one system:

ThymineC wrote:Here's what I'm considering: you can only maintain a certain number of "source points" (points at which energy is being extracted from the vacuum of space by a Heisenberg extractor) in a system at any one time. Otherwise, it can cause Bad Things™ to happen. Every additional open source point within a volume of space causes disturbance of some kind to the space-time manifold and too many might cause all the source points to collapse or other bad things to happen.

I see wormholes as being based on similar principles to the H-Extractor, and therefore I believe that there is an upper cap on the number of wormholes that can be supported with any one system, with each additional wormhole causing greater disturbance to the surrounding area of space, making all wormholes require more power to sustain. This also has the effect of limiting the number of jumpgates that can be established in a given system, so the player and other agents can't do something silly like build 50 of them within a single one.

It will be exponentially more expensive to "boost" any given wormholes. It will be exponentially more expensive to sustain an increasing number of wormholes within a system. There are only a finite number of systems that lie a sufficiently short distance from the system you might want your forces to invade. Therefore you are limited in the degree to which you can utilise jumpdrives to ferry whole fleets about the galaxy, no matter how powerful you may (plausibly) become.

Interestingly, this mechanic may not only be used as a limitation but also a tactic in which one force generates and sustains many wormholes to prevent other forces for generating them as well. It may also be possible for a faction to effectively blockade a system by generating enough wormholes to reduce the capabilities of the pre-existing jumpholes/jumpgates that constitute the conventional entry/exit points of the system. However, this is likely a very energy-expensive way of going about it, and it probably makes more sense for forces to blockade systems in a more conventional way unless they have a means of generating a lot of energy within the blockaded system.

Operational Level
Jumpdrives can utilised over longer distances if they don't need to shift as much mass. For smaller forces, like small fleets or wings, this can be a practical way of getting your ships around a little faster. This should not diminish strategic-level play, as these forces shouldn't be large enough to be able to conquer well-defended systems, and will need to be complemented by larger forces which can if this is what the player wants to do.

I'm primarily interested in how jumpdrives will be utilised for commercial and industrial purposes at this level, however. I would imagine that one of the economies of scale that a corporation might develop once they have the capital to do so is create jumpdrive-equipped stations (or position jump-drive equipped ships) at regular intervals along the trade routes they most often use, and allow jump-drive equipped ships to "skip" along these. This should reduce travel time significantly, and hence be a worthwhile investment for businesses. I imagine that businesses would be using large haulers that are carrying lots of goods on each trip, and so they would not be able to jump very large distances using this approach - but still larger than entire fleets would.

Tactical Level
At this level, you have relatively small, individual ships that use jumpdrives to lock them on to relatively distant pre-established wormhole mouths - jumpgates or jumpholes in distant systems, most likely. I see this being most commonly used for communication couriers, which ferry orders and status updates through space where no information infrastructure has been established, as I propose in Bad News Messages Network?; and science/exploration vessels, which allow the player to quickly traverse the galaxy in a relatively small ship, if that is what they want to do.

In this case, the amount of mass that needs to be transited is small, so a jumpdrive can sustain a decent connection with a relatively far away second endpoint.

So does this resolve any of the issues?

A good, constructive discussion! In most other forums, we would have been questioning each others' parentage and ban-hammered into paste by now.

Without minimizing the effort that everyone has put into their thoughts -- and I've carefully read them all -- at this point I think I can summarize my position with a couple of points.

1. I remain opposed to artificial jumphole generators. The mitigating mechanic proposed for these -- an extremely noticeable sensor signal while the endpoint is being generated -- is a reasonable suggestion. But it seems to me that if such a signal is bright enough to be easily detectable, why wouldn't I instantly send an attack fleet there before the generator ship that's trying to create an endpoint in my territory has a chance to finish building it?

Conversely, if the signal is made more subtle, then -- unless I spend the time and money to build massive numbers of picket ships -- we're back to enemy fleets pretty much being able to jump into any part of any of my territory without me knowing about it and being able to plan for it. Again, that might seem like fun for players who prefer a universe in which the attacker is heavily favored by physics. I don't believe all players of LT will enjoy being beaten up at any random moment, though.

Note: It might appear that this objection means I also have to object to jumpdrives. I don't think so; the idea seems fine as long as what jumpdrives do is let an equipped ship enter a jumphole (am I using this terminology correctly? sigh) from a much greater distance away in normal space than a ship not so equipped.

2. I think I might see a compromise with respect to the notion of player techs that modify jumpgate charging. (Well, it looks like a compromise to me; we'll see. )

It's this: a technology can be researched (at considerable cost) that leads to a device called a jumphole charge recycler. When built (at even greater cost) and fitted to a jumpgate, it significantly reduces the amount of charge taken from a jumphole when a ship goes through.

Here's the catch: there has to be one on both jumpgate endpoints.

What this means is that you can, if you're prepared to pay for it, upgrade the movement infrastructure of your multi-system territory. By reducing charge costs, movement between systems that are part of your territory can be reduced significantly, allowing more traffic -- of whatever kind, military, commercial, etc. -- to pass through per unit time. In additional to enhancing commerce, this would allow military fleets to move pretty quickly to any system at the edge of your controlled territory.

What it would not do is let you move massive fleets immediately into any system you don't control. For those, the regular rules affecting jumphole/jumpgate charge capacity and recharge rate apply. (Of course, if you can persuade an adjacent empire to let you build a charge recycler on the jumpgate in their territory, go for it.)

The overall effect would be to let players (human or NPC) increase the movement rate within their borders, but movement rates between territories would remain limited, giving defenders a chance to observe fleet buildups on the other side of a wormhole and prepare strategic plans.

Does this help?

Flatfingers wrote:I remain opposed to artificial jumphole generators. The mitigating mechanic proposed for these -- an extremely noticeable sensor signal while the endpoint is being generated -- is a reasonable suggestion. But it seems to me that if such a signal is bright enough to be easily detectable, why wouldn't I instantly send an attack fleet there before the generator ship that's trying to create an endpoint in my territory has a chance to finish building it?

Conversely, if the signal is made more subtle, then -- unless I spend the time and money to build massive numbers of picket ships -- we're back to enemy fleets pretty much being able to jump into any part of any of my territory without me knowing about it and being able to plan for it. Again, that might seem like fun for players who prefer a universe in which the attacker is heavily favored by physics. I don't believe all players of LT will enjoy being beaten up at any random moment, though.

By "it shines up like a beacon", I mean within reason; there's a good chance you'll spot the orphan wormhole mouth being generated if you're vigilant, constructed intel outposts in the right places, have a few patrols about, etc. It's not guaranteed though, and if you fail then the attacker has the advantage. I believe that the system can be balanced in such a way that if the defender gives it enough thought, he can thwart most attempts to generate backdoors within his systems, but if the attacker gives the matter enough thought, he may be able to still get around that. The system would likely be biased in favour of the defender, however, since the attacker would need to sneak into the system through conventional entry/exit points and get to the target location all without being noticed. If he's noticed, you will be alerted and you can react to the event as appropriate.

A similar kind of discussion arose around the time I was proposing hacking mechanics and we were discussing things like attacker/defender bias for hacking module-equipped pirates that were sneaking up on miners, I believe.

Flatfingers wrote:I think I might see a compromise with respect to the notion of player techs that modify jumpgate charging. (Well, it looks like a compromise to me; we'll see. )

It's this: a technology can be researched (at considerable cost) that leads to a device called a jumphole charge recycler. When built (at even greater cost) and fitted to a jumpgate, it significantly reduces the amount of charge taken from a jumphole when a ship goes through.

Here's the catch: there has to be one on both jumpgate endpoints.

What this means is that you can, if you're prepared to pay for it, upgrade the movement infrastructure of your multi-system territory. By reducing charge costs, movement between systems that are part of your territory can be reduced significantly, allowing more traffic -- of whatever kind, military, commercial, etc. -- to pass through per unit time. In additional to enhancing commerce, this would allow military fleets to move pretty quickly to any system at the edge of your controlled territory.

What it would not do is let you move massive fleets immediately into any system you don't control. For those, the regular rules affecting jumphole/jumpgate charge capacity and recharge rate apply. (Of course, if you can persuade another empire to let you build a charge recycler on the jumpgate in their territory, go for it.)

The overall effect would be to let players (human or NPC) increase the movement rate within their borders, but movement rates between territories would remain limited, giving defenders a chance to observe fleet buildups on the other side of a wormhole and prepare strategic plans.

If this is what you want, then Hyperion's daisy-chain idea is already ideal for this, as he was saying to me in IRC.

However, in games like Sins of a Solar Empire and Endless Space, part of the strategic value of the game I think came from the player not being able to instantly reshuffle their forces around that quickly within even their own territory, because this allowed for the enemy to launch forces at a system the player controls. If the player didn't anticipate this and their main forces are located elsewhere, it will take time for them to relocate their forces to counter the attack, during which the enemy can capture some of the player's systems. In future, the player may try to think of strategies to prevent that from happening. If you make it easy for players in Limit Theory to reshuffle their forces within their own territory this way, I think you potentially eliminate some forms of strategic gameplay.

Edit: On further consideration, I like the idea. I think it could work nicer than the daisy-chain idea because it shouldn't allow for immediate reshuffling, but I'm not sure, since the daisy-chain approach can be balanced by making the energy cost such that you can never reshuffle forces around your empire too quickly. So that would be pretty nice as well. Either idea would work for me, I guess.

ThymineC wrote:

Flatfingers wrote:a technology can be researched (at considerable cost) that leads to a device called a jumphole charge recycler. When built (at even greater cost) and fitted to a jumpgate, it significantly reduces the amount of charge taken from a jumphole when a ship goes through. Here's the catch: there has to be one on both jumpgate endpoints.
...
The overall effect would be to let players (human or NPC) increase the movement rate within their borders, but movement rates between territories would remain limited, giving defenders a chance to observe fleet buildups on the other side of a wormhole and prepare strategic plans.

If this is what you want, then Hyperion's daisy-chain idea is already ideal for this, as he was saying to me in IRC.

My suggestion was inspired in part by Hyperion's daisy-chain idea, and I should have said so. Thanks for the credit reminder.

Flatfingers wrote:

ThymineC wrote:

Flatfingers wrote:a technology can be researched (at considerable cost) that leads to a device called a jumphole charge recycler. When built (at even greater cost) and fitted to a jumpgate, it significantly reduces the amount of charge taken from a jumphole when a ship goes through. Here's the catch: there has to be one on both jumpgate endpoints.
...
The overall effect would be to let players (human or NPC) increase the movement rate within their borders, but movement rates between territories would remain limited, giving defenders a chance to observe fleet buildups on the other side of a wormhole and prepare strategic plans.

If this is what you want, then Hyperion's daisy-chain idea is already ideal for this, as he was saying to me in IRC.

My suggestion was inspired in part by Hyperion's daisy-chain idea, and I should have said so. Thanks for the credit reminder.

No problem. Edited my post.

Edited it again.

One of the other things we have to keep in mind (to help alleviate the issue of "suddenly, ships!") is how realistically are you going to go out in the middle of nowhere to start up your operations without at least some form of AWACs?

Here's how I imagine gameplay would progress;

1) Player starts out, wants to create some sort of operation. They would likely choose something close by civilization since the liklihood of pirates would be non-existent. Think more along the lines of Liberty space in Freelancer. You would probably make your living there until you had enough assets to venture away from 'mother' and start on your own.

2) Player eventually moves closer to the frontier, with having assets that would allow them to defend a small outpost until they were able to build up a base. Since they aren't way out there, the chance of pirates is increased, but not to the point where one would have to worry about it constantly. With the player's built up assets, it would also make the liklihood of being a random smudge on someone's windshield less likely. Think more along the lines of some of the more inner systems closer to Liberty in Freelancer, but actually in something like Rheinland or Kusari.

3) The player has built up enough assets where venturing into deep space is fine. They have enough where they can fight off any pirate attacks and have enough of a force that pirates won't want to mess with willy-nilly in case they fear repercussions.

Of course, this is under a couple realizations;
A) If a pirate fleet wants to take it's killer stack somewhere, it will, regardless of how 'protected' the system you currently are in. You could be starting out in a majorly developed system, but if the AI wanted to wipe you, you wouldn't be able to stop it anyways.

B) This does not solve the issue of surprise attacks. Yeah, you could have ships suddenly, but if they had enough force, you wouldn't have been able to defend against them even with advance warning.

This is no way meant to make excuses for jumpdrive-to-anywhere. Just some more food for thought.

I *do* really like the idea of the daisy chain. Sniffing a frequency would be yet another purpose for an AWACs ship.

Flatfingers wrote:1. I remain opposed to artificial jumphole generators. The mitigating mechanic proposed for these -- an extremely noticeable sensor signal while the endpoint is being generated -- is a reasonable suggestion. But it seems to me that if such a signal is bright enough to be easily detectable, why wouldn't I instantly send an attack fleet there before the generator ship that's trying to create an endpoint in my territory has a chance to finish building it?

If I was generating this wormhole, I would initiate the generation of the first... so you send out your attack fleet... then generate the real one while your fleet is on the other side of the sector.
It's not a very good mitigating factor.

Note: It might appear that this objection means I also have to object to jumpdrives. I don't think so; the idea seems fine as long as what jumpdrives do is let an equipped ship enter a jumphole (am I using this terminology correctly? sigh) from a much greater distance away in normal space than a ship not so equipped.

Sounds good.
It aids travel instead of outright removing travel from the game.



Orphan wormholes

So far these seem to be used as an excuse to create anywhere-to-anywhere jumpdrives.
The problem with having an "orphan" wormhole is that it is unlikely that it has stayed orphan forever.
Someone was bound to stumble over it eventually.

So... I would make them hard to detect... and mobile.
They would still be "classic" wormholes. Two connected points and not stargates that are connected to an infinite number of possible destinations.

Detection:
Such a wormhole jumps around the sector at an erratic interval.
It could also hop to another sector.
When it does, it also changes it's "frequency".

There is no one-size-fits-all wormhole scanner.
Finding such a wormhole is a "science mission". The eggheads in your ship's science module get to earn their pay for once.
(there is very little use for these in normal gameplay =)

There may be more than one such wormhole in a sector but you won't know how many. If a "search project" fails, it may just not have found the one wormhole that is there. Or the three that are there.

However... if and when you find one, you have a temporary side road to... somewhere.
If you use this orphan wormhole - using your jumpdrive - you find out where it leads.

Only you know the frequency of this connection. Only you can find and use it.
No sector in the universe would be completely safe... but you don't get to pick exactly where you find a route to.

If someone uses such a thing, it could generate a jump anomaly that is detectable in the entire sector.
So you know where such a hidden wormhole is... but not how to use it.
You could put up a few scouts and some defenses, though, if this is your "home system".

This would mix up the static routes through the universe once in a while... if someone sells you the frequencies to such side roads or you find them yourself.

Such a connection might remain up for a day or a week but eventually it vanishes again.

This could also open up new methods of warfare, think building a ship with good enough thermal plating to get to the convective zone of a neighboring star, open up a wormhole, and fire blazing star bits at the colony on a planet owned by a hostile faction. That would be fun to see; not that it could ever really make it into LT 1.

Gazz wrote:

Flatfingers wrote:1. I remain opposed to artificial jumphole generators. The mitigating mechanic proposed for these -- an extremely noticeable sensor signal while the endpoint is being generated -- is a reasonable suggestion. But it seems to me that if such a signal is bright enough to be easily detectable, why wouldn't I instantly send an attack fleet there before the generator ship that's trying to create an endpoint in my territory has a chance to finish building it?

If I was generating this wormhole, I would initiate the generation of the first... so you send out your attack fleet... then generate the real one while your fleet is on the other side of the sector.
It's not a very good mitigating factor.

How does this differ from any other feint attack tactic involving other proposed gameplay mechanisms, such as using a relatively cheap fleet of decoy drones to create the impression of a powerful force being used to attack one system, drawing enemy forces there, while attacking with a real fleet elsewhere?

Generating an orphan wormhole mouth capable of ferrying an entire fleet would take a fair amount of time and a great deal of energy. This entails two things: that if I spot an enemy ship generating an orphan wormhole mouth in its early stages, I have a reasonable amount of time to react; and that it takes a lot of resources or money to create/buy a ship that is capable of sustaining a sufficiently-charged orphan wormhole mouth - these ships won't be small or cheap, and if the attacker wishes to use one to cross into the defender's territory, they'd be risking a valuable and expensive member of their fleet.

As well as this, Hyperion's DCMs or Flatfinger's JCRs would make it pretty easy for a defender to relocate his forces about within his own territory if he made the necessary investments.

Until the orphan is generated, the only immediate threat I have to deal with is the JD-equipped ship itself. By discovering it, the defender immediately gains the advantage, since they only need to neutralise a single, immobile and largely vulnerable ship unless it manages to establish the wormhole first. A small fleet of fast and relatively well-armed ships should be able to handle it.

So assuming that I've invested sufficiently enough in intel infrastructure or have established enough patrols in my region to notice any foreign orphan wormhole mouths being generated in them. in response to a situation that you propose, this is how I would act:

• You send an expensive JD-equipped ship into System A, a system that I control, through conventional pre-established jumpholes/jumpgates that I haven't been monitoring well. You manage to evade my notice. You fly your ship to the position you want to establish an orphan at. You begin the generation of that orphan.
• However, one of my intel stations in the system notices the formation of a foreign orphan wormhole in the system. The worker NPC I've set to manage that station alerts his superior, who alerts his superior in turn and so on all the way up the chain until it reaches me. I now know that an enemy orphan wormhole is being generated within System A. I could send a few fast ships to destroy your JD-equipped one, but I plan to ambush your forces as they enter instead, using the orphan as a chokepoint. Not expecting this to be a feign, I mobilise all my forces and utilise the DC/JCR network to quickly get my forces to that system.
• Meanwhile, you lie outside an undefended System B, somewhere well away from A with your real force. You again send an expensive JD-equipped vessel into the system which I don't notice. You position it as before and begin generating the orphan.
• Again, I notice the generation of this second orphan. I've expended a lot of the energy of the daisy-chain network (if using that) and have insufficient power to relocate the majority of my forces to anywhere far away. If using the JCR system, again I cannot relocate most of my forces. My forces are currently positioned near the orphan at System A or are at least not far off. I execute the following:
  
  • I send a few small but well-armed fighters ahead to the orphan at System B, on course to destroy the JD-equipped ship there. If the DC network has spare energy available, I utilise it for this small task force with high priority.
  • I send a few small but well-armed fighters ahead to the orphan at System A, on course to destroy the JD-equipped ship there. If the DC network has spare energy available, I utilise it for this small task force with medium priority.
  • I relocate the rest of my forces to about the mid-point between System A and System B. They largely travel using conventional means, but if I have spare DC network capacity left, I utilise it for my main force with low priority.
  [/color]

I'm close to the first orphan, so it's unlikely it gets generated in time. If it does, it will open and I will notice nothing coming through. I will assume it is a decoy and begin relocating my main forces closer to System B. If the second orphan manages to establish in time, which it could very well do, then you will send your forces through and steamroll over my territory for quite a bit before my main forces catch up, which would be either around the midpoint between the two systems or en route to B at that point.

If the attacker manages to generate an orphan unnoticed, he has the advantage. If the defender notices the generation of an orphan in his territory and the attacker doesn't notice that the defender notices, the defender has the advantage. If the defender notices the orphan and the attacker notices that the defender notices the orphan, then the attacker will likely try to retreat and try a different tactic.

(Edit)
On another note, I was thinking about my previous suggestion that couriers/exploration/science vessels utilising jump-drives should be able to jump quite long distances and therefore skip a few systems at a time. I think it would be ideal if this only works for jumpholes/jumpgates that the vessel has previously visited (In retrospect I don't think it would work very well if they could latch on to wormhole mouths that they hadn't visited yet).

This would mean that these vessels would need to explore unknown space one system at a time using conventional means, but could return to systems within explored space and jump around within it much faster. This would effectively operate quite similarly to Fatmop's excellent deployable jump beacon proposal (without the deployable jump beacon part).

in light of this furious jumpdrive denying:

do we really want to be able to sit out ANY treat by fortifying single points and nothing can ever get a way around that besides finding another entry?
as those possible entries would most likely be of very limited number, and its very possible that ALL of them will be heavily fortified.
in combination with mass-limited wormholes there would be a point of fortification where literally nothing can move through the wormhole without being destroyed on the other side.
period.

so there would be no possibility to enter this area, ever.
except if we allow some way of generating wormholes to an unknown, not pre-fortified point.

this removes the possibility of simply sitting down and do not have to worry about anything enemy.


regarding the argument with "but they can pop up everywhere they like!"
i say: you can do the same!

build a jumpdrive equipped rapid reaction force which jumps into place and fights the intruders when you get attacked.


may we limit WHM to static installations, jumpgates, to make them a bit less concerning.

but by completely removing independent movement AND limiting wormhole capacities we'd produce unbreakable walls of NOPE around militarised systems

Cornflakes_91 wrote:do we really want to be able to sit out ANY treat by fortifying single points and nothing can ever get a way around that besides finding another entry?
as those possible entries would most likely be of very limited number, and its very possible that ALL of them will be heavily fortified.

Nope.
That's why a few posts above I suggested a way to break such "stale mates"... without it becoming super easy to cheese/exploit.

There is no such thing as complete and guaranteed safety. Nor should there be.
I'm campaigning for a defensive strategy to be possible - not perfect. Perfect systems are bad. Always.

However, that implies that the offensive strategy (that you propose) can not be the first order optimal strategy.
Any wormhole-whatever-technology that allows you to pick the exact destination of a multi-system jump makes defense nearly impossible because it negates depth. There is no trading ground for time, no falling back to regroup, nothing but one cataclysmic battle. Win or lose. Toss a coin. There is neither space nor time to do any strategic stuff.


The knowledge about "hidden" wormholes like that would be a valuable commodity.
And the search for them remains a viable profession because they are of limited duration.
Or do you want your competition in the mass hauling business to know a route that is half the distance? You, too, could cut your operating costs by purchasing the info about this hidden wormhole I found at the low low price of 800 credits!


As for the "hard to cheese" part:
These wormholes would usually cover longer distances so the chance of you discovering one that leads straight into your chosen enemy's backyard would be low.
But such a chance would exist.
Finding a useful shortcut: Absolutely and very possible.
Finding a backdoor to precisely the sector and location you want: Good luck.