Black box recovery - possible to re-recover the black boxes?

Micha

Micha
So I lost the black boxes I had recovered (got blown up by an Elite Anaconda which joined the middle of a fight I was having with an FGS and blew me out of space in 5 seconds flat - and that's an NPC in Colonia! Reinforced bulkheads and 6B shields (the best you can get around here) in a Python obviously don't mean anything. I mean, fair enough, I was outgunned, there was no way I could win that, but at least give me a few seconds time to at least get the bleep out of an impossible situation! It's not like I was in a paper-thin Adder or anything. How I was meant to comply with the demands in that time period I'll never know either..).

Anyway, the mission brief says once lost the black boxes can't be recovered, however, when I respawned the mission was still in progress. Another mission to deliver some cargo was marked as failed.

So my question is - is it possible to recover the lost black boxes somehow, or is it just a game inconsistency (not that we have any of those..) that it marks some missions failed, but not others and you have to manually abandon them?
 

Kingston@#

Kingston@#
just go back were you collected them from and they will re-spawn again! though i think once destroyed mission should be a failure.
comply by dropping your cargo scoop. npc will then not open fire, while you drop your cargo :)
delivery of cargo, mission failed because you lost the cargo, specific too mission.
collection missions you will need to collect the cargo again if lost.
 
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Jmanis

Jmanis
What the above guy said. Sites will spawn as many times as you need to recollect the cargo. There are bizzare instances where wrinkles can occur to make missions no longer successful though... (I had an assasination where the mission USS would only spawn in a system other than the one mentioned in the mission brief. USS would spawn, target would be there, i'd destroy target, but it wouldn't complete the mission)
 

Micha

Micha
Ok thanks :)

Haven't gone back because I ran out of gaming time anyway, and the target body was a half-hour SC away.. and I thought that either the BB's would not respawn or be found in the SOI of the body where I was destroyed rather than the original one. Neither system is showing a "Mission" marker, so I figured I'd ask first before wasting time.

Personally would make sense to either fail the mission (just like with the delivery missions - in fact, why can't I re-buy whatever it was I was meant to deliver?? Or make whatever is meant to be delivered mission-specific, ie, not "Water" but "Queswellian Spring Water"; anyway!) or to spawn the items wherever you got destroyed (possibly even having to hunt down the pirate that killed you as they probably scooped the items).
 

Flin

F
It should respawn. I just crashed and destroyed a canister so checked the forum whether mission signal source will reappear.

FYI, I had to be close to the body for it to spawn. Prior to that I was flying around a few ls out to no avail.
 

Imgran

I
The NPC shouls shouldn't even have time to spawn in if you're doing the mission in an intelligent way.

Get as many collector limpet controllers as you can comfortably fit in your ship, preferably at least 3 total limpets' worth of controllers, and don't forget to stock your cargo bay half full of limpets. Deploy the limpets as soon as you drop into the signal source and drop your cargo scoop. Do NOT target individual modules, just let the collectors do their thing while you keep an eye on the contacts window, because you may need to hop to it pretty fast.

The limpets should have the USS cleared out in a matter of about 10-15 seconds, and if you're quick with your cargo scoop you can be out of the USS before the NPC ships even have a chance to drop in behind you. I've dropped into a lot of black box USSes and only got blown one time when I was a bit dozy and fumbled around trying to hit boost with my cargo scoop deployed.

Anyway, once you're out of the USS you're free and clear. They can give chase and ay try to interdict you, but I've never really feared interdiction because I tend to fly the kind of ships that can outrun anything they can't outfight.

This is actually a kind of mission where smaller ships work out best. Best ships for this kind of scoop-and-dash mission are the ones with good boost speed so as soon as you've got all the goods you're free to make a dash out of the USS.. Cobra III is probably the perfect ship for the mission if you're doing them one at a time, if you're stacking the missions get an Asp Explorer. Either ship is quick enough to get the job done before anything big enough to worry about can show up to the dance.
 
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Sapyx

Sapyx
As far as I am aware, the missions still work like this.

While the mission quota remains unfilled, you can lose and regain the black boxes as many times as you wish; the mission USSs will continue to respawn. But once the quota is reached and you are on your way back to hand in the mission, then no more USSs will spawn.

Example: you have a mission to find four black boxes. You find four of them at one USS, but one of them is destroyed by pirates/timeout before you can scoop it. So you can then go back out into Supercruise to look for one more. If you now get interdicted and a pirate NPC hatch-break-steals one out of your hold, you now only have two, but just find another mission USS and you can find two more.

Suppose you now drop down into a second mission USS and there are four more black boxes there. You only need two, but you can scoop all four if you want to. Having extra won't hurt. But you now have met your quota. You should get a little mission update message in your comms inbox telling you to hurry back with the black boxes and hand in the mission. Once you get that mission update message, no more mission USSs will spawn, you must protect what you have from death and theft, or the mission will not be able to be completed.

Salvage missions that cannot be completed will not fail automatically - it will stay on the board until you abandon it, or the timer runs out and you fail it.
 

Micha

Micha
Ok, perhaps I wasn't clear - I scooped all 4 black boxes and made good my highwake to the next system, where I got interdicted (mission extra - destroy the ships that are after you). During that fight I got destroyed because additional ships joined the fray (I wouldn't have submitted to the interdiction if it wasn't a fight I was reasonably certain I could win).

So I completed the scooping and then got blown up in another system/instance.

And yeah, I did a lot of SC'ing around the target planet again, slowly, at speed, at altitude, in orbital cruise, etc etc. No luck, so I'm guessing because I scooped all 4 boxes, the mission "ticked" that part as being complete, but then after I got blown up there's a logic bug which stops the mission from being marked as "failed". Might be time to raise a bug to FDev about this (to mark the mission failed, not to reinstate the spawning of the mission USS).

+1 to Sapyx for clarification.
 
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