It just makes sense. No matter how you look at it. It makes far more sense to have a choice to drop anywhere from “oh god my eyes” to… eh around 30-40ls than it does to almost collide every time.
From a lore standpoint, the FSD locks onto the largest mass and that’s why you can only go to stars. But that doesn’t explain why we faceplant into them, so close that you have to spend a good amount of time getting back out of the gravity well. I always imagine my pilot mumbling about the extra fuel burn.. I would imagine that if an FSD was engineered to be consumer friendly, it would drop the user at a comfortable distance from the star. Also you know, like safety. Obviously because of the mass lock navigation, you’d still drop pointed directly at the star.
From a practicality standpoint, it would basically allow pilots to choose: faceplant or no faceplant. Drop right up close to a star, like normal, good range for nav beacons, signal sources, fuel scooping. Or drop about 30ls back, not anything crazy. Just enough so that if you’re traveling a long distance and you don’t need to fuel at this brown dwarf, you don’t have to fill your whole view with it. You can then line up with your next jump instead of having to fly around a star. This is key.
It could even be a optional button press during FSD charge or in witchspace with a prompt like “Coronal Entry?” Or something similar.. real simple and streamlined. And like I said, if you still enter system pointed directly at the star, it doesn’t really change the existing game mechanic of “if you’re not paying attention, you fly into the sun”, it just takes a little bit longer depending on which entry you choose.
I don’t feel like this would interrupt normal play at all, I don’t think it removes anything from gameplay, and I think it’s one of the few spaceflight mechanics that just doesn’t make sense from a design standpoint. Like, I don’t feel as though in-universe engineers would have designed those systems to work that way. Or maybe if I was an in-universe engineer, I’d tweak mine like this haha.
Anyways, long ramblings from the void o7
