DSSA = Less challenging deep space journey?

[Christian-A-Hill]

Before anyone says something, this is by NO means a criticism of the DSSA project!! I am excited about the arrival of FC although I won't be getting one any time soon. Also excited about the DSSA undertaking to place FCs around the galaxy. I have nothing but respect for everyone connected to DSSA and all the planning, commitment going into it.
---------------------------------
With the availability of FCs around the galaxy, how will it affect challenging extended deep space journey?
Currently, going out in the void for long time means better be careful with that PowerPlant because no way to fix till back in civilization. With DSSA we can just find the nearest FC for pit stop to fix up things.

I know one does not need to use the service and pretend it did not happen. But I for one will stop even just to say thank you for the project of this magnitude. To let the station attendants know their effort had been worthwhile.

I read about heroic stories of commanders going in the black months or years at a time during non engineering era. They did not have the FSD booster to zip around the distances. We adapted. Probably the DSSA FCs will be something similar effect on the explorer, and we will just adapt?
Any thoughts?

 

[Factabulous]

we will just adapt?

Hmm, good question as nothing has ever changed in the game since it's first beta. What will happen now we're going to get that first change ever?

They did not have the FSD booster to zip around the distances

Oh wait, you mean things have changed before ... carry on!

o7

 

[Orvidius]

One "somewhat" obvious point to consider is that except for key locations (Sgr A*, Beagle Point, etc) people will have to seek out carriers if they want to use them. The chances of stumbling upon them are low, except at high profile locations.

But I also like to look at it like this... Climbing Mount Everest is still a huge challenge that routinely kills people, even with the "Base Camp" and a bunch of ladders installed on the mountain.

Here in the Eastern US, we have the Appalachian Trail, which is about 2,200 miles (3,500 km) long. There are wooden shelters every 10 to 20 miles, and intersecting trails and roads that lead to towns. However it's still seen as a good way to get away from the modern world, and enjoy nature. Many people will choose to hike the entire thing. Doing so is still an accomplishment, which is more in the doing than in the logistics.

Access to supplies along the way can be seen more as a necessity (or modern convenience, depending on your point of view), than as something that ruins the experience.

 

[Erimus Kamzel]

The game has changed so much since gamma, travelling the galaxy has been made easier and easier over the years. Personally speaking, engineered FSDs fundamentally changed the vibe of exploration since they removed the challenge of crossing interarm voids, and made traversing the far recesses easier than ever. When people began buckyballing across the entire galaxy in 24 hours using 70 LY+ ships, it was a realisation that there is no longer that sense of adventure.. or at least it was a different sense of adventure than what had preceded it.

I think the times of feeling lost in the void are long gone. We have massive jump ranges, fuel rats to rescue us, star filters to filter out the good stuff and bypass the deadbeat systems. 20K LY route plotters. Jumponium, and neutron jumps.. all aspects that have 'shrunk' the galaxy, not in size, but in the ease and time commitment required to travel to places that once seemed a whole world away.

Carriers are just the next step along that road Frontier decided to go down.

The main issue for me was that all these QoL additions are good but they really should have had some counterbalance to try and preserve that feeling of being in a endless galaxy full of mystery. Neutron jumping was the only addition that had a semblance of risk vs reward.

I think exploration and travelling the galaxy needs to evolve. Frontier haven't added a lot of actual content to discover, the Codex last year yes, but even that is old hat now. There are no handcrafted nebula beyond the Orion Spur. No clusters either. Harmless black holes, no accretion disks, no proper space phenomena that isn't a cut and paste of some codex entry. Planetary surfaces are old hat. The varied landscapes we once had, like 100km deep craters containing 80km high mountain ranges, are long gone - "fixed' in some distant patch.

The DSSA is something you can take or leave, its a conscious choice whether you seek them out and use them. What they do offer though is the chance to make more use of that empty space - a chance to bring different kinds of gameplay and events to new far off places. Its just the next step in this evolving gameworld.

One day I really hope Frontier consider opening up the means to reach the Magellanic Clouds, or even Andromeda, but only if they go back to the drawing board and have those locations stick to the original vision of how travelling the depths worked - that is players seeking out and creating hyperspace links, one system at a time, making slow progress. If that had been implemented into ED from the off, this galaxy would still have vast regions of uncharted space (not just systems, but whole regions where no one had yet reached, even years after release). That was the galaxy we were sold back in the DDF days. It'd be a hard sell now though, with all the easy to use comforts and massive jump ranges we've become accustomed to.

 

[Chrismasterski]

The game has changed so much since gamma, travelling the galaxy has been made easier and easier over the years. Personally speaking, engineered FSDs fundamentally changed the vibe of exploration since they removed the challenge of crossing interarm voids, and made traversing the far recesses easier than ever. When people began buckyballing across the entire galaxy in 24 hours using 70 LY+ ships, it was a realisation that there is no longer that sense of adventure.. or at least it was a different sense of adventure than what had preceded it.

I think the times of feeling lost in the void are long gone. We have massive jump ranges, fuel rats to rescue us, star filters to filter out the good stuff and bypass the deadbeat systems. 20K LY route plotters. Jumponium, and neutron jumps.. all aspects that have 'shrunk' the galaxy, not in size, but in the ease and time commitment required to travel to places that once seemed a whole world away.

Carriers are just the next step along that road Frontier decided to go down.

The main issue for me was that all these QoL additions are good but they really should have had some counterbalance to try and preserve that feeling of being in a endless galaxy full of mystery. Neutron jumping was the only addition that had a semblance of risk vs reward.

I think exploration and travelling the galaxy needs to evolve. Frontier haven't added a lot of actual content to discover, the Codex last year yes, but even that is old hat now. There are no handcrafted nebula beyond the Orion Spur. No clusters either. Harmless black holes, no accretion disks, no proper space phenomena that isn't a cut and paste of some codex entry. Planetary surfaces are old hat. The varied landscapes we once had, like 100km deep craters containing 80km high mountain ranges, are long gone - "fixed' in some distant patch.

The DSSA is something you can take or leave, its a conscious choice whether you seek them out and use them. What they do offer though is the chance to make more use of that empty space - a chance to bring different kinds of gameplay and events to new far off places. Its just the next step in this evolving gameworld.

One day I really hope Frontier consider opening up the means to reach the Magellanic Clouds, or even Andromeda, but only if they go back to the drawing board and have those locations stick to the original vision of how travelling the depths worked - that is players seeking out and creating hyperspace links, one system at a time, making slow progress. If that had been implemented into ED from the off, this galaxy would still have vast regions of uncharted space (not just systems, but whole regions where no one had yet reached, even years after release). That was the galaxy we were sold back in the DDF days. It'd be a hard sell now though, with all the easy to use comforts and massive jump ranges we've become accustomed to.

I'd like for exploration to be more challenging as well but unfortunately there's a decent portion of the community that's been complaining about long travel times, so I doubt that'll ever happen

 

[iain666]

there's a decent portion of the community that's been complaining about long travel times

Perhaps they are playing the wrong game...

 

[Deleted member 38366]

How about another point of view :

- might it make Deep Space Exploration more encouraging and attractive ?

I don't know about you guys, but I found my first steps to Exploration absolutely daunting.
On my very first trip, I think I "lost it" some 400LY from SOL in a Cobra (Engineers wasn't a thing yet).
My first longer trips lasted several weeks and I found myself having to battle Space Madness due to stimulus deprivation.

Not few "1st tourists" reportedly took a bigger bite than they could chew and quite some managed to transform their rides into wrecks due to inexperience or neglect.
So with Carriers being "only" a few thousand LY away in most Sectors, I do believe there's some positive aspect to it all.

Those who have no interest in them? They'll basically never ever run into one by chance in some random System. No harm done.

As a reference, many Stations didn't exist in several parts of the Galaxy a few years back.
Did their appearance prove to be some showstopper? No, I don't think so.

 

[marx]

Yeah, this would not be about the DSSA, but more about deep space carriers. (Or deep galaxy, or non-bubble carriers, or whatever.) Judging by how quickly the self-imposed limit there was filled, I think we can reasonably expect two hundred carriers out there... at the start, anyway. We'll see how long they'll stay.

In other words, the game is optionally getting easier again. Rather, I'd say that deep galaxy exploration gets a bit more convenient. This isn't bad. It's not like it's difficult to survive out there.


Personally, I think that the best time for exploration was first with Horizons adding synthesized boosts (and deciding to boost somewhere when you didn't have enough mats for a boost back would be an enormous risk), since that was when larger parts of the galaxy became newly accessible. Then neutron stars later helped with that again. As the galaxy is, going around it in with a jump range much larger than 40 ly makes navigation quite trivial. Buuut... if it's challenge you desire, a "return to the old ways" if you will, then not only can you still do that, but also do it in many more ships. Way back when, 35-40 ly was the province of the Anaconda, DBX and AspX. Now, if you wanted the old experience but didn't really fancy any of those three, you could basically do it in pretty much any ship these days. Personally, I count that as a plus. (And hey, stock jump ranges remained largely unchanged since launch, with only a small number of ships having received "mandatory" buffs to their base ranges, via hull mass decreases. So if you don't want the big increases, they aren't forced on you.)

The knowledge that the galaxy will have quite a lot of remote carriers in it will never really go away, but if you wish to impose limits on yourself (for a greater challenge perhaps), then choosing not to use them is trivial. After all, you'll have to go looking at maps to find which systems the carriers are in.

But if remote fleet carriers will mean that we get more of the galaxy explored outside the Sol - Colonia - Sgr A* triangle, hey, that's a win in my book.

 

[Christian-A-Hill]

I think the times of feeling lost in the void are long gone. We have massive jump ranges, fuel rats to rescue us, star filters to filter out the good stuff and bypass the deadbeat systems. 20K LY route plotters. Jumponium, and neutron jumps.. all aspects that have 'shrunk' the galaxy, not in size, but in the ease and time commitment required to travel to places that once seemed a whole world away.

You have summed up my entire thought in your words. This is precisely what I have been thinking. More so after I came back from my latest Ishum trip. I wasn't very regular but made it back from round trip to settle in Colonia in about a month. I got the sense of how huge the galaxy is at the same time made me realize how fast I can get around. The feeling of reaching the final frontier is very much non-existent.

I know there is also the argument that less than 2% of the galaxy is still unmapped. So technically there are lot more still needs to be discovered. But when I see the EDAstrometrics maps/charts, I cannot help but think there is no huge void to be found. I will still use QoL stuff got introducing, since they are just game mechanics, but ED exploration would have been totally different for most Explorer if no one tried to 'shrink' the galaxy. Sure it would have taken long time to reach somewhere, but all the prep for 'the journey ahead' would have been little more enjoyable in my opinion.

I am not trying to create new definition of Exploration, but I believe it is truly an activity/profession for people who are not looking to get somewhere in hurry all the time. Maybe these group of people wants to experience that Space Madness after spending months in space and can't wait to get back there again.

The introduction of FC could be an attempt to spread the 'exploring' fun around the galaxy, now that getting about is not that hard.

 

[Orvidius]

One thing to keep in mind when looking at the EDastro heat maps is that the colors are on a logarithmic scale. It's just as incomprehensible to our brains as the really huge numbers in the galaxy (400 billion systems). But what it means is that any non-black pixel on the map just has to have at least one star visited, within a column of the galaxy that is 10x10 lightyears in size, but several thousand lightyears tall. That "pixel" might contain thousands, perhaps many thousands of stars. But if just one was visited, it turns blue instead of black. The green areas only have about 20 or so visited systems in that 10x10x8000 lightyear column. And yellow is about a hundred. Only the white and red areas are close to saturation, except in the truly sparse areas (near Beagle Point, some particularly thin gaps, and the outer rim, most notably) where saturation can happen at a lower color. And even along the Colonia Road there are many undiscovered systems.

TL;DR: The blue areas are all practically untouched, except at the edges.

 

[Erimus Kamzel]

I know there is also the argument that less than 2% of the galaxy is still unmapped. So technically there are lot more still needs to be discovered. But when I see the EDAstrometrics maps/charts, I cannot help but think there is no huge void to be found.

This is an important point.

Its like saying I've been to my local beach and walked up and down it many many times. I've explored its coves, the dunes, the shore, etc.. but because I haven't stood on every patch of sand there, it remains 99.999..% unexplored to me. That's akin to players exploring every single region in this galaxy, and every sector in every region too. There isn't an area that's reachable that hasn't got someone's tags there. Just because only 0.042% of the stars have been visited doesn't mean that every recess the galaxy once had remains a mystery.

Bottom line is, Frontier using the tiny number of stars visited as an indication at how much more there is to explore, and instilling a sense of mystery via it, is a little misleading. If there were whole regions of the galaxy still un-visited (for whatever reason), then that sense of wonder and mystery a lot of players had back in the day would still be here with us today. We'd always have in mind and wonder 'what's there?'. 'How do I get there?'

I think we're all wise enough now to realise that we're not going to find some truly unique bit of content on one of these airless worlds (the Codex tried but was so limited in its variety and actual use, other than eye candy, its just another meh moment now).

I'm not sure how Frontier can inject that sense of mystery back into the galaxy - maybe with the introduction of atmospheric worlds, and provided they're are as geologically varied as they possibly can be, with worlds that have amazing scenery, oceans, snow-capped mountains, vast tundra and forests, grand canyons that make Earth's look insignificant in comparison. Not sure we'll get that level of fidelity in Elite, but something like that would make landing on each world and exploring the variety of landscapes and lifeforms it has a whole adventure in its own right. That would inject a new kind of mystery and sense of the unknown.

 

[Old Duck]

My use for a FC will be for more challenging exploration, sorta. For example, one of my favorite exploration ships is my Eagle, yet it's pure drudgery to get it from Point A to Point B, so I default to my 65 LY Krait instead. But with DSSA, I'm hoping to meet up with a carrier in the general area of where I'm exploring and transfer my Eagle over so that I can use it for actual exploration. Remember, grind (pressing J) is not the same as challenge (e.g. flying shieldless and AMFU-less).

 

[ebbrell]

Now we need space travel to be dangerous. Module problem random thing go wrong something.

Air leaks, anything
Lose and engine even landing thrusters

At moment it's safe safe, do we need them everywhere?

 

[Mengy]

I'd like for exploration to be more challenging as well but unfortunately there's a decent portion of the community that's been complaining about long travel times, so I doubt that'll ever happen

But challenge does not equal shorter travel times.

Real exploration challenge could come from things like:

• Solar flares while fuel scooping which need to be maneuvered around and avoided.
• Dangerous space phenomena like meteorite storms and electric storms in nebulas.
• More robust ship maintenance, requiring more mat usage and collection while flying in deep space.
• More dangerous planet surfaces, providing some hazards to mat collection.

This is why I prefer exploring the galactic fringes, I find it more challenging (thus more fun) to carefully and strategically jump my ship using FSD boosts into distant stars, regions where the route plotters don’t work. One misjump without enough jump mats could very easily strand myself.

 

[marx]

Bottom line is, Frontier using the tiny number of stars visited as an indication at how much more there is to explore, and instilling a sense of mystery via it, is a little misleading.

I think you're extrapolating here, and that too is a little misleading. Sure, Frontier have quoted the statistic a few times, but it's not like they built any sort of marketing around it, and certainly not any hype. In fact, the three times Frontier brought it up were the following:
1. Michael Brookes mentioned it on 2016. March 17 in the middle of some stream
2. Frontier's Twitter account posted it on 2018. March 2 - this was the only time when the number was the focus of the message
3. Frontier's anniversary celebration message mentioned it (alongside such super important statistics as how many limpets have players fired) on 2019. December 16

That's hardly advertising exploration with it. In fact, pretty much any expedition that made it to Frontier's newsletters had received much more promotion than the tiny percentage did. (Also, you probably just mixed up your terms, but I wouldn't say that players having explored over a hundred million systems is a tiny number.) Frontier's marketing does some eyebrow-raising things at times (then again, that's marketing for you), but this one at least isn't about it.

I think we're all wise enough now to realise that we're not going to find some truly unique bit of content on one of these airless worlds (the Codex tried but was so limited in its variety and actual use, other than eye candy, its just another meh moment now).

The hand-crafted content has run dry, yes. It's in its nature to do so. Most people who do explore for a long while in Elite tends to do so for the procedurally generated stuff. The thing is, you're looking at this from the perspective of a veteran player, who began playing during the early days. I think it's important to try looking through the eyes of new players, and better yet, chatting with them about it - you might be surprised about various perspectives.
Over five years have passed, however: by now, we know a lot more about the galaxy, and also have a better idea of all that we don't know. The latter is about the procedural generation though. Like we established, there's pretty much no new hand-authored content to be found - and it's little wonder that Frontier isn't touting discovering new mysteries and whatnot either.

The long-term solution wouldn't be adding more hand-made content: instead, it would be what you described, greatly extending procedural generation of planets. (Although to be fair, there could be plenty more done in space too!)

Oh, another point brought up here, on how well the galaxy is explored: you might also want to look at https://cim.sotl.org.uk/elite-dangerous/, made by @Ian Doncaster - see this thread too. Even the blue sectors themselves are moderately explored, and it's only the red that I'd say is mostly done.


Anyway, sorry, this was mostly off-topic. I've also often argued for more risk and more reward, but the thread is about remote carriers, and they would effect exploration. So: Remote fleet carriers will make selling data more convenient. They'll also make surviving out there a bit easier, but it had always been easy, so I don't think that matters a lot. Bear in mind that you could ask players for first fuel and then repairs for a long while now anyway. If anything, that has made exploration much easier than fleet carriers will. If you make a mistake, other players can save from you its consequences quite often. (With carriers, you'll at least have to get your ship to the nearest one yourself.)

Mind you, I don't mind this in the slightest: the introduction of fuel transfer limpets, and extending that to repair, made possible an excellent amount of player community interaction. Carriers might likely inject some more of it too. So far, they have been looking good on that front.

 

[schlowi123]

I just want to fly a spaceship!
Most of the time I've been in the black. But after I came back from the Outer Arm Vacuus a couple of weeks ago I've stayed in the bubble. Did some things here and some things there but in the end I just enjoyed flying the spaceships I own … think about that! I o w n spaceships and fly them around … in space! … WOHOOO!
Would I support the idea Erimus wrote about above (creating hyperlinks)? Absolutely! I would love to do that. Even … or maybe especially … If that would mean that one has to restock materials on planets (in hopefully a more efficient way than we do nowadays) and the way back should also take a long time
But these are dreams I dream while flying my spaceship … in space … and nobody can take this away from me, even if the next "harbour" is just around the corner

Also, this:

I'ce been up and down and left and right in the galaxy … I've been in tens of thousands of systems … but views like the one shown above still get me … probably because I never know when I will "stumble" above them … And the DSSA won't take that away from this my gorgeous experience in space … … … flying a fracking spaceship that is … in case anybody has forgotten

 

[Christian-A-Hill]

I'ce been up and down and left and right in the galaxy … I've been in tens of thousands of systems … but views like the one shown above still get me … probably because I never know when I will "stumble" above them … And the DSSA won't take that away from this my gorgeous experience in space … … … flying a fracking spaceship that is … in case anybody has forgotten

Totally agree with that! I love space and everything about it. Played many space genre games in my lifetime, but nothing tops ED. FC or no FC, I enjoy tinkering with my ship, fly around and making a living with whatever 'job' I can find only to finance journeys to get lost into the void.
I have been waking up and going to the same job for last ~20 years but never approached the employer demanding they add new content to my job because I am getting bored.
I come to ED galaxy to have the feeling of being in space, zipping across from system to system in my spaceships. New content is fine, but in ED there are still lot for me. I don't think I will ever be done tinkering my 3 ships or trying to find system with odd planets. Or simply try to land on a planet surface with shieldless DBX to stretch my legs.

I really want to thank all of you who responded here. This is precisely what makes the community great. I got to hear lots of different viewpoints. Some of them I never thought of. Some I agree with some I don't but gives food for thought.
------
I don't know if anyone who responded here are from Fuel Rats or Hull Seals, does FC have potential to affect these 2 communities? Maybe some rats will be stationed on these FCs and will be able to help someone without trying to close huge distance? Will that take away some of their adventure of long planning and rescue missions?

I am guessing getting help will be little faster now since they will be able to do rescue missions from closest FC base.

 

[Rudi Raumkraut]

I'm not sure how Frontier can inject that sense of mystery back into the galaxy - maybe with the introduction of atmospheric worlds, and provided they're are as geologically varied as they possibly can be, with worlds that have amazing scenery, oceans, snow-capped mountains, vast tundra and forests, grand canyons that make Earth's look insignificant in comparison. Not sure we'll get that level of fidelity in Elite, but something like that would make landing on each world and exploring the variety of landscapes and lifeforms it has a whole adventure in its own right. That would inject a new kind of mystery and sense of the unknown.

With the "inspirational" last patches/updates in mind I doubt the atmo worlds will be more than some landables with grass-textures and some trees spread over it.
If so the new(next era) variety and mystery will get stale as fast/slow as the self-chosen tasks/immersion/imagination of a Cmdr allows - as it is with the actual content.

Same imo will be proved right with the FCs/DSSA.
You can see them as an unwanted safety-net or you can make an expedition over many month to visit them all(cause of reasons)

Important is just to call yourself the only true explorer and fetch a drink doing it!

 

[Commander William Diffin]

This is an important point.

Its like saying I've been to my local beach and walked up and down it many many times. I've explored its coves, the dunes, the shore, etc.. but because I haven't stood on every patch of sand there, it remains 99.999..% unexplored to me. That's akin to players exploring every single region in this galaxy, and every sector in every region too. There isn't an area that's reachable that hasn't got someone's tags there. Just because only 0.042% of the stars have been visited doesn't mean that every recess the galaxy once had remains a mystery.

Bottom line is, Frontier using the tiny number of stars visited as an indication at how much more there is to explore, and instilling a sense of mystery via it, is a little misleading. If there were whole regions of the galaxy still un-visited (for whatever reason), then that sense of wonder and mystery a lot of players had back in the day would still be here with us today. We'd always have in mind and wonder 'what's there?'. 'How do I get there?'

I think we're all wise enough now to realise that we're not going to find some truly unique bit of content on one of these airless worlds (the Codex tried but was so limited in its variety and actual use, other than eye candy, its just another meh moment now).

I'm not sure how Frontier can inject that sense of mystery back into the galaxy - maybe with the introduction of atmospheric worlds, and provided they're are as geologically varied as they possibly can be, with worlds that have amazing scenery, oceans, snow-capped mountains, vast tundra and forests, grand canyons that make Earth's look insignificant in comparison. Not sure we'll get that level of fidelity in Elite, but something like that would make landing on each world and exploring the variety of landscapes and lifeforms it has a whole adventure in its own right. That would inject a new kind of mystery and sense of the unknown.

Frankly I always thought it was a mistake to give ships the range to explore the entire Galaxy in the first place, and always regretted that an achievement as wild as reaching the placeholder at the centre of the Galaxy could be accomplished in a matter of hours instead of months or years. I missed the 7ly range limit of original Acornsoft Elite, and the Hyperdrive servicing time limit and Military Hyperdrive mechanic of Frontier First Encounters. But then I took advantage of the jump ranges anyway and said nothing, not that it would have made any difference if I had said anything.

After Atmospheric Landings and Space Legs, the only best answer to restoring the mystery of exploration must be to re-institute original Elite's Galactic Hyperdrive to other galaxies, possibly limited to Fleet Carriers. But then there are only so many galaxies in the Local Group, and of those only Andromeda and feasibly Triangulum are in the same league as the Milky Way. But then there are other galaxy groups.

Otherwise the Galaxy could yet be populated with more of the missing astronomical phenomena, such as rogue asteroids, comets and comet clouds, meteor streams, storms and impacts (and showers on atmospheric planets), stellar plasma streams and rings, non-spherical stars, detectable bodies deliberately left absent from the Galactic Map like black dwarfs and rogue planets, novae, nebulae throughout the Galactic dust lanes, and globular clusters off the plane of the Galaxy, etc.

Also the variety within the different classes of planets and moons already in-game might be increased, with multiple terrain types on a single world. The most obvious example is of precipitated ice caps on the poles of a body, perhaps giving an icy/rocky world. The number of terrain formations and planetary features might also be increased, including active vulcanism, earthquakes, weather systems, precipitation (rain,sleet, snow and hail), river, lake, sea and ocean systems, cave systems, lava tubes, underground oceans, planet-wide extraterrestrial life, etc.

There are options.

 

[Nordmarken]

Dont think deep space travel was especially challenging before DSSA. And then I've roamed around, including mutliple neutron jumps, with only 8 % hull at one time. Obviously I dont use shields either. But I do welcome the DSSA initiative since it gives some extra insurance to those mishaps that actually can happen. Like forgetting the g-forces on a planet until its too late.