Simple procedural missions while out in the black

[CMDR Yates]

You know how sometimes you'll be chilling in your ship somewhere in the bubble and a mission or tipoff will land in your inbox?

Wouldn't it be cool if that happened in deep space?

Not all the time. Just once every few hours or days, to break things up and give you some occasional structure if you want it.

A scout ship has been lost and we've determined you're the only ship in a thousand light years of the site. If you can scan the wreck/retrieve a black box/rescue a survivor, the Pilots Federation will pay you several million credits.

Universal Cartographics have detected atypical magnetic activity in System X. If you can go there and scan the whole system, we'll pay you a 500% bonus on it.

Scientists have had reports of an unusual genus of void life in the vicinity of Nebula Y. If you can locate some and get a composition scan/research sample, they'll reward you handsomely.

The missions given would obviously have to take into account what modules you have on board.

Seems like it wouldn't be that hard to implement

 

[CZRFeign]

Love these suggestions, I like the rescue mission and a healthy pay off would make you really consider putting that passenger cabin/cargo rack on your explorer build.

I’d love to stumble across a derelict station or abandoned colony base too. Especially after the atypical magnetic activity alert. Picking through a ghost station to find some clue as to what happened. Hell, even just exploring such a derelict would be amazing especially after being out in the black for so long. Or a creepy audio log that explains nothing but makes you regret being so far away from civilisation.

 

[space voyager]

Something to spice up life out there would be great. Cool ideas.

 

[CMDR Yates]

And for those who want complete isolation, it would be trivial to make it a feature that can be switched off.

Call it the Deep Space Dispatch Network or something. Put a button on the comms tab that opts in or out. It's a no-brainer, IMO.

 

[Old Duck]

I miss the good 'ol days when FTL communication was by ship delivery only. None of this "Instant Galactic Internet" nonsense. None of this telepresence. You want to deliver me a message, you're going to have to track me down and transmit it to me in person*. Braben is scared to death of artificial gravity, yet he breaks the laws of physics in all other ways possible. GRRR!

* for the sake of gameplay, I can ignore FTL comms inside a system.

 

[avow555]

Great suggestions.
All assets are currently in-game just now, so just the will to implement them.

 

[CMDR Yates]

I miss the good 'ol days when FTL communication was by ship delivery only. None of this "Instant Galactic Internet" nonsense. None of this telepresence. You want to deliver me a message, you're going to have to track me down and transmit it to me in person*. Braben is scared to death of artificial gravity, yet he breaks the laws of physics in all other ways possible. GRRR!

* for the sake of gameplay, I can ignore FTL comms inside a system.

We wouldn't have a game like Elite Dangerous if the devs weren't already very liberal about what they considered "scientific accuracy". That it even gives a nod to accuracy (in terms of scale and whatnot) is impressive.

Yes, people always bring up "frame dragging", Alcubierre drives, etc. etc., but let's be honest, the FTL technology in this and all games is sci-fi space magic with a lot of handwavium applied, and any similarity to real-life theoretical physics is a convenient coincidence that lets them come up with a vague associated justification for what your spaceship can do, to help with your suspension of disbelief. They could easily do the same with a text transmission if enough people cared. Blah blah quantum entanglement, whatever.

I'm not an absolutist when it comes to fun trumps accuracy, because I think a degree of scientific accuracy (or at least "accuracy") actually contributes to the fun. But the goal either way should be the achievement of fun. If the adherence to scientific accuracy is costing most people more fun than it earns them, then there's no harm in tweaking that ratio IMO.

I love exploring the vast expanses of the galaxy, and the sense of scale and isolation. But there are times when the empty black is dry. as. hell. And I think that turns most players off.

 

[Old Duck]

I'm not an absolutist when it comes to fun trumps accuracy, because I think a degree of scientific accuracy (or at least "accuracy") actually contributes to the fun. But the goal either way should be the achievement of fun. If the adherence to scientific accuracy is costing most people more fun than it earns them, then there's no harm in tweaking that ratio IMO.

And I'm not an absolutist when it comes to accuracy trumps fun, but I personally think the game would be more fun if only ships could go FTL, not electromagnetic waves. This gives meaning to data delivery missions and the need for a ship or representative to be present in a system in order to get electronic mail. Heck, there could even be missions to gather news around the Bubble, bring it to GalNet Central, and then deliver the GalNet "newspaper" to various systems.

So for now I just use my own head-cannon to get around instant comms. The sci-fi show Andromeda had AI mail that would simulate real-time comms with a "mission giver", but it was just dialog and responses preprogrammed ahead of time. That's what I imagine all these "Good job, CMDR" messages to be when I complete a mission in a different system than where I was given a message - it's just prerecorded AI message (which ironically is exactly what it is, from a game code perspective).

Long story short, I'm happy to get away from all of this spam when I'm out exploring. I also go hiking without my cell phone. So with respect to the OP, the Bubble is HUGE, so let's keep the junk mail limited to it and save the pristine loneliness of the rest of the galaxy for those of us who like it that way.

 

[dm06]

When and how do you expect to recieve reward for each suggested scenario?..

Let me guess.

A scout ship has been lost and we've determined you're the only ship in a thousand light years of the site. If you can scan the wreck/retrieve a black box/rescue a survivor, the Pilots Federation will pay you several million credits.
Deliver the salvage to faction's starpot?

Universal Cartographics have detected atypical magnetic activity in System X. If you can go there and scan the whole system, we'll pay you a 500% bonus on it.
Sell exploration data at starport controlled by the faction?

Scientists have had reports of an unusual genus of void life in the vicinity of Nebula Y. If you can locate some and get a composition scan/research sample, they'll reward you handsomely.
I don't even aware about game mechanics in the case to make guesses.

 

[CMDR Yates]

Long story short, I'm happy to get away from all of this spam when I'm out exploring. I also go hiking without my cell phone. So with respect to the OP, the Bubble is HUGE, so let's keep the junk mail limited to it and save the pristine loneliness of the rest of the galaxy for those of us who like it that way.

You could switch it off and never look at the option again, never see a single message.

FWIW, my headcannon for to data delivery missions is that you're carrying a vast amount of big data that's can be delivered more quickly and economically on physical media than using whatever FTL comms is used for short messages and mission updates. The FTL messages could have vast range but extremely low bitrate, so sending it that way would be like sending a 6GB movie by plain text message. "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

Particularly apt: "If an Airbus A380 were filled with microSD cards each holding 512 gigabytes of storage capacity, the theoretical total storage space onboard would be approximately 91 exabytes. A 4h47m flight from New York to Los Angeles would work out to a data transport rate of well over 5 petabytes per second, although this does not account for the time required to write to and read from the cards, which would almost certainly be much longer than the duration of the flight."

 

[CMDR Yates]

A scout ship has been lost and we've determined you're the only ship in a thousand light years of the site. If you can scan the wreck/retrieve a black box/rescue a survivor, the Pilots Federation will pay you several million credits.
Deliver the salvage to faction's starpot?

Let's say, the mission is given by Pilot's Federation, and can be claimed at any starport in the galaxy.

Universal Cartographics have detected atypical magnetic activity in System X. If you can go there and scan the whole system, we'll pay you a 500% bonus on it.
Sell exploration data at starport controlled by the faction?

Same procedure as Codex vouchers: claim them from the authority screen at any starport.

Scientists have had reports of an unusual genus of void life in the vicinity of Nebula Y. If you can locate some and get a composition scan/research sample, they'll reward you handsomely.
I don't even aware about game mechanics in the case to make guesses.

Codex vouchers, again.

 

[dm06]

Long story short, I'm happy to get away from all of this spam when I'm out exploring. I also go hiking without my cell phone. So with respect to the OP, the Bubble is HUGE, so let's keep the junk mail limited to it and save the pristine loneliness of the rest of the galaxy for those of us who like it that way.

If you talking about that "contact details" messages then I agree. Always discarded those messages because kind of always busy. But once I did accept one. And I found that very handy and feel very grateful. Why?.. because that was easy delivery mission with rep+++++ reward from the faction I wanted to gain rep. And it was not that easy to find such missions in station's mission board.

 

[AdmiralXanos]

I miss the good 'ol days when FTL communication was by ship delivery only. None of this "Instant Galactic Internet" nonsense. None of this telepresence. You want to deliver me a message, you're going to have to track me down and transmit it to me in person*. Braben is scared to death of artificial gravity, yet he breaks the laws of physics in all other ways possible. GRRR!

* for the sake of gameplay, I can ignore FTL comms inside a system.

The way I figure any interstellar communication would work is if the radio transmissions were also using space compression. So you have a transmitter that beams out data and compresses space in the direction of the receiver. Only works line-of-sight but because no mass is being compressed it can be multiples faster than any typical FTL drive. So an email for a food supply order doesn't take 6 years to arrive at the next system over.

 

[CMDR Yates]

Just got finished with another very long exploration trip, and am more convinced of how great it would be if there was at least an option for an infrequent drip feed of suggested tasks and/or procedural breadcrumb trails to follow while we're out there.

I love the solitude of being away from the bubble, the eerie feeling of vast emptiness. I wouldn't want that to be undermined. But there comes a point, when you've scanned hundreds of systems and know what to expect, and start to recognise the underlying patterns of what is generated where (generally speaking), that it all starts to feel very mechanistic and predictable. I become acutely aware I'm just exploring an algorithm, and I know there are no surprises coming.

On top of that, I think knowing you're gonna be cut off from missions and even the option of external direction, puts a lot of players off the idea of exploring, when otherwise it might be something they could get into.

A notification popping up from Cartographics or the Pilots Federation, or a distant signal detection out of the blue maybe once in 200 or 500 jumps, giving something to be investigated the vicinity of my current system, would add that element of the unexpected, and some varied flavour text of the "what and why" would add the illusion of depth to the assets we find. It would make deep space exploration feel like more of a fully-fledged, active career, as well. Finding a centuries-old shipwreck or an unidentified alien artifact, once in a very long time, might actually add to the loneliness and the mystery of deep space.

Of course, a source of missions like this should be able to be switched off as well. Perhaps there should be a comms toggle for all kinds of tipoff missions including the current ones as well.

 

[CrackedBeaker]

Great idea - there's a lot of neat things that could be done with this.

"A nearby system was scanned by another commander, but in reviewing the data, we found some interesting readings that we'd like to follow up on. Could you divert there and map the moon designated XXXXX 8b? You will be amply rewarded for your time."

"Long range scans indicate a possible Thargoid incursion into system XXXXX, and you are the closest commander to the system in question. Would you be able to travel there and use your FSS to search out possible Non-Human Signal Sources, to confirm?"

 

[Hopix]

Great idea.

 

[MK Regular]

A notification popping up from Cartographics or the Pilots Federation, or a distant signal detection out of the blue maybe once in 200 or 500 jumps, giving something to be investigated the vicinity of my current system, would add that element of the unexpected, and some varied flavour text of the "what and why" would add the illusion of depth to the assets we find. It would make deep space exploration feel like more of a fully-fledged, active career, as well. Finding a centuries-old shipwreck or an unidentified alien artifact, once in a very long time, might actually add to the loneliness and the mystery of deep space.

Something like this is definitely be something I would be interested in, provided that the things that I am investigating actually make sense.

As much as it would be interesting to find centuries-old shipwrecks and abandoned bases, it would not make sense to be able to find them more than a few thousand LY away from the bubble. FSDs are a relatively new invention in-universe (less than 25 years iirc), before which everyone was using the hyperdrives from FE2 and FFE that had less range, were significantly slower, and had much shorter service lives than FSDs. The old hyperdrives would take anywhere up to a week to make a single jump, and would typically conk out after about a year without an overhaul meaning that ships would be hard-pressed to travel more than 1,000 ly without needing to get their hyperdrive overhauled. If we are ever able to find shipwrecks on the other side of the galaxy, they be one of 3 things:

• Be relatively 'fresh' shipwrecks equipped with FSDs
• Be part of a large (and by extension expensive) expedition (see Project Dynasty)
• Be of non-human origin

When it comes to detecting emissions (as per your original post), the main issue is that emissions only propagate at the speed of light. Sure you might have detected a large magnetic flux in a system 50,000 ly away, but the event that caused the flux would have occurred 50,000 years ago and has probably ended long since then.

The "another ship passed through the system and we want you to go take a second look" makes sense. The main thing with the mission sub-type is that the system chosen should have something interesting in it (preferably something that the original commander did not scan), be it a biological surface site, a glowing gas giant, an Earth-like world, etc...

Of course, a source of missions like this should be able to be switched off as well. Perhaps there should be a comms toggle for all kinds of tipoff missions including the current ones as well.

More toggles to customize the notifications you get is generally a good thing. Personally I'd keep them all turned on as I have my own headcannon as to how FTL communication works in ED.

 

[Jmanis]

A good idea, but I want to throw one caveat out there.

You'll only get offers from faction's you're Allied with, and those factions must be within 20LY of your current location.

Thing is, you already "get missions and tipoffs in the black"... they're triggered by hanging out in normal space for 15-20 minutes or something like that. 90% of them I never do, as they're always offered by some rando faction I've never heard of, and will ultimately interfere with the activities I'm doing for a particular faction.

I wish these in-flight activities happened more often tbh, and wish they happened mid supercruise or during other more common activities... but I wish the offeres aligned with the factions I already support more often.

Getting allied to a faction isn't much work, and it makes sense that if they've developed a good connection with you that they'd seek you out for that sort of work. And if you're a freelancer trying to stay in most people's good books, you should be allied with many factions at any one time, so it's not an onerous overhead.

If you talking about that "contact details" messages then I agree. Always discarded those messages because kind of always busy. But once I did accept one. And I found that very handy and feel very grateful. Why?.. because that was easy delivery mission with rep+++++ reward from the faction I wanted to gain rep. And it was not that easy to find such missions in station's mission board.

Yeah, they're often worth more, for less work, so they're actually worthwhile activities, but yeah, in my case almost always offered by factions I don't want to work for, or I'm usually unfriendly/hostile to them, which begs the question why they're even asking me in the first place.

 

[MK Regular]

A good idea, but I want to throw one caveat out there.

You'll only get offers from faction's you're Allied with, and those factions must be within 20LY of your current location.

OP's suggestion is about tip-off style missions that are meant to be given out to players that are far outside the bubble. There will not be any allied factions within 20 ly of the player's location because there is a good chance that there will be no factions (allied or not) within 20,000 ly of the player's location.

What you suggest would be kinda nice for existing tip-off missions though.

 

[Jmanis]

OP's suggestion is about tip-off style missions that are meant to be given out to players that are far outside the bubble. There will not be any allied factions within 20 ly of the player's location because there is a good chance that there will be no factions (allied or not) within 20,000 ly of the player's location.

What you suggest would be kinda nice for existing tip-off missions though.

Ah, misread what "out in the black" meant.

It's funny... while I've not made a suggestion like the OP before, I have suggested activites for out in deep space, particularly requiring the various limpets and other bits and bobs.

I guess part of the problem is all the explorers wanted USS and other activities taken out of deep space because it disturbed their feng shui about coming across that sort of thing in so-called "uninhabited space"... and secondly there was a lot of revulsion at the idea of

• Needing "all this additional equipment to explore", and
• "Who's actually going to risk potential billions in exploration data for some risky thing worth a couple million"

Just what I've been hit with before. Personally, I think it's a great idea from the OP