//mayday//mayday

[Mace71]

//mayday//this is the Crouching Tiger//taken heavy damage//lost power, venting fuel//please respond//

It's already so cool for me that we can go silent and invisible to radar giving excellent pirate scenarios of waiting in an asteroid belt or near a well known fuel skimming spot for fat trading ships. But how cool would it be to be able to send out maydays, legitimately or not, and having players or NPC's respond.

Whether you be pirate faking it or legitimate trader in trouble it would add some tension to responding especially if the rewards are high for helping. These are the things I used to pretend doing as a 13 year old in the original Elite

 

[Matthiby]

So long as it works better than the Mayday in FE2

 

[ZaphodBeeble]

So long as it works better than the Mayday in FE2

Good point! I don't recall that ever having any effect.

 

[Bowak]

I think it'd be great if they were implemented with players having the opportunity to respond. Maybe the mayday call would appear as a radio source to people in system so players there could choose to investigate or not.

If no player investigates within a certain amount of time, the game could generate an ai response, the exact nature of which would be determined by the type of system and the player's various rankings with the different groups.

Of course, it'd also have to be possible for a sneaky player to set off the mayday call as a trap, with the appropriate penalties if caught etc.

 

[trekman]

//mayday//this is the Crouching Tiger//taken heavy damage//lost power, venting fuel//please respond//

It's already so cool for me that we can go silent and invisible to radar giving excellent pirate scenarios of waiting in an asteroid belt or near a well known fuel skimming spot for fat trading ships. But how cool would it be to be able to send out maydays, legitimately or not, and having players or NPC's respond.

Whether you be pirate faking it or legitimate trader in trouble it would add some tension to responding especially if the rewards are high for helping. These are the things I used to pretend doing as a 13 year old in the original Elite

I'm pretty sure I remember David Braben saying that the ability to send out distress signals will be in the finished game.

 

[baskila]

I can already see someone floating somewhere god knows where who sends distress signal because of lack of fuel. I also see two ships that arrive at the location, stay there for a while, laugh at the poor soul over the comms and in the end leave him there.

 

[Hydrino]

The main issue is that comms in a realistic game are limited to the speed of light so distress calls should only come from local system and the delay could be significant (hours). This should be modelled in the mission system so for instance the capital ship distress call in the promo video could only be answered by ships in-system using mini-jump or FSD, not from ships even 1 Light Year away. As they say, space is vast, ming-boggling huge, incomprehensibly vast.

This unless FD have some game handwavium like the Frame Shift Drive so that comms travel FTL. I haven't read anything about that.

Here an article on current NASA experiment using lasers for higher bit-rate data transmission (video) in space [note it is still limited to the speed of light so a signal would take about 8 minutes to come from the Sun for example]:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...missions?source=CTWNLE_nlt_dailyam_2014-06-09

 

[Hydrino]

The main issue is that comms in a realistic game are limited to the speed of light so distress calls should only come from local system and the delay could be significant (hours). This should be modelled in the mission system so for instance the capital ship distress call in the promo video could only be answered by ships in-system using mini-jump or FSD, not from ships even 1 Light Year away. As they say, space is vast, ming-boggling huge, incomprehensibly vast.

This unless FD have some game handwavium like the Frame Shift Drive so that comms travel FTL. I haven't read anything about that.

Here an article on current NASA experiment using lasers for higher bit-rate data transmission (video) in space [note it is still limited to the speed of light so a signal would take about 8 minutes to come from the Sun for example]:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...missions?source=CTWNLE_nlt_dailyam_2014-06-09

I just had a thought after hitting send. The factions could have space comms ships and even snail-mail ships that begin blasting news and other information over the comms electro-magnetic bands as they jump daily from system to system carrying command and control messages and gifts for your Aunty in the system across the vacuum (or pond as they say).

There would still be a delay but even distress calls could possibly be forwarded in this way.

 

[RCKJD]

Well, a net of interlinked quantum entanglement satellites/ buoys could spread out the message quickly. Closest sat picks up the distress signal and spreads it across the net.
Patrolling NPC Police vipers respond to the distress call and so could player, helpful or opportunistic alike.

 

[Y2K]

I can already see someone floating somewhere god knows where who sends distress signal because of lack of fuel. I also see two ships that arrive at the location, stay there for a while, laugh at the poor soul over the comms and in the end leave him there.

Stuff like this is what gives this game the potential to be amazing

 

[CMDR Texas Stu]

I'm looking forward to this just as the above replies and OP.
That said, comms seem to be needed first.

 

[Ben Ryder]

//mayday//this is the Crouching Tiger//taken heavy damage//lost power, venting fuel//please respond//

It's already so cool for me that we can go silent and invisible to radar giving excellent pirate scenarios of waiting in an asteroid belt or near a well known fuel skimming spot for fat trading ships. But how cool would it be to be able to send out maydays, legitimately or not, and having players or NPC's respond.

Whether you be pirate faking it or legitimate trader in trouble it would add some tension to responding especially if the rewards are high for helping. These are the things I used to pretend doing as a 13 year old in the original Elite

This topic has come up a couple of times and I'm hoping they add a simple control to target most friendly or friendly in trouble. A the moment we can locate and cycle through hostiles but theres nothing yet for quickly identifying our friends