Suggesting a change to gas scooping

Steve

Visually impaired (VI) players really can't scoop gas, and some players don't enjoy scooping gas. Other simply won't bother in its current state because it's perceived as tedious. Although I've learned to do it well, I wouldn't miss gas scooping in its current form if it were changed to accommodate VI players and to make it less tedious.

My suggestion: change the fly-around scooping method to function like a vacuum. Here's how it works. Park your ship in the cloud; no movement required. Activate your scoops. The scoops automatically vacuum up the cloud around the ship. The cloud visibly shrinks as units of gas are gathered (this would be ideal). When done, a message informs the player how many units have been gathered, and whether the scoop ended because the scoops are full or because the cloud was depleted. This is in addition to the per-unit-collected messages we receive now.

In case it isn't clear why this would help VI players, this change would permit a player to SHIP BEACON to discover a cloud at X, Y, then to autopilot to X, Y. No fancy autopilot functions required to fly around to scoop the gas. However, the behavior of despawning the cloud could be a tricky to implement because, if a cloud dissipates right next to the ship, then that might cause the scoop to end, if implemented in such a fashion. Then, what would happen would be that the VI player would not be able to see where to get the rest of the cloud; perhaps SHIP BEACON could still help. I don't have a great suggestion for remedying this.

Corollary changes:

Widescoops (the improved scoop we gain from captaincy) can be changed to accelerate the process.

Mining spec can also accelerate the process. I suggest this because one of the mining spec perks is that the deployed scoops do not impede maneuverability, which, in practice, speeds up scooping right now.

Thoughts? This was brought up on the unofficial Discord earlier today.