How I Lost Millions Worth of Data in an Instant

[CanYouHackett97]

tl;dr: I just lost days worth of exploration data because I wanted to land on a planet before going to bed.

I started in Elite Dangerous a couple months ago. At first I wasn't crazy about it, but I was able to buy an ASP Explorer after doing a wing mission with friends. Started grinding missions to get Federation ranks so I could visit Sol. After that, I decided I'd try exploring. So I spent almost an entire afternoon and night jumping to systems, scanning them, mapping planets, and then flying back and turning in my data at a starport. I got 1,000 LY away from Sol, got around 46 million credits and had a good time.
Now I'm really into the game and wanna keep exploring. About a week ago I take off on my mission to leave the Inner Orion Spur. Spent a couple nights jumping my way to the Outer Orion Spur, using Neutrons, scanning every system and mapping the valuable bodies, until I finally make it and get the achievement for leaving the Inner Orion Spur.
Now time for the long trip back. Did the same thing going back, jumping to systems, scanning, mapping, using Neutrons.
I was about to call it a night after scanning 3 terraforming candidates in a system. One of them has planetary landing. I just got Horizons last week and have only landed on a planet once, so I think why not land on this one before logging off. I fly to it, have a beautiful approach, going to land in this big crater, when I realize that the ground is coming up faster than I realized. I start pulling up and thrusting up, but it's too little too late, my ship bonks into the ground. All the HUD immediately disappears on me and I'm in shock. My ship is gone. Days worth of data is gone. Definitely had over 50 million credits worth of data, maybe even 100 million, and it was all gone in an instant because I wanted to do a cheeky planetary landing before going to bed. I tried closing the game quickly hoping it would undo it somehow, but, alas, my ship was still gone. Really ruined my whole night. Want to die. Was SO looking forward to turning in that data and seeing how much I would get for it all. Now I'll never know.
Guess I'll just have to get back out there and do it again.

 

[PauloG01]

Before you land you should check the gravity of the planet, a value above 1 requires caution.
Still honestly things like that happened to all of us.
Good luck.

o7

 

[dreampage]

tl;dr: I just lost days worth of exploration data because I wanted to land on a planet before going to bed.

I started in Elite Dangerous a couple months ago. At first I wasn't crazy about it, but I was able to buy an ASP Explorer after doing a wing mission with friends. Started grinding missions to get Federation ranks so I could visit Sol. After that, I decided I'd try exploring. So I spent almost an entire afternoon and night jumping to systems, scanning them, mapping planets, and then flying back and turning in my data at a starport. I got 1,000 LY away from Sol, got around 46 million credits and had a good time.
Now I'm really into the game and wanna keep exploring. About a week ago I take off on my mission to leave the Inner Orion Spur. Spent a couple nights jumping my way to the Outer Orion Spur, using Neutrons, scanning every system and mapping the valuable bodies, until I finally make it and get the achievement for leaving the Inner Orion Spur.
Now time for the long trip back. Did the same thing going back, jumping to systems, scanning, mapping, using Neutrons.
I was about to call it a night after scanning 3 terraforming candidates in a system. One of them has planetary landing. I just got Horizons last week and have only landed on a planet once, so I think why not land on this one before logging off. I fly to it, have a beautiful approach, going to land in this big crater, when I realize that the ground is coming up faster than I realized. I start pulling up and thrusting up, but it's too little too late, my ship bonks into the ground. All the HUD immediately disappears on me and I'm in shock. My ship is gone. Days worth of data is gone. Definitely had over 50 million credits worth of data, maybe even 100 million, and it was all gone in an instant because I wanted to do a cheeky planetary landing before going to bed. I tried closing the game quickly hoping it would undo it somehow, but, alas, my ship was still gone. Really ruined my whole night. Want to die. Was SO looking forward to turning in that data and seeing how much I would get for it all. Now I'll never know.
Guess I'll just have to get back out there and do it again.

This is a mistake I'm sure most of us have made at least once. Sadly this is the reality of exploration, you have to be really careful and mindful of the gravity of the planet. The higher the gravity the more dangerous it is to land. The best thing you can do is to learn from it, as there's no way to get your ship and data back. I'm sure you'll do it again and will earn much much more than before.

 

[Northpin]

It happens, especially when landing on high-g planets.
Make sure you run stronger shields and that you can boost. Pulling up and boosting would probably saved your ship, but this thought will not come up unless you already dug your canopy in the dirt at least once.

So in the future, make sure you check each planet you are goin to land. Around 1g means being cautious already, over 2.0g means being highly cautious
The trick to land on high-G planets is to perfectly level your ship and control the descent only with slight touches of vertical thrusters.

 

[Maymo]

The good news is that you’ll probably only ever let this happen once!! You’ve suffered one of the more nasty parts of the learning curve...

Just hop right back on the horse...

High gravity landings when you’re on a deep space exploration journey is a totally unnecessary risk (in my opinion), but if you’re going to do them 4 pips to sys has saved me from any hull damage many many times...

It’s surprising just how strong even D rated shields can become with max power to systems.

 

[Leper Messiah]

Sorry to hear that, I kind of wish FD would give us the option of sending some sort of compressed data stream to sell data (with a charge) when away from a UC station.

 

[Rat Catcher]

My first though was 'what happened to your shields?' But as others have said, it happens to most of us at least once, the loss of exploration data (and the rebuy) hurts your bank account as well as loss of 'work' needing to be repeated.
Sorry it happened, now get back out and enoy yourself, slightly poorer but with more knowledge to help you along

 

[Skip Rockbounder]

Yup, been there, but not all the way there (though my mate has when we were exploring in wing) the first thing to do when trying something completely 'new' planetary landing/shooting Thargoids is make sure you have nothing to lose.

Some time ago there was a patch released, and one of the things addressed was... Fixed: ship crashing on Recall, three days earlier both me and my mate bought clippers one black and one white, we SRV'd a bit on a planet then called it a day and recalled the ships, Horror, both of us got a terrible message on screen warning of a fatal ship crash and I watched mine plummet to the ground half a mile away, we never found his, but the shell of mine could be pushed around with the SRV (surprisingly lightweight) anyway we were able to drive many miles to a base and enter ship with rebuy there... but the devestation I felt I will remember always..

 

[maboleth]

Uh oh, it sucks to lose so much data. But it really happens to all of us.
The first time this happened to me was on 2.1g planet. I didn't lose my ship but was very close. I was descending way faster than should. The thing that saved me was actually doing nose-up+engine boost maneuver. And even with that my ship continued to descent until the boost cancelled it enough and moved the ship back to space.

 

[Fray]

Pft, that's nothing... ; -) Try 18,000Ly over a month, then wiping on a 0.05G world. I took a day or so to prepare again, then headed straight back out to the exact same rock to get 'revenge' (i.e. land on it successfully and leave in one piece). That trip, which led on to Colonia, proved to make my first fortune.

And I'm sure there are plenty of examples far 'worse' than mine, of even more data - and time, discoveries, etc - lost. So yeah, it's a good ol' rite of passage for explorers, frankly. Learning to take those mistakes in their stride and learn from them. Explorers are built of sterner, stranger stuff than anyone else.

That's one thing I've always loved about exploration in Elite, which no other role has; the longer you're out there, the more you have to risk, and potentially the greater the chance of making a mistake and losing it all in an instant. I always compare it to Dark Souls in that sense, except in Elite there are no bloodstains to retrieve your scan data from.

So yeah, when exploring, always check the gravity on a landing, always reactivate your shields just in case, and check your rate of descent (relative to the gravity) after the glide stage. Incredibly basic things, but it's being impatient or careless/over-confident (as I was with the 18K wipe; a vertical descent into a POI from about 7km up) that mean those basics get neglected momentarily - small details, big consequences. Keeping in mind how your ship handles under higher G's can be important, too. Bigger ships with D thrusters can sometimes just fall out of the sky if they roll or bank in higher G's...

 

[Cmdr Nemo]

I recall the first time I made a jump. Having NO knowledge of what it was going to be like on the other side. I flew right into the star and was destroyed. Though it was a beginner's sidney and I got a free one to replace it. I learned a valuable lesson on how to brake when entering hyper.

 

[Seizewell Warrior]

OP I feel your pain - playing on PC, 8 weeks into an excursion out to Beagle Point I'm currently in a pickle where I might lose everything due to possibly getting stranded beyond my jump range.

This is the one mechanic which I still dislike about this game, a momentary lapse of concentration or silly mistake can lose months of progress. We all understand the concept of rebuy and that dead is (almost) dead but at times I wish there was a Rebuy+ that allowed you to re-spawn to a more current save. Back to the previous base you docked at might be fine running missions in The Bubble, but it was conceived long before CMDR's started setting out on these long voyages. Guess it's a chance we have to live with doing exploration!

 

[CanYouHackett97]

Everybody's saying how I gotta watch out for high gravity planets but this one was only like 0.46 g I was just coming in way too fast and had no shields on (never need them when exploring so I have them off to save power).
But thanks everybody for the support.

 

[Skip Rockbounder]

4.6 is high, and it your ship suffers 4.6 times the pressure in the collision than it would were it to crash into Earth, having no shields means every time you touch something your ship's integrity suffers, if you wanna go explore AND come back to tell about it... Shields will help and a stronger hull will last longer, Neutron star jumping does damage the hull and at the moment we can't fix that, and when you come back the's a good chance of Pirate attacks and Player attacks.

 

[Bob Lighthouse]

Everybody's saying how I gotta watch out for high gravity planets but this one was only like 4.6 g I was just coming in way too fast and had no shields on (never need them when exploring so I have them off to save power).
But thanks everybody for the support.

Sure you do, as you just experienced.


Get decent shields and put 4 pips to SYS to avoid that again.

This is a great guide to the Asp.
You can see how it works in high Gs at the end.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkmgrFet5ac

 

[Rat Catcher]

OP: Out exploring, like you, I run without shields (just about everything not needed to 'fly' is powered down) as it also helps to run cooler as well as saving fuel. But... whenever considering a planetary landing the shields are switched back on, and as @Bob Lighthouse suggested, pips are set to 4 on sys, just in case.
We all learn by our mistakes and get into the habit of ensuring everything is set up for the current task.
Yes, while not 9.0G a body at 4.6G is not going to be at all forgiving... My first (and only) loss to lithobraking was only a little over 2G - no shields or hull reinforcement - it was all over before the third bounce...

 

[Momatty]

There's no such thing as 'only' 4.6 gs. I pancaked on a 1.2 body my first time. That ground can come up pretty fast.

 

[Fray]

Everybody's saying how I gotta watch out for high gravity planets but this one was only like 4.6 g

C'mon, 4.6G has a colossal effect on--- well, mass...

I tend to call anything over 1 as high, because that's our frame of reference which shapes so much of who and what we are on Earth. If someone wants to contextualise it to game lore and which planet your character was born on, well, I suppose anything over 2.2G would be high for my character.

In terms of averages of planets the player can land on, however, I'd guess 'high' gravity would still be under 1G, i.e. something which represents an above average value, because the vast majority of worlds and moons we can land on are quite small, and/or not exactly massive.

So yeah, 4.6G is enormous by any measure in terms of how it affects the flight model, and how much damage it'll do when things go awry. Tilt a medium or large ship (FA-on) whilst 'hovering' on a very low-G world and then on one near or a little over 1G, then at 2G, and so on, and you'll see the pronounced difference in how hard your ship has to fight to keep you at that angle and not descending. Eventually, with enough mass and a severe enough angle, the ship will very quickly lose the fight to stay up and just start dropping, increasing in speed until you correct the angle [or explode]. The positional thrusters can be overworked in moments on larger ships (I have 'fell over' - into someone else's landing spot - in my T9, whilst trying to too quickly correct a bad angle of landing approach at a surface port on a reasonably high-G world... that was rather panic inducing/embarrassing).

Shunting power into the Engines is also vital on higher-G worlds.

Get decent shields and put 4 pips to SYS to avoid that again.

Are you talking generally, or specifically for high-G landings?

There is no right or wrong, sure, just preferences and min-maxing re mass reduction/jump range, but I always just shove D shields on exploration vessels. If you ever need powerful shields, then you probably shouldn't be correcting your equipment, you should be correcting your judgement and flying skills... Shields should just be there to give a little buffer on the odd careless or hasty touchdown.

But yeah, extreme G worlds with large ships might require some tailoring, given it's almost impossible to not even touchdown without biting into your shields a little.

 

[Maymo]

Everybody's saying how I gotta watch out for high gravity planets but this one was only like 4.6 g I was just coming in way too fast and had no shields on (never need them when exploring so I have them off to save power).
But thanks everybody for the support.

Only 4.6g huh...

Man, that planet may as well have had horns and a forked tail...

Stay well away.

 

[Bob Lighthouse]

Are you talking generally, or specifically for high-G landings?

...

...to avoid that again.

Is that not clear?