I think it can be safely said that few people have been looking forward to the arrival of Fleet Carriers, and the opportunities they'd bring to long-range exploration more than I have. I wrote about this only last week in my post "My Grand Tour of the Galaxy, and What it Means to Me". Sadly, before I have even reached Star One, the first major stop on my great galactic expedition, I've had to resign myself to the fact that, as things currently stand in Elite Dangerous, long-range exploration is practically impossible. With great sadness and disappointment I am heading back to the bubble while I still have enough fuel to get there.
So why do I believe that long-range exploration is impossible? Simply put it's the non-availability of any fuel out in the black. While my trusty Cobra Mk IV could scoop from stars, the carrier required Tritium, mined from icy rings. Now out in the black there are plenty of ringed worlds, but icy rings are just some of those and many of the ringed planets are small. I made several stops in systems with pristine icy ring reserves. These systems all had at least one Tritium hotspot, though none that overlapped sadly.
I spent many hours mining in those rings. I found one ring that did have a medium reserve of Tritium, but the other rings had almost no tritium at all. To make matters worse, none of the rings had a single Tritium core asteroid, in fact I only found two core asteroids the whole time... one for Low Temperature Diamonds, and one for Alexandrite.
To put this into context, there is a complex formula for working out how much Tritium is needed per light year to jump a carrier, but to simplify things it can be roughly calculated at 260 tonnes per 500 light year jump. A trip to Beagle Point is 65,000ly (requiring 33,800t though somebody did I think manage this on a single tank), a trip to circumnavigate the galaxy is 330,000ly (requiring about 170,000t) and the journey I wanted to undertake in which I would visit all of the cardinal points and more in the galaxy would be 450,000ly (requiring about 230,000t).
At a deep-core mining rate, this huge amount of Tritium could be mined between 2,300 and 1,150 hours (288 and 144 full eight-hour days of gameplay). I was fully prepared for that and anticipated the journey would take me approximately two years. Unfortunately at the rate I was finding Tritium, only about 20t / hr, it would take a whopping 1,437 full eight hour days of gameplay just for mining. That's almost four full years of gameplay if I played every single day, full-time, and which would also require many months of full time play to make the jumps. Sorry Frontier, but I'm just not prepared to grind for what would probably be ten to fifteen years of normal gaming for a journey that should take two.
Any why should it only take one or two? Well it should only take one or two because inside the bubble there are double and triple hotspots for Tritium, and they're also very easy to find because of tools such as Inara and EDDB. When you add to this that in my trip of about 35,000ly I didn't encounter a single notable stellar phenomena, it's very clear that Frontier have got a lot of work to do before long-range exploration in a carrier can become a realistic prospect for players.
I am absolutely gutted that I have to give up and head back, but sadly the alternative will be stranding my carrier, and my entire fleet out deep in the black somewhere which would make the entire game completely unplayable for me. Frontier need to fix this.
When they do I shall restart the trip. I still very much want to undertake this epic journey and will do so at the earliest opportunity. For now though, for right now, it's simply impossible.
So why do I believe that long-range exploration is impossible? Simply put it's the non-availability of any fuel out in the black. While my trusty Cobra Mk IV could scoop from stars, the carrier required Tritium, mined from icy rings. Now out in the black there are plenty of ringed worlds, but icy rings are just some of those and many of the ringed planets are small. I made several stops in systems with pristine icy ring reserves. These systems all had at least one Tritium hotspot, though none that overlapped sadly.
I spent many hours mining in those rings. I found one ring that did have a medium reserve of Tritium, but the other rings had almost no tritium at all. To make matters worse, none of the rings had a single Tritium core asteroid, in fact I only found two core asteroids the whole time... one for Low Temperature Diamonds, and one for Alexandrite.
To put this into context, there is a complex formula for working out how much Tritium is needed per light year to jump a carrier, but to simplify things it can be roughly calculated at 260 tonnes per 500 light year jump. A trip to Beagle Point is 65,000ly (requiring 33,800t though somebody did I think manage this on a single tank), a trip to circumnavigate the galaxy is 330,000ly (requiring about 170,000t) and the journey I wanted to undertake in which I would visit all of the cardinal points and more in the galaxy would be 450,000ly (requiring about 230,000t).
At a deep-core mining rate, this huge amount of Tritium could be mined between 2,300 and 1,150 hours (288 and 144 full eight-hour days of gameplay). I was fully prepared for that and anticipated the journey would take me approximately two years. Unfortunately at the rate I was finding Tritium, only about 20t / hr, it would take a whopping 1,437 full eight hour days of gameplay just for mining. That's almost four full years of gameplay if I played every single day, full-time, and which would also require many months of full time play to make the jumps. Sorry Frontier, but I'm just not prepared to grind for what would probably be ten to fifteen years of normal gaming for a journey that should take two.
Any why should it only take one or two? Well it should only take one or two because inside the bubble there are double and triple hotspots for Tritium, and they're also very easy to find because of tools such as Inara and EDDB. When you add to this that in my trip of about 35,000ly I didn't encounter a single notable stellar phenomena, it's very clear that Frontier have got a lot of work to do before long-range exploration in a carrier can become a realistic prospect for players.
I am absolutely gutted that I have to give up and head back, but sadly the alternative will be stranding my carrier, and my entire fleet out deep in the black somewhere which would make the entire game completely unplayable for me. Frontier need to fix this.
When they do I shall restart the trip. I still very much want to undertake this epic journey and will do so at the earliest opportunity. For now though, for right now, it's simply impossible.
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Someone should have read about Tritium before they set off. Ah well, fail to prepare, prepare to ... uh, I forget
