Adv. Discovery Scanner makes Exploration less 'fun' (for me).

[Rekal]

PS, don't take any of this personally, I'm just playing devil's advocate.

I don't take things personally, but I hope you don't mind me throwing it back at you!

And your point is?

My point was concluded with a period. The standard way of concluding a statement in English.

I'm sorry, but I'd like to see your raw data for the survey you've done

Let me see if I can find it...ah here it is:
Survey Questions: 2 Survey Respondents: 1
Will nerfing the ADS improve game play for you? Yes: 0 No: 1
Will you be less likely to willingly explore if the ADS is nerfed? Yes: 1 No: 0

Any other data you'd like to see?

No, but you have to push out quite far now to find something that doesn't have someone else's fingerprints on it and we're only 4 months in. What's it going to be like in a year, 2 years, 5 years?

So?

I think your definition of "quite far" needs to be shared. I've gone out what I consider "quite far" and turned around cause I couldn't go any further than 65kLy from Sol. Are you saying every icy rock in the middle of settled space has already been detail scanned? The ADS that apparently ruins people's fun doesn't put a pilot's name on the system. Only a detailed surface scan will put a pilot's name on it as the discoverer.

So?

So it's a sandbox game, play the way you want to play.

This applies to EVERY SINGLE human activity where someone derives satisfaction.

You're right, but you're willfully ignoring the point. Let me put it another way then. Using parallax to discover stellar bodies is similar to stopping to smell the roses. You've heard the phrase. It's just a platitude with no literal purpose.

What do you actually get from smelling the roses? You experience a different smell--some claim it's a good smell, most if they're honest are sort of indifferent--and if you're unlucky you poke your finger on a thorn or experience an allergic reaction that requires the use of your epipen.

What do you actually get from parallax discovery? A planet that could have been found with a 5 second press of the ADS, but you didn't use the ADS--some claim that's good and displays your exceptional skill, most if they're honest are sort of indifferent--and if you're unlucky it's probably just an icy planet with very little value that people using the best technology (ADS) available instead of their naked eyes just skipped.

Some people enjoy griefing. Is that valid? Elite's a sandbox, anything goes right?

Yeah, griefing is a valid play style. Unless it involves some exploit recognized by Frontier or actual memory adjusting cheats they're using the same game mechanics as you are. If they want to defecate all over their little section of the sandbox, all it will accomplish is fewer people willing to play in that section of the sandbox. It's a big sandbox. Blocking players is simple enough.

No, because ships *can* be OP.

I have to admit, you've lost me on this rebuttal. I've tried turning it over and over in my head, but I'm not seeing an angle. Are you saying that ships are allowed to be over powered, but internal modules available to any ship are not allowed to be over powered?

I thought the analogy was pretty clear. Collecting a set quantity of profits in a Type 6 is slower and more tedious than collecting the same quantity of profits in a Type 9. Discovering stellar bodies using parallax is slower and more tedious than discovering stellar bodies using the ADS. The point is removing the Type 9 (ADS) will not give the profits earned (discovered bodies) using the Type 6 (Parallax) any added value. It's still just a slower and more tedious way of doing something. If you apply additional personal value to flying a Type 6 (using parallax discovery) then you are able and welcome to use it.

But I will say this - the speed of exploration is utterly irrelevant to this discussion, it depends entirely on what there is to discover. It took the human race several 10's of thousands of years to get to the point where we'd explored most of one planet. To be able to determine is a system had anything of interest in less than 10 seconds doesn't quite sit right with me.

That's your opinion, and it's certainly valid to a degree. If you look at technological advancement though, the line on the graph appears to be exponential. After an additional 13 centuries, we may not even recognize what humans become as humans.

Parallax discovery is very simple, which is why it possible to do with the naked eye. The principle is to take two pictures of the same background stars from two different locations, or at two different times. The background stars are so far away, they will have negligible parallax or position change based on viewer's position. Bodies in the system will will have a noticeable parallax and change position between the two images. A simple difference program can check these images faster, more accurately, and with less eye fatigue than a human in much less than 10 seconds.

Think about all the other technology that needs to be available in this game setting. The Frame Shift Drive relies on Frame Dragging which is a natural phenomenon caused by a rotating mass's gravity. The level of understanding of gravity has to be pretty high to put this to practical use. The FSD detects the depth of natural gravity wells and slows down accordingly. Gravity has no range limit, it extends indefinitely and simply gets weaker with distance. Why is it so hard to believe a highly specialized expensive piece of scanning technology could detect and localize these gravity wells from extreme ranges?

Is "Because I think it's not fun" really the only argument?

 

[Mephane]

I have not followed the entire discussion so please bear with me if this has already been mentioned. I was sceptical at first about the "infinite range" Advanced Discovery Scanner, but now have grown fond of it; parallax discovery can become tedious, but I wouldn't mind if not for the number of objects I would never have discovered without an ADS. Systems with a black hole 400,000Ls away from the primary, you could spend ours cruising around in vain.

What I do think FD needs to reconsider, however, is the idea that any discovery scanner will show objects as a textured rendering on the system map. Like, just pinging them gives you an image that very often quite clearly tells you whether it is rocky/icy, water world/earth-like, a or high metal content/metal rich etc. I find that to be rather uninspiring, to know at the press of a button whether an entire system is worth exploring in detail or just consists of a bunch of barren rocks. I would find it far more interesting if the scanner found things, but only told you about their mass and nothing else, so you would have to investigate them with a real scan to find out. Basically just a bunch of grey circles on the system map, each a certain size according to their mass.

 

[Genar-Hofoen]

I have not followed the entire discussion so please bear with me if this has already been mentioned. I was sceptical at first about the "infinite range" Advanced Discovery Scanner, but now have grown fond of it; parallax discovery can become tedious, but I wouldn't mind if not for the number of objects I would never have discovered without an ADS. Systems with a black hole 400,000Ls away from the primary, you could spend ours cruising around in vain.

What I do think FD needs to reconsider, however, is the idea that any discovery scanner will show objects as a textured rendering on the system map. Like, just pinging them gives you an image that very often quite clearly tells you whether it is rocky/icy, water world/earth-like, a or high metal content/metal rich etc. I find that to be rather uninspiring, to know at the press of a button whether an entire system is worth exploring in detail or just consists of a bunch of barren rocks. I would find it far more interesting if the scanner found things, but only told you about their mass and nothing else, so you would have to investigate them with a real scan to find out. Basically just a bunch of grey circles on the system map, each a certain size according to their mass.

I agree with your first paragraph.

I don't like your idea in the second paragraph though. Again, having to scan every body within a system just to see if it's an earth-like or gas giant or whatever, reintroduces intolerable tedium to Exploration. We can tell merely by optical means if a planet is likely to be a gas giant, rocky, icy, or what have you, so the ADS as is makes perfect sense. Who's to say it doesn't detect planets etc. by means of their gravitational bending of space-time, and also utilises spectral analysis (the light and other radiation from these bodies has already been travelling from them to your current location for a long time after all) and optical analysis to determine what kind of Thing that system body is?

We can tell from Earth that Saturn is a gas giant, or that Titan has some kind of atmosphere, or that the moon is rocky, and so on.

Speaking purely from a profit/time point of view, currently, the money that Universal Cartographics gives you for the data you sell, renders things like Icy planets and rocky moons to simply not be worth the time you spent collecting the data. If your idea was implemented, then how disappointing would it be to have to spend a long time in one system only to find that the planets within it were all icy worthlessness? That's far more likely to deter players from taking on the Exploration role, in my opinion.

Rgds.

 

[Chris M Fortune]

I have not followed the entire discussion so please bear with me if this has already been mentioned. I was sceptical at first about the "infinite range" Advanced Discovery Scanner, but now have grown fond of it; parallax discovery can become tedious, but I wouldn't mind if not for the number of objects I would never have discovered without an ADS. Systems with a black hole 400,000Ls away from the primary, you could spend ours cruising around in vain.

What I do think FD needs to reconsider, however, is the idea that any discovery scanner will show objects as a textured rendering on the system map. Like, just pinging them gives you an image that very often quite clearly tells you whether it is rocky/icy, water world/earth-like, a or high metal content/metal rich etc. I find that to be rather uninspiring, to know at the press of a button whether an entire system is worth exploring in detail or just consists of a bunch of barren rocks. I would find it far more interesting if the scanner found things, but only told you about their mass and nothing else, so you would have to investigate them with a real scan to find out. Basically just a bunch of grey circles on the system map, each a certain size according to their mass.

I agree with this to an extent, but only if there was a way that through close and proper examining the data you did get you could make a fair estimation of the type.

It would be easy to differentiate gas giants from the rest and I would assume just as easy to recognize debris types. Its the separation of the rocky types that could provide some skill/understanding that may enhance the game. Size mass ratio would give an indication of density which should give a clue as to the potential metal content whilst distance from the star and star surface temperature should allow a rough approximation of likely surface temperature.

This would of course be dependent on the information you get being correct, which unfortunately just by looking at the data we have in the galaxy map/system maps in not currently the case.


With regards to the OP, I recently started a new commander with a view to going the exploration role to an extreme, not allowing ANY income from anywhere except exploration. With this in mind I have had to work with the limitations of the basic and intermediate scanners for the past few days.

Parallax discovery is awesome till you have done it, then it becomes tedious very fast. I have no problem with reducing the clarity, given certain balances. Nerfing the planetary range may be easier but we can "discover" stellar bodies at thousands of light-years range so how could you justify not being able to scan for one at a sub light-year one even with portable kit.

 

[McCormeg]

What I do think FD needs to reconsider, however, is the idea that any discovery scanner will show objects as a textured rendering on the system map. Like, just pinging them gives you an image that very often quite clearly tells you whether it is rocky/icy, water world/earth-like, a or high metal content/metal rich etc. I find that to be rather uninspiring, to know at the press of a button whether an entire system is worth exploring in detail or just consists of a bunch of barren rocks. I would find it far more interesting if the scanner found things, but only told you about their mass and nothing else, so you would have to investigate them with a real scan to find out. Basically just a bunch of grey circles on the system map, each a certain size according to their mass.

Good Point.

Overall for me the whole exploration system is borked in the state it is right now.

1st) Why do we get information on the galaxymap about the stars and inhabited systems right from the start? Does it make sense to know what planets and stations exist in the neigbour system even if i hadn't been there and had a look by myself?

A better way could be to show stars in your vicinity only as signatures you can lock on your FSD for the purpose to get there. But other than that conceal any other information about the system. So you realy have to go there and gather information about your surrounding area by yourself rather than having all information about known space ready at hand without the need to do anything.

This would also be a nice opportunity to introduce a personalized galaxy map archive, where your gathered information would be stored, where you can display your last visited lokations/routes etc.pp. and this would bring a new dimension to the exploration profession and to the sense "whow. here i am and the whole galaxy is there for me to be explored".

2nd) For the in system exploration:

Why present everything on a silber tablet the moment you hit the advanced discovery scanner? Why not introduce scanmodules which can track different radiation, differen trace gases or different biosignatures. Or some combination of these. The better the module, the greater the range of these modules or more combinations are available for one single module. So your scan can be more specific customized to detect the things you want it to detect. Introduce a new minigame where you have to adjust sliders which determine what kind of signal you whant to pick up. The result will then be displayed in space as a symbol where you can head on and look what is hidden underneath your scan results.

Experienced explorers would find out very easily what they have to look for to find the nice earthlike planets. Maybe something like a combination of nitrogen and iron radiation etc. We have all the shiny scientific data about different planets and their composition but they are of no use ingame especialy for the purpose of detecting theses celestials. Thats a shame.

 

[Genar-Hofoen]

Good Point.

Overall for me the whole exploration system is borked in the state it is right now.

1st) Why do we get information on the galaxymap about the stars and inhabited systems right from the start? Does it make sense to know what planets and stations exist in the neigbour system even if i hadn't been there and had a look by myself?

A better way could be to show stars in your vicinity only as signatures you can lock on your FSD for the purpose to get there. But other than that conceal any other information about the system. So you realy have to go there and gather information about your surrounding area by yourself rather than having all information about known space ready at hand without the need to do anything.

This would also be a nice opportunity to introduce a personalized galaxy map archive, where your gathered information would be stored, where you can display your last visited lokations/routes etc.pp. and this would bring a new dimension to the exploration profession and to the sense "whow. here i am and the whole galaxy is there for me to be explored".

I think it's very unlikely that FDEV will change how the Galaxy Map works in that respect - the route (heh) they've chosen with how it works is what everyone is used to now - any "fog of the unknown" like you see in other games is not going to happen here.

Besides, I like the galaxy map as is. We already have a large swathe of our galaxy mapped in terms of what stars are where - the galaxy map is partly based on real data from real star map surveys. The rest is comprised of speculation extrapolated from what has been learned from these survey maps. So I think what FDEV have done is rather splendid.

2nd) For the in system exploration:

Why present everything on a silber tablet the moment you hit the advanced discovery scanner? Why not introduce scanmodules which can track different radiation, differen trace gases or different biosignatures. Or some combination of these. The better the module, the greater the range of these modules or more combinations are available for one single module. So your scan can be more specific customized to detect the things you want it to detect. Introduce a new minigame where you have to adjust sliders which determine what kind of signal you whant to pick up. The result will then be displayed in space as a symbol where you can head on and look what is hidden underneath your scan results.

Experienced explorers would find out very easily what they have to look for to find the nice earthlike planets. Maybe something like a combination of nitrogen and iron radiation etc. We have all the shiny scientific data about different planets and their composition but they are of no use ingame especialy for the purpose of detecting theses celestials. Thats a shame.

My reply to that is in a quote from a post I made shortly before yours...

Having to scan every body within a system just to see if it's an earth-like or gas giant or whatever, reintroduces intolerable tedium to Exploration. We can tell merely by optical means if a planet is likely to be a gas giant, rocky, icy, or what have you, so the ADS as is makes perfect sense. Who's to say it doesn't detect planets etc. by means of their gravitational bending of space-time, and also utilises spectral analysis (the light and other radiation from these bodies has already been travelling from them to your current location for a long time after all) and optical analysis to determine what kind of Thing that system body is?

We can tell from Earth that Saturn is a gas giant, or that Titan has some kind of atmosphere, or that the moon is rocky, and so on.

Speaking purely from a profit/time point of view, currently, the money that Universal Cartographics gives you for the data you sell, renders things like Icy planets and rocky moons to simply not be worth the time you spent collecting the data. If your idea was implemented, then how disappointing would it be to have to spend a long time in one system only to find that the planets within it were all icy worthlessness? That's far more likely to deter players from taking on the Exploration role, in my opinion.

Rgds.

 

[Galten75]

I'm gonna jump in here as my first post and ventilate my view of the ADS.

I started out on my explorer route with the Intermediate Discovery Scanner and was quite content. Started to figure out how to get to parts of the system using the parrallax method honking my small horn like a crazed Bangkok taxidriver. It was satisfying finding stuff far of in the distant but it was time consuming as heck. My first short (around 700 ly or so) trip granted me enough to buy a ADS.

At first I felt like I was cheating getting everything on screen. But after a few trips (now around 3-4000 Ly and 400 systems) I can't imagine going back honking every 1000 ls. I totally feel for the OP and those wanting the same thing. I also could live with a tweek in price and include a fourth scanner between IDS and ADS.

What I would really like is more exploration content and perhaps more specialized content finding very specific, exotic stuff - don't know what exactly but some kind of cool stuff.

In that way honking the ADS will scan the system for "normal" things. But the specialized scanners, of course taking slots in our ships, can show exciting stuff not revealed by normal honk. This together with planetary landings and perhaps dedicated Explorer ships will spice things up?

// G

 

[Porina]

How about some context as to what might be "discoverable" at what distance?



This is a Jupiter sized planet. It is called Jupiter. I imaged it from Earth earlier this month using a telescope and camera. Looking up the details, Jupiter at its closest is 588 Gm, and it sure wasn't at its closest at the time I took that image. Factoring the speed of light at approximately 0.3 Gm/s, it would be at least 2000 Ls away. I don't have A rated kit either, so better performance than that is possible. If you were to measure the spectrum of the light you can gain clues about its composition.

I don't have an example to hand but Saturn is similarly visible at a closest distance to Earth of around 4000 Ls. Going beyond that is beyond my practical limits though. Uranus would be at least 8600 Ls away and as a smaller body, it would be harder to observe as much more than a point of light at my technology level.

Given the above, I don't think the ADS is that unreasonable. With over a thousand years to poke around with technology I'm sure things have got at least twice as better As others have proposed previously, maybe there should be some detection signature threshold instead of a fixed distance. Thus you might see a distant star easily enough, but not necessarily smaller objects around it until you get closer.

 

[Genar-Hofoen]

How about some context as to what might be "discoverable" at what distance?

View attachment 30823

This is a Jupiter sized planet. It is called Jupiter. I imaged it from Earth earlier this month using a telescope and camera. Looking up the details, Jupiter at its closest is 588 Gm, and it sure wasn't at its closest at the time I took that image. Factoring the speed of light at approximately 0.3 Gm/s, it would be at least 2000 Ls away. I don't have A rated kit either, so better performance than that is possible. If you were to measure the spectrum of the light you can gain clues about its composition.

I don't have an example to hand but Saturn is similarly visible at a closest distance to Earth of around 4000 Ls. Going beyond that is beyond my practical limits though. Uranus would be at least 8600 Ls away and as a smaller body, it would be harder to observe as much more than a point of light at my technology level.

Given the above, I don't think the ADS is that unreasonable. With over a thousand years to poke around with technology I'm sure things have got at least twice as better As others have proposed previously, maybe there should be some detection signature threshold instead of a fixed distance. Thus you might see a distant star easily enough, but not necessarily smaller objects around it until you get closer.

Yeah that's what I said earlier - totally agreed

Thanks for the interesting post btw.