Collector limpet expired... yeah, cos it keeps running into asteroids!

Shaamaan

Shaamaan
This one's been going on for QUITE a while... can we we PLEASE get collector limpets that aren't suicidal? They just love to fly into asteroids.

Oh, and on this subject, can we please have chunks NOT phase into asteroids in the first place, please? :/

Having limpets immune to asteroid collisions and allow them to phase through the asteroids would be a decent (if unrealistic) start until a more sensible fix for the chunks can be implemented...
 
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Deadlock-3000

D
*shrug* No sympathy. You live in a society that banned machine learning and AI. Stupid is built right into the Elite design philosophy, on purpose.
 

Shaamaan

Shaamaan
Deadlock-3000 said:
*shrug* No sympathy. You live in a society that banned machine learning and AI. Stupid is built right into the Elite design philosophy, on purpose.
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Ya know... I could make do with a manual tractor beam in that case, something you have to aim manually (i.e. skill-based), if it's fast and reliable, if we can't have sensible limpets. :/
 

CMDR Jayce MacLeod

CMDR Jayce MacLeod
I agree, this has irked me for years, and now that Mining is super popular now, it really should be addressed. Change the flight pattern of the limpets and we will have vastly fewer crashed limpets.
 

Deadlock-3000

D
Shaamaan said:
Ya know... I could make do with a manual tractor beam in that case, something you have to aim manually (i.e. skill-based), if it's fast and reliable, if we can't have sensible limpets. :/
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Oh wouldn't we all? But no, it's limpets. Limpets for this, limpets for that. Limpets that hack, limpets that clean, limpets that fix, limpets that fetch. You want to go on a general-purpose wander? Two thirds of your ship internals might be dedicated to the incredibly volume-consuming task of controlling slightly different varieties of limpet. Half of the rest is different kinds of scanner and the control mechanisms for all the keybinds you need to operate all of these scanners and launch all of the limpets with.

Now with added infinite supercruise-capable limpets that map planets for you.

4.0 will add the ability to personally pilot a limpet.

Limpets.
 
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CaptainCaboose

CaptainCaboose
Maybe I'm the only guy here that spent an absurd amount of time mining prior to Beyond CH4. Maybe I'm not. But I'll tell you this: Limpets have come a long way over the last year in terms of collision detection and avoidance. There is Absolutely no way the old limpet AI would be able to function with the new deep core stuff.

"Back in my day" the limpets would slam face-first into every roid you were mining, even if it had almost 0 rotation, about every 1-in-10 loops, over half your total limpet count was lost-on-collision.

They've made improvements to it, they'll continue to do so, it will be all rainbows and kittens n' stuff, you'll see...

YOU'LL ALL SEE!
 

Andovar

Andovar
CaptainCaboose said:
Maybe I'm the only guy here that spent an absurd amount of time mining prior to Beyond CH4. Maybe I'm not. But I'll tell you this: Limpets have come a long way over the last year in terms of collision detection and avoidance. There is Absolutely no way the old limpet AI would be able to function with the new deep core stuff.
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I agree. They're actually pretty impressive if you watch them work.
Their little headlights look almost like a scanner as they follow the surface of an asteroid chunk. The old AI didn't have any of this pathfinding.

The 2 cases where I see the majority of the problems are:
  1. when the chunks they're trying to retrieve are stuck inside an asteroid. this doesn't happen often to me, but it's a bug that needs fixing.
  2. when the chunks are so close to the roid that they're basically sitting on the surface. this causes the limpets to faceplant when attempting to pickup.

For #2, sometimes the limpet collision will bounce the chunk far enough away so that the next limpet can get it. Or on a few rare occasions, I end up manually scooping.
The only AI adjustment i could see here is maybe have them hit the breaks at the last sec and go in slow for the pickup.
 
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777Driver

777Driver
I don't understand why limpets need to be so fragile, fair enough point defence needs to be able to take them out, couldn't the devs code some magic so they are much tougher when involved in collisions?
 

CaptainCaboose

CaptainCaboose
NyanCat Limpets would be amazing for 5 minutes.

As to why they don't just make limpets tougher; I assume that A: they need to die to point defense, as stated, and B: if your collectors are stuck, alive, jammed into a roid they can't path around, then you can't collect anything until they expire of old age, so that's 5-10 minutes of sitting there watching them slam repeatedly into the roid where you literally can't do anything except maybe powercycle your collector limpet controllers and hope that kills the little buggers.

They just need to continue work on the pathing and everything will be good to go.

PROTIP, btw: If you are moving your ship while the collector is returning, you are making their jobs much harder. Use your abrasion blasters to free up what you can see, wait for them to collect all the chunks, THEN reposition and repeat.

Takes a little longer than usual but you lose less limpets. Mining isn't fast anyway, a few more seconds won't hurt.
 

ibmalone

I
I've not seen the fragments or limpets trapped in an asteroid, how does one achieve that? Typically only run two at a time when mining though.

CaptainCaboose said:
PROTIP, btw: If you are moving your ship while the collector is returning, you are making their jobs much harder. Use your abrasion blasters to free up what you can see, wait for them to collect all the chunks, THEN reposition and repeat.
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Yes, I typically fly gently around the outside of a detonated core to give them a clear path between the ship and the fragments, snipe surface chunks as you go. That said, I'm usually throwing out limpets to make space.
 

Shaamaan

Shaamaan
Andovar said:
I agree. They're actually pretty impressive if you watch them work.
Their little headlights look almost like a scanner as they follow the surface of an asteroid chunk. The old AI didn't have any of this pathfinding.
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Oh, I've been there too. But that really doesn't excuse the fact they STILL have a death-wish at times.

As for the chunk-in-asteroid bug... I've had it happen in two out of 3 asteroids I wanted to mine during a session today, so... yeah. I know, I know - statistics, I might just be on the unlucky end of the spectrum. But it's still bloody annoying when it happens and there's little you can do about it.
 

ibmalone

I
Shaamaan said:
Oh, I've been there too. But that really doesn't excuse the fact they STILL have a death-wish at times.

As for the chunk-in-asteroid bug... I've had it happen in two out of 3 asteroids I wanted to mine during a session today, so... yeah. I know, I know - statistics, I might just be on the unlucky end of the spectrum. But it's still bloody annoying when it happens and there's little you can do about it.
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Is the chunk-in-asteroid with new mining or old mining? (Just curious.)
 

Deleted member 38366

D
To me it seems Limpets (Core Mining) become "very dumb" the moment they return AND the Ship happens to move.

Them trying to maintain sync with Ship movement seems to override their Collision Avoidance.

On top, it seems they only try to avoid the main fragments of a blown up Asteroid (Core Mining). Anything else they still happily ignore and suicide like Lemmings.

PS.
I remember getting about 1 out of 25 Core Mining Mineral fragments stuck inside an Asteroid Fragment. Fairly common occurrence to me.
 

mecha_mike

mecha_mike
Even if my ship is perfectly still, limpets expire after leaving the cargo bay and going out pretty often when mining. I have watched them die with external cam without anything interfering with them. right outside the hatch.

Every time i use limpets to collect materials at an encoded or decraded site , the first limpet always dies after returning the fetched article, if my ship is still , or moving ever so slightly forward , if my hatch is pointing away or towards the targets, same results, first limpet dies then the second and third does the job (this on PS4 and on AspX and Phantom.) sometimes the second dies to at once but thats a tad more rarely.
 

ElPueblo

ElPueblo
mecha_mike said:
Even if my ship is perfectly still, limpets expire after leaving the cargo bay and going out pretty often when mining. I have watched them die with external cam without anything interfering with them. right outside the hatch.

Every time i use limpets to collect materials at an encoded or decraded site , the first limpet always dies after returning the fetched article, if my ship is still , or moving ever so slightly forward , if my hatch is pointing away or towards the targets, same results, first limpet dies then the second and third does the job (this on PS4 and on AspX and Phantom.) sometimes the second dies to at once but thats a tad more rarely.
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Make sure you do not have anything selected (i.e. cargo, chunks etc) when launching limpet.
If you target something, the limpet will collect it and then die, it works like that since 2.2 (I think).
 
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