Ok let me prefix this by saying I love local, I love the fat that WH space is special in this regard, but since its downtime atm I thought it roll this around my head and see if I could come up with an idea or way it could be done that would give something to the player base so they dont feel like they/we are losing something.
What Is Local ?
Its a chat window for people in the same system, but I think it could be more than that lore wise, and this will feed into my suggestions later, but what if Local is a Concord radio bandwidth beamed to all nearby(in system) ships, and all ships beam back their transponder code, anyone talking is then just radio messages being sent round the system, in this regard local would no longer just be a chat channel it would become an actual game mechanic that we could play with.
Worm Holes in this scenario would not have concord radio towers to braudcast local transponder beacons so no one shows up in local without actually sending out an actual message into their local space and thus have their transponder+message show up in other peoples chat box.
What is LowSec Itās space concord has no or much less control over and they dont activly police, so it would stand to reason that their radio towers would be slower, less well maintained and as a result low sec local would be slower to update, this could work the same way concord does for High Sec with their response fleets, the lower the security level the slower concord is to respond, So in low sec with local it could function the same , the lower the security rating of the space the less maintained local radio towers are, this could manifest itself in a delay between some one entering the system and then showing up in local, the closer to null sec the longer it takes for some one to show up without talking, but since talking and sending out a message over this system is direct and immediate you would or could at any moment decide to show yourself to the locals, āHiā
Null Sec As we all know Null sec is the wild west of unclaimed space just waiting for players to venture out and do something, and there have been a constant voice in the void asking for no local, and just as many people calling back a loud āF#&K Uā .
So to continue this idea, players would build their own Radio Towers, power them, fuel them, sov holders would deploy their own radio/local network and for any systems its active in and functioning in, they would have a normal local, for systems where the power or fuel has run out it would rapidly start to degrade in its functionality pairing with how low sec towers work, getting slower and slower until eventually powering down, mechnically they could work like Mobile Depoās be a little larger and of course look cool with a spinning radar dish on it, to fuel it just dump in fuel like a mobile depo it would use the fuel to power its battery, then once the fuel runs out its battery would drain until no local.
I think it should have the same timer setup that the depo does as well, so attacking it will drop its shield and re-enforce it for two days, after which you can kill it.
It will be on the sov holder to maintain their radio, making sure its in fuel, making sure its no re-enforced, and protecting it.
This will give a huge swath of null sec no local, while keeping it in main sov systems while at the same time making local a weapon or target that will or could play a tactical part in sov warfare, now hostiles pre attack will be sending out scouts to take down their enemies local so that they can sneak in for surprise attacks.
just a thought im sure its got tons of holes. and perfect time servers back upā¦