Jump Drive Relays? Practical or Not?
It's a thought that keeps appearing in my head but I don't come around to trying it out as I forget about it because when I do open the game, I just focus on my survival world or try and build "good" looking ships.
But basically the thought is that a relay of jump drives with automated defenses and automatic energy collection are laid out like a highway of sorts that a ship just has to connect to, then activate and let the ship jump across a large distance without having to have a jump drive aboard and with the logistics that comes with it, basically acting like star gates so that if I want to visit another place but I don't want the hassle of having to supply a jump drive with power just for travelling, I can do so.
Why would someone do this? Well it sounds cool even if a bit heavy on the material side also it has a bit of merit that you don't have to have a bunch of jump drives on your ship to travel to other locations, you don't have to wait for your jump drives to recharge or divert energy and resources to jump drives, you don't need to have jump drive capability on all ships to travel vast distances meaning you don't need to bring your biggest and largest ships with jump drive capabilities if you want to travel far within a reasonable time, and some other merits.
There are issues like the issue of "why?" because I know that you can have all the resources required just by being on a planet/moon and mining out on asteroids near planets or just operating on the asteroids for all resource requirements, but it could have some use in some challenges, and another issue is that I don't know if the solar power would generate power that far away because as I said I never tested this idea out so it could basically be impossible because the solar panels don't work or aren't working properly because the game is ignoring that grid because it's outside a certain distance or whatever.
This is just a thought as it's a very common trope in many sci-fi settings but no one is really talking about it or at least I haven't seen anybody talking about this way specifically, because everyone seems to talk about mods whenever this kind of thing is needed with jump gates or better jump drives and whatnot.
This also makes the game feel more alive in a sense because wandering hostile factions could stumble upon your relay and you have to get there to fight them off or if the relay is destroyed, you go there to fix it, of course this is if that's how enemy spawning works because I think they only spawn at contract locations, specific trigger locations, or near the player, I'm not 100% sure but I think that's how it works, so maybe this is a dud as well.