With all that discussion I would like to remember a "mistake" with Cobra pad size and 10 Ly colonisation range (and a little more range after relase and another little change in two months). Frontier listen carefully. I am sure.
New ship: Panther Clipper
- Thread starter Rubbernuke
- Start date
It is the hauling beast it was teased as.
It wasn't me who demanded evidence and proof.
It isn't me who has a problem that the game is grounded in its lore and (own) coherence.
I think that the only basis we have in this thread is that we agree to disagree.
Edit: Spelling
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Your original statement was 'in the year 3311 it is unrealistic to have windows in a spaceship'. Using the Realis mood (is) indicates that you are making statement if you intend to make a hypothesis, please flag it as one. Btw: A theory differs from a hypothesis that it needs grounding.
I am a bit surprised at your beef about SCO.
'The bulk of the fun' seems to be about the mundane. Goal oriented gameplay is a valid choice, to be honest I love taking a RL job on, and to setup the process, but that's a job. I don't have multiple hours to just sit there in Supercruise. In discussion, squadron members theorised years ago about being able to fly in good time to those locations.
SCO is not superficial so I wonder if you could share that more fully.
The issue is what people see as fun. The rush to get things done within a few hours of play ( in my opinion ) is the real issue. If you aren't willing to put a lot of hours in don't do it ,
I haven't done colonisation .
I didn't do the thargoid war ,
I don't do on foot stuff ( well I've found two bacterium ).
But that upsets people because they want it all and now .
Sometimes it's the journey and length of time taken that gives you a sense of achievement .
Now these are just my thoughts of my own expectations in game.
Personally I think colonisation should have been asking for more stuff , the PC 2 was around what I was expecting a bit more but when using spacey wavey magical storage is a bit much .
I do have SCO drives fitted ( for the range increase) Im in no rush and have plenty of hours in game and now have plenty more to go as I've got to do ally exploring again since moving to PC .
SCO is what it is, a shortcut to compress an empty part of the game (imo). FD could do a lot with it, but don't- meaning it stays dull and compounds issues elsewhere.
For example if we had more in depth sensors and crew stations for it, you could make SC detection cat and mouse where dedicated players could make you invisible. Large ships such as the PC could then justify more seats, and make it more 'ship' like.
You could also have patrol zones, where you have to find gaps that might suit smaller, more agile ships to remain undetected. This in turn could be adapted for solar radiation belts where certain areas are saturated and unsurvivable (like corrosive clouds) that would make smaller ships much more vulnerable. This is sort of almost in game now with shipping lanes / deep space- just under developed.
As it stands SC is mostly point to point, and empty. SCO just speeds up traversal.
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You forgot gib c9 SCB. Oh, and gib c9 PP to power c9 SCB and prizzy.
I do, but very rarely nowadays.
Or just shout at the sky?
Oh, I wouldn't imply such... That would be very unkind.
ETA: Both of us have been forum menbers for a few year, in that time many suggestions have been made and negated by suggesting it would affect the balance of the game, or something, yet, the same posters negating an idea will also suggest that adding specialist modules for exploration, or mining would be perfectly acceptable...
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No it doesn’t: same number of slots but two are simply bigger to provide the extra cargo space that is wanted without inventing magical TARDIS modules and without increasing overall slot count, preventing it surpassing other ships for shield / hull capability.
Wonder what will be the minimum shield class required. Probably it is 7, so 256 tonnes are lost.
But, for colonisers like me, all in all it is still great to have a ship with a bigger cargo space.
Its just that I need to install advanced docking computer, even now with my cutter I 'm getting a lot of tickets from reckless flying when a smaller ship insists on entering the station while Im going out..
But, for colonisers like me, all in all it is still great to have a ship with a bigger cargo space.
Its just that I need to install advanced docking computer, even now with my cutter I 'm getting a lot of tickets from reckless flying when a smaller ship insists on entering the station while Im going out..
As opposed to requests for Optimised Fuel Tanks, Optimised Shield Cell Banks … or, for that matter, C6+ Hull / Module / Guardian Shield reinforcements when?
It’s the same solution … just without magic!
I did try to do some checking on this a few days back. Long story short, it's actually really difficult to automatically detect that a system is part of a chain in a way that matches intuitive definitions well and isn't really susceptible to missing data messing things up. Still, allowing that some colonisation will have made systems which were originally part of a chain now have enough development around them that it won't be clear which one was the original chain ... maybe around 5-10% of systems were originally colonised as part of chains to somewhere else. (EDIT: to be clear, 5-10% is a maximum and it might be considerably lower than that, less than 1% is possible)
There are probably more posts complaining about people building bridging outposts (I'm not counting yours as one) than there are actual bridging outposts.
The FSD is the most obvious truly revolutionary change - going from it taking multiple weeks for even a fast ship to cross the bubble in 3290 and in-system commuting taking a couple of days, to even an E-grade FSD being able to make the trip in a few hours and in-system commuting taking minutes, and this change coming in extremely rapidly in a couple of years compared with the multiple centuries the same pace of change took on the scale of Earth.
And that's why genuinely revolutionary changes - to which "what if a box, but bigger?" really doesn't count as so I'm not going to ask how the thread got onto this... - don't happen very often: working through all the implications is way too much effort (and in the case of the FSD, one Frontier largely avoided doing either)
SCO in isolation is great - it replaces the boring bits of supercruise which for a decade had been "the most optimal move is not to touch the controls for two-to-twenty minutes" with a hands-on and skill-based way to travel from A to B. It's a far more interesting solution to the "big systems" problem than the average "microjumps" player suggestion, interacts well with the bits of supercruise which were already fun, brings in a much greater variation of ship-to-ship performance in supercruise as well (I don't just mean the difference between new and old ships), etc.
The problem is that it also sticks the final nail in the coffin of the original Elite/FE2/FFE design for trade as a profession. It was only the final nail, of course - supercruise itself had essentially 95% killed it already with no replacement for a decade, so SCO was the right thing to do - but it leaves trade (and other hauling tasks like Colonisation) in a fairly thin spot for game design.
The previous three games had non-optional pirate attacks in almost all systems, and evading or escaping an encounter was extremely difficult compared with trivial. So your trade profit was essentially your reward for surviving those attacks and defeating the pirates (you got token bounties for the kills too, but very much like the few thousand credits original ED also gave). That meant that your trade ship had to consider how it was going to fight off the pirates, and in an insecure system fight off multiple consecutive bands of pirates. A "medium security"-equivalent system in the earlier games would be comparable to a CG system in Open in terms of number of expected encounters (though not in terms of strength of those encounters, necessarily!); a "low security" or "Anarchy" one would be pretty much constant fighting from star to station.
ED broke that - there often won't be a pirate in supercruise, they often won't have time to interdict especially if you're not following the 0:06 Rules For Getting Interdicted book, the interdiction is (easily) beatable if they do, and you can low wake before they scratch even paper shields if that fails. So now trade profit isn't your reward for completing an exciting spacelanes battle ... it's your reward for flying from A to B for a few minutes while nothing much happens. (SCO means that you can pretty much have dropped out at the destination system before any pirate has time to spawn and notice you exist)
And that means that there's not much to do with the "freighter" design space in Elite Dangerous other than "bigger box". The whole "journey-based" gameplay of the original games is dead, replaced with going to specific POIs for specific types of fun. And that works okay for combat or exploration or missions, but doesn't work for hauling because the destination is the "safe" station at each end.
This is not fixable [1], so SCO was a good idea to fix some of the other problems of supercruise instead. But hauling still doesn't really work.
[1] I don't mean that there's technically no way to do it - I can think of fairly conceptually simple ways to bring both interdiction and piracy up to Elite/FE2 levels even with SCO - I mean that the game has spent almost exactly a decade (mid-2015 being the important patch note) committing to PvE combat being optional, and both attracting and enculturing players and designing ships and other game mechanics on that basis. It would be a "revolutionary change" on the scale of the FSD, but taking place during rather than before the game.
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In pure cargo capacity terms, changing the Panther's top slots from 8-8C-7-7C-6-6 to 8-8-8-7-7-6 would also give the same cargo capacity, flexibility and slot count. I'm guessing that part of the point is to also give them flexibility to retrofit these bays to existing smaller freighters as well without adding entirely new internals to them.
That said I really don't see "high-capacity" cargo bays as being magic. The cargo bays we have clearly aren't set up to be the most compact compression of cargo possible - you can eject any selected cargo item in a full mixed hold with no delay - so there must be a fair bit of empty space in them to allow any cargo "slot" to be accessed separately. Even the original Elite had the concept that cargo bays could be more than a basic box to stick smaller boxes in.
Elite (1984) Manual said:
Someone coming up with a more efficient arrangement for doing this by building a couple of ship internals specifically around cargo handling (but in doing so making them useless for fitting much else into because they're no longer the standard shape or connectivity) hardly requires space magic.
If FSD is 'revolutionary' depends a bit on how one looks at the lore: In original 1984 Elite, we had a similar drive. Elite 2 & 3 had a different drive for interstellar travel. I don't remember the details but Drew Wagar and Obsidian Ant talked about the development of the FSD some years ago and explained it to be a bit of a rediscovery of the Elite 1984 drive tech. If we look at ED as non-connected to previous games, it is revolutionary, indeed and more or less the core driver (pun intended) for the entire game.
Back on the PC- I do wonder with the pivoting thrusters if agility wise the PC is half okay for its size.
My opinion on the Panther Clipper is that it's approx 200 tonnes too low. As it stands it's verging on being cynical.
Comparing with the Panther LX , yeah I know non canon. It's more of a Panther 0.5 if you take the tonnage. Or compared with the Cutter maybe Panther 1.5. Rounding errors excepted
Comparing with the Panther LX , yeah I know non canon. It's more of a Panther 0.5 if you take the tonnage. Or compared with the Cutter maybe Panther 1.5. Rounding errors excepted
Considering how cargo collection seems to work I always assumed that there is some kind of internal automated mechanism that moves things to racks within the ship after it enters through the scoop (or via limpet). Wouldn’t make a lot of sense otherwise, especially for corrosive items automatically getting assigned to the corrosion resistant storage (if there are multiple cargo racks present).
As I said before in the thread, just because a design has existed for centuries and works, doesn’t mean there is no room to improve it. Especially with the return of a much larger ship than anything else that has the ability for a designer to mess around with some stuff on a larger scale before it may - or may not - be brought to a smaller form factor in cargo handling and/or storage.
If it has agility levels resembling the Cutter that would be great [for its size]. Part of the reason the T9 is just so insufferable is that (basically) nothing happens when you hit the roll input in supercruise. And not much more for pitch. Speed… yeah, it’s not great either, but at least it’s no Thargoid Orthrus (those things moved at something like 240 at highest speed).
I do have a number of those but a few were made in part with eventual future development in mind. Whether I’ll ever have the time to get to them before I stop engaging with colonization because I overestimated how much I’m willing to, or something something Thargoid or Guardians happens to them to make further construction halt, or I just run out of time in the game (third one least likely, currently), that’s another matter of its own.
But I don’t think there is any particular issue with the pace of expansion at this point, not to take the topic too far in the direction. We had the initial explosion because “new feature” and I doubt things’ll go much faster again from here. If at all.