AlexeiTimoshenko wrote:I'm fine with 6 transit pulses. Using a 30 second tactical turn it makes each transit pulse 5 seconds. Ships/smct/drones may well be able to move faster than speed 6, but the wp itself should need a brief amount of time to reset.
I don't think that it's so much about the WP resetting (or recovering from the temporary disruption caused by a transiting ship) than it is about saying that there might need to be a "window" for safely allowing ships to enter the WP without risk of a ST or accidentally ramming each other.
Regardless, I'm of two minds on the question. I understand the reasons for limiting it to 6 transit pulses, but at the same time, I dislike disallowing one of the best reasons for mounting engine tuners on BC's, CV's, or CV's (or SDF's) (though at the same time one might argue that that could be seen as "meta-gaming" the rules) as well as disallowing ES, CT, FG, or DD's from being able to be a 7th or 8th ship in a transit. (Or perhaps even more ships being allowed to transit in a single turn with different engines.)
One other thing that seems to get overlooked in the discussion is that barring better engines, ships larger than BC will not be able to utilize all 6 transit pulses in most cases. The only exception I can see offhand is if a larger ship begins a turn in the wp hex and is allowed to move on impulse 1 for transit.
Oh, I wouldn't say that that point is overlooked at all. I would suggest that this is a reason why ships like BB's or SD's might mount Engine Tuners to gain an extra point of tactical speed for this very purpose. But it wouldn't help out a MT with a max speed of 4 with I-drives. (Well, yes, you could get a 5th MT thru a WP, but not a 6th.)
Honestly though, this is one of those points where the game mechanics seem to me to not do a particularly good job of handling what would seem realistic. Let's say for example that you have 6 MT's you'd like to get thru a WP within a 30 second window. By the rules of the game, it can't happen. But in "reality", there seems to me no reason why a couple of the MT's couldn't just delay their movement a little to time their entry into the WP to occur 20 and 25 seconds after the first MT entered the WP.
But to allow this within the scope of the rules, you'd have to allow ships to delay the expenditure of their MP within the movement phase, which I tend to think would NOT be a good idea for a general rule with normal Starfire movement rules. That being said, I could see the possibility of making an exception strictly for transiting a WP. I think that to allow it in any other phase of the tactical game would simply be too complicated and create far more problems than it'd be worth.