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Dev Post: Mobile Micro Jump Unit and Mobile Scan Inhibitor

January 6, 2014

Hello one and all. Happy New Year and I hope you all had an enjoyable and fulfilling holiday season.

Today we’re updating Singularity with its first version of the patch that will one day become Rubicon 1.1. With it comes working versions of the first two of the 1.1 Mobile Structures that we’re ready to tell you about and start collecting feedback for.

I’m very excited about both of these structures and the new creative options they will open up. Both were intentionally chosen to provide the most open ended gameplay possible.

The versions described in this thread and on SISI are of course still open to change, and it is very likely that a lot of specific stats will be tweaked between now and release. We will also be announcing more structures for 1.1 (and more for later patches) at later points.

Mobile Micro Jump Unit

This baby does pretty much exactly what the name implies. When active, any player within range can use it to launch their ship 100km in the direction that the ship is travelling when it makes use of the structure. It has no cooldown or limit to how many ships can use it at once, but it does have a spoolup time just like the MJD module. This spoolup duration is not modified by skills and on the base structure it is 12s (just like the MJD module would be if you could use it without skills).

The actual Micro Jump effect works exactly the same as the effect from the module. So during the cycle you go full throttle in one direction with a sig radius penalty, it can’t be cancelled, scrams prevent you from jumping, it preserves speed on landing, all that jazz. You only have to be within range of the structure at the start of the micro jump cycle, not at the end. If the structure is destroyed during your spoolup time, you do not get launched. Since the MJU has no cooldown, a player can start the jump cycle from a Micro Jump module or MJU immediately after finishing a previous jump facilitated by a different MJU.

There will be mass restrictions to prevent caps and supercaps from using it, but everything else is fair game. We are currently planning to set the mass restrictions such that freighters can use it but anything larger is blocked. Like I mentioned above, it is usable by everyone and is not restricted to the owner or their corp/fleet. This means you can feel free to use it to try and escape, but your assailant is also free to use it to follow you.

Like the Cynosaural Inhibitor and the Siphon Unit, the MJU is a single use structure. Once dropped it can never be scooped and will stay in space until it either gets blown up or finishes its lifetime.

Right now we have the base version set to 20s module activation time, 48hr lifetime, 25k ehp (mostly structure), 50m3 volume and a build cost of about 1m isk.
Micro Jump spoolup is 12s like an unskilled MJD.

Current activation range is 2500m but we’re already leaning towards expanding that.
It can’t be placed within 20km of gates or stations, within 40km of a starbase tower or within 6km of another MJU.

Please note that the version on SISI at the time of this post has a few known defects, including the lack of a visual model in space and the lack of a working mass restriction.

Mobile Scan Inhibitor

This is the structure that caused the biggest buzz from the recent round of Chaos observation, time for some details that I think will significantly change how you all see it.

This structure prevents anything inside its 30km radius from appearing on either DScan or Probe Scans. The Scan Inhibitor structure itself however does show up on both types of scan and is very easy to probe down. So you can prevent people from knowing what is inside it but you can’t prevent people from knowing that something is there.

Players inside the radius of the structure will be able to scan as normal, except that they won’t get scan results from anything that’s right beside them inside the radius.

Another single use structure, no rescooping.
Current stats are 60s activation time, 2h lifetime, 45k ehp (once again mostly structure), 50m3 volume and a build cost of ~5m isk.
Like I said above, it has an effective radius of 30km, meaning that even if you’re at the edge, someone warping to 0 on it can still catch you fairly easily, especially with inties.
Can’t be deployed within 75km of gates or stations, or within 40km of control towers. Can’t be deployed within 40km of another scan inhibitor so you can overlap them but you can never use one to mask the central structure of another.

Like I said above, we chose these structures as part of our second wave because we think that they have a lot of possibilities for creative use that will enrich the sandbox. We’ll be announcing more as we get closer to 1.1 and the future Rubicon point releases but for now thanks in advance for taking the time to provide us your feedback on these first two structures.

Both of these structures are currently live on SISI with the first public version of Rubicon 1.1. For a general list of changes available on this SISI build please take a look at CCP Habakuk’s thread here. To learn how to set up the SISI test server for yourself and get a sneak peak at the future of EVE, take a look at the guide here.

Thanks!
-Fozzie

[ Original Dev Post ]