[Puke]

you could do more with supply usage if weapons did not use supplies. then you could make a ship that only holds enough supplies to move one sector, but when fleeted with other ships it can move further.

I know the warp point damage thing hurts ships warping thru, and the system-center (black hole) damage only hurts ships *stopping* on that sector. how does storm sector damage work? if it only damages ships stopping there, 1MP ships could not move through, but 3 MP ships could move in, jump, and move out without taking damage.

I think the warp point damage is the best way to do this, but it has some real problems. to make a ship capable of passing through, since there is no component that protects ships from natural disasters, you will need lots of armor. enough to make a ship 'unkillable.'

so say you make a large component called a jump-engine or some such, that provides movement and also a few tens of thousands of armor points. to be able to fight these ships, you would have to get rid of normal armor in the game, and make all weapons skip armor. then you could use shields to represent armor, and phased shields to represent shields.

thats all workable, but here are the problems:

you wont actually be able to kill jump ships in any practicle fashion. you will leave them as hollowed out hulks with an in-tact engine. this would not be bad, if not for two things. one, they will continue to cost the owner maintenance. two, they will continue to blocade a planet if left in orbit of it.

as for what this adds to the game, it creates another choice for ship building. you will have to decide between having a ship with long range mobility, or having a ship that devotes all of its resources to combat. imagine if warp engines took up 1/2 or 2/3s of the space of a ship. then ships without warp engines would have double or tripple the mass to devote to armor and weapons. much more formidable in combat, but they cant leave home.

like i said, the ability to ferry these ships is entirely secondary to stoping them from leaving home. they could just be given a strategic movement of one or two, but then they would not have much of a chance of intercepting anything in-system.