Is anyone else here using SLF for Exobiology scouting?

[Sapient6]

(boldly assuming anyone else here is doing anything with Exobiology at all)

This weekend I decided to take a quick hop out of the bubble to play around with Exobiology and see how I feel about it and what part it might play, if any, in any future exploration I do. Right off the bat: Exobiology gives me something to do while exploring individual landable planets, and a reason to venture into landscapes that the SRV is absolutely NOT suited to. The obvious solution here is to explore in a small ship, like a diamondback explorer, but I much prefer something bigger.

So... I've found that using a SLF is fantastic for scouting out some of the harder to find stuff (last night: fungoids that apparently only want to grow in mountainous areas that are quicker to traverse on foot than in an SRV). The gameplay loop here is a nice change of pace, which is something I like in a long exploration trip.

BUT I'm having trouble making it work. I can scout out and find what I want in a SLF pretty easy, keeping my ship on STAY, find what I want, figure out the target location's heading from my ship's current location before I fly back to my ship... but once I'm in my ship the heading alone often isn't enough. The ship is typically 5-10 km from the target, so if there are no notable landmarks I can quickly lose it again.

So here I am again wishing for a planetside waypoint system. But wishing for ponies aside, anyone else play around with this and find a decent way to depart a specific planetside location and then return to it?

 

[Ian Doncaster]

So here I am again wishing for a planetside waypoint system. But wishing for ponies aside, anyone else play around with this and find a decent way to depart a specific planetside location and then return to it?

Coordinates can be matched up between SLF, ship and SRV and then you can hopefully get close enough with the SRV to take a heading on foot. (I can't remember right now if you can get coordinates on foot, which would be ideal but I don't recall seeing them)

So far I've not found life in terrain the SRV can't handle - though I have had to park the ship a couple of kilometres away and drive in through the mountains a few times.

 

[Sapient6]

Coordinates can be matched up between SLF, ship and SRV and then you can hopefully get close enough with the SRV to take a heading on foot. (I can't remember right now if you can get coordinates on foot, which would be ideal but I don't recall seeing them)

Oh jeeze... are there coordinates in that mess of a flying interface somewhere? I'm old and the text is so small*. Thanks, I'll give that a go.

* ("Dear Frontier, if looks could kill my eyeballs would come after you for not letting me adjust that font size. Or they'd come after someone whose blurry outline looks pretty much like yours.")

So far I've not found life in terrain the SRV can't handle - though I have had to park the ship a couple of kilometres away and drive in through the mountains a few times.

I haven't found life in terrain the SRV can't handle either, but I have found it in terrain that I can navigate more quickly on foot. Depends entirely how closely I can land.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Oh jeeze... are there coordinates in that mess of a flying interface somewhere? I'm old and the text is so small*. Thanks, I'll give that a go.

Spoiler: Right of centre, just above the shields indicator

Same place when in flight.

 

[HRDiagram]

After two months of Exobiology, most of them spent looking for space mushroom&co, in an AspX, I have come to the following conclusions:

-the SRV to me is almost completely useless: the time it takes to embark disembark is roughly identical to that of a ship, I prefer to hop with my ship from one specimen to another (especially true for plants that require 300m or more of distance between samples).
-the AspX, my absolute love, even with its medium size, is too big to be landing and looking for space mushroom, especially for some Frutexa and Fungoida, who love to grow in the most impervious terrains.

As a matter of fact, based on my experience, my new Exobiology ship is a Hauler: it has a good jump range (about 43ly), carries an SRV (which I rarely use) and is small enough to land anywhere! I haven't found a place where I wasn't able to land her: from now on the SRV will only be used if I need its guns to farm materials.

On top of it, I have Engineered her with High performance Thrusters and her cruise speed is around 440m/s, with a boost speed in excess of 630m/s.

It's a dream come true!

 

[Sapient6]

As a matter of fact, based on my experience, my new Exobiology ship is a Hauler...

If I was going to do dedicated Exobiology I'd probably go with a diamondback explorer just for the combination of "small" and "lots of window" (shame it doesn't AspX-stile underside windows). But I don't think I could DO "dedicated Exobiology". What is far more likely for me is that I might use it as a periodic change of pace in a long term exploration trip. And as far as long term exploration is concerned I generally prefer a larger ship so I can cram it full of stuff (that I'll probably never use, like a repair controller and a pair of AFMU).

Still, I dig that the Hauler is seeing this action. It's a nice little ship. I have a pair of them named Shuttle A and Shuttle B that I use for bopping between my home station and Jameson when I want to buy a ship (what else am I going to use my exploration money for?).

I think on my next exploration trip I'm going to go in my Krait Mk2. It's pretty easy to land in rough terrain compared to other ships that can carry a SLF, it has a nice window for surveying the ground for a nice landing site, and it can carry pretty much whatever I might want to bring.

 

[HRDiagram]

If I was going to do dedicated Exobiology I'd probably go with a diamondback explorer just for the combination of "small" and "lots of window" (shame it doesn't AspX-stile underside windows). But I don't think I could DO "dedicated Exobiology". What is far more likely for me is that I might use it as a periodic change of pace in a long term exploration trip. And as far as long term exploration is concerned I generally prefer a larger ship so I can cram it full of stuff (that I'll probably never use, like a repair controller and a pair of AFMU).

Still, I dig that the Hauler is seeing this action. It's a nice little ship. I have a pair of them named Shuttle A and Shuttle B that I use for bopping between my home station and Jameson when I want to buy a ship (what else am I going to use my exploration money for?).

I think on my next exploration trip I'm going to go in my Krait Mk2. It's pretty easy to land in rough terrain compared to other ships that can carry a SLF, it has a nice window for surveying the ground for a nice landing site, and it can carry pretty much whatever I might want to bring.

I have a DBX, it's my second fav ship after the AspX (actually, third after the Type-7, but that's a guilty pleasure...!)

The Hauler has an appalling view, I don't get the magnificent sights of the Lakon canopies, but I have been using it for about a week for short ranged exploration (not couriering, not long range/deep black stuff) and I am having a blast with it. Provided that it's fully engineered, so it's a beast in that respect, it lands everywhere and since I like climbing mountains I can go with it wherever I want, dismiss it and have it pick me up again at any point with not much fuss (conversely, landing an AspX is a nightmare, and even the DBX is much bigger in that respect).

Its future use will be as a short range explorer for in depth exobiology and general sightseeing, using a FC in the black as a base of operations.

 

[LifesAJourney]

I do a lot of exo searching/scanning and DBX is a perfect ship for it. I don't think I've ever had to land further than 120-150m from stuff I wanted to scan. I can't imagine going there by SLF, remembering the coordinates and then returning there with a bigger ship, trying to land, etc. A massive waste of time and effort, if you ask me.

Sometimes I do switch to SRV for fun and variety and it's possible to find everything from the ground (even bacteria colonies) but indeed it's less efficient.

 

[HRDiagram]

Sometimes I do switch to SRV for fun and variety and it's possible to find everything from the ground (even bacteria colonies) but indeed it's less efficient.

One of the reasons why I don't use the SRV more frequently for exobiology (apart from it being too slow) is that I tend touse the external camera to spot bacterial colonies, but the continuous blackout is annoying, so that will hopefully be solved with the revamp of the camera suite in update 6

 

[LifesAJourney]

Well, my head-tracking device is a great help for looking for bacterias from SRV. Without it the external camera seems to be the best option, indeed.

 

[Sapient6]

I do a lot of exo searching/scanning and DBX is a perfect ship for it. I don't think I've ever had to land further than 120-150m from stuff I wanted to scan. I can't imagine going there by SLF, remembering the coordinates and then returning there with a bigger ship, trying to land, etc. A massive waste of time and effort, if you ask me.

Sometimes I do switch to SRV for fun and variety and it's possible to find everything from the ground (even bacteria colonies) but indeed it's less efficient.

"for fun and variety" is exactly what the SLF in my process is really for. It's a little bit faster than my lumbering ship for seeking out the rare stuff that makes itself harder to find, but that is just inexperience on my part. With time I'll come to know right off the bat where to find the stuff I'm looking for, and I think that time for me is likely to fall entirely within just the early days of a long range exploration trip (if I don't have it all completely down when I end this current short trip today or tomorrow).

As I said earlier, on long trips I look for things to break up the routine. So it's not so much "my SLF helps me with Exobiology" as it is "Exobiology gives me an excuse to use my SLF". And then suddenly it's not "A massive waste of time and effort" because the point for me in that moment is not the exobiology, it's the SLF. I think it has to be this way throughout Exobiology, because the profession in and of itself is not at all engaging or compelling to me. It ends up being an excuse to use my SLF, an excuse to map otherwise uninteresting planets, an excuse to land on said planets, an excuse to hop into my SRV, an excuse to wander around on foot, an excuse to spend an entire session in a single system.

I think Exploration is a lot like that throughout. It's not an activity in Elite that stands up well to the ravages of Efficiency. The more we listen to Efficiency, the more we would cut out of Exploration.

For real, if you have not already: grab a ship with a SLF. Fly to an atmospheric landable. Descend to a daylight portion of the planet but stop immediately after glide, so hopefully your altitude is something like 4km. From that point launch in your SLF. If you were sitting next to me in that moment and told me I was wasting my time, I'm not even sure I'd hear your voice.

 

[Orvidius]

Yeah, for exobio I've just been using small ships. I did a lot with the DBX since it has a small landing footprint, good visibility, and is pretty nimble with A-rated thrusters (which you can install and still have a great jump range). I'm also enjoying the Imperial Courier. To me these work a lot better than trying to find things with the SLF, dock, land, and then drive back out with the SRV. But at least that does seem viable if you have a large ship, since there will be a lot of biology in places where a large ship will not be able to land.

 

[LifesAJourney]

For real, if you have not already: grab a ship with a SLF. Fly to an atmospheric landable. Descend to a daylight portion of the planet but stop immediately after glide, so hopefully your altitude is something like 4km. From that point launch in your SLF. If you were sitting next to me in that moment and told me I was wasting my time, I'm not even sure I'd hear your voice.

The power of ED is that everyone can do things how they want. I hate big ships so I'd rather do exo stuff in a small ship and have fun in SLF in canyons or HazReses. You'd rather do things differently. That's perfectly fine. It's all about blazing your own trail, after all.

 

[Sapient6]

So, unfortunately, I let my optimism run away with me. Last night I definitively proved to myself that this does not actually work. I cannot locate a specific life form (noting down its exact lat/long) then fly 10km back to my ship, and expect that life form to be there when I return to its location with my ship. A SLF can be used to spot what I'm looking for so I know what to look for in my ship, but that is not much value. I could find a life form and then sit on it in my SLF and instruct my ship to follow... if I trusted follow when I'm planetside. But I'm not at all sure I'd be willing to trust that when I'm carrying a lot of exploration data.