So Debris Fields. I visited my first one the other day, after stumbeling upon a few on a random mission. And lets face it, they are kinda empty and meaningless at this point. That's why we are here now: To discuss, how to improve Debris Fields.
While Elite Dangerous has a lot of stuff, that requires attention. I always loved doing salvage and hope, that an implementation of these ideas, could bring new joy to me and others looking to clean up space.
- Make the Debris Fields an Dynamic Zone. Around the Bubble Conflict is always taken place in form of Conflict Zones created during a War State of the BGS. During which both sides would incur a huge ammount of ship wrecks and debris. So once a Conflict is resolved, the CZ should turn into Debris Fields.
- Turn Debris Field into a Salavage Operation. Although destroyed ships already drop materials on destruction, active CZs are not really a place to collect stuff as limpets are rather notorious for getting destroyed and manul pickup would be just tedious. But once a conflict is resolved there should be a small window to recover wrecks, before they drift into oblivion and beyond sensor range. A debris field would consist of a number of salvage ships, (maybe even pirates for low sec/anarchy space) and clouds of debris & wrecks slowly drifting apart. Each cloud should contain materials, escape pods, black boxes and whatnot, together with a lot of destroyable junk, that needs to be cleared out with weapons or pushing for Collector Limpets to work. Each Cloud would be properly marked with a beacon, which would have been placed by a npc survey crew(behind the scences of course).
- Create Salvage Missions around Debris Field. So now we've got actually usable Debris Fields, with a bunch of materials and regular commodities. Both parties, that have been involved in the conflict, should have an interest to have their people and secrets recovered and post Missions, that would take place in Debris Fields. Since the war is over at this point, all salvage is claimed by the winner and your work for the losers would be illegal and therefore also pay more, with the risk of getting spotted by System Authority patrolling the Debris Fields.
- Let Debris Fields expire. After a certain ammount of time, like a week or so. All Wreckage should either be cleared out or drifted beyond sensor reach, therefore lost. A second limit for Debris Fields, should be the overall materials collected by players within them. So that on Server Tick such Debris Fields would vanish.
While Elite Dangerous has a lot of stuff, that requires attention. I always loved doing salvage and hope, that an implementation of these ideas, could bring new joy to me and others looking to clean up space.
