You’re right that force projection has been nerfed over the years — it went from super broken to still very broken in the specific way that matters for small-gang interaction.
- Acknowledge the nerfs (agree on history).
Yes: projection used to be insane. The problem is that the remaining “short-range inevitability” is still enough to suppress roaming and independent play.
- Jump fatigue doesn’t address the first-drop problem.
Jump fatigue mainly limits repeated long-distance chaining by the same ships. It doesn’t change the fact that the first response to a roaming gang / PvE target can still be fast enough to be functionally inevitable. So it reduced cross-map projection, but it doesn’t fix “spotted → overwhelmed” inside a region/local cluster.
- “Failbear” is not an argument.
Calling people failbears is just ad hominem. If the mechanics create low marginal risk for incumbents and hard counters for smaller groups, that’s a design problem whether or not someone likes it.
- This is about relative risk–reward in sov null.
My point isn’t “null should be safe” or “delete escalation.” It’s that sov null currently lets large groups remove their own marginal risk too efficiently (intel certainty + rapid response), while also giving them near-hard counters versus smaller groups. That’s why the proposal focuses on reaction windows (cyno spool-up + per-cyno throughput limits) and less perfect passive intel (delayed/anonymous signals), so small groups get time-to-play while large groups can still keep the space they actually use relatively safe.