In this case you have the opton of placing a ship within 10 hops of Terra, that was the start ship transport range in HHT.

Not sure what that meant cruncher, what I'm talking about is being able to buy or have a scanner at the start of the game so you can have a chance to make it to Stardock. Let's say I get on the game 5 hours after rebang and a team has beat me onto the game. It would be nice to be able to slowly move to stardock slowly while scanning all the way. Too many games are decided by who gets in there first as you well know. At least give the rest of us a chance to know when we should not make a B-line for stardock by scanning along the way for the trap. However to get in the game new and have no one to talk to about what is going on and nothing to do but chance a run for the dock, it's a gamble that only benefits the well structured teams that beat everyone onto the game or the lucky few that are not at work when the game starts.

Sorry Shadow, she was replying to my derail of this thread, which I moved to a thread in general discussions.

I love your idea, although there may not even be a safe path to stardock. A density scanner would keep you alive though.

It's a problem that needs to be addressed, one way or another. Maybe more than one way.

If it's a gold edit can't you make the start ship equiped with a scanner?

Yeah, I think that's a good option to add. The ability to set what hardware certain ships have when you buy them.

Would I be foolish to hold out on releasing the next version of my TWA until these features are implemented? I want to give twarp to a couple cargo ships, and it would be awesome if I could limit them to Type I.

That definitely won't be in the release I'm about to put up. This has been mostly a bug fix release, since a few cooperative players have given me some good bug reports this time around. But after that, I could look over this area for some small and simple, hopefully low-impact features to implement. I'm looking for the time to get the truce mode feature implemented, but that's a tough one to tackle. But I don't have a problem doing small features in the meantime. So I'll try to get this in for the next update.