The auto pathing is what really bothers me and feels very arbitrary to have it in place rather than; "IF storm hits THEN take X damage" along with "IF storm hits AND damage applied in the last X seconds THEN do nothing". This would eliminate rapid stacking of storm procs while removing the super speed auto path which seems like it's in place because the same storm can (I think) proc damage multiple times, which if you were moving slow enough it would kill your fleet very quickly.
Hmm, interesting - what you're describing is similar to how it works, at least as far as damaging storm strikes - those are limited to about one every 5 seconds, on average.
The speed boost (which I think is what you mean by auto-pathing?) can apply more often than that and is tied to the animation of the storm strikes. The direction a strike pushes you in is away from the cell the strike is in, so you can to a degree control which way you go by controlling the angle at which you hit a storm cell. If you head directly into a storm, you either need e-burn on to punch through, or chances are you'll get bounced back out.
The reason the rapid stacking is there is because it's something the player can make use of to speed up travel, especially when paired with e-burn and a certain hullmod. It's also possible to spot glowing cells that are about to break into storm and pass over them so that you benefit from the strike when it happens just behind your fleet.
Eh you can't realy control its direction unless you sit on the front central hit box of a zone, but then you get pushed off centre on other storms. At that point you are at the mercy of RNG. I've been pushed several light years in the wrong direction many times and it's complete bogus. There is no skill to master, only RNGesus. And it does not make a journey quicker because of that.
Btw what I described was to have no knock back mechanic but still include close to the same damage taken when moving through storms. Currently It's not a fun mechanic and it doesn't make sense even in a sci-fi sense.
This is how I look at it:
-If hyperspace travel time is too slow by default, there are plenty of other ways to reduce that which are far more immersive.
-If nebula are suppose to be more like soft-walls then give us a good reason not to ever want to go into them AND give us a accurate nebula map with no cut off sections (ie. no nebula cutting off access to a cluster of stars unless those stars are generated to be somehow unique or worth traversing nebula).
-It's not immersive to see my fleet look like it just did a sudden speed hack for 1 second and then another, and another.
-It does not make sense gameplay wise. It does not look immersive. And it's frustrating watching the game effectively play by itself.
-Did I mention it's not immersive?