All of this sounds pretty reasonable - it’s a good middle ground.
It gives those who want to use autopilot a way to cut down on pressing J, but doesn’t just make it an easy hands off experience - there’s still some of the old flying skill involved.
I would love a NPC Helmsman
- Thread starter lysan
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All of this sounds pretty reasonable - it’s a good middle ground.
It gives those who want to use autopilot a way to cut down on pressing J, but doesn’t just make it an easy hands off experience - there’s still some of the old flying skill involved.
How do you manage to jump often enough that it becomes "repetitive and utterly boring" without fuel scooping? Do you have any optional modules in your ship besides fuel tanks?
Tell you what, why don't we get FDev to automate everything and then we can just start the game and let it play itself while we watch Netflix, read, go shopping, post to the forum, play Start Citizen or anything else. Think how easy that would be. No grind, no pressing J every 40 seconds.
Just leave the game to play itself and in a few days you'd have every ship fully 'A' rated, engineered to the max and more credits than you know what to do with.
That would please just about everyone that complains about how bad Elite is and how hard it is to do anything because of the grind etc. In fact, you wouldn't know about anything in the game so there shouldn't be anything to complain about.
Except not being able to play the game, of course.
Do you think FDev would go for it?
I look forward to the video you post of you refuelling your car while driving round the petrol station at a measurable fraction of the speed of light.
I get what you're saying but in ED fuel-scooping is not difficult or 'fun'. But as it is refuelling I quite understand that it should be like that.
Why would he bother though? There's no need to compare fuel scooping to real-world tasks to suggest that there's something inherently difficult about it. Not when you can just examine the actual task in-game, which is about as difficult as breathing.
I mean seriously, you can write 'some people clearly find it difficult' all you like and I won't even dispute it, having seen what I presume are people wearing blindfolds and boxing gloves playing the game on youtube and twitch, but that's not to say that by any reasonable standard it is a difficult task. With orbit lines on, it consists of flying towards a massive, glowing ball and making sure to keep the nose of your ship pointed to the non-glowing ball side of a line. Sure you can refine the technique and get more efficient at it but to achieve the basic task of getting fuel in the tank without flying into a star that is all that is needed.
Anybody who genuinely finds that difficult probably isn't going to be having much fun by the time they move onto slightly more advanced areas of the game, such as... well anything that isn't flying in a straight line basically.
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Enderby, my last post was on the snarky side and I apologize for that.
But the thing is, as an expert pilot there will be many skills you have mastered that you can now exercise without thinking about them. That doesn't mean that you're doing something that's trivial, it means that you're very good.
I'm now at the point where I can fuel scoop without too many mistakes. I'm better than I was, and I'll be better than I am. I've acquired a skill, and one that's rather more subtle than a simple sequence of button pushes that some people seem to think is all that's required to make an extended sequence of jumps.
If FDev see fit to provide an autopilot for long sequences of jumps, so be it. They do after all provide an autodocker. But it'll be a lot more complicated than a button-pushing macro, and it will replace a significant piloting skill, even if that skill may no longer stand out to those who have mastered it.
But the thing is, as an expert pilot there will be many skills you have mastered that you can now exercise without thinking about them. That doesn't mean that you're doing something that's trivial, it means that you're very good.
I'm now at the point where I can fuel scoop without too many mistakes. I'm better than I was, and I'll be better than I am. I've acquired a skill, and one that's rather more subtle than a simple sequence of button pushes that some people seem to think is all that's required to make an extended sequence of jumps.
If FDev see fit to provide an autopilot for long sequences of jumps, so be it. They do after all provide an autodocker. But it'll be a lot more complicated than a button-pushing macro, and it will replace a significant piloting skill, even if that skill may no longer stand out to those who have mastered it.
Except in ED you're not a captain of anything, you're just a pilot who also owns the ship, in case you haven't noticed ED's ships are nothing like the Allure of The Seas, they don't have a crew of thousands taking commands from you in the captain's chair on the bridge. In fact, they don't even have a captain's chair, nor have a command bridge and even less have an actual ship-manning crew, they just have a couple of seats (3 tops) in the cockpit, ED's ships are much more akin to airplanes than seafaring large vessels, and the airplane's pilots are surely not spending the voyage reading books at his personal quarters
Anyway, despite you argumentation being hugely flawed, this doesn't remove your underlying point (having some form of autopilot) from being valid. After all, even planes do have auto pilot.
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There was no need to apologise but I appreciate it that you did. Point taken. All the best with mastering the scooping!
Somehow it’s a skill to not fall asleep.
Even something as simple as pointing your ship accurately at the system you're jumping to which, if spot on, or degrees of, could give you a fuel-use bonus. At the moment the game centres you on it (if you're pointing in the right general direction). Make this a little mini-game to liven up even a simple jump. Even if it only makes it a little bit more engaging.
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Good idea!
The NPC helmsman flies to the last fueling point, and disengage the automation, you do the refuel thingy and continues to the next point, raise and repeat.
You will still need to do manual flying when you refuel the ship, but you don't need to micromanage every single jump.
What a utterly silly comment, and it got nothing to do with this OP, that one passes over your head like.....
No thank you very much, this is not needed, as I said we already got ship transfer and It's not something I like, but I accept it, I just want to handle over control a let go of the micromanaging star jumps.
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I'd argue it is.
If ya think jumping is bad in Elite Dangerous, try sailing from Kingston to St. Kitts in Naval Action. You could get 1/3rd of the way to Sag A by the time you get there. In otherwords... it could be worse!
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Don't know the game, can you set a course and it will follow that set course, or do you need to micromanage left and right until you get there?
I don't believe so; their website states "Captains are expected to navigate using landmarks and compass." - that tells me no auto-sailing.
You do know how that is in the real world right, got nothing to do with "auto sailing"
The essentials of modern navigation had been well established by the 1770s, when Europeans first settled on the West Coast of North America. The
sextant, a practical tool for celestial (sky) navigation, was in common use. The chronometer (an accurate clock) had been invented.
Today the most basic way is to:
Plot course....
Set pilot to follow compass....
Check clock......
Set alarm, that is how it was done some years ago.
Even when they didn't had the "pilot" they fixated the rudder on the ship.
It got nothing to do with NAVIGATION, you mix those terms up mate.
Navigation=plot course
pilot the ship=follow set course.