Newcomer / Intro What are you up to?

[Codger]

Besides this, I had a pirate problem. When I entered the ring, I was completely alone. Noone on the radar, noone moving around, even after waiting some time.
Then I started mining, collected some gold in the process - that rock I had chosen had quite a bit of it.
Then, after I had been mining for some minutes, someone dropped in on me, scanned me and started shooting. So I ran, leaving uncollected goods and limpets behind...

This is a "feature" of rings. If you are within about 500LY of civilization, any time you enter a ring a pirate or two will spawn a couple of minutes later.

So, what you need to do is enter the ring, wait a bit until the pirates show up, let them scan you (if you only have limpets they will not attack), then wait a while until they fly away and you see their wakes left behind.

After that you can mine in peace and they will not return (unless you log off and on, or exit and re-enter the ring).

If you don't want to wait around for all that, or if you have something other than limpets in your hold, you can also just boost, boost, boost away from the spot where you entered the ring. Get far enough away and they will probably not find you. It's a bit riskier, but it does work as long as you fly far enough

 

[Skürt Avil]

I've never used, nor even looked into, packhounds. Are they worth having?

Yes, they're great fun. And G5'd they do loads of damage, even to your own ship! Always drop a few heatsinks when using them.

 

[Ashnak]

I've never used, nor even looked into, packhounds. Are they worth having?

Yes.
I use them on my shady misson runner - you know, scan a data point on a ground installation, discretely disable a generator, stuff like that which is usually worth a million or two. The packhounds are great for taking out those generators from outside the base's detection range. Using regular missiles, the ground defenses usually get them and it takes ages. But shoot a single salvo of packhounds from dual launchers, and 24 missiles will (try to - some will hit a building or two standing in the way) will converge on that generator and take it down. With lots of discretion.
In PvP, their main use is to fry your opponent's GPU. Quad launchers will mean 48 missiles with smoke tracks spinning through space towards your ship, all of which wants to be rendered.
As you can see in this video (just grabbed something that promised to show lots of PH's), their use otherwise (I would guess those are unenegineered) is limited.

 

[Marvin the Martian]

He would have been dead in a fraction of that time with conventional weapons.

It does look cool though.

 

[CMDR Timber McWolf]

This is a "feature" of rings. If you are within about 500LY of civilization, any time you enter a ring a pirate or two will spawn a couple of minutes later.

So, what you need to do is enter the ring, wait a bit until the pirates show up, let them scan you (if you only have limpets they will not attack), then wait a while until they fly away and you see their wakes left behind.

After that you can mine in peace and they will not return (unless you log off and on, or exit and re-enter the ring).

If you don't want to wait around for all that, or if you have something other than limpets in your hold, you can also just boost, boost, boost away from the spot where you entered the ring. Get far enough away and they will probably not find you. It's a bit riskier, but it does work as long as you fly far enough

I see. So this is not really suited for a quick mining run, it needs some more commitment.

I initially tried to boost away, but I felt like 16 Tons was not fast enough.

 

[CMDRQuainMarln]

I see. So this is not really suited for a quick mining run, it needs some more commitment.

I initially tried to boost away, but I felt like 16 Tons was not fast enough.

The secret to mining in the bubble is having grade 5 dirty drives with drag effect so you are fast enough to boost away from the pirates.
Another option is to hitch a ride on a fleet carrier for a weekend of mining at the Parrots Head Sector triple overlap platinum hotspot. 981ly outside the bubble and away from all pirates. I've done it with my carrier 3 times playing 245k/t for platinum and Monazite core mining is OK there too.
If it interests you I could put my fleet carrier out there over a weekend again. I need 1000t or more mining to make it worth the trip.

 

[Fnord Velkor]

.... and you see their wakes left behind.
...

That is the most important thing.

 

[Fnord Velkor]

The secret to mining in the bubble is having grade 5 dirty drives with drag effect so you are fast enough to boost away from the pirates.
...

No, I disagree, the secret isn't a secret it is what everyone except NPC pirate scum knows - wait for the pirate to turn up, get bored and high-wake out.

 

[Tyres O'Flaherty]

No, I disagree, the secret isn't a secret it is what everyone except NPC pirate scum knows - wait for the pirate to turn up, get bored and high-wake out.

Yep.

Mind you, I never mine in the bubble but that's another gift option a carrier gives you. You can even park your ship in ring and come back to it to just carry on unmolested.

 

[Nekozji]

Today has been mostly old-school planetary scanning, and it doesn't really make for much by way of visuals...

According to the galactic map, I have passed through a somewhat sparse region (between arms?) and entered denser space to the north. Despite this, there's still a lot of systems been tapped - but maybe that's because I've decided to cherrypick and only route through F and G type systems. Or maybe it's because I'm beelining towards a bunch of black holes that are likely a bit of a tourist destination because they stand out as fuzzy grey blips even when their stellar type isn't selected. Either way, I'm only 3 jumps away, and once I've gotten my "I was here" selfie, I'm torn between picking a random direction roughly towards the galactic core, or returning home and selling my data.

So far this trip has netted me a large number of HMCs, about 20 of them terraformable, plus some un-scanned WWs, and one undiscovered ammonia world. All together my estimated scan value is upwards of 70 million, which is 3-4 reputations to allied, if I spend it wisely. For a 4 day expedition, that doesn't feel too bad. It could take that long running errands and ferrying passengers. Exploration might actually be a very effective way to gain rep.

I shall have to check up on the current top 20 factions and which ones I've already ticked off. Might be close to the full set, and if I remember right, this is close to 10% of the bubble in which I'll have an ally in the system.

The remaining 90%... that's going to be harder. We rapidly fall out of the 100-system factions, rapidly reducing the contributions to the overall %. In fact it's probably a fool's errand to even try for more than 20%, so I don't think I will. But 20% would be very significant indeed!

 

[CMDRQuainMarln]

No, I disagree, the secret isn't a secret it is what everyone except NPC pirate scum knows - wait for the pirate to turn up, get bored and high-wake out.

I'm impatient and that takes too long for me. I'd rather put all pips to engines and just keep boosting with my grade 5 dirty drag drives until they're off the radar scope and then get back to mining.

 

[aRJay]

I tried mining in a ring today and there was something that confused me.
I had scanned the system a few days ago, including the rings. It showed a few hotspots.
Today, I went there and did not find any of the hotspots. Are these hotspots exclusively for explosive mining?
16 Tons only has some mining lasers and a set of abrasion blasters.

Besides this, I had a pirate problem. When I entered the ring, I was completely alone. Noone on the radar, noone moving around, even after waiting some time.
Then I started mining, collected some gold in the process - that rock I had chosen had quite a bit of it.
Then, after I had been mining for some minutes, someone dropped in on me, scanned me and started shooting. So I ran, leaving uncollected goods and limpets behind...
Well, at least I had my expenses covered and some extra cash from those 8 tons of gold...
But I guess for the time being, I will be asteroid belt mining in inhabited areas with reliable police forces...

Always assume that 1 or more ships will arrive in the ring to look you over a short time after you arrive there, usually they are pirates but you get the occasional miner or police or even a combination of them all.
Normal practice is to wait until any pirates have scanned you, complained about how selfish you have been by not having anything other than limpets on board, then jumped out. Once they have jumped you are safe to start refining as they won’t come back after the jump.
Of course if you leave the ring and come back, the game crashes or you log out as soon as you appear back in the ring the visitors reset so start running immediatel.

 

[aRJay]

How do you know you are playing too much EDO?

When you get out of breath walking to the shops and decide you will park a bit further away from the biological sites to get in a bit more walking while you collect your samples.

 

[aRJay]

Back in the bubble, we’ll almost I am at the New Growth asteroid base in the Pencil Sector having decide to cash in early.

The trip netted me some 165,716,838 credits after costs from Universal Cartographics and Vista Genomics it also jumped me up two ranks and I am now a Taxonomist.

There were lots of first discoveries from both.

 

[Teiri]

THanks for that advice. I'll give the external camera a try but will probably give up on this lot of bacterium as the one sample I have isn't a new one for me and I would now like to move on.

The routes I plot are all stars apart from red dwarfs as there's more chance of finding the valuable bodies such as water worlds and terraformables (unless I'm in an area where there's few stars but right now there are plenty as I've reached a spiral arm.)

I'm being on a little salad hunting trip currently... Yeah, bacteria can be a pain, especially grey ones on a ice world orbiting a dim star. But on top of external camera what else you can do (except of jumping around constantly and scanning with rigth click).

Turret. In fact when in SRV and salad hunting, turret is a great thing for it's visibility. When driving, i'm often in the turret view. From what i see, bacteria are kind of not too visible from their side, but if you're on any kind of higher than them, that helps a lot. Even if it's a very modest SRV turrret altitude. Also easier looking at your flanks while driving.

Then, a llittle maneuvrable ship surfing at 50m of altitude will make your bacteria hunt much shorter. You can see them very well from altitude, land, scan and continue further. I found myself bookmarking bio planets and returning to them with my bio specced Sidewinder - very fast, very maneuvrable and very little so i can land anywhere. That's only for Carrier-based exploration though (or for the case when you decide to try exploring in a very small ship - in fact it's fun). However, i can say that being very fast isn't worth much, as if you surf at 500 m/s, stuff won't even render. And bacteria often prefer flat terrains. Could mean that flying slowly a little around the place can find those bacteria quite fast, even if you're in your Explorer Asp/Krait/DBX. With big ships it's probably getting more complicated, i never tried.

And other (than bacteria) salad hunting targets tend to be much more visible from the distance. Idk if of any use, but i just wanted to say, that for the case when you're unsure if you're wasting time on this hardly ever findable bio, there's a tool for that.

 

[Nekozji]

An HMC doing a very good impression of a living, breathing world full of chlorophyll.

Also an unexpectedly cool backlighting sitch.

And the Codex says I've never been to an O type before so... tick?

Meanwhile, spot the tourist trap... The motion of the background stars kicked in early, so I manoeuvred to put the galactic band behind it. This is worse.

It's actually getting a bit concerning at 1000km... not sure I like it now.

Nope nope nope leaving... it doesn't come across at all on static shots. It is oddly terrifying face to face.

So obviously I went to find another in the system next door. This one is disappointing, so little light deflection. I had expected more.

Oh. Oh dear.

So anyway, I boldly ran away moved on from that and went somewhere safer better instead.

 

[0threeleven]

Found yet another Ammonia planet with four bios, you lookup flat in the dictionary and it shows a picture of this place, here I'm whizzing in my space suit.

Ye ole bacteria with tussock in the background.

The fungus was easy Pizzey on this planet, I found all three samples out on the flats.

Three of these frutexa and I'm off like a herd of turtles.

 

[Codger]

I see. So this is not really suited for a quick mining run, it needs some more commitment.

I initially tried to boost away, but I felt like 16 Tons was not fast enough.

I forgot to mention the 3rd option, which is the one I choose -- blow them up for being a pain in the rear. My mining ship is well shielded and armed, and I just get rid of those pesky pirates with a face full of lasers and multicannons.

Most miners want to min/max their rides and don't take weapons and big shields. I give up a size 6 slot to have shields, so my mining Cutter holds only 256 tons. But for me it's perfect because I get tired after about 200 tons anyway. Plus I get to blow up those pirates.

Such is my choice.

You didn't ask but here's my mining build (laser mining). It suits me.

Coriolis EDCD Edition

A ship builder, outfitting and comparison tool for Elite Dangerous

s.orbis.zone

 

[CMDR Timber McWolf]

I forgot to mention the 3rd option, which is the one I choose -- blow them up for being a pain in the rear. My mining ship is well shielded and armed, and I just get rid of those pesky pirates with a face full of lasers and multicannons.

Most miners want to min/max their rides and don't take weapons and big shields. I give up a size 6 slot to have shields, so my mining Cutter holds only 256 tons. But for me it's perfect because I get tired after about 200 tons anyway. Plus I get to blow up those pirates.

Such is my choice.

You didn't ask but here's my mining build (laser mining). It suits me.

Coriolis EDCD Edition

A ship builder, outfitting and comparison tool for Elite Dangerous

s.orbis.zone

The Keelback leaves you with little options in this regard, even without a shield, I do not get more than 64 tons of cargo space.
Not that I would have been able to fill them up, yet. But 32 tons kept me longing for more as I quickly ran into the issue with having to decide it I want limpets or mined goods in my cargo.

Besides the Cutter, which other ship would be suitable for a similar build to yours? Similar in the sense of being able to fend off pirates and have enough cargo space that I do not have to bother about those eight limpets (maybe even some more?).
Keep in mind that I am not fully through the ranks with the main powers. I am a Warrant Officer in the Federal Navy and an Outsider in the Imperial Navy - the Alliance might have heard of my existance, but there is no mention-worthy relationship as of now.

 

[Ashnak]

Anaconda or Type-10 would be the next best alternatives. T-10 has more hardpoints, Anaconda has larger hardpoints.
I'd get a fighter bay in either case.