[Proposal]: Ship and equipment shipping and fitting time

[clintonmead]

Suggestion

The idea in #2548 of time limiting all missions has an exploit, one could take an assassination mission with a tight time limit and high reward, fly in fast ship to near the destination, stop at a shipyard, great your big bulky cruiser, and finish the target off.

This is not a problem really with time limited cargo missions because having a ship than can actually fit the cargo is a limiting factor, but in assassination missions one could just change from a fast scout to a decked out combat ship near the assassination target.

Instead, the game should keep track of where everyone's ships are "stored", and when a player wants to change ships it needs to be "shipped" to the current location, presumably over a certain period of time. The game already does calculations on estimated time to complete cargo missions, so this could be used as the "shipping time".

There's a few options to determine shipping time:

1. Assume the ship is equipped with stock engine/structure/reactor and calculate time based on that.
2. Assume the ship is equipped with the zero cost engine/structure/reactor and calculate shipping time based on that.
3. Calculate shipping time based on the equipment the ship is currently equipped with, falling back to zero cost parts if the ship is not equipped with an engine/structure/reactor.

In the case of 3, there's the question of whether you can change the equipment on a ship currently at another shipyard, or it's stuck with the equipment it last had when leaving that shipyard in another ship.

One could further extend this system by giving equipment locations too. Then equipment will also need to be shipped. Presumably this will happen faster than ships though. Perhaps lighter equipment could be shipped faster than heavier equipment, as it could be loaded onto smaller ships.

Presumably all this shipping will have a nominal cost.

One could get around this just by buying new ships and selling the old ones, negating the shipping price. There's probably three ways to discourage this though:

1. In the case of newly bought ships, have a substantial build/delivery time, that makes it impractical to swap ships by buying a new one except for missions will already quite long timers. Whilst I think that is acceptable for ships, I think it would be annoying for equipment.
2. In the case of newly bought equipment (or even existing equipment), add a "fitting" time. This may depend on module size (and perhaps module type) and discourage just infinite hot swapping.
3. In the case of both equipment and ships, have a reduced sale price: [Proposal]: Option for reduced sale price for outfits/ships #2531. So then one can't just buy new parts wherever they go and just sell the old ones without penalty.

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow this project's Code of Conduct

[bobbens]

So, back in the day, Naev would track where your ships were stored. To ship them over, it wouldn't take time, but credits. Long story short, players hated it, and it was horrible from from a gaming experience point of view. It was eventually removed, and nobody has really missed it since.

While the idea makes sense from a realistic and sort of a limitation point of view. From a gaming experience point of view, it's really painful, and I think that a player switching to a faster ship and then back to a heavy one to do a bounty, is just the way the game is, and I don't think something we should try to discourage as a behaviour. Rather, it is probably good to encourage the player to have different builds for different settings.

I would be quite against bringing back a mechanism like this into Naev. However, I wouldn't be necessary against some sort of framework that could allow something like this to be implemented. I imagine it could be done with an event + ship variables. All that would be needed would be to add support to display additional information in the equipment view, which would have to be implemented in C and given some Lua API. It could probably find other neat uses too in the future.