Hi there,

Jump Points is a big feature, there is a lot going on in the design, more than could be communicated in one ISC, so there is some bits of info that I realised afterwards that we managed to gloss over and some of these seemed to have caused a lot of speculation/controversies, so I'd like to attempt to rectify some of those and clarify some others.

Transient Jump Points do not have or use ATCs. Transient Jump Points are free for all experiences, you align, tune and the activate the Jump Point and then are pulled in.

As you can see from Transient Jump Points. The inclusion of ATC in the permenant Jump Points flow is not a techinal requirement needed for transitioning players between systems or anything like that. They are part of the flow solely for gameplay reasons. The ATC exists here for fairness to all jumpers, a fairness intentionally omitted in the Transient flow. The permenant Jump Points will likely be busy high volume routes. We dont want slower ships being trumped to jump by faster ships all the time, we also want to make sure we protect those ships who have waited and determine who is at fault for doing something obstructive, ATC will help us do this.

Additionally the ATC exists to imply and actually impose some level of decision making on those who choose to skirt the law or play outright criminally. Those player may instead choose or have to seek out Transient Jump Points to make their journeys in order to avoid this extra scrutiny.

I also want to clarify how ATC also makes sense as part of a bigger picture. Think of Permenant Jump Points as known controlled border checkpoints between systems. If you were the UEE authority in charge of protecting a system like Stanton from lawless systems that you know you border with, like Pyro, would you operate an open borders with them? I dont think you would, you'd find a way to control it.

In this sense ATC is being used as the gate keeper. How does it do that I see you all asking. If ATC hasnt granted you permission to jump yet then by default they actively jam jump drives from tuning. Once you have permission to jump they selectively choose to stop jamming your jump drive, whch then lets you tune and jump, simple.

Finally, I wanted to clarify an error in one clip of footage. You don't shoot the jump point with a gun to activate it, but you do initiate the opening with an activation step. The footage showed this as a physical shot from a gun but it was wrong to be depicted like that, I'm sorry I didnt spot it in the edit before the video was released, as if I had done so I would have sought its removal. So, please dont worry we didnt add combat to opening a Jump Point.

Thanks for reading,

Edward Fuller, Senior Principal System Designer