I had two separate hour-and-a-half windows to play last night. In each of those, I took a delivery mission that required travel from one planet to the other. That QT travel time ate up 20 minutes of play time... literally sitting there watching a flashy screen. With interdiction that interrupted both jumps, the total effective travel time actually took longer. I was able to complete only 1 delivery mission per each play session. That's sad. I had hoped to do much more in that amount of play time. Yeah, I know, stay closer, travel to the moons instead of other planets.... But here's the thing. The universe is only going to get bigger. And my play times will likely not get longer. At this rate, I'm destined to be stuck in a handful of central systems for the entirety of my very real adult life!! Not cool. And I suspect I'm not the only one that has this limitation to my time. Furthermore.... I play SC to fly my ship. By this I mean that having my hands on the controls in a single-seater ship actually matters to the outcome of my experience. QT completely removes control of my ship from me for long stretches at a time. This needs to change, especially for single-seat craft. QT needs to change to require continuous flight-style input from the pilot to successfully navigate the jump. OR QT needs to be greatly accelerated for long jumps, allowing the time sink to be exponentially reduced. Just my two cents.... Thoughts? EDIT 1: I know, pick local missions that require little QT. I get it. Been there, done that. Frankly, I've run most of those. This time I was trying to get my fighter from ArcCorp to Hurston so I could test hover mode on bunker mission turrets (I know, just fly over in a big ship and claim it at the destination - but that's not how the final game is supposed to work, so I didn't "cheat"). But I never got that far because QT took so long. And yes, I know, take the Avenger, it has a bigger faster QT drive. I did that first try, and a strange bug caused my untimely death above Area 18. So I had to grab a different fighter. And thus QT took longer. Bigger ships are not better at dog-fighting or racing, the two things which I (and many others, I would venture to say) enjoy doing. I enjoy flying fast, small, fairly responsive ships, not big tubs. So what if I take a delivery mission across the system in a big ship for efficiency sake, then a sweet local mission comes up and I need a fighter to swing it (keep in mind there is no way to check for this mission in advance from home base - it is only visible locally!). Back across system to home base to get my fighter because I took the Connie for the delivery mission cause it is bigger and more efficient for the jump... then putz back to the local mission area only to find that it's not available 30 mins later when I get there again. I understand the ideas of trade-offs and balance between bigger and smaller ships. But it seems to me this travel time big-vs-small trade-off falls too far on the side of penalizing fun in smaller ships which many of us enjoy. And this scenario will play out into the larger game eventually. Why do you think many of us are so excited about the Kraken and other ship carrying ships? They allow us the speed/efficiency of the bigger ship for the travel and the fun of the smaller craft when we get to our destination. But are you really telling me I am going to need a Polaris minimum to efficiently travel the systems doing bounties and other fighter pilot fun? No ship transport? Then spend long times in QT. Or miss out. There has got to be a better way for fun. I'm not arguing that they scrap the dynamic entirely. Travel time should still be meaningful. But meaningful does not mean painful or boring or just a time sink. Travel time should be meaningful fun - it's a game after all! Who plays a driving game to put on cruise control, sit back and watch the scenery go by? No! We like to be in control - or at least think we are (looking at you auto-gimbal and auto-hover)! And in driving games, at least there is scenery going by! Who do you know who flies across country, gets off the 8 hour flight and says, wow, that was fun, let's do it again!? Most people come off that exhausted. Travel in real life is hard - unless you're on a cruise ship filled with other things to do. And single-seaters are not cruise ships filled with other fun things to do. In the current direction, for single-seat fighters there will be little else to do but watch the blurred star-field go by (brief mini-games aside). So I think somehow, CI needs to find a way to help it be more fun than a paltry mini-game... or at least a little less painful by being shorter. (I know QT is not fully implemented. I'm not focused on the state the game is in now. Ultimately I'm saying the final needs significantly more flesh than what we have on these bones now - even for single-seat fighters and racers.) Edit 2: I think it is relevant, even now while the system is in development, to note that the current implementation has veered from the express "intended game mechanics" (intended to not be boring, with time sinks likely 10 mins or shorter as per quotes provided by others below) and to add to that intended mechanic an idea or suggestion - that the player pilot retain flight-like control of the ship during QT. I realize that the intended additions to QT may redeem QT from being boring in multi-crew ships. Great! But there have been no ideas expressed for single-seater ships which would conceivably reduce the boredom factor during QT. (The heat mechanic simply does not achieve relieving the boredom.) Maybe the "downside" (but fun element) to QT in single-seater ships could be that QT jumps in single-seater ships require hands-on flight control... EDIT 3: Thank you all for contributing to the conversation. Two contributed ideas seem to make sense to me: 1) small single-seater and large multi-crew ships need a difference in QT function to help distinguish them in gameplay (per CR's expressed goal); and 2) QT would not greatly benefit from restoring flight-style control to the pilot due to QT being too fast (any divergence at that speed would cause occupant death) and the divergence from the intended destination at that high speed would become a real issue if trajectory navigation were actively exposed to pilot control. But the problem (in my opinion) still remains. What can CI do to make single-seat QT less boring than it is now? (The final vision CR has related ultimately offers little-to-no fun increase for single-seaters.) If manual control is out, is there anything constructive we can add as an idea to increase the fun quotient for single-seater QT? What about giving single-seaters a significantly longer spool-up time to achieve equal speeds to larger size QT engines? This would effectively allow more hands-on control time (and add more vulnerability) to single-seaters leading up to the jump, but pay off in less hands-off controls-time during the actual jump, thereby decreasing the single-seater QT boredom factor. Allow quick QT spool to achieve current speeds, but allow the pilot to tune or continue the spooling to calculate a charge to the drive for greater speed up to and matching that of the QT engines on medium and large ships. Maybe leave Capital ships in a class of their own... Example: envision a fleet moving with fighter escorts. They come under attack. The medium and large ships spool up in no time and could QT jump to escape but this would leave their fighters behind - the single-seaters would take longer to spool to those speeds, especially while engaged in defensive maneuvers. So the fleet has to make a judgment call: option 1) remain vulnerable till the escorts can jump too so that they all arrive at the same time with escort at the exit of QT (since in this proposed system, because single-seaters and big ships would QT at near similar speeds, arriving together would be much more viable than is currently planned); or option 2) jump ahead of the escort and arrive at the destination more vulnerable due to the fighter escort being left behind still engaged and spooling. If there was a Cap ship in this group, it - having the fastest QT speeds - could optionally jump ahead to cover the medium to large ships, or stay behind with the whole fleet a couple minutes to allow the single-seaters some additional cover as they spooled for the jump as a fleet. Notice, I'm not eliminating the reality of travel time. I'm just proposing near equalized small, medium, and large ship travel time in exchange for giving single-seaters significantly longer spool time to achieve the greater speeds medium and large ships are already capable of. This function could yield more hands-on controls time than we currently have planned for the single-seater travel gameplay loop and could at the same time reinsert more fun choices into the single-seater ship travel gameplay loop as well.