Hyperdrives and Stargates (IRC remix)

[Suicide Junkie]

Consider a hyperdrive component for ships and a stargate component for bases.

This would be given either a unique name or a unique AI Tag ability, whichever is more convenient.

Each turn a script will run and search for spaceobjects with hyperdrives or stargates.
If the name of the parent object contains a special substring: "([{######}])" where the # are arbitrary digits, then the player is attempting to dial the gate or activate the hyperdrive.
An energy cost will be subtracted from the player's reserves, and the script will open a warppoint to the appropriate destination if possible.

For Hyperdrives, the numbers would indicate which direction and how far the warppoint destination will be. It will then take only 1 move point to traverse the warppoint and effectively increase the speed of the ship.

If ships are limited to speed 1 as "sublight", hyperdrives would need a range of only 3 to 5 to be hugely effective. Cloaked ships could use hyperdrives, but it would be obvious that something happened when a warppoint opens and closes as the cloaked ship transits.

For stargates, the numbers would indicate the destination's map coordinates (which system and which hex). If a stargate exists in that destination hex, and a stargate warppoint is not already present in either hex, then a new warppoint will be opened. Otherwise an appropriate error message can be posted to the log (incoming wormhole, destination not available, destination busy, etc).

Hyperdrive type warppoints would always be closed on the following turn, while stargate type warppoints could be given a 50% chance of closing each month.

Stargates could also be modelled as units, and thus be placed in planetary cargo, or loaded on to ships and flown around. The parent object's name would be searched for the dial code each month (Option; only functions if the parent object is a planet)
Build one, and try to dial the enemy homeworld from your military base, or build two, and shuffle military forces between your borders.