Maybe if someone wants to evacuate a planetary force, they have to beat the besieging force first.  That wouldn't reduce the timers, but would stop people evacuating without some effort.

In terms of growing the game, i think this would be very useful.  As someone who only recently reactivated their account, it is a bit difficult to get to know and start talking to anyone in game.  Changing this and giving people someone to talk to would be great for both mentor and student.

It probably would convince more people so stick it through the tutorial as well.  If they have someone telling them that jump times will get better etc.

Raph
I agree entirely, I just figured this is something that people have raised for a long time, and perhaps another approach would be more up Sir Emi's alley if he's dead set on not changing the timers.

It seems ridiculous in terms of story that ships would take a week to line up and fire.  Perhaps with the new blind jump feature that is quick to plot and would allow captains to escape as long as they were active, it would make sense to reduce the max timer to something to the size of a day, or maybe 12 hrs.

Although then this massively changes the balance of COM to SOS missions; which is already arguably out of whack.

I don't envy Sir Emi his job, especially with all the new modules and gameplay factors that are being introduced.

I've got an idea that doesn't fix the problem, but gives a bit of use to ship combat

Imagine that for a ship to use it's FTL drive, it must requisition all of the ship's power.  Maybe we can make it so that if a ship jumps while another ship is preparing to attack, the escaping ship has to take a volley of weapons fire from the attacking ship, and has to take it with no shields to stop it.  It could perhaps be a set percentage of the attacker's weapons.  Or perhaps each weapon has a percentage chance of hitting the ship as it jumps and it's shields are down.  Perhaps long range weapons are more likely to hit or something like that.

This wouldn't fix the timers issue, but would give some bonus to making someone jump away, and would allow you to do meaningful damage to someone, even if they escape.

I'm from australia, and we have a quite interesting city.  It goes over state lines, and only one of the states uses a daylight saving system.  That means for half the year, crossing the road changes the time of day by an hour.  So you might leave home at 7:30, take half an hour to get there, and barely make it in by 9:00.  And if you make plans with a friend, you have to keep in mind which side of town you're meeting in, because it changes the time you'll get there.

Glad I don't live there!

I think what should happen is these QP modules be available to research for everyone. Just the usage of QP before it's release would allow us to get already made modules a little ahead of time. Hell from what I can see so far, it looks like the only way you will be able to do some of these new missions that are coming like the wormhole stuff is by spending QP to get the mods needed. Which if that is the case is total bullcrap. Most of this we should be able to research.  As for reverse engineering, it is complete crap.  I think once we reverse engineer something it should become available to build without having to reverse engineer the same kind of thing over and over.  I would also think our scientist would be smart enough to remember what they learned from reverse engineering something and then using that knowledge to build bigger and better modules of the same type.

I always thought that the justification for not being able to research things like safety override and creamtorium was to keep them rare, and give people an incentive to do more nest missions.  There's rare loot in most games, and it's not necessarily a bad thing.  But I definitely think all game play areas should be accessible without investing QP.  I'm sure Emi will let us all research the tech for wormholes.  Maybe those modules just make it a little quicker, like the new mining modules?

And Joolz. You're probably right about VIP.  Getting the new modules was a silly spend, but it was fun :p
VIP and nav officer are my next priorities now.

I guess we have to look at it from Emi's perspective.  It gives newer players an incentive to go VIP.  And do be honest, if they do pay to get these modules, at least it's not a huge bonus that non-paying players can't compete with.

If the QP only modules were scaled to be of real benefit to the more senior players,that might widen the gap between new and old players even more.  I'm not too upset with how they are at the moment.

(and we'll see how the planetary fortress mod goes, that might be more useful for senior players...)

I found that the cloning module wasn't a bad investment of my SEA QP.  the slow but steady influx of new men is useful, and it's handy to know if I ever get beaten up enough to lose men, i've got a resupply on ship.

Ditto goes for the power marines.  I put some SEA points in, and the marines are really useful compared to my low level modules.

That said, I don't have enough QP to go for many more modules, + I'm focussing on going VIP, but still, not entirely useless from my perspective...

Well I guess if you compare for instance VIP and the navigation officer, VIP gives you the same benefit, plus so much extra stuff.  But a manufacturing officer must be really important when you get to your stage in the game.

well I think the heading mysterious encounters describes that comment perfectly....

Although I must say, if your ships have on board slides, maybe I'd be willing to accept a little creepy behaviour.  My on board entertainment is limited to convincing the new clones that everyone wears their underwear on the outside 

Is there the ability to set the planetary force, even if it's just a lone miner, as a protected force?  That way it wouldn't be target unless you lost the COM.

(I haven't mined while doing COM's since my timers are too short to make it worthwhile, so I've never tested it)

To change the topic slightly.  I was wondering with these missions, if there's any way to gauge the mineral that's there.  If I get a 100,000,000 dollar deposit, then of course I'm interested in going out, If I can be guaranteed that it's diamond, not tin.

Is there any correlation between higher deposit worth, and higher value minerals?  Or could I just find an absolutely enormous pile of a 200 dollar mineral?

Ah that makes sense.  I focus a lot more on SOS missions than I do on COM's, so I use a lot more medicines than I find.  Guess if you played the opposite way, you might end up stockpiling them up.

Well I'm glad its worthwhile for you, we definitely need more people putting down roots.  Maybe that'd convince Emi to let us trade resources player to player 

This makes it so much more important to have VIP I guess.  Those chained jumps will be an incredible time saver, especially if you don't play often.

Just out of curiosity, do these stations turn a profit?

I've made a fair bit of use out of the station at Jupiter, so I can imagine you're dragging in a bit of money :p