The Warp Highway

I still dunno why all the space sims always cut to something like a cutscene when you enter that cool looking warp field tunnel thingie.

You'd think that'd be a cool place to fight with really huge and cheap video card special effects, with bits of your ship getting blown off and tumbling out of the warp tunnel and making shockwaves and all that.

Plus the Theory of Relativity stuff (or the lack of it) always makes me think about what it would mean to car chases, like, where one ship has to chase another one down, in and out of warp.

And we usually think of it all in terms of "Jumps," where you can't steer or correct your course once you are in the warp tunnel, so you need to "scan ahead" on your flight path and calculate a safe trajectory and take things Very Seriously before you start breaking all the rules of physics, which seems kinda funny to me, like we're trying to make up for all the Rules we're breaking by not breaking THAT one Rule, its like some kinda Physics Cheater Guilt Complex thingie heh.

"If you hit a piece of dust at that speed you would die!"

"Oh gimme a break!"

"Now you are just trying to have too much fun!"

Not that that isn't cool, I'm just saying that ain't the only way to do it.

Why couldn't you just treat it as two ships speeding up and slowing down really fast with cool special effects?

"They're right on our tail!"

"I'm gonna take a quick left and drop out of warp, hang on!"

Ex-bouncer's thing was that it would be cooler to think of it as a Warp Highway, with convoys sticking together for safety in numbers and Warp Highwaymen and Warp Onramps and Warp Truck Stops and stuff.

See, with that sorta thing, chase scenes get really interesting, when you can swerve in and out of Warp Traffic to try to avoid getting blasted.

I think that makes sense in terms of organizing space traffic better too, y'know, like, stay the hell out of the way 'cause there's ships flying between these two space beacons at warp speed or something.

And you'd need to organize lanes of incoming and outgoing traffic in any busy star system with Trantorian Planets and stuff anyways, y'know?

Like, you'd need to approach a planet's Southern Hemisphere and Stay Below the Solar Plane if you were incoming, 'cause the northern half is used by outgoing ships.

Or whatever.