Colonisation Answers

Check systems around on your own. You soon realise that ton of them are just single star systems. Not to mention that there are many good systems -sometimes bordering populated systems with more than 10ly to the closest star. What's crazier - I tested this out with s ship of limit close to 10ly. I have noticed that there you would need often to colonize 2-3 systems from populated one to finally get to planetary system not a lone stars. That's why 15-20ly seems logical.
Yeah 20Ly max would be a reasonable figure. I went out to bovomit from the Bubble in a 20Ly ship once... the only time i had issues was when i went between spiral arms... but there was always a way through.
 
I tested this out with s ship of limit close to 10ly. I have noticed that there you would need often to colonize 2-3 systems from populated one to finally get to planetary system not a lone stars. That's why 15-20ly seems logical.

How long does it take to reach Colonia with a 20 ly limit?
 
Colonisation is a bit of a strange proposition.
The individual cmdr is personally given the opportunity to create a generic set of startports in star systems. Of which there are already tens of thousands out there spanning hundreds of light years. ...I don't really get it.

For me it all hinges on how customisable these ports are. How tweakable the ongoing management system is as the architect. Not very I expect as any random pmf & pp can come along and reshape it. I'm hoping for something more personal. And this appears to be enabling us to use the dev system, to recreate what already exists? I'm failing to see anything brand new?
Think I would of preferred traditional base building. A place to store goods, ships, and things.


Flimley
 
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Colonisation is a bit of a strange proposition.
The individual cmdr is personally given the opportunity to create a generic set of startports in star systems. Of which there are already tens of thousands out there spanning hundreds of light years. ...I don't really get it.

For me it all hinges on how customisable these ports are, and how tweakable the ongoing management system is as the architect. Not very I'm expecting as any random pmf & pp can come along and reshape it. I'm hoping for something more personal. And this appears to be enabling us to use the dev system, to recreate what already exists? I'm failing to see anything brand new?
Think I would of preferred traditional base building. A place to store goods, ships, and things.

Flimley
Agree. On the other hand. They can implement a brand new important feature quite efficiently. Powerplay 2.0 showed that they can not only rework features but in my opinion do that gracefully. Powerplay 2.0 and upcoming colonization got me back to the game. Seems that colonization will come into the game in a very blunt and basic form. I don't think they will expand on it swiftly but might be wrong. Personally I would like to see personal storages in game. Even in a form of a contact on a station. The contact which would also provide you some extra materials based on your system and constructions. I am really hoping that they approach the fan base in a "under promise and over deliver" fashion. o7
 
Well, if you think the content they added in the last year is good and this colonization thing is going to make you return and play the game on the long term, we're not in the same category of "returning players".

Stop moving the goal posts, he's a returning player - just accept it. And there's more of him who are coming back.
 
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For me it all hinges on how customisable these ports are. How tweakable the ongoing management system is as the architect. Not very I expect as any random pmf & pp can come along and reshape it.
What do you mean by "... as any random pmf & pp can come along and reshape it"?

Ostensibly, they can't. You, as the person who initiated the system to be built, are the only one who can shape it, insofaras placing things, picking economies for facilities etc..

Only thing factions and pp can do by the sounds is exert influence no different to what they can do with current populated systems in the game.
 
What do you mean by "... as any random pmf & pp can come along and reshape it"?

Ostensibly, they can't. You, as the person who initiated the system to be built, are the only one who can shape it, insofaras placing things, picking economies for facilities etc..

That's what I understand too, once the system architect locks the settlement/outpost design in and signals that it's ready - that's it. It's pure BGS mechanics from that point on.
 
The radius of the bubble is approx. 150ly.
That means the surface area of the bubble (4πr²) is about 282600ly².
If we divide that by the 10ly range then I think we have around 28260 systems that could be current starting points from which we could begin our colonisation efforts.
This is a complete guesstimate but let's say each one of those has 2 or 3 systems within 10ly that only it could colonise.
That means there's something like 70,000 systems up for grabs on day 1.
Someone PLEASE check my maths but that sounds like a lot of systems to dismiss as "uninteresting".
OK, checking the maths:
Only one noteworthy error I reckon - you can't divide an area by a distance and get a dimensionless number like a system-count. Instead, you need to divide the area by another area (e.g. the average area on that sphere per system).
I was going to guess somewhere between 5 and 10 ly for the distance between systems out there, but then realised that I could cheat and get a better estimate of it by using Spansh to count the systems between 150 and 152 ly from Sol (it gave 952). This is probably including pretty much all of the systems in that sphere, I guess, since there are probably few or no undiscovered systems in the vicinity of the Bubble.
That yields an average inter-system distance of roughly 8.4 ly, using what is I guess a bit of a fudge - I just took the cube root of: (the volume of that 2-ly-thick shell divided by the system count within it) - but is probably plenty accurate enough for this purpose.
Using that to estimate a per-system area would give us around 4000 systems on/near the surface of the sphere, most of which probably do have some neighbours which could be colonised.

We can of course cheat even harder and just use Spansh to directly give us a estimate (again this depends on the assumption that everything remotely near the Bubble has been discovered already):
First of all, adopting Ian's note that the Bubble radius is more like 200 ly, and then just asking Spansh to give us all systems between 200 and 210 ly from Sol, it returns 7978 systems. All of those are just outside the perimeter of that 200 ly sphere, and are thus likely to be (just about) colonisable from within that sphere. (The number is very linear with the thickness of the shell, so if we choose 8 ly we get almost 6400 systems etc.) This is a pretty good match to Ian's guess of "probably under 10,000 for actual outward expansion". (Who's surprised? :D)

If we just use the 8.4 ly system separation on its own, and use that to very roughly estimate the expected number of systems in a 10-ly-thick annulus around a 200-ly-radius sphere, i.e. ~ 4*pi*200^2*10/(8.4^3), we get an estimate of 8480 systems, which is the same as 7978 if you're a physicist ;)

(In fact, the average "known to Spansh"-system separation, calculated as above, is a wee bit higher at 200 ly from Sol than at 150 ly - around 8.7 ly - which may be a hint that Spansh does not know about all systems in that annulus... Or it may just be a random fluctuation in the star density.)

So who wants to guess at many Elite players are going to want to colonise a system each Thursday morning?
I have no real instinct for this (others will!), but it's pretty hard for me to believe it'll be even close to 8000, especially after the initial novelty-surge wears off. If I had to guess, I'd say after the first few weeks it'll be < 1000 but I look forward to finding out.
(The recent very attractive CG got almost 23000 participants, but I'd say colonisation is a lot more niche than "I want the awesome FSDs".)
 
So who wants to guess at many Elite players are going to want to colonise a system each Thursday morning?
I have no real instinct for this (others will!), but it's pretty hard for me to believe it'll be even close to 8000, especially after the initial novelty-surge wears off. If I had to guess, I'd say after the first few weeks it'll be < 1000 but I look forward to finding out.

I think we'll see 2,500-3,000 applications the first week but 30% of those will fail to reach completion. Afterwards, as the reality of how much hard work it actually entails sinks in, <1,000 as you said.
 
If we just use the 8.4 ly system separation on its own, and use that to very roughly estimate the expected number of systems in a 10-ly-thick annulus around a 200-ly-radius sphere, i.e. ~ 4*pi*200^2*10/(8.4^3), we get an estimate of 8480 systems, which is the same as 7978 if you're a physicist ;)

If I understand, you're saying there's about 8,000 potential colonisation targets around the periphery of the bubble? (Though "annulus" has me confused - I'd have thought a shell.)

But high-value systems (exceptionally resource-rich or especially aesthetically appealing or noteworthy) are what colonisers at the periphery are likely to be going for, and they're scarce by definition - which means a substantial majority of systems are likely to be ignored, outside of BGS/PP strategy, or as stepping stones to a more valuable system.

For this reason I suspect competition for nearby systems will be a bit more intense than the raw calculation implies.
 
If I understand, you're saying there's about 8,000 potential colonisation targets around the periphery of the bubble? (Though "annulus" has me confused - I'd have thought a shell.)

But high-value systems (exceptionally resource-rich or especially aesthetically appealing or noteworthy) are what colonisers at the periphery are likely to be going for, and they're scarce by definition - which means a substantial majority of systems are likely to be ignored, outside of BGS/PP strategy, or as stepping stones to a more valuable system.

For this reason I suspect competition for nearby systems will be a bit more intense than the raw calculation implies.
Good points, and yes "shell" would be a better term.
 
But high-value systems (exceptionally resource-rich or especially aesthetically appealing or noteworthy) are what colonisers at the periphery are likely to be going for, and they're scarce by definition - which means a substantial majority of systems are likely to be ignored, outside of BGS/PP strategy, or as stepping stones to a more valuable system.

Agreed. And I'd like to also point out that systems near neutron stars will be valuable later on as freighters can use them to reach to reach the ever expanding outer limits of the colonization wave.

FC's can be bogged down by hour (s) long jump start times. It's a mistake to completely rely on them.
 
Stop moving the goal posts, he's a returning player - just accept it. And there's more of him who are coming back.
Yes, and so am I. So? My point was none of this is enough to keep most players engaged in the long run, not the big majority anyways. But time will tell if I'm right or wrong on this. I'm hoping I'm wrong, for the sake of the game.
 
Yes, and so am I. So? My point was none of this is enough to keep most players engaged in the long run, not the big majority anyways. ...
Popular doesn't necessitate it's good though. There's a boatload of stuff FD need to sort out more urgently than colonisation, but they've decided to prioritise this. Unsurprisingly, it's functionality is limited entirely by those very things that FD need to get sorted more urgently.

But you can't sell fixes to your core product, apparently.
 
I'm convinced that this data is stored in the data files the Codex draws from and just isn't accessible, for no bloody reason at all. I'm probably wrong. It probably isn't stored anywhere, unless you have been faithfully using EDDiscovery for your entire playing history, and have never lost any data to hardware crashes or upgrades. Then there might be a way (but I wouldn't know it).

If I had known all along what I know now, I might have kept a spreadsheet of at least some discoveries, but it seems like my ship's log should actually contain useful details like that.
If you are an ok coder, you could write an app that parses the JSON files to get that info. It's stored on your PC. Outside of that EDDiscovery, I think that uses a program to upload that info, could be wrong though.
 
If we're Colonizing systems with 0 population, what mechanic is there to make the population grow,shrink or stay the same?
Or is it an arbitray/calculated number?
All the systems I've ever visited have the same population today as they did 6 yeaars ago (Thargoid deastroyed systems exceepted).
 
If we're Colonizing systems with 0 population, what mechanic is there to make the population grow,shrink or stay the same?
Or is it an arbitray/calculated number?
All the systems I've ever visited have the same population today as they did 6 yeaars ago (Thargoid deastroyed systems exceepted).
I personally vote for a ton of passenger and/or cryopod deliveries, for the lulz.
 
If we're Colonizing systems with 0 population, what mechanic is there to make the population grow,shrink or stay the same?
Or is it an arbitray/calculated number?
All the systems I've ever visited have the same population today as they did 6 yeaars ago (Thargoid deastroyed systems exceepted).
Likely options are:
  • New BGS mechanics get introduced to do that (I'll comment on that a bit later); or
  • Different facilities contribute a static value to population, for colonised systems

I'd prefer the former, because there's a reasonable mechanic to be made from a pop growth/shrink mechanic that sends stations into the abandoned/repair state like in the Thargoid war, until the situation gets addressed by raising the population.
 
I'm thinking it's the romantic idea of "the lone commander at the edge of the galaxy" with his own remote outpost in the middle of nowhere. It's probably why quite a number of players are insisting the colonization can be soloable.

Though why somebody would want to go through all that headache, stress and likely, misteps alone is beyond me.
I would. But then fun for me is to trek between the bubble and Beagle Point ... and all points between ... for long-range exploration. I'd have a blast setting up a colony deep into the black where few players would ever find it.
 
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