Dialogue — Are you a leader of an outpost? Let's talk about Elytra Launchers.

EDIT: Finalized Design Factsheet

* There should be one sticky piston in TD2.
Hello!

I've been working on an elytra launcher design (click my signature for more info) that allows for very cheap and very fast travel across the Empire. I've decided it would be a good idea to connect with the people who will be affected by this.

Some Quick Facts:

• Each tower allows around 6000 blocks of travel (to y=60).
• There are two designs, one is more inconspicuous (there's a small part on the ground and a small part near y=256, that you can't really see from the ground) while the other is a giant tower but is more convenient and resource-friendly.
• The travel is very quick. About 3:20 to travel a full 6000 blocks.
• The design is fairly resource-friendly, you should be able to fit absolutely everything needed in a single DC.
• This means that anyone with elytra will find it much more hassle-free to travel around the Wild anywhere there's any towers.
• The designs are based around this launcher.

I've just wanted to open a dialogue with you guys. Do you have any questions? Are you worried about griefing? Are you excited for this? Do you think you'll set up one in your own town? Any thoughts on where exactly we should place the towers?
Questions. Comments. Concerns. Thoughts. All welcome.

It sounds like the speed will be similar to using a nether rail, so I might not swap out my current methods of transportation. That being said I'd probably use it for exploring or visiting areas I haven't built up yet.

Grief wise, it's hard to say. It might be easier for people to get out to find your base. It also gives a method for you to travel without 3k+ of rail pointing at your outpost. So there is some good and bad.

Another thing I think it's important to remember is that most griefers are very new players and will probably be priced out of elytra.

A dream come true

Bump! Designs' complete details will be released soon.

That is freaking cool. Will defonitely be building one to see if I can make it work on EMC. like kev said, my minerail is faster and if I weren't so lazy and made a horse path that would be even faster but this, this is cool nonetheless.

Speed of travel might be around that of a nether rail but building these would a lot less dangerous then building in the nether and would also be faster to finish.
This could have other implications in terms of outpost travel; you can set 1 up central tower in your main outpost and have additional towers 6k blocks away in different directions allowing players to easily spread out further to locate rare resources or create builds that can't be done in town.
Also their are trade and social implications with it being easier to set up routs between different groups outposts.

This does have the potential to slightly increase griefing but not to the extent you would think.
If you already have a rail to your outpost this in no way will increase the risk and if you do this instead of a rail
any increase would be slight due the one disadvantage of these towers: their reliance on the Elytra. Elytra are a rare item and demand for them is high and this will probably always be true barring a later update adding other methods of acquisition. Which mean it's going to be awhile before their is even a reasonable level of saturation of this item in the community and even then this will be an expensive item well out of the range of a new player (even after several waste resets this will probably cost more then a beacon). Most griefers are not players who have been around or stay around for long it's highly unlikely that one will be able to afford one, will stick around long enough to be able to buy one, or will be willing to go through the effort required to acquire an Elytra themselves.
The problem of the expense/difficulty of the acquisition of the Elytra can be partly alleviated by having outpost group owned Elytra that can be loaned out with some sort of documented (important step to be able to report theft to staff) agreement.

Yes it's neat that travel can take place in the air now. Next we'll have pet dragons we can use to fly around on. Like winged horses with gnarly breath.

One thing i don't see here is when empires gets updated. The perks get kicked in with the right amount of tokens. Thus it's like town rules can apply.

Which means outposts can have no fly flags in place. Assuming your not flying into outpost after outpost with no fly flags. The travel speed of elytra may be better than that of the nether. But what happens when you run out of materials to create those high rising towers. It takes time to gather new material, unlike the nether where your just tearing through netherrack.

I'd assume that

1. The no fly flag would be part of a no move flag, not separate.

2. It might not even be allowed, that restriction of movement would be super annoying.

Also, Elytra towers take very few resources to set up, are much more flexible location-wise, and don't require you to press any buttons or stuff once you've launched and are at 0˚ pitch, versus horse tunnels (which I assume you're talking about, since they don't use resources outside of picks to break the netherrack).

Have any of these been built on emc yet?

No. I'm waiting a bit for the forums to calm down from 1.9 freakout before I actually try and collect help.

so yes, one has been built. right now in town. It didn't work at all I'm gonna try and build another one later but right now my launcher is not launching me at all. I did happen to cover my res with boats the first time I put it together, i walked into the boats from the side... don't do that. It's a little bit harder than one might think. not being able to fly is a bit of a hindrance in moving around it though. perhaps I again bumped the boats out of alignment but they appear to be where they should be, stacked. You can /v gawadrito on smp7 to see if you can't figure out what might be going wrong.

Edit: used this modification to account for lag... it seemed a little more fool proof with the launch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbTb71yiQmI

I did try it without that modification first and thought maybe I just wasn't hitting it right. with this modification I ruled that out.

I'm pretty sure that the launcher doesn't work unfortunately. This is because Aikar removed the feature that boats move us. So, the stacked boats in that design don't actually do anything.

As a side note, if this did work, I would recommend you use xisumavoid's design based off this one that uses ladders as the launcher mechanism instead of slime blocks. It's much more reliable!
[Link to Xisuma's Video]

hehe, that is the one I used. good to know that it might not be that I just messed something up but I'm going to try again. considering this new information I expect the same result but we can only hope. there is definitely still the super fast boats on ice lol. and the towers themselves allow for pretty long flight travels but not nearly as far as the launcher would. I think aikar probably anticipated this launcher as well. since having several of them seems to be a drain on the server if they are in loaded chunks.

Technically, just saying, the elytra IS faster. It moves at around 30-40 m/s whereas the rail around 14 m/s. (I think)

12 at an angle, 8 ona straight. however factor in the nethers 1:8 ratio and now you are moving at 64 m/s in the nether on a straight with the rail and 96m/s on a diagonal path. more so with the horse. All those speeds being maintained where with the elytra you are not maintaining 30-40m/s not even 20 with any consistency. Also, throw the new super fast boats on ice into the nether and the elytra just can't hang, whatsoever. The launcher would still be an awesome idea. It's more scenic and pleasing to the senses then staring at red walls for thousand of blocks.

Anyone who wants to join my kingdom pm me

Good points! I do agree! The elytra is so much fun to ride

Well crap. Don't really know what to do with this one. I'm back to the drawing board.

Also do you know why he made this change?