Colony Ships in Elite - anyone remember them?

[Cr3anMachin3]

Hi all. New to the forum. As an old Elite player....I have a really strong childhood memory of encountering 2 vast colony ships (like the Battlestar Galactica) in deep space. Can anyone else verify the truth that these existed? This was in the Spectrum 48k Firebird conversion of Elite. I'm 95% that I found them in the game...just slowly traversing through space. I had read they only existed in some versions.

Does anyone know if there are plans to include these in Eliteangerous? Thanks

 

[azdour]

Where would the fun be for the explorers who find them if they already know they exist

Maybe Frontier can confirm that there are rumours about myths regarding colony ships - that way it leaves it vague and something to search for and confirm?

 

[Bumvelcrow]

Pretty sure that was just in the manual. Nostalgia creeping up unbidden or the Spectrum version being more different than I realised?

B

 

[Stachel]

Oh yeah for sure. Wouldn't it be amazing to find this vast structure in the void you could board and (assuming we can ambulate at some point) explore? Maybe find intact sections you can recompress and habitate? Use as a base of operations for your group of friends? Salvage, loot archaeotech and biological material, skirt booby traps and automated defenses, maybe even fight other players for control etc.

The stuff (wet) dreams are made of. And assuredly coming .. eventually.

 

[metatheurgist]

Think they were called Generation Ships (since it would take several generations of crew to get there). They didn't exist in the C64 version. Would be a nice easter egg for E: D.

 

[technome]

I'm really hoping they'll be in the game somewhere.

They will have been crawling through space at sub-light speeds for centuries, so it should be easy to fit them into the game with a believable backstory.

But what has happened to the crews and the ships themselves during their time away from their home systems?

It's surely a golden opportunity for some scripted scenarios.

 

[usernametaken]

It's my understanding that generation/colony ships were never actually in the game.

It would be a hard thing for FD to put into E: D because in this day and age datamining would reveal the models and other associated data pretty quickly.

 

[technome]

It's my understanding that generation/colony ships were never actually in the game.

They weren't in the original game but they were part of the backstory. A lot of the original players were hoping to find one, some day.

It would be a hard thing for FD to put into E: D because in this day and age datamining would reveal the models and other associated data pretty quickly.

It'd be no more difficult than any other scripted scenario injection.

 

[Le-Betz]

Played the C64 Version back then and i never encountered a colony ship. I remember a comrade in school who claimed that he had seen one, but i have no idea, if he made that up (sailors, hunters, fishermen and also pilots, i'd guess ).

One can only hope to have another chance to catch up on this.

 

[Cr3anMachin3]

ah yes it WAS "Generation ships". Perhaps it is my nostalgia creeping back. I more want to know if they were EVER in any of the old versions. Only the coders who converted those games would know for sure I suppose.

As far as having them in Elite Dangerous...I agree....it should be a myth but never definite.

 

[Yaffle]

Think they were called Generation Ships (since it would take several generations of crew to get there). They didn't exist in the C64 version. Would be a nice easter egg for E: D.

Nor in the BBC version. I visited every star looking for one, and a dredger. Every. Single. Star.

 

[usernametaken]

It'd be no more difficult than any other scripted scenario injection.

I possibly wasn't clear. I more meant that it would be nigh on impossible for FD to put them in E: D and have them be a complete surprise to the first person to stumble across one in-game. Data miners would have uncovered all the info in the data files long before any player find them in a more natural way.

 

[Cody]

I visited every star looking for one, and a dredger. Every. Single. Star.

Really? All 2048? Hmm... as for generation ships:

"Before the development of the WS Thru-Space drive, in all its various forms, interstellar travel occurred in large, self-sustaining environment ships—Generation Ships—most of which have now been logged and their progress monitored. There are more than seventy thousand of these immense vessels ploughing their way through the galaxy, some of them into their 30th generation. The penalty for interference with such a vessel is marooning." (Webster's Space Dictionary, 324th ed)

 

[Cr3anMachin3]

there were also Dredgers I think as well. Maybe those were what I saw, if they were indeed in the old Speccy 48k version. Amazing to think they crammed so much game into such a little box!

 

[technome]

Nor in the BBC version. I visited every star looking for one, and a dredger. Every. Single. Star.

\o/

I feel your pain. I may not have had quite your dedication but I searched a lot of systems too.

 

[tooterfish]

I possibly wasn't clear. I more meant that it would be nigh on impossible for FD to put them in E: D and have them be a complete surprise to the first person to stumble across one in-game. Data miners would have uncovered all the info in the data files long before any player find them in a more natural way.

I think it's a matter of historical record where they all are anyway (they're not exactly prone to unpredictable manoeuvring), and interacting with them is strictly forbidden on pain of lasers to the face.

Why the people of the Elite universe decided not to put these poor chumps out of their misery when they invented the hyperdrive is anyone's guess. I can't imagine the look on their faces when they finally arrive at their destination, only to find it's been settled for a thousand years already...

 

[Frobitz]

Wasn't there also something in the manual about miners who'd turn asteroids into bases and if you started mining them a bunch of fighters would emerge?

Sure I recall a friend who said this happened to them in game but I was always dubious.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Why the people of the Elite universe decided not to put these poor chumps out of their misery when they invented the hyperdrive is anyone's guess. I can't imagine the look on their faces when they finally arrive at their destination, only to find it's been settled for a thousand years already...

So, the hyperdrive's just been invented. Someone remembers that they really should go and get the generation ships caught up. They fly up to the first one they find, find there's been a malfunction decades ago - everyone's long dead.

The second one they find is still intact, and they dock - but the crew are culturally centuries behind current society, and the realisation that they've as a society spent two hundred years in bleak sunless space, eating endlessly recycled food and water, living and dying in spaces the size of a box ... not so that their descendants could reach a new world and bring humanity to the stars, but so that someone could say "wait, you lot, we've got a better idea" and the whole journey was pointless ... that really hits them hard psychologically. The shock is essentially fatal to the inhabitants, and that really shakes up those involved in the rescue, many of whom quit their involvement with the project.

The third one gets discovered ... they decide to leave it for a little bit, and try to work out how to make a better job of it than they did of the second one. The usual bureaucratic indecision occurs, humanity as a whole gets distracted by the new settlements springing up on Sirius, on Barnard's Star, on Ross 154 - with the huge increase in prosperity as the price of formerly rare minerals falls.

By the time anyone gets round to coming up with a plan and someone to fund it, they realise that on top of everything else, they then will have to explain to the ship inhabitants not only what's happened, but why they waited thirty years to tell them, and the whole thing gets quietly shelved, the pre-Federation government pragmatically assuming that:
a) almost all the ships will suffer some sort of fatal malfunction before they reach their destination
b) in the event that one doesn't, it really really really won't be their problem.

'b' is, unsurprisingly, also convincing logic to modern-day governments, and the generation ships are assumed to have nothing worth salvaging for the even less scrupulous types.

 

[Iskariot]

I think we might see generation ships

Mostly Harmless Questions

Le-Betz: Will there be Generation Ships?

-It would be fun to have them, certainly!

 

[Zvanya]

I think it's a matter of historical record where they all are anyway (they're not exactly prone to unpredictable manoeuvring), and interacting with them is strictly forbidden on pain of lasers to the face.

Why the people of the Elite universe decided not to put these poor chumps out of their misery when they invented the hyperdrive is anyone's guess. I can't imagine the look on their faces when they finally arrive at their destination, only to find it's been settled for a thousand years already...

I hope you mean rescue them when you say "put them out of their misery". The chances of encountering one accidentally are nil. They are all in interstellar space.