Community Event / Creation Castor and Pollux Day Two: hell is other people

What do you do now?

  • Mine the dark system: buy a map and start cutting out Tantalum with your mining laser

    Votes: 2 4.8%

  • Pirate the dark system: tool up ready to relieve some well-armed miners of their cargo

    Votes: 3 7.1%

  • Hunt for bounties: wait in the dark for mayday requests, then go in to destroy some pirates

    Votes: 11 26.2%

  • Trade with other nearby systems: export Tantalum and import service robots for a good profit

    Votes: 15 35.7%

  • Smuggle for Mr. Hendley: export Tantalum and import slaves for a sinful profit

    Votes: 11 26.2%
  • Total voters
    42

Andrew Sayers

A
Hey all,

This week we're playing through an event based largely on Elite: Dangerous' publicly archived designs (but you might recognise the map from the previous game). You can read chapter one or jump straight in to day two...

Following the discovery of a rogue planet near the Castor and Pollux star systems, a great wave of explorers crashed upon the system. Despite a recurring joke that the most common discovery was another explorer's ship, by the end of the day even the free public maps had a good idea of the system's composition:

helen.png

Free maps only ever tell you the cheap part of the story though. Those willing to pay an explorer for a premium map have learnt Helen's third satellite planet has an asteroid belt with vast deposits of Tantalum in it. Whichever organisation owns that world will control every manufacturing economy for light years around.

Most ships yesterday had parked in orbit around the gas giant, gathering data or harvesting the clouds of dust and gas surrounding the rogue planet. Pirates quickly realised a missile capable of opening a ship's hull cost more than the goods within it, so safety in numbers was enough to protect all but the weakest members of the herd. But as they saw miners start leaving for Helen-3, wise pirates realised today would bring a more profitable prey.

Elsewhere, traders had the pick of the market. Castor and Pollux both promised steep discounts to commanders willing to trade with them instead of the other system, but it didn't generate enough traffic and only reduced what little profit they made. Later in the day, missions to transport chief financial officers to nearby systems fueled speculation about possible upcoming mergers.

Yesterday did bring one last surprise. While docked in Castor undergoing repairs from a minor skirmish, a man approached you in the space station concourse:

Mr. Hendley said:
Hi there friend. Pardon me for saying, but I need a favour from someone that doesn't see much gravity, and from the way you're holding that railing like it owes you money, I'd say you're my man.

We've tried configuring these worker bots, but the dumb clanks take forever to program and we don't have the time. Slavery's never technically been declared illegal round here, but we've got loan inspectors crawling all over the station and we can't risk that investment going to Pollux. If you happened to turn up later with people in your hold, I'd be happy to take them off your hands... no questions asked, y'know.
Click to expand...
 
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RobFisher

RobFisher
I'm keen to make contacts and do some missions, but this slave trade thing seems too risky by far. I want to sleep at night.

I'll take one load of tantalum from Castor and bring robots back to Pollux and see what their attitude to slavery is. On my travels I'll be on the lookout for something more interesting and profitable than this trade run, but less icky and risky than the slave run.

I'm also keeping an eye on the news feeds to see if there are any clues about who might end up winning the rogue planet.
 

Zarkon

Z
I usually lean towards legal ways of making profit, so I voted to spend my time bounty hunting by helping out cargo ships, miners or even running Tantalum myself to lure the pirates to me.
 
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Voyager_NL

Voyager_NL
I'll probably do a few Tantalum/Slave runs untill it becomes clear that the slaves are becoming very dangerous to import. I'll probably switch to importing the bots or doing some bounty runs.
 

Rollo

R
I'd be carrying on with mining, those glistering minerals have me all mesmerized...

...and hire Cmdr. Zarkon to watch my back. I don't want to end up in chains in a dark sinful corner of Cathy's cargo bay...or maybe I do! ;) :D
 

Perseus

Perseus
Oh, the bounties are building. Illegal mining, trading and smuggling, in addition to regular piracy.
Pollux/Castor are going to be very profitable, by the looks of it. :D
 
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Minti2

Deadly, But very fluffy...
Minti2

Andrew Sayers

A
The Lone Gunman said:
I would, if not to much trouble for you, the more details the better :)
Click to expand...

Ok, but don't say I didn't warn you :p

This chapter introduces the bounty hunting and smuggling careers, and hints briefly at passenger transport (which is mostly a distinct career from trading). It also introduces contacts in the form of Mr. Hendley (another obscure reference, now I think of it). Contacts are people willing to do favours for you, and while important to all players will probably be vital to smugglers needing to offload goods off the back of a starship.

David Braben's procedural generation video described how FFE has quite an intricate physics simulation based on realistic star systems and sub-systems, determining how much mass can appear where in a system. For the map in this chapter, I took a random system in FFE (Enfave [-2,12]) and used the 6th planet in the system for the dark system Helen (or Clytemnestra, the other sister of Castor and Pollux). A little bit of editing and a Frontier font got the map above.

The explorers proposal says players will be able to sell each other updated map data. We can reasonably assume data will become common knowledge over time, but suggesting basic information will become available immediately is speculation on my behalf - I don't see it anywhere in the maps proposal for example. Having said that, a shareware-esque teaser map would be a good way of stimulating players to go exploring and trade data.

Not strictly Elite-related, but "satellite planet" is not a standard term. My understanding is that anything orbiting a planet is technically a moon, no matter how big it is. For example, in real life Ganymede is still called a moon of Jupiter even though it's bigger than the planet Mercury. A quick search on Google didn't turn up a particularly suggestive word for "small planet-sized thing orbiting a big planet-sized thing that isn't orbiting a star-sized thing", so I made one up and hoped Dr. Wookie's friends at NASA wouldn't point and laugh at me too much.

Although not stated explicitly anywhere, reading between the lines it seems that honourable pirates are supposed to see combat as a last resort. Bounty hunters get money for kills, so it's generally in their economic interest to fight anyone with a bounty. But a destroyed ship will drop very little cargo, so pirates benefit most when they can talk the cargo out of their target's hold. This chapter suggests pirates would be more cautious in a system mining low value goods than in a system where everyone's hold is filled with riches.

Speaking of which, to reiterate a previous point for completeness - Tantalum played a part in the assassination of Dentara Rast in FFE, and featured in the Elite Reclamation Prologue, where it was suggested to be a vital part in the fast travel hyperdrives that were invented shortly before the time Elite: Dangerous was set.

The mining proposal says players will be able to mine asteroids, comets and gas/dust clouds. This thread includes two of them, but even the fetishistic level of continuity in this story wasn't enough to shoehorn in a comet mining section.

This chapter also touches on missions. Whereas events are just wafted in the general direction of players, missions generated from those events will involve players much more directly in the plot.

Finally "clank" is a derogative term for robot, according to Lave Radio.
 
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