New USS thing?

[DrNoesis]

i couldnt find any mention of it before, so my apologies if this is old news...

Last night I went for a short hop out of the bubble and back and a little way out I ran into a USS, well beyond the distance I'd normally expect to see them.

With it being Thargoid o'clock I figured i'd take a look and was a little saddened to find it was a Convoy Dispersal Pattern, Threat 1.

Still not convinced it wasnt related to the thargoids (especially with remembering how UA's used to turn up in convoys) I figured I'd drop in and see if I'd discovered something...

The 6 asp explorers I found there werent what I was expecting, but the coms chatter was great - lots of "I wonder what we'll find out here" and that kind of thing.

So yeah, nothing too amazing, but after god knows how many delayed transports and wedding invitations ive seen over the years, it was actually kind of cool to drop in someplace unexpected and find some NPC's "exploring" a bit.

It's just one of those little bits of flavour that made me smile, and reminded me that us explorers dont always go forgotten

 

[Reido]

That would be "The Happy Explorer's".

They've been around for quite some time. I drop in to visit them every once in a while just to see if anything about the encounter has changed after major updates. I think they're mostly just in the game as easy targets for people farming mats, but I rather like the light banter and just hang out for a couple of minutes until they jump out and then continue on my way again.


Reido (CMDR Andrew Reid)

 

[Sapyx]

Once upon a time, you'd occasionally be offered "kill explorers" missions; they were introduced with the 2.0 mission system revamp, I believe, along with the "kill refugees" and "kill agitators" missions. It was supposed to make it more challenging than the "kill any old civilian" missions. I don't know if they still give those out; I think that mission type got dropped because "explorers" were too darned hard to find. But these are the explorers you were supposed to find and kill when you get those missions.

 

[marx]

Once upon a time, you'd occasionally be offered "kill explorers" missions; they were introduced with the 2.0 mission system revamp, I believe, along with the "kill refugees" and "kill agitators" missions. It was supposed to make it more challenging than the "kill any old civilian" missions. I don't know if they still give those out; I think that mission type got dropped because "explorers" were too darned hard to find. But these are the explorers you were supposed to find and kill when you get those missions.

I've found that explorer convoys are easy enough to find just outside the bubble, but the problem there would be the distance. Why would anyone take a "kill explorers" mission and travel that much, when they could take "kill anyone else" missions and have to do maybe one jump? Maybe if the rewards were increased by what distance you'd have to travel, but then we could have easily ended up with yet another case where the rewards inflate far too much and people exploit them to farm silly amounts of credits.

Would have made for some fun stories though. "Lots of Commanders turn to massacring innocent explorers for seemingly no good reason"