Spacelane

Star System Lane Indicator MFD

In the Vanilla game there are three main spacelanes:

• Witchpoint Beacon to the Main Orbital Station
• Witchpoint Beacon to the Sun
• Main Orbital Station to the Sun

The first is used by incoming traders who wish to dock at the Main Orbital Station. Some travel in the other direction. The second is used by visitors who wish to refuel without docking at the Main Orbital Station The third is used by those wishing to refuel who did not do so at the Main Orbital Station

Rock Hermits may be found on any of the three spacelanes. Pirates prey on the shipping there. GalCop Police try to protect the traders from the pirates. Bounty Hunters prey on the pirates.

OXPs

• Star System Lane Indicator MFD (Wesfire, 2019+) tells you if you are on one of the three spacelanes
• Deep Space Pirates (Eric Walch, 2009+) increases the chances of encountering pirates outside the space lanes
• Total patrol OXP (Cmdr McLane, 2008+) increases the chances of encountering a police patrol outside the main space lane (witchpoint/station)
• Sunskimmers OXP (Dr Nil, 2006; Phkb, 2022) adds traffic to the sun-based space-lanes to skim fuel
• Space Crowds (Astrobe, 2017+) increases encounters outside the space lanes in a more realistic fashion
• Fuel Station OXP (Thargoid, 2009+) provides refuelling stations close to the witchpoint beacons
• Gates (Thargoid, 2009+) provides gates which allow one to avoid the space lanes for a price
• Masslock Compensator (Redspear, 2018), Traffic Redistributer (Redspear, 2017) & Variable Masslock (Norby, 2015) each reduce the mass-locking prevalent on the space-lanes
• Configurable Populator (Ngalo, 2016) allow tweaking of the various denizens of the space-lanes
• Population Control (Phkb, 2019) is intended to limit the size of pirate groups in safer systems. The number of police patrols is also increased slightly.
• Space Lane Adherance Bonus (Phkb, 2016) provides an incentive to stay on the space lane

Links

• Piracy
• Pirates (2011)

• Why do NPC's stick to the spacelanes and become pirate-fodder? How to persuade players to do the same?

Difficulty for new players (2013)

How Does Avoiding the Spacelanes Break Gameplay? (2017)

• Why do NPC's make their way out through pirate-infested space-lanes to the Witchpoint beacon and then jump from there? Why not do so from the much safer aegis of the orbital station?

Three attempts to answer:

(Newbie) Moving to a new system. BB Thread (2021)

Ideally Imperfect OOniverse: Calibrated Hyperspace jumps. BB Thread (2017-8)

Long gone Commander checking in,.... BB Thread (2008)