YellowApple wrote:New Terran Union wrote:Would using a wormhole generator to allow quick transit of a reserve fleet ontoo the battlefield as reinforcements be okay?
I'm personally okay with this to an extent. I do RP with a sprawling network of permanent wormholes (a.k.a. "static superluminal transit nodes"), as well as wormhole-based FTL ("dynamic superluminal transit"). However, I almost always apply Murphy's Law and make sure that something goes wrong if I'm using dynamic wormholes (most commonly, some glitch occurs where the contents of the wormhole-based transmission are pushed either forward or backward in time and/or in a completely different universe, therefore causing substantial delays), and even the static ones will occasionally fail (usually, they'll lose their main power and run on a battery backup, giving enough time for anyone/anything already in them to exit and for the node to be sealed off before power is cut completely). I also implement charging times on these dynamic wormholes - after all, creating two interconnected black holes large enough to not spaghettify a ship and stable enough to not collapse and slice the ship in two and at anywhere near my intended target takes quite a bit of energy.
Another restriction I impose upon myself is accuracy. Since I'd be reaching a destination faster than said destination's light is reaching my original position, there's not only a significant calculation cost as I have to precisely compute where the star I'm seeing now is located several hundred/thousand/million/billion years from when the light was first transmitted, but also the unlikelihood of actually reaching that position accurately via line-of-sight alone. Building a static node works around this issue, but at the cost of getting the necessary materials and engineering brainpower to that distant location, which takes quite a bit of time to do.
Basically, this would all depend on who you're RPing with; while I'm totally cool with it, others will, as Balrogga pointed out, consider it a dick move to just warp in a bunch of ships out of nowhere. My recommendation is that - if you do go this route - definitely impose some limitations and apply the Code of Bro.
More or less what YellowApple said. I'd be mostly OK with it, but it would need to be RPed well (ie with actual downsides and difficulties of using it that show up in actual space combat). My own spacedrives are pseudowormhole-based, with "theoretical" instantaneous transit anywhere within their range of operations. The weakness I RP in the system is twofold: imprecision and jump lag time. There's a chance, which increases as you generate longer Real Space transits, that you might not end up exactly where you intend. Jump coordinate calculation is extremely finicky; one of the ship's AI's main jobs is to deal with it, and we still require manual confirmation that we're in the right system for transstellar jumps. Precise short-hop jumps are usually more trouble co calculate than they're worth. The other penalty is what I call jump lag. It takes time for the system to recharge between jumps (which again increases with Real Space transit length), during which the ship is basically immobilised because this is the only engine we have except for docking thrusters. In short; I'm not going to be RPing tactical FTL without serious tactical penalties imposed on myself for doing so. It's only fair. And I probably won't be doing so at all.