Opinion: 10 LY range for colonization is ridiculously low.

[drakkster2025]

You folks are forgetting the jump range your first ship had. It was under 10 ly. Most transports wont have a massive jump range so trading would be hindered(BGS wise). I think 500ly would be a good colonization range but that would have to be daisy chained to the bubble so cargo transports can have refueling stations along the way. IDK what do you think?

 

[Tifu]

You folks are forgetting the jump range your first ship had. It was under 10 ly. Most transports wont have a massive jump range so trading would be hindered(BGS wise). I think 500ly would be a good jump range but that would have to be daisy chained to the bubble so cargo transports can have refueling stations along the way. IDK what do you think?

I was thinking the very same thing. The T8 fully loaded will be doing 15ly per jump on the average. And making FC's a requirement for reasonable logistics, which is what will happen if the spot is hundreds of light years away, is not going to go down well with the majority of players.

 

[DjVortex]

I'm already envisioning it: 500 ARX for each added lightyear.

 

[RowelRodRagues]

It could just be a low cap to start for reasons of “will it break stuff” but could be increased over time kind of thing. I mean if we give people 10’000 LY to start for all we know it could change the orbit of the galaxy and we all get Spode. At least it is something rather than nothing. I am anxious to see how well it does, and see how they implement further additions of expansion down the road.

 

[Screemonster]

10 LY does seem surprisingly low, in that you don't have to get very far off the galactic plane and still within the limits of the current bubble and its nearby space - as Titans Leigong and Thor found! - before a 10LY range makes you go in all sorts of weird directions to get a fairly low net distance, and plenty of perfectly normal systems are completely inaccessible.

There's a cluster of 4 systems I hung out in for a while, smack in the middle of the bubble, that are within a sidewinder's range of each other but you need a range of at least 9.98 to escape the little island. I didn't notice until I tried to jump my canyon-hooning eagle to what I thought was a nearby system outside the zone and found it was impossible to plot a route.

Even 15ly - the catchment range of most missions that aren't specifically pirate assassinations - would be a huge improvement but would still require going the long way around to cross any of the gaps between the spiral arms (never mind the time it would take to reach such a gap)

 

[Desirsar]

I'm already envisioning it: 500 ARX for each added lightyear.

I'd pay a non-zero amount, but that's worse than anything EA could come up with. A couple thousand for 1000LY instead of 10 and I'll be working that into my monthly budgeting spreadsheets.

 

[Exeider]

my issue isn't so much a 10ly bubble, Player bubbles SHOULD start that small, it's the fact you have to start off from the EXISTING bubble. That's foolish. If someone is wanting to actually finance the creation of a colony somewhere, they should be allowed to put it where they want and build their "empire" from there.

If frontier want to add a few no go zones for their purposes, or make sure rather important landmark systems like Sag A stay unowned. Then simply lock them out of the chooseable systems, like Permit locks and fleet carriers. The entire point should be to encourage players to spread out, not cluster.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

You folks are forgetting the jump range your first ship had. It was under 10 ly.

I don't forget that. But its not relevant to the current discussion.

 

[Valorin]

I like 10ly. They will most likely make it a 20 or 40 in the end, but the shorter the range, the less colonised systems out in the lonely black. And there's enough empty systems around the Bubble for everyone.

 

[Cmdr Travers]

I like 10ly. They will most likely make it a 20 or 40 in the end, but the shorter the range, the less colonised systems out in the lonely black. And there's enough empty systems around the Bubble for everyone.

I did some maths on the time it would take to Colonise out at Sag A* if a player plays every single week and is a regular gamer...

10ly - 77 years
20ly - 34 years
40ly - 16 years

Frontier did say with colonisation we could spread out into the galaxy. Do you see my point? That's more grind than I want to deal with

 

[Cmdr Travers]

I like 10ly. They will most likely make it a 20 or 40 in the end, but the shorter the range, the less colonised systems out in the lonely black. And there's enough empty systems around the Bubble for everyone.

I think you're also forgetting that a great many players don't want and don't like being in the bubble. There are thousands of explorers in Elite, people who enjoy being out in the black. Releasing a colonisation feature but limiting it only to players and player groups that want to stay in the bubble will alienate a huge volume of the player base as the feature to them, as it is to me, is utterly useless.

To give you one example...

• A player group that enjoys war with the Thargoids -
• A player group that has been set up to do piracy -
• A player group involved with the Fuel Rats -

There's also the point that there are already colonies out in the black that didn't take 77 years to build. Colonia, Explorer's Anchorage, and the Heart and Soul nebulae are just a few.

 

[kofeyh]

I was thinking the very same thing. The T8 fully loaded will be doing 15ly per jump on the average. And making FC's a requirement for reasonable logistics, which is what will happen if the spot is hundreds of light years away, is not going to go down well with the majority of players.

The range of a a shield less type-8, with just cargo racks and no shields or fuel scoop, fully laden, with no engineering, no booster and just an A rated FSD is just about 100ly. This is pretty much worst case. It's more if you fit a shield.

Engineering and an fsd booster pushes it to in excessive of 200ly, without needing fuel.

Add a fuel scoop in either scenario and the distance is somewhat irrelevant.

Given the likely costs of all the materials and goods (we have seen what powerplay 2.0 is like) we can consider that some context for the amount of resources required for colonisation, and thus it's likely to carry a pretty sizable commitment.

10 ly severely limits how many systems are even available to colonise, 100 ly would be doable pretty comfortably by most commanders who (also) have the funds and resources to undertake an expansion into a new system.

Even 50 ly would make sense. 10ly is less distance than some existing populated systems are from each other. Other than starting from Colonia, it doesn't really give people much choice.

 

[Cmdr Travers]

At first i thought i had misheard or Piers had misspoken.

Yes, they said the numbers can change, but starting from a base of 10LY and possibly making it bigger? I'm pretty sure many of us (most of us?) had images of spreading out into the dark at a rate much faster than 10LY... even 100LY would be low in my opinion. 1000 LY, yeah, i could go with that.

The problem with 1,000ly is that while it works from the standpoint of colonisation as a reasonable maximum distance to build from an existing base, it causes other problems.

These being that explorers out in the black would suddenly find themselves tripping over populated systems. Much of the appeal for explorers is seeing nothing and nobody for weeks. 5,000ly seems a much more reasonable distance to me, but temper it with additional costs or a longer construction time.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

The problem with 1,000ly is that while it works from the standpoint of colonisation as a reasonable maximum distance to build from an existing base, it causes other problems.

These being that explorers out in the black would suddenly find themselves tripping over populated systems. Much of the appeal for explorers is seeing nothing and nobody for weeks. 5,000ly seems a much more reasonable distance to me, but temper it with additional costs or a longer construction time.

As an explorer, someone who has spent a lot of time exploring since Gamma release, I don't see an issue. The galaxy is huge, and even if every player went out there and started daisy chaining systems way out into the black, there would still be huge swathes of space with no nearby inhabited systems.

 

[kofeyh]

As an explorer, someone who has spent a lot of time exploring since Gamma release, I don't see an issue. The galaxy is huge, and even if every player went out there and started daisy chaining systems way out into the black, there would still be huge swathes of space with no nearby inhabited systems.

Bingo. Galaxy is vast and the player count is such that we aren't even going to make a dent in the populated vs discovered systems, let alone undiscovered.

Vast swathes of the galaxy are empty and undiscovered. The amount of gatekeeping is pretty wild.

 

[Cmdr Travers]

As an explorer, someone who has spent a lot of time exploring since Gamma release, I don't see an issue. The galaxy is huge, and even if every player went out there and started daisy chaining systems way out into the black, there would still be huge swathes of space with no nearby inhabited systems.

I agree, though not every explorer will see it that way. Some will see it as "What's the point heading into the black if I'm gonna see starports everywhere?" Explorers can set the galaxy map to unpopulated systems, but I still think this is something for Frontier to think about. The Colonia bridge is supposed to be the exception, a super-special thing to help Cmdrs get to Colonia, and those bases are about 1,000ly apart or so.

I think it should be possible to build out to 5,000ly but it should take four weeks and be more expensive. Currently with 10ly, even if it was possible to build out in the black, which it isn't, that means you could fly all the way to Sag A* in an unengineered Eagle with no fuel scoop. That seems counter-productive to me.

 

[IstvaanDCIV]

I may have missed a post in here or in one of the other threads, but have any of the ED astronomy / maths boffins guesstimated what a 10 ly actually means for us.

That's a sphere approximately 320 ly in diameter, 10 ly thick.
By my extremely simplistic calculations, (calculating sphere volumes of radius 150 and 160 and subtracting) that gets us very roughly 3 million cubic lightyears of volume. Which is an increase in the volume of space taken up by the bubble by 'very roughly' 20%.

I've seen estimates of 100,000 systems in the bubble, of which roughly 20,000 are inhabited.
Taking that same approximate star density (which won't be uniform, but good enough for my loose numbers) players will gain access to around 20,000 systems on Day 1.
Not all of which will be desirable systems, but the potential is there to double the number of Human-inhabited systems in the Elite Dangerous in one week.

That's with 10 ly.
Some people want 500+ ly.

The rate of growth for inhabited space will limited by the number of players engaging in colonisation, and by how fast they can set up a colony before being able to move onto the next one. The range won't effect that, but it will effect how spread out these newly-established colonies will be. So a shorter range would, if anything, make things feel more crowded.

 

[IstvaanDCIV]

10ly is a very low distance. I was expecting something more like 20-30ly, as that's the range for BGS. Hopefully it's just a temporary value that's used while in beta.

 

[Cmdr Travers]

10ly is a very low distance. I was expecting something more like 20-30ly, as that's the range for BGS. Hopefully it's just a temporary value that's used while in beta.

20-30ly fits with PowerPlay 2 but not with the BGS. The BGS has the Colonia Bridge, Explorer's Anchorage, the Heart and Soul Nebulae, and Colonia itself, along with other isolated populated systems out deep in the black. That is the BGS.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

I agree, though not every explorer will see it that way. Some will see it as "What's the point heading into the black if I'm gonna see starports everywhere?" Explorers can set the galaxy map to unpopulated systems, but I still think this is something for Frontier to think about. The Colonia bridge is supposed to be the exception, a super-special thing to help Cmdrs get to Colonia, and those bases are about 1,000ly apart or so.

I think it should be possible to build out to 5,000ly but it should take four weeks and be more expensive. Currently with 10ly, even if it was possible to build out in the black, which it isn't, that means you could fly all the way to Sag A* in an unengineered Eagle with no fuel scoop. That seems counter-productive to me.

The time limit on getting things done will restrict it somewhat anyway. Groups will manage it probably, but solo people looking to set up systems will have to consider lower distances, at least if it goes beyond the 500LY range of a fleet carrier, although I think 500LY might be too much anyway.... or perhaps just right.

I also don't think most would want more than 1 system, unless they are making a bridge to somewhere. Maybe groups would want to set up mini-bubbles. Some extreme players might want to make many systems, but i think most players and groups, given a decent range for colinization, would be happy with a single system.

By making people do bridges made of a long chains of systems, most likely we will end up with lots of very basic systems with just one startport as people make minimal bridges, and instead of relying on building up systems to expand outwwards, they will just use their FCs to move back and forth with huge quantites of goods. And then it will just become a huge grind to expand out.