Given a few days to mull over it, I think I've hit upon the best compromise: A neutrino gate station (like the fling beacon) that lets you spend FTL to give a fleet a timed status effect. For, say, 60 seconds, this effect remains on the fleet, and drastically boosts acceleration while disabling shields and cutting health by a large percentage. Fleets should have a button that lets them cancel this effect and drop out of neutrino flight early. Largely matches the flavor (requires multiple stations for longer trips, gives something vaguely akin to the cube mechanic) while still being almost certainly doable without too much trouble.

God damn I am ready for a SOTS reboot. Come onnnnnnn Kerberos!

Loa FTL is essentially the fling beacon though, just with a twist.

Loa FTL is something I hadn't decided on yet, simply because it's so wildly different from everything else and tied intrinsically to their morphing mechanic. A simple solution would be an ultra-FTL-cheap short-ranged jumpdrive that can only act with stabilization (so you can form highways with neutrino gates even in deep space), a more complicated (and less performant) solution would be a hyperdrive that varies speed based on distance to the nearest neutrino gate sort of like how Stutterwarp works... Perhaps instead it might be more accurate to make it roughly equivalent to cheap, short-ranged fling beacons. It's a problem I've not solved yet, unfortunately.

Not interested in the Loa FTL, or not able to implement it? Just curious is all.

I do intend to revisit this at some point, if for nothing else than figuring out why the engine really doesn't want to load Stutterwarp designs on game start. The original plan involves a bit more faction work, but I ended up splitting off some ideas for Tactical Paradigms and a recent update to Less Khan instead, as I tend to prefer a more modular approach allowing tailoring of your own experience. I would greatly like to eventually finish this out fully, there's just been little time or interest.

Hello, fellow SOTS refugee. This is the only 4x atm that scratches the sots itch even a little :(