Dump SC

[Para Handy]

.............
Look I dont care if we fly through the systems space but lets at least have some flexibility. .............

I really don't see what the gripe is. I mean, seriously. Nobody is forcing you to make long supercruise journeys. If you don't want to travel for any distance, just don't go there / take that mission / accept that diversion.

So you have all the flexibility you want - don't take the long trips.

/thread

 

[varonica]

Therefore I am happy for those that want to use SC because it is nothing to do with me what your gameplay is but why criticize when I ask not to sometimes . Are you really bothered what experience I have in game ? I don't care what anyone else's is after all.

Except some people do, because the title of the thread is "Dump SC". Some people won't be satisfied until they either get what they want or leave the game altogether, and to be honest I am not sure how they will fit the two things together. We get enough forum complaints now about people taking he fast way to earn money, what happens when some people SC to stations to trade and other people just jump there, magnifying their earning capacity by a hundredfold. Do we then reduce mission payout and rewards for the people who "just jump around" or ignore it altogether and let the forums go into meltdown!

 

[krylite]

I would suggest doubling the maximum sc speed, and double the accel/del rates. ( I would bet Fdev could still 'balance' out the interdiction mechanics even with those faster rates) Plus someday whether with an upgraded autopilot-docking computer, or npc co-pilot, allow automatic piloting and approach to target in system, similar to what autopilot could do in Elite2: Frontier and Elite 3: First Encounters. That said, sc is needed since the ED-verse is realtime mmo & simulator and I actually love the sc now, best star trek-like warp speed cruising simulation in a game.

 

[PiggyPiggyPig]

Get rid of SC!
Oh great, and where pray tell will I get the time to crack open and sup on a Pepsi ?
But seriously, and as mentioned already, increasing the SC speed would get my vote, that and maybe lessening the affects of planetary gravitational wells.

 

[Han Zulu]

Get rid of SC!
Oh great, and where pray tell will I get the time to crack open and sup on a Pepsi ?

Extra rep for the vintage computers!

 

[Frank]

I really don't see what the gripe is. I mean, seriously. Nobody is forcing you to make long supercruise journeys. If you don't want to travel for any distance, just don't go there / take that mission / accept that diversion.

So you have all the flexibility you want - don't take the long trips.

/thread

There are missions where you don't know you're in for a long haul until you've already accepted them

Get rid of SC!
Oh great, and where pray tell will I get the time to crack open and sup on a Pepsi ?
But seriously, and as mentioned already, increasing the SC speed would get my vote, that and maybe lessening the affects of planetary gravitational wells.
http://i63.tinypic.com/w1qtg3.jpg

Supercruise is great. I wouldn't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But do we really need 8 or 9 minutes worth of bathwater? I'm with the rest of you on this, that a bit of extra speed would be nice.

 

[Lucifera Danzig]

There are missions where you don't know you're in for a long haul until you've already accepted them

Not anymore. The distance in light seconds from point of arrival has been included in the mission details for a while now.

 

[Mag1cMushrum]

I partially agree about SC being a bore. I'd love to have some kind of radio station aka GTA series, news, political broadcasts (to sway players to join factions) and other items including real music - or even a real internet radio player that plugs into web "live" radio stations - being a "utility" perhaps fdev can get around paying any licenses and call the radio section "Classic Radio" as it would be since it would be playing from the year 3304...

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Is that true? When they were talking about having the insta-jump from box-to-box, did they know how to do pirating? I'm having a hard time seeing how they would have done pirating, bounty hunting, and such without some form of travelling. I thought pirating and bounty hunting was part of the original kickstarter, so it sounds to me that the idea of travelling in space was there from start.

There was some sort of concept of an interdiction "net" - so the pirates would wait half-way between the nav beacon and the space station with a net, you'd jump between the two, get caught in the net, and drop out and have to fight.

You could also have the drop-out be further from the station than it currently is, so rather than supercruising, then dropping basically on top of the NFZ, you'd micro-jump to about 50km from the station and pirates would have time to intercept you on the way in.

USSes would also have made more sense - you'd have done a system scan, the USSes would have been revealed, and then you could select one as a jump target and go to it.

For the basic trade-pirate-hunt gameplay it would probably have been better than supercruise ... but for actually exploring the galaxy, and especially for planetary approach and landings, supercruise works far better.

(Like every solution to the "space is big" problem it's a compromise. With multiplayer limiting the options already, supercruise is probably the best of the alternatives, but certainly not without its problems.)

 

[Frank]

Not anymore. The distance in light seconds from point of arrival has been included in the mission details for a while now.

You'll have to forgive me. I'm a little distance away from the Bubble so I can't just check for myself. Does this full travel distance information include assassination missions where you have to speak to a contact to find out where your target is? Brilliant if it does.

But I'd still prefer a bit of a reduction in the time idly watching stars whizzing past.

 

[PiggyPiggyPig]

Extra rep for the vintage computers!

Thankyou kindly sir.
Here's a clearer picture. https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...tro-gaming-hardware-Software-etc-etc/page2#28

 

[PiggyPiggyPig]

I partially agree about SC being a bore. I'd love to have some kind of radio station aka GTA series, news, political broadcasts (to sway players to join factions) and other items including real music - or even a real internet radio player that plugs into web "live" radio stations - being a "utility" perhaps fdev can get around paying any licenses and call the radio section "Classic Radio" as it would be since it would be playing from the year 3304...

Great idea!!!! GTA style radio stations. And if I may be allowed to expand on this....to include some faint interference, the odd crackle or hiss, should that system harbour aggressive NPC or players.
And how about being able to purchase an old 1980's portable TV set in outfitting for your dashboard, allowing you to watch YouTube videos or browse the internet.

 

[MadDogMurdock]

I partially agree about SC being a bore. I'd love to have some kind of radio station aka GTA series, news, political broadcasts (to sway players to join factions) and other items including real music - or even a real internet radio player that plugs into web "live" radio stations - being a "utility" perhaps fdev can get around paying any licenses and call the radio section "Classic Radio" as it would be since it would be playing from the year 3304...

I'm pretty sure the community radio stations would love to be accessible from the game.

 

[Lucifera Danzig]

You'll have to forgive me. I'm a little distance away from the Bubble so I can't just check for myself. Does this full travel distance information include assassination missions where you have to speak to a contact to find out where your target is? Brilliant if it does.

But I'd still prefer a bit of a reduction in the time idly watching stars whizzing past.

Having never taken an assassination mission during my entire time playing the game...I have no idea. But I'll take a peak next time I play and find out.

 

[StiTch]

Boy OP, do I have the game for you: http://progressquest.com/info.php

 

[wstephenson]

I for one think Supercruise is an awesome addition to the game. It makes it possible to traverse huge distances in an acceptable timeframe and it makes you feel you are actually piloting a starship when you zoom past stars, planets, moons and asteroid rings.
I think it is one of the most beautiful spaceflight mechanics ever.

I would like a few improvements though.
For example I would like the HUD in supercruise to change, to get a different configuration, like when we approach planets.
I also would like a bit more piloty things to do in SC, perhaps by using pip control for different aspects.

I'm usually scanning contacts and watching my six in SC unless I'm hunting, then I'm scanning contacts and looking for targets.

This is my 'piloty thing', when I'm in populated space, say around a CG. I am constantly watching the behaviour of other ships on the scanner. More 'Piloty Things' I would like to have in SC would be 1) set Alarm On New Contact so when I am returning to the bubble I get shaken out of complacency with something more than a quiet click, and 2) a way to select specific SC contacts fast. Let me illustrate this with an example:

I am a Wanted pirate in a trade/bounty-hunting CG system. My life is not a peaceful one. There are ~30 contacts, NPCs and players in SC. Three of those are hollow rectangles in my aft hemisphere. If one of those is an Engineered PvP build FAS or FdL, it could boil my ViperMk4 without trying, so I try not to put myself in the way of interdiction. I would like to see if any of those are threats: i) ships that can challenge me, and ii) on a possible intercept track. To check this I need to target this contact. I can't do this directly in the Contacts list because I don't know which contact (listed by ship type) corresponds to the potential threat. So I have a high workload, constantly cycling through Next/Prev target, updating my view of the behaviour of the potentially threatening contacts, while also looking for targets.

So this exciting environment could be more efficient to handle if there was a way for me to 'tag' contacts and cycle through 'tagged' contacts as a separate list, in the same way as hostiles are treated. This could even be expanded to a tactical Multicrew mode, where the crewmember can directly target and interrogate contacts.

Other things I'd like to have would be a spectrum of SC contact visibility, rather than all or nothing. Unresolved contacts at extreme range, target size class at long range, ship type at medium range, and cmdr name and loadout details at closer range.

And if I'm really pushing the boat out, a stealth mechanism where visibility is a function of mass and power consumption (but I've mentioned that one before).

All of these would make populated SC environments (even) more interesting.

Lol! I dip into this forum after mostly staying away from it over the past six months - and lo! what do I see? The old "supercruise is boring™" argument.

Good to have you back - but maybe you were drawn to the good old fashioned thread topics?[/QUOTE]

Extra rep for the vintage computers!

Maybe he should play some PET Star Trek whilst on long, boring Supercruise runs? No loading screens, just moving around the galaxy and action!

 

[Fenris Wolf]

I do miss the old time slip drive, but SC wont be going away.

Bit difficult in a 'live' universe to speed up time

 

[DocLooshkin]

This is all very specifically incorrect, regardless of the definition you've decided on. Supercruise is not a "time multiplier," it's modeled very specifically on the Alcubierre Drive theory.
Source: http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Frame_Shift_Drive

Excerpt:

"Frame shift drives use a modified Alcubierre Drive design to compress space in front of ships in supercruise."

Alcubierre Drive:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

The only assumption is that we will have figured out how to meet the engineering challenges necessary to make it work in about a thousand years.

Hello, Ms Danzig.

Just to clarify a point, the Frame-Shift Drive and Miguel Alcubierre's warp drive concepts don't appear to have had any relationship with each other at all, prior to the very excellent Mr Drew Wagar inventing one for a lore article optimistically called Elite Drive Technology – The Definitive Guide, which he published in early 2016.

The ED Wiki page references only Mr Wagar's article, which he subsequently purged from his site along with the rest of his lore project, after FD very sensibly decided the huge amount of lore produced much earlier than ED itself was fair game for being ignored and rewritten. Canonn Research maintains a copy of some of his abandoned work, but not the article in question, which - as far as I know - can now only be found via the Wayback Machine and other web archives.

It might be the case that the Alcubierre-FSD relationship has been retconned in elsewhere in lore, but I'm currently out of the loop with the official spinoffs (waiting and hoping for more audiobooks) and don't know one way or the other. I hope it hasn't, as despite Mr Wagar's love for the idea, the Alcubierre warp system is a very poor fit for what's shown in the game.

As far as I know, the FSD is loosely inspired by the FTL technologies shown in Star Trek and Star Wars and is built entirely around the needs of gameplay, rather than any theory of FTL travel.

 

[Lucifera Danzig]

Hello, Ms Danzig.

Just to clarify a point, the Frame-Shift Drive and Miguel Alcubierre's warp drive concepts don't appear to have had any relationship with each other at all, prior to the very excellent Mr Drew Wagar inventing one for a lore article optimistically called Elite Drive Technology – The Definitive Guide, which he published in early 2016.

The ED Wiki page references only Mr Wagar's article, which he subsequently purged from his site along with the rest of his lore project, after FD very sensibly decided the huge amount of lore produced much earlier than ED itself was fair game for being ignored and rewritten. Canonn Research maintains a copy of some of his abandoned work, but not the article in question, which - as far as I know - can now only be found via the Wayback Machine and other web archives.

It might be the case that the Alcubierre-FSD relationship has been retconned in elsewhere in lore, but I'm currently out of the loop with the official spinoffs (waiting and hoping for more audiobooks) and don't know one way or the other. I hope it hasn't, as despite Mr Wagar's love for the idea, the Alcubierre warp system is a very poor fit for what's shown in the game.

As far as I know, the FSD is loosely inspired by the FTL technologies shown in Star Trek and Star Wars and is built entirely around the needs of gameplay, rather than any theory of FTL travel.

The description in the manual accessible from the launcher describes the FSD operating in exactly the same manner as the Alcubierre Drive. And it's still described as such in the current updated manual, page 69.

 

[Maka Gucci]

Wow, well points for not holding back on making dramatic suggestions.
I vote no, I'm all for an end to hours waiting in SC for HGEs to spawn, only to fill up with proto heat radiators/fight alloys, and nay find a single damn core dynamics composite. Yea, end that. But SC in general, no thanks.