New mission type idea, making K-drive useful and exciting, high speed train heist in a giant tunnel rail system.

[Lepris4848]

So while at work, I had this crazy idea for a mission type. I'm sure it's not an entirely original idea, but picturing it would give an exciting and plausible purpose for K-drives.

So the mission type starts on orb valis with you infiltrating a corpus facility/factory that has a giant tram tunnel below for loading up a cargo train to send to other locations on venus. Once you enter the tunnel, which is a pretty large tunnel and wide, I imagine a pair of tracks for trains, and a road for land vehicles. Eudico says the train is approaching, suddenly a giant train comes up out of a tunnel in the ground and is moving down the tunnel at full speed. You need to get on your K-drive to catch up to it. Archwing doesn't work down here. The key for this to work is the vent kids provided you with an upgrade to your k-drive in the form of stolen corpus magrail guides. The corpus rail system is electrified so the tracks themselves provide the power for the trains to move, and due to how big and heavy the train is, it can only go so fast along the rail system. But you being a small k-drive, you can move along the rail track maybe say.... as fast as volt? So to catch up to the train quickly, you line up and lock your k-drive to the rail track and with the extra power from the rail, it boosts you down the track after the train. Once you catch up to the train, obviously you need to get off the rail track to manually pull up beside the train. I imagine this is also how you would catch up to the action again if you fall off your k-drive or die and respawn far behind the train. Just get on the track and boost til you catch up behind the train. And this somehow only works in one direction, so you can't simply boost on the opposing track to zip to the front of the train. Or maybe you could, I dunno making this a permanent mechanic could make this entire k-drive mode boring if it turns into a shooter on rails so to speak (like that recent rambo game, not literally =)

So this train is pretty long, you gotta chase it and your k-drive moves just a bit faster than the train. Now that we can shoot a secondary while on the k-drive, you need to shoot a bunch of corpus off the train while you're at it. And since you can only shoot straight ahead, aiming and shooting at these enemies will either require jumping over or on the train to shoot them which will slow you down a bit. Once you get past a bunch of cars to around the halfway point, it enters the corpus factory loader portion of the tunnel.

At this stage, the train splits into 2 (I dunno why, make up a technical reason for it =b). The 2 trains are at the far sides of the tunnel still flying down the tunnel at full speed. Some containers come down from the ceiling of the tunnel matching speed with the train and load onto the empty cars. All the while you're still trying to advance and now fighting off corpus shooting at you at both sides from the 2 trains. Eventually the 2 trains finish loading and Eudico warns you they're about to converge. Now the trains start coming together with you k-driving in between and you need to find an empty gap or empty car to jump through or you get crushed between the 2 trains.

Now the tunnel narrows a little and train leaves the corpus facility and is on its way at full speed to the next facility. Here the tunnel can twist and turn, even up and down but your k-drive maintains orientation to the road. Think sci-fi racing games like F-zero, but in a train tunnel. There's this long straight stretch seemingly downhill towards the core, here you can jump your k-drive on a rail and grind non-stop while aiming with your secondary and shooting at corpus guards on the train. This would be something of a scripted stretch where this long straight stretch would be non-stop until you kill all the guards. Think of that impossibly long runway in fast and furious 6. At this point the scripted phase ends and the tunnel changes to something else like a bend.

At some point, we'd want an excuse to power on the opposing train rail so that it's going in the same direction as the train you're chasing. The reason for this is because at this point, if you get knocked off your k-drive and have to spawn far behind the train, you want a way to quickly get back into the action near the front half of the train, so being able to rail boost along the opposing track past the half of the train you've already disabled would be better. The excuse for the corpus turning this track on is to send a small number of maintenance cars with corpus security on board to try to engage you. Since these cars are lighter than the train, they can quickly catch up similar to how you do on the k-drives. This opposing rail might stay active for the rest of the game mode, not sure because don't want this mode to just turn into a shooter on rails where you can spend the rest of the mission doing a non-stop drive-by on the train.

Now your goal is to attack the front engine and bring the train to a stop so solaris united can disrupt corpus supplies, or steal supplies, etc. Havne't really thought about this part much. Ideally I'd like to see some kind of fight where you you have to blow off pieces off the train from the outside while on k-drive. They could make you infiltrate the train on foot with your warframe, but that doesn't sound as fun to me. I kinda pictured a boss battle where the train is the boss. So you gotta blow off pieces of the train engine all while dodging pieces of the train falling off, obstacles in the tunnel, the train track switching sides of the tunnel once in a while, maybe dodge the occasional oncoming train, corpus shooting back at you, maybe at one point, the train intentionally slows down so it falls behind you, and then activates its laser plow/cowcatcher on the front and tries to mow you down. I imagine you'd need to get on one of the active rails and use your boost to keep ahead. You would need to control your speed such that you'd stay ahead of the train's plow, but also slow down so as not to slam into the oncoming laser barriers before they deactivate for the train to pass. And since you don't have to worry about steering, your mouse is free to rotate to look behind, and aim your gun to shoot at targets to disable the train's plow. Lots of ideas. Eventually once enough pieces get blown off, and once the train comes to a halt, mission ends.

- So general rules, this mode would make the most use out of k-drive. Basically you're chasing a train down a tunnel that can turn left, right, up and down. So while you could try to manually steer your archwing through these tunnels, the k-drive would automatically just hug the road no matter if the track goes up or down, and you just need to worry about steering left, right, and dodging obstacles. The only time you wouldn't need to worry about steering at all would be if you're using the speed boosting while locked to the train rail in order to catch up to the train. Here you're free to look in any direction and aim your weapon, and you can adjust how quickly you're boosting along the track.

- You also wouldn't be able to get too far ahead of the train because there are laser gates/fields that block the tunnel ahead of the train, and they only open when the train approaches.

- if you get knocked off your k-drive, or you're killled and respawn, you'll likely be kinda far back and gotta chase down the train. Here you use the upgrade the ventkids provided for your k-drive and lock your k-drive to the active train track so you can take advantage of the powered rail and boost after the train to quickly catch up within seconds. But you'd have unlock to get off the track and manually pull up beside the train to proceed with the mission.

So that's the basic concept. With archwing available in open worlds, the K-drives no longer serve any real purpose. Well, here's an idea to not only make k-drives exclusively useful, but possibly really fun if done right. And at least this is viable now that you can shoot while riding k-drive. So what do you guys think? Sound like fun? Sound stupid?

[Pizzarugi]

So long as Little Duck says "All you 'ad to do was follow the muckin' train, Tenno" if you fail, +1.

[Swagernator22663]

Let k-drives die peacefully, let them rest they deserve it.

[Unimira]

When they first announced Orb Vallis I expected it to be designed with K-drives in mind, instead we got Archwing haven with only a couple K-drive rails strewn on top of it.

With this half-hearted approach the K-drives deserve to die.

But I agree with OP that they could be made fun, I just don't believe DE can do it based on what I've seen so far.

[xombob89]

You know what, this is a great idea assuming they could make this work. Im just concerned as to what happens if you fall down from the K-Drive (maybe you covered it but didn't have time to read the whole novel ;D) 

I do kinda like K-Drive races but they are so pointless and boring atm, something like this to spice things up would be great and maybe give me a reason to upgrade /change my K-drive too. 

[Rookie808]

This would be cool

[(PSN)AccursedImmortal]

On 9/6/2020 at 1:03 AM, Unimira said:

When they first announced Orb Vallis I expected it to be designed with K-drives in mind, instead we got Archwing haven with only a couple K-drive rails strewn on top of it.

With this half-hearted approach the K-drives deserve to die.

But I agree with OP that they could be made fun, I just don't believe DE can do it based on what I've seen so far.

I agree. If they wanted K Drives to be successful, they would have had connecting ramps leading to every major site on the map. I just don't see the point of K Drives getting us to places when Archwing does it 400% better. At this point K Drives is more like a mini-game.

[(NSW)Gamer-Steve]

I could definitely see this being a viable new mission at some point!

 

There are also some various Orokin things underground, but of course a fair number of those caverns are dead ends. That being said, this could certainly expand from that, even extending to a new bounty mission type (Or personal star chart node if the community & OP / DE prefers that).

The Corpus may have technology built onto the tunnel systems they manage that disable Archwings / AW Launchers, which would explain why they cannot be used. But perhaps the mission type could be introduced in a new operation, as the corpus are preparing their own Empyrean armada (@[DE]Rebecca, I hope this idea for an Operation helps)! The train's supplies could be en route to ships above the atmosphere of Venus, so the more trains are stopped, the better.

 

As for the mission rewards, I'd think that you would be able to help yourself to a share of what SU & the Vent Kids nab from the train's wreckage, and like all other missions it would have it's own reward table. I'm not 100% sure how / if it should be an endless mission though, but in theory the Operation-version of the mission could see your Tenno squad board a nearby ship or cargo transport up to the Corpus fleet above the planet, where you can get a taste of what the Corpus Railjack missions (The indoor ship parts that is) are like, and take down a Corpus ship commander (Or other Corpus-equivalent word for captain / commander, such as Fleet Supervisor).

 

Hypothetically, if this were to be incorporated into the Vallis (Whether or not it became it's own Venus mission node, but I think it should be from the Vallis and / or Fortuna myself), maybe it could be a bounty started from the Vent Kids' syndicate (And still with the Kids / Little Duck keeping tabs on the situation, especially with that one line in the event you fail the mission!), and rather than take the elevator up to the surface, this mission could be started from a vent system leading out in a different direction from Fortuna (Unless you find a VK representative in the Vallis), and you come out in the underground tunnel where the train will come by!

[xombob89]

Even if this specific idea wouldn't be implemented, I do hope they have something planned for K-Drives to be used in actual missions. Especially now that they added those bugs in deimos, should consider making a bounty that involves catching and using those things for something. It would at least be different. 

 

Sadly I think mech missions will come before that, and I dont even like the mechs personally.