Idea For Improving Advanced FTL Navigation

[ewanchapman]

As far as I can tell, there's a general consensus on both Reddit and this forum that the Advanced FTL Navigation augment, as presented in the game, is not very useful. Since you can only use it to visit blue, already-visited beacons (and for one blue option), its main uses are to jump to known-safe beacons (if, e.g. your ship is on fire, you have boarders you need to deal with, you need to jump away from a ship that's about to kill you, and you really need a fightless beacon to fix up your ship), jump back to an already-visited store, or explore several jumps into a dead-end and then jump back out into the main sector.

These are all highly situational and in most cases people never buy the augment, or if they receive it for free they sell it.

So, here's my suggestion for making the augment better: upgrade it so that when installed, the player ship can jump to any beacon in the sector map. This would give it a variety of small benefits that might make it more desirable to buy. Some examples:

Jump directly to the exit beacon, no matter where you are in the sector (if, e.g. you're intentionally getting a few extra beacons by letting the Rebels overtake the exit, and only want one Rebel fight on the way out)
Jump directly to any quest beacon
Jump "around" nebulae or known hazard beacons
Jump directly to repair beacons or the Flagship in Sector 8, skipping some of the potentially dangerous fights there
Since Long Range Scanners give you info about beacons that are one jump away, and this Advanced FTL Navigation means that every beacon is one jump away, having both of these augments gives you a free sector map at the start of each sector.
If you already have a sector map (either from the above or from an event), you can search for things like the Zoltan Researchers, Zoltan Ship Quest and Rock Homeworlds Crystal Sector Wormhole by visiting all the non-ship nodes, even if they're not connected.

The thread can probably come up with some other applications, too.

Thoughts? Comments? Tomatoes? Let me know what you think about this.