[Space] Space Strategy: FTL Bottlenecks

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

For gaming purposes I would say the important issue is how easy you want to make it to suppress piracy and smuggling., In the Starfire setting piracy is just impractical because the movement of ships is too easily controlled. You can do a bit with gates that are undetectable on one end but it won't last long before the traffic reveals its location and they put a sentry on it.

If I wanted a piracy friendly setting I'd use a warp drive system, not any sort of jump point, because what you really want is a way for ships to be engaged from outside of communications range with law enforcement, and it's fairly practical to tune warp drives for that, just make it possible to intercept while in warp (you could in principle design your jump drive so you can intercept other ships in jump, but it's more work and winds up looking like a warp drive where you can only enter hyperspace in specific locations).