Will there be classes for spaceships (exploration vessel, trading, etc.)?
I think it will be kinda cool to have only flagships with ability to travel interstellar distances, carrying smaller ships.
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This is my vision of how FTL will work in thrive. First youāll discover an FTL drive which is massive and takes a ton of energy, so only huge ships can contain them and they will be slow. Then you gradually improve it to make it smaller and faster. FInally youāll be able to have even tiny fighter sized (not that the ship classes will be precisely defined, as not even real world ship classes are very strict) equipped with FTL drives, but even then huge ships can have more powerfull drives, which depending on how well it fits into the game will either be faster or just required to be bigger based on the mass (this is a debuff to huge ships as they will need bigger FTL drivers or they are slower).
So initially you would absolutely have mothership type exploration ships that house smaller landing craft for exploring. But once you develop more you could choose to have small scouting ships with FTL drives.
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Thanks!
Can i ask you, what types of FTL travel will we be able to use (hyperspace, warp, etc.)?
Iām in favour of hyperspace. Not sure how different warping would be. Is it like that you are still physically in the universe and can crash into things?
This is my inspiration for how the hyperdrive would basically work (I havenāt read this in a while so there might be some changes that Iād make): http://stargate.wikia.com/wiki/Hyperdrive (Iāve read a lot of the stargate wiki so when designing scifi stuff I steal draw a lot of inspiration from there)
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I am personally in favour of using sub-light engines(will this be an option?).
About hyperspace, maybe some ideas from Elite:Dangerous can be applied here. 
I guess as with everything you can just not unlock the technology, but it will limit your gameplay. Like not being able to effectively explore your galaxy. Not sure if the other species can be limited to not use FTL (this will be extra work on top of all the other customization that is already somewhat confirmed), so you would get totally destroyed by them if you didnāt bother with FTL and one of them decided to wipe you out. Itās quite early to say how diplomacy etc. would work in the space stage.
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@hhyyrylainen I totally love stargate too and so fully support taking inspiration from there. Also they have great concepts.
The idea of an FTL drive that gets smaller and more power efficient over time is a great one.
@SolarFlare re ship classes I think it fits well with the rest of the game to have a freestyle editor which can make pretty much any ship. So if you put fighter bays on it then itās a carrier, if you put laser cannons on it then itās a gunboat, if you take the engines off then itās a space station etc.
We can just offer the chance to make anything you like by clipping parts together. That would fit with all the other editors and offer loads of options for ships and make each playthrough different.
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This is a little off topic,but this page contains a few realistic types of spacecraft propulsion:
I wonder if it would be possible to build space stations within hyperspace?
It depends on the hyperspace mechanics. If hyperspace is active (it needs power to remain inside) or passive (it needs power to enter and exit) space stations will have different power to defense ratio. It also depends on how velocity factors into hyperspace. Maybe hyperspace is that of constant motion.
These are all questions that will need to be answered with game balance.
I personally think that acceleration gates (warp gates) would be a nice feature to use as well as ships having their own FTL drives. The gates would be more useful for trading and transport routes while the FTL drives on the ships themselves would be best for military and exploratory uses. Gates would use less āfuelā -whatever that may be- but would not have a use for exploration of space at all and would be pretty stupid to use for military uses as the enemy could wait at the other end and know where you would pop up.
Also I think that FTL drives, like most tech, will start out huge and not necessarily get any smaller just more compact (more Umpf per square inch) with flagships simply having the longest range of FTL jump out of any ship class but not be as fast as ships with less massive FTL drives. So flagships would have the distance but fighters could move āshortā distances quicker. I say āshortā even though we are talking of moving Faster Than Light, its relatively short in comparision to the flagshipās range per jump.
I keep saying that the FTL drives have jumps and just for those who donāt know why Iām saying it let me exmplain: FTL drives will most likely overheat very quickly and could leave a ship stranded in empty space with only the normal enigines working if it overheats. To prevent this most FTL drives would only be able to be turned on for a limited amount of time before they would need to cool off no matter how much fuel you have for them. So you could only use 1 unit of fuel before you would have to turn it off even though your ship houses hundreds of units of fuel. As your tech gets better the distance, speed, size, and mass of your FTL drives would also improve.
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I, personally, would go with wormholes, simply for the realism factor. If weāre willing to abstract things a bit, though, I have no gameplay-related quibbles with onboard FTL. Of course, itās all way too far in the future to tell which one will end up being useful.