Exploration and Death

Varrag · May 13, 2015

Personally, I find the concept with clones pretty cool, alas it's not part of the Elite's (weak) lore.

All this talk about ejections seats which can be detected, accurately pinpointed and picked up even if your ship has been destroyed 60.000 light years away from human space is not very appealing to me. First - we always manage to escape the doomed ship alive, always. No one ever dies. Second - us explorers are supposed to be daredevils, going where no one has even gone before. However, when we crash our ship, there is a ready ambulance and pickup truck to go wherever you float in your seat and drag your ass back home across the huge distances - fast, 100% safely, and free. Are we exploring the unknown here, or we're just bunch of kids on excursion?

Nope. This simply doesn't work for me. In fact, it's completely immersion breaking stuff. It feels more like having a car accident on busy highway than losing your ship in vast, uncharted, lonely galaxy.

CMDR AKIRA MASAKARI · May 13, 2015

Ziljan said:
Wait a minute, do people actually die while exploring? I thought this was just an offline-death bug?

Lol Ziljan, from your latest posting in the forum i think i understand you might want exploration to be more dangerous.

mossfoot · May 13, 2015

Varrag said:
Personally, I find the concept with clones pretty cool.

All this talk about ejections seats which can be detected, accurately pinpointed and picked up even if your ship has been destroyed 60.000 light years away from human space is not very appealing to me. First - we always manage to escape the doomed ship alive, always. No one ever dies.

Which is all the excuse I need to remind people of my Pilot Ejection Table

- https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=107694

Second - us explorers are supposed to be daredevils, going where no one has even gone before. However, when we crash our ship, there is a ready ambulance and pickup truck which will go wherever you float in your seat and drag your ass back home across the huge distances - fast, 100% safely, and free.

Nope. This simply doesn't work for me. In fact, it's completely immersion breaking stuff. It feels more like having a car accident on busy highway than losing your ship in vast, uncharted, dangerous galaxy.

Don't see how an endless parade of clones fixes that. Just becomes Borderlands then.

I'm all for adding some kind of IronMan mode, but all you're doing is replacing the idea of always ejecting safely with NEVER ejecting safely. What, even if you crashed into the side of a station right next to the search and rescue depot? Even in a combat zone which is in the same orbit as a major station? Even if you choose to self destruct your ship and should have all the time in the world to prepare for a nominal ejection?

Besides, bottom line, the devs say it's ejection. So the whole cloning thing won't ever be part of the lore anyway, no matter how often it's brought up.

I see what you mean about 100% survival being immersion breaking, but that's exactly the reason I created the Pilot Ejection Table in the first place. Sure you eject, but that doesn't mean you survive, or are ever found. The odds get slimmer the further you're away from Sol, or the more enemies you're up against, or if you have a crappy life support system, etc...

Honestly the ONLY thing that doesn't quite mesh when it comes to ejection is the lack of time delay - and that's just a matter of game mechanics.

Varrag · May 13, 2015

mossfoot said:
Which is all the excuse I need to remind people of my Pilot Ejection Table - https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=107694

Interesting concept indeed. Repped

mossfoot said:
Don't see how an endless parade of clones fixes that. Just becomes Borderlands then.

I'm all for adding some kind of IronMan mode, but all you're doing is replacing the idea of always ejecting safely with NEVER ejecting safely.

In theory, there should be no need to complicate things with ejection at all, no matter where and how your ship has been destroyed: when the hull reaches zero, or life support runs out of oxygen, your mind is automatically and instantly transferred via FTL comms into your clone. This is simple and elegant solution. I know, it's EVE all over the place, but I just cannot pretend that I didn't like how they've done (and explained) player's miraculous comeback to life.

I am aware that cloning is not, and -most likely- will never be in Elite's lore, and I am not advocating for it either. But it would be nice if someone in FDEV actually bothered to write something relatively consistent in this regard and explain a few things, lore-wise purely.

Ziljan · May 13, 2015

CMDR AKIRA MASAKARI said:
Lol Ziljan, from your latest posting in the forum i think i understand you might want exploration to be more dangerous.

Not arbitrarily dangerous. Just a little more realistic

I like that neutron stars are dangerous, but in reality, normal stars aren't any safer when you get as close as we do to refuel. We just have to pretend that they are "safe" for the sake of "gameplay", and mostly for the new players who would die repeatedly while learning to refuel. Honestly though, I don't buy any argument that says that installing safety rails makes an activity more fun. In studies done in human psychology, even toddlers find play time more fun when there is greater risk or actual danger involved. It's just human nature to attach more significance to hazardous happenings.

jpaulwilson1982 · May 13, 2015

The idea of instant teleportation never really bothered me. I mean, I have no clue how it would be possible in technical terms, but given everything that is possible, teleportation seems to fit in just fine in a sci-fi setting, along with impossible FTL travel, impractical ship designs that just look cool, folding time and space, stuff like that. Time travel, on the other hand... I hate it. Seriously. It never makes sense to me.

popuptoaster · May 13, 2015

jpaulwilson1982 said:
The idea of instant teleportation never really bothered me. I mean, I have no clue how it would be possible in technical terms, but given everything that is possible, teleportation seems to fit in just fine in a sci-fi setting, along with impossible FTL travel, impractical ship designs that just look cool, folding time and space, stuff like that. Time travel, on the other hand... I hate it. Seriously. It never makes sense to me.

Time travel doesn't make sense to anyone, but because of relativity you do it all the time and it works out just fine.

jpaulwilson1982 · May 14, 2015

popuptoaster said:
Time travel doesn't make sense to anyone, but because of relativity you do it all the time and it works out just fine.

Time travel into the future is perfectly fine, whether it's done naturally in normal time or at an accelerated pace via tinkering with space-time and all that. But it's time travel into the past that scrambles my brains. Sorry, I should have been more clear.

Ziljan · May 14, 2015

jpaulwilson1982 said:
Time travel into the future is perfectly fine, whether it's done naturally in normal time or at an accelerated pace via tinkering with space-time and all that. But it's time travel into the past that scrambles my brains. Sorry, I should have been more clear.

Since obsevers in different reference frames can't always agree on the order that events happen in, then the concept of past, present, and future must be called into question as a relative concept. From relativity, we can reach the mathematical possiblity that time is simply a 4th spatial dimension that we only observe in a certain sequence depending on vantage point, in the same way that we can only be in one spatial location at given time with a specific vantage point. In that sense, time might not be any harder to conceive of than length. Just like we can't get from X=0 to X=5 without going through X=3, we can't get from the past to the future without going through the present. So in a way, we can also imagine that the past and future aren't things that have happened or are going to happen, but things that simply are. Just like 5 billion light years way is something that simply is, and not merely a point in the future that is 5 billion year away if you travel at the speed of light (even though we can't see it as it exists today, or in our current location).

Thinking of time as a kind of spatial dimension plays havoc with our sense of self determination and free will (unless you believe in infinite universes for each potential quantum outcome), but as hard as that might be to accept, it might also be true. Interesting to think about anyway.

Murishani · May 14, 2015

Ziljan said:
in the same way that we can only be in one spatial location at given time with a specific vantage point.

Haroche and Wineland would like a word...

Ziljan said:
(unless you believe in infinite universes for each potential quantum outcome)

...nevermind