Beam Me Up! thoughts and stuff

This page is more of a (disorganized) repository of knowledge. You might be more interested in the IC2 forum discussion thread or the release thread.

Blocks and items

  • Must have: Teleporter. Include CC peripheral capability (but function without it).
  • Interdictor block: dampens signal strength nearby (17x17x17?). Stacks exponentially with other interdictors. Again include CC peripheral capability for frequency setting.
  • Nice to have: Interdictor grenade: dampens signal temporarily. Same range as the block, no frequency setting (dampens all frequencies), decays over time (1 minute?) from 100% dampening.
  • Beacon block: improves signal strength in its block and maybe the six adjacent blocks (extremely short range). Does not connect to EnergyNet, may be charged as a tier 2 energy storage, may be recharged in place by right-clicking with energy crystal. 5 minute operational lifetime.
  • Personal beacon: gives a teleporter a way to track you and slightly improves your signal strength (1/10th of a beacon block?). Is an electric item. Possibly merge with the beacon block?
  • Nice to have: Beacon dart: throw it onto mobs and players to let your teleporter move them around.

Mechanics

  • Lock-on mechanics: a teleporter must "lock onto" a remote location to teleport to or from there.

    • Locks degrade over time (~30 seconds from 100% to below 10%). They also have random signal variation aside from this degradation, including some fairly powerful (but very short-term) spikes or drops in signal quality (gaussian distribution with a mean of 0 and standard deviation of 5% of base signal strength).
    • Signal strength is calculated 20 times per second (every tick).
    • Signal strength is also a function of distance -- shorter range teleports are more likely to succeed perfectly. See below for calculations, under signal mechanics.
    • An imperfect signal strength (< 90%) will have various consequences, starting with short-to-medium term potion effects (e.g. blind, nausea), through imprecise positioning (see below) at < 50%, up to and including a chance to fail to [de/re]materialize at signal strength < 5%.
    • A lock held at < 10% signal for one second will be lost, and the transporter holding it will be forced into a cooldown of 10 seconds, during which it can attempt no new locks. If the lock is broken before the one second timeout, the cooldown is proportionally reduced. The cooldown resets if signal strength rises above 10% while the lock is still active.
    • Imprecise positioning (see above) can naturally refer to arriving in the wrong place, but also to retrieving the wrong items (blocks are teleportable!). Imprecise positioning can be up to 16 blocks on any of the three axes.
    • Related to the above, blocks placed on a teleporter do not prevent it from operating!

  • Signal mechanics: each block of distance adds +1 to necessary signal. The transporter has a 500 base signal and can boost by up to 10% of necessary signal at the cost of 512 EU/t.

    • The beacon block reduces the effective distance by 20%, but will never reduce it below 400 (effective distance is never less than transporter base signal reduced by beacon effectiveness). Only one beacon may ever apply to a given transporter lock. Beacons may thus bring you 100% signal up to 625 blocks away, or 687 blocks with maximum boost (see lock boost mechanic below).
    • Each interdictor ranging on a lock-on point multiplies the effective signal by 1/2, then 2/5, 3/8, 1/4. I picked these numbers out of my ass, but they seem to work. Interdictors past the first four bring no additional benefit.
      • For the worst-case scenario (interdiction-wise), the effective signal is 550 (using maximum boost) and the target signal is only 400 (there is a beacon). Reductions: 275, 110, 41.25, 15. The final interdictor leaves the signal below 5%.
      • Note that lacking a beacon (signal required 500), the third interdictor would have reduced the signal below 10%.
      • Further note that lacking the locking boost (so 500 effective signal), we get 250, 100, 37.5, 13.63 -- the third interdictor is again enough to reduce below 10%, even with a beacon giving us 400 effective distance.
    • The displayed signal strength is a straight division of teleporter signal / necessary signal, clamped to 100% (effective signal strength may be above 100%, e.g. 550/400, but this will not be shown).

  • Energy consumption is relative to distance as well as player inventory "weight" (if a player is being teleported).

    • Teleporter internal energy storage same as an MFSU (include an MFSU in the recipe?).
    • Basically, we want to reach somewhere around 4,500,000 EU for the teleport of a fully-laden player for the maximum distance, including lock-on consumption and holding the lock for a second (two teleport ticks). Of course, this should all be configurable.

    Bah. I was stupid and lost the text I'd typed in here because my session expired while I was editing. I'd come to 100 EU/block, 3D Manhattan Distance + 512 EU/t to maintain lock + between 64 and 10,000 EU/t to counter a poor lock + up to 50,000 EU/t for a signal bonus equal to 10% of the distance (see signal calculation for details) + 1,000 EU/item in inventory of block or player going through == 4,018,240 EU for the maximum distance, maximum lock boost, maximum player weight, one second lock situation.

  • Interdictors (and beacons) are queried for their active state only when a locking attempt is made (nice and CPU cheap).

    • Warning: interdictors will not normally consume or accept energy when their chunk is unloaded. However, dampening will consume power, as the chunk will be loaded by the teleport lock-on attempt. As such, the interdictor can be fairly quickly drained by a sufficiently empowered aggressor. Keep your interdictors and generators chunk loaded to prevent this. It's out of scope for me to do so, and I don't know what your base looks like, anyway.

  • Multiple interdictors covering the same area stack well with each other -- if a single interdictor would reduce the signal from 100% to 50%, a second one will reduce it to less than 25%. Three interdictors can cancel out either beacons or lock boost, and four interdictors will cancel out both (see calculations above, under signal mechanics).

    • Interdictors can accept LV or MV, and interdict an area 17x17x17. They have an internal energy storage of 600,000 EU and consume a steady 4 EU/t while idling.
    • When a teleport lock is being acquired into or out of an interdicted area, all interdictors that can range to that location are queried whether they will attempt to interdict the lock's frequency. If so, they are notified to consume energy, and told how many interdictors responded positively, so they can adjust their power usage.
    • A single interdictor will consume 1 EU/t per interdicted locking attempt, and each additional interdictor that ranges on the same lock attempt increases the power usage by 1 EU/t (so 4 interdictors will all consume 4 EU/t each, plus the 4 EU/t idling == 32 EU/t total power draw). Only four interdictors can range on the same lock attempt.
      • Further calculations: a single interdictor, at max power draw (128 EU/t) can dampen 124 simultaneous teleport locks. Four interdictors will completely break 4 simultaneous locks, consuming 512 EU/t to do so (but remember, broken locks can't be used for teleporting, so this is not as bad as it sounds).

  • Transporters, interdictors, and beacons have a frequency attached.

    • Interdictors will not affect their target frequency.
    • Beacons will only affect their target frequency.
    • Two or more transporters on the same frequency interfere with each other, making it difficult to acquire locks on any given coordinates. The interference is relative to their proximity to each other, so a transporter far enough away won't interfere at all.
    • Two transporters on the same frequency will act as boosters for each other (effective distance reduced by 50%) if the destination is the other transporter. One can assume what's happening is one transporter sends to a halfway point, then the other transporter receives from that halfway point, all of this happening too fast to see. To do this, both transporters use power both for maintaining the target lock and for the actual teleport (Obvious corollary: if one transporter runs out of power, they're not working in tandem anymore).

  • Tentative idea for maximum awesomeness: transporters placed three blocks over another transporter will visually match their "active" state, making this (rather, this) completely awesome and cool. Note that the second transporter really shouldn't do anything at all aside from look pretty.

  • LiquidUU integration could help: use the nice handy protomatter to cut the retrieval energy costs (without affecting transmission cost). Thanks to Khalamov for this idea.