Exploration epic fail

[kmwmtd]

Fellow explorers,

I won't bore you with all the details, but last night went something like this:

• exploring
• dozing
• star-faceplanting
• repairing
• exploding
• deathing

The ship was relatively intact after the encounter with the star - hull at 88%, power plant at 90%, everything else at 98 or 99%. I was repairing all the systems I could - so excluding hull, power plant and AFMU.

Since I was in the repair screen and listening to YouTube, I don't know exactly what lead to the explosion, though if it had been heat, I would have still expected to see sparks and smoke first even though I was in the right-hand panel. Personally, I think it was something to do with repairing the canopy or life support too close to the star and the heat rising so quickly that the ship didn't get time to warn me. I was in Solo, so not another player, and in the middle of nowhere, so not an NPC.

Are there any logs that might indicate what went wrong? Has anyone ever contacted FD support and got info on the cause of their ship loss? I'm not trying to get the ship (or, more importantly, the 2 months of exploration data) back (if that is even a thing in ED) as I'm pretty certain it was my stupid mistake, but I would like to try to identify what that stupid mistake was so I don't do it again.

Looking for a silver lining, since my rebuy took me to Colonia, my travel time to the bubble is now only 1/3 what it was yesterday ... and all it cost was cr10m rebuy and enough exploration data to make me cr100m+ and to get me to Explorer Elite [sad][cry]

Anyone know a good in-game therapist?

 

[Mad-Max]

I use the third party tool EDDiscovery (https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/138155-EDDiscovery) which has a tab dedicated to logging just about everything that you do and what happens to your ship.
Otherwise you can sift through ED's netlogs yourself, though it's a lot of text and is somewhat equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack - not impossible, but a lot of work.
The netlog files should be in your game directory in the folder "logs", alternatively in your user-folder (source: https://support.frontier.co.uk/kb/faq.php?id=108)

 

[newman1702]

It's possible that you didn't have enough power for AFMU and everything else, and didn't shut something down to free up said power, so you ended up on emergency life support and didn't notice. Or AFMU turned off your life support when fixing it and then you didn't turn it back on. While you were happily youtubing you were running out of emergency air and blew up when the counter you didn't see reached 0.

In any case, I very much doubt you overheated. It takes a long time to actually die from it and you typically won't even overheat when on thrusters only close to a star - the heat will only spike when trying to charge the FSD, so you should have been fine - life support running out is probably the best bet.

 

[Darth Krayt]

Was any alcohol involved?

 

[kmwmtd]

Was any alcohol involved?

Only afterwards ... copiously!!

- - - Updated - - -

I use the third party tool EDDiscovery (https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/138155-EDDiscovery) which has a tab dedicated to logging just about everything that you do and what happens to your ship.
Otherwise you can sift through ED's netlogs yourself, though it's a lot of text and is somewhat equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack - not impossible, but a lot of work.
The netlog files should be in your game directory in the folder "logs", alternatively in your user-folder (source: https://support.frontier.co.uk/kb/faq.php?id=108)

Thanks. I had a look at some of the logs after the event, but I obviously wasn't in the best frame of mind I'll have a more thorough look tonight. I'll try EDDiscovery. Do you know if it will mine existing logs (i.e. if I install it tonight will it show me information for last night using any logs lying around?) or will it only report on things that occur while it is watching?

 

[kmwmtd]

It's possible that you didn't have enough power for AFMU and everything else, and didn't shut something down to free up said power, so you ended up on emergency life support and didn't notice. Or AFMU turned off your life support when fixing it and then you didn't turn it back on. While you were happily youtubing you were running out of emergency air and blew up when the counter you didn't see reached 0.

In any case, I very much doubt you overheated. It takes a long time to actually die from it and you typically won't even overheat when on thrusters only close to a star - the heat will only spike when trying to charge the FSD, so you should have been fine - life support running out is probably the best bet.

Thanks.

The ship had plenty of power - it usually runs at about 90% of capacity as I turn off anything I'm not using, and I was in the process of taking modules offline to repair them, so there should have been additional power available. I didn't do anything this time (as far as I know) that I hadn't done many times before - running down the list of damaged modules, picking repair for those that can be repaired. This should offline the module, freeing up the power (which the ship didn't need anyway).
The life-support was definitely OK before the ... incident - even with basic modules, I would have had 5 minutes of emergency oxygen, and there's no way I would have missed the big blue circles that appear in the middle of the HUD when the life support is off. Definitely not there when I went into hyperspace, nor when the 'Too close' message appeared.
I had been in the repair panel for less than 30 seconds, and had only queued the canopy and life support repairs a few seconds earlier. It is *possible* that I might have fallen asleep after queuing the repairs, and a few seconds was actually longer, but if there's one benefit of running into a star, it's that it wakes you up Also, having watched videos of life support failures, it seems that the pilot's vision gets blurry and then they black out - neither of these things happened (pending a decision of the sleep thing, of course)

 

[iain666]

I'll try EDDiscovery. Do you know if it will mine existing logs (i.e. if I install it tonight will it show me information for last night using any logs lying around?) or will it only report on things that occur while it is watching?

It will read all your journals - so everything from the time 2.2 dropped if you've not deleted them.

First launch can take a fair while - it downloads star positions from EDSM for map-drawing purposes and that's quite a big chunk of data these days.

 

[kmwmtd]

It will read all your journals - so everything from the time 2.2 dropped if you've not deleted them.

First launch can take a fair while - it downloads star positions from EDSM for map-drawing purposes and that's quite a big chunk of data these days.

Excellent. Thanks for the info.

I'm in no hurry - going to be a while before my PTSD (Player Triggered Stupidity Death) subsides enough to risk undocking

 

[kmwmtd]

It's possible that you didn't have enough power for AFMU and everything else, and didn't shut something down to free up said power, so you ended up on emergency life support and didn't notice. Or AFMU turned off your life support when fixing it and then you didn't turn it back on. While you were happily youtubing you were running out of emergency air and blew up when the counter you didn't see reached 0.

Turns out you were right ... sort of. While the problem wasn't running out of power or me forgetting to turn the life support back on, support have confirmed that emergency life support ran out. See this thread for details, but in summary every time you repair the life support and use the emergency oxygen, your reserve is not replenished when you turn life support back on. Hence, make enough repairs over time and eventually you run out. In my case, I must have had mere seconds left, and so more-or-less the instant I started repairs, I ran out of oxygen. Interestingly I didn't get blurry vision or a black out - maybe they don't always happen.

Anyway, I now have an explanation, and support (much to my surprise as I didn't ask for it) have helped me get pretty much back where I was

 

[mikekim]

seen a couple of these myself....

bit immersion breaking though when you arrive back at your starting station instantly though..