All of my Cmdrs have a G3 Artemis with enhanced batteries and reduced tool consumption.
I threw a DBX for my exploration alt together DBX
Is there any chance for Player Instituded Stations and Settlements?
- Thread starter Coleton707
- Start date
I threw a DBX for my exploration alt together DBX
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
Whether faster A > B is of benefit may depend on where one wants to start exploring and how fast one wishes to return from the last system explored.
The larger the jump range, the more short jumps in the brown dwarf plane you can do without refuelling. Not that there's anything exciting in there, just more icy bodies, so it is a bit of a moot point.
I want to thank everyone for all the advice so far. Going to start my hours-long session at midnight tonight. Just want to get the Animal Crackers and Flavored Water together in a bit. Any more advice is definitely appreciated!
If you're visiting the closest Guardian sites go in solo, certain characters who lurk there are likely to send you to the rebuy screen.
For the FSD, if you go with the DBX don't forget to get a pre-engineered FSD, not the standard one. Adds quite a few LY. An all-out DBX can do 80+ LY.
This really depends on how much exploration you plan to do in this ship.
A standard engineered FSD can get a lightweight but not hyper-optimised DBX (i.e. no lightweight engineering on other components) to ~65 LY range without the Guardian booster. That's 16 jumps per 1000 LY.
Swapping for the pre-engineered one will get ~68 LY range on the same build, which means 15 jumps per 1000 LY.
So for every 1000 LY travelled, you save about 1 minute in travel time by using the pre-engineered drive. (If you're neutron-boosting heavily, this is 1 minute per 4000 LY instead)
But ... the pre-engineered drive costs about twice the materials of a maxed G5 standard FSD. You need to get 26 Tellurium and another 8-10 Datamined Wake Exceptions. That's going to take a while - probably an hour or two.
So you only come out ahead over the standard engineered drive after travelling probably around 100,000 LY (more, if you use neutron boosts). That's a long way - you could cross the galaxy and get most of the way back for that. Any time you spend jumping at less than max-range (because you're looking around near a nebula or similar) you get no benefit at all.
An interesting counter-proposition: only upgrade the drive to G4, plus the Mass Manager experimental. This gives the lightweight DBX a range of ~61 LY, which means 17 jumps per 1000 LY. So, that's a minute more per 1000 LY again ... but your material costs are massively down: you don't need any DWEs or Arsenic or Chemical Manipulators, it's all much more common stuff and less of it. So you save a couple more hours of material collection, in exchange for it taking a couple more hours to travel 100,000 LY. If you're "just" planning to wander around the various nebulae near the bubble, maybe hop over to Sag A* or Colonia as well ... you're probably going to be more efficient just using the G4 blueprint.
And you can go further: G3 with no experimental gets ~55 LY range, which is just over 18 jumps per 1000 LY, but basically no material collection requirements at all: you could get everything you needed by completing one decent mission to trade down for the Chemical items, scanning a few wakes at the engineer's base when you get there, and hopping briefly out in the SRV to shoot a rock or two for the Phosphorus. Compared with the pre-engineered drive, you've saved several hours of material collection, and it'll take you three minutes longer for every 1000 LY travelled (or 4000 LY if neutron boosting) - with a bit of neutron use, you could do an entire trip out to Beagle Point and back, detouring to various landmarks along the way, and still save time over getting the pre-engineered drive.
Calculations will vary depending on ship build. If you're planning to explore around the outer rim or a long way off the galactic plane, the diffeence between 61 LY and 68 LY may be the difference between being able to make a jump at all or not. But very often you don't need to maximise the ship before you set off - don't feel you have to! Most of my exploration was done in a Python with 20-30 LY range depending on how much engineering I'd had time for and what else I put on it: I've used faster ships since but once you get over about 50 LY range it really stops mattering much in most cases. Conversely, if you've been playing for ages and have near-full material reserves, sure, get the pre-engineered drive, you might as well. But don't automatically go for the "best" module: the time saved by using it might well be wiped out ten times over by the time needed to get it a lot of the time.
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
For travelling I prefer the AspX over the DBX, because the Class 4 scoop in the DBX takes longer to scoop fuel than the Class 6 I usually fit to the AspX.
Assuming you want to go through the whole unlocking and building rep with the engineer beforehand.
Building rep doesn't matter in this case - when engineering a module at a new engineer for the first time, you'll reach rep 2 before the first module gets to grade 2, and so on. It'll cost slightly more of the lower-grade materials than normal to do the first module, but not by an amount that makes a massive difference to the calculations because another couple of Atypical Wake Echoes and Chemical Processors doesn't change the time taken much at all.
Unlocking ... grabbing one Soontill Relic for Martuuk is a few hundred LY travel, which even in the unengineered DBX isn't going to take very long, and you can grab the wake scans (and maybe do the Chemical mission and material trader visit) along the way too. If the answer to "where do you get the bulk Tellurium for the pre-engineered module?" was going to be a suggestion to visit the Crystal Shards sites rather than something more proportionate, then the Soontill Relic is a lot less travel, too. Likewise a lot less travel than heading out to Guardian space for the FSD Booster materials.
If FSD blueprints were locked to Jameson or Dekker or Palin who is at the end of a chain involving some substantial unlock requirements ... sure. The pre-engineered heatsink probably is quicker to collect the materials for than to go through the whole chain to unlock Ram Tah ... the pre-engineered surface scanner is cheaper in materials than its engineered equivalent for twice the performance gain even before the time taken to unlock the relevant engineers is taken into account. But the FSD is definitely one of those "exponential cost increase for marginal gain" modules intended for endgame players who aren't resource-constrained in the first place.
For comparison between DBXs with and without a double-engineered FSD, from the A* Challenge thread (a standing challenge, from Sol to Sagittarius A*):
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...a-challenge-v2-0.516860/page-19#post-10155550
The fastest DBX time with a double-engineered FSD is by CMDR crotalus in 2:08:44 and the fastest without is CMDR Darplata94 in 2:19:09. Both are very good pilots with a good route making use of the Neutron Superhighway.
Personally, I completed my Galactic circumnavigation in a DBX without a double-engineered FSD (max range a little over 77LY) and was able to get to anywhere on the Rim I wanted, with enough FSD injections. It was good to have this range as well when crossing between Galactic Arms.
The double-engineered FSD is useful if your FSD is getting shut down (e.g. by Thargoids) but the benefits from increased range only matter in niche cases, e.g. racing or going far above/below the Galactic Centre.
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...a-challenge-v2-0.516860/page-19#post-10155550
The fastest DBX time with a double-engineered FSD is by CMDR crotalus in 2:08:44 and the fastest without is CMDR Darplata94 in 2:19:09. Both are very good pilots with a good route making use of the Neutron Superhighway.
Personally, I completed my Galactic circumnavigation in a DBX without a double-engineered FSD (max range a little over 77LY) and was able to get to anywhere on the Rim I wanted, with enough FSD injections. It was good to have this range as well when crossing between Galactic Arms.
The double-engineered FSD is useful if your FSD is getting shut down (e.g. by Thargoids) but the benefits from increased range only matter in niche cases, e.g. racing or going far above/below the Galactic Centre.
As I said I threw it together for my alt who certainly wasn't going through the unlocks.
I can pick up the manufactured and raw mats from locations in the Bubble in a single session. Never been to the crystal sites, never seen the point.
Meta for data is obviously Jameson's Cobra though personally I prefer scanning wakes at an orbital installation.
For a cheaper and more minimalist approach a Hauler with fully engineered FSD and a Guardian FSD Booster together with a shop bought G3 Artemis with Night Vision is a great exploration alternative and can land in even more awkward locations than the DBX.
You can save some money on the Fleet Carrier by not installing everything and bring the upkeep down to 14.7 million per week and still have everything you need for exploring.
So much awesome and detailed advice! Thanks, everyone!
All that is true, but with a catch: you will only have one loadout for a given exploration ship, so you might as well max it out. For combat ships, of which you can have dozens of different loadouts, I agree that you might want to maximize your ressources, but for a given explo ship you will do it once and then never touch it again: she deserves the best.
Just a heads up: if the exploration of the galaxy would continue with the same speed (by the whole player base), it would take over 35,000 real years to fully explore the Milky Way. So yeah, you will die before that happens.
LOL! Yeah I figured it was something like that. Now I just need to find a way to either become immortal or find a way to inspire 35,000 people to explore for at least a year each.
Something tells me that i'd have better luck becoming immortal.
There was a 'leak' some years back that outlined the roadmap for Elite to a large degree. So far, a lot of it has come true, including what the narrative is seemingly leading up to be effectively onfoot Thargoids. I think once that happens, IIRC, the only item that was left on the list that hasn't been announced/happened yet was base building. Make of that what you will. o7
