The new travel options sound nice, but im worried about the Slipstream mechanics, the ability create a surge, add a wormhole and a gate making the game have too much fast travel options and hence leading to a lack of loss of scale. (this looks like going from Morrowind fasttravel to Skyrim fasttravel)
I see the Inversed Slipstream mechanics causing 4 things.
1. It makes the trick of perfectly navegating the border of a slip stream going in the opposite directio to evade storms obsolete, hence reducing the fun of traveling.
2. Will prevent the player from having to take alternate routes and making the space feel too friendly and accomodating, given that the sector is supposed to feel hostile.
3. Makes escaping from persuing fleets too easy, since I doubt the AI will be smart enough to follow a player entering a stream with reversed polarity.
4. enables worlds that have eternal slipstream radiating outwards from them to be a thing. So a world you can see but only visit once you unlocked the skill. (hey at leasst one positive)
There is a mod similar to the surge mechanic called something like "hyperspace jump", which you unlock after defeating a Radiant. The consequence of the mod was that I essentially stopped using anything else besides it for traveling.(I ended up removing it from my games) While the mod didnt have the limitation of needing planetary bodies, that actually doesnt feel like a limitation, since you are essentially always traveling from a system to another system. So it works as a simple fast travel system instead of a rare oportunity. Limiting it to Black holes and neutron stars seems more reasonable and I hope it also has quite a high cost to offset the advantages of
1. ignoring terrain
2. ignoring storms
3. greatly reducing the amount of time -> supply, salary, opportunity, planning needs
As for wormhole and making a gate, it will certainly reduce the mystery of the Domain tech when you are suddently able to make one. So it certainly would need quite the reaction from the factions and some serious questing to make it feel fitting.
In the end, would this also make outposts kinda irrelevant?
As for the UI hotbar. Please make it possible to add two rows and change its size. so that its:
Alt+[0-9]
Ctrl+[0-9]
[0-9]
That would give 30 slots which is highly needed since many mods have special abilities and just no place to put the icons. (maybe with the +/- lock system from the BG3 hotbar)
On a similar vein, the infoscreens with all its tabs (gates, salvage, contacts, important....) needs to have hotkeys, since they arent ordered or color coded, so its always a pain to find the button for the right thing.
Hence it would be nice if the most used would be able to go ctrl+Initial leter.
ctrl+g gates
ctrl+c contacts
ctrl+i important
ctrl+....
or even better enable the API to assign hotkeys, then StellarNetworks can add them to all their extra tabs.
or enable collabsable hotbars where we can link buttons to spezific tabs.