Cornflakes_91 wrote:
level gating: "you cant go through here until you are this strong"
Maybe. This might be a neat way to implement "hidden" systems - especially if we consider that a wormhole's detectability is tied with its emissions, which in turn is tied with its charge level (which in turn is very low for a D-type wormhole). So they could be difficult to find, perhaps more difficult than U-types.
I think maybe we can just consider these "dormant" wormholes to be S1-endpoints with very low equilibrium charge levels, but I like the idea. They're very hard to detect because they have low charge, and when you do find them, you need a WHM to use them anyway.
Cornflakes_91 wrote:
or they could defend them until they collapse, to prevent permanent resource usage from defending the wormhole.
But the idea is that they cannot possibly find all the U-type endpoints in a system...that is unless you can keep them charged in which case fewer and fewer U-type wormholes collapse and consequently fewer and fewer U-type wormholes form and then they can.
But if you can't charge U-type wormholes, then you can't stop them from collapsing, so you can't stop a bunch of new ones forming. And between the fact that U-type wormholes are hard to detect, impossible to sustain and pretty numerous, it will be next to impossible for a defender to plug all of its holes. A spy, smuggler, etc. only needs to find
one U-type endpoint into a system which is challenging enough, but a defender would need to defend
all of the U-type wormholes to make itself impregnable from attack.
Cornflakes_91 wrote:smugglers wont likely have enough resources to put up an jumpgate installation on the other end
Why would they need to? Only tunnellers need to have WHMs equipped. Smugglers only need to find "back doors" between systems to pass through them and wouldn't need to utilise WHM at all.
I've thought of something that I find more elegant than a current element of my proposal: instead of typing wormhole emissivity/detectability to charge level, tie it to decay rate - the higher the decay rate, the more emissions the wormhole produces (and the easier it is to spot), because those emissions
are the result of the wormhole decaying. This naturally makes J-type wormholes very easy to spot (they have very high decay rates), S-type wormholes pretty easy to spot (they have moderate decay rates countered by moderate natural charge rate) and U-type wormholes pretty hard to spot (they have low decay rates - contrary to earlier where I mistakenly labelled them as having moderate decay rates).
The dormant wormholes Cornflakes proposes would be S1-type endpoints with very low charge and decay rates, so they're hard to spot and when you spot 'em you gotta charge 'em to use 'em.
This doesn't change a lot since I was already thinking that charge levels and decay rates should generally positively correlate, but this seems a lot more elegant than before.