You guys should google some recent images of the peace, serenity, and natural purity of the Mt Everest summit.
Opinion: 10 LY range for colonization is ridiculously low.
- Thread starter Agony_Aunt
- Start date
Ive been trying to make a route from a system on the edge of the bubble ( no prizes for guessing where) and a rather modest 230 light year colonisation trail.
First problem is that there is only one unpopulated system less than 10ly away.
This system only has access to two systems that go further into the bubble and not out of it.
From this point there are more systems but they all go in and not out.
Its not going to expand the bubble it will consolidate it.
20ly would make expansion possible, but as so many others have pointed out it wont get us very far. To hit my 230 light year target it would still require a minumum of 12 colonisations
First problem is that there is only one unpopulated system less than 10ly away.
This system only has access to two systems that go further into the bubble and not out of it.
From this point there are more systems but they all go in and not out.
Its not going to expand the bubble it will consolidate it.
20ly would make expansion possible, but as so many others have pointed out it wont get us very far. To hit my 230 light year target it would still require a minumum of 12 colonisations
And yet that wasn't the question. It wasn't "what's wrong with colonising different systems".. it was"what's wrong with colonising this specific system, out of the billions out there.
The point is, FD is giving us tools to shape the galaxy, and they're well aware of the... let's call it passion... players can have for it. Given what's happened with PMFs, player galnet and the BGS in general, people are already fixated on spreading their faction and claiming their territory... that's not the point of this though.
It's to grow existing human territories, not start new ones. Depending on how FD implement this, there's already dozens of potential start points for growing humanity out.. and CGs could place more.
"But is not my faction!" some will say... good... it wasn't their faction to start with either. Those who care about ownership and territorialism will stick to the confines of the core systems, while those who just care about growing in distant places have options. Maybe even CGs can seed new starts. But the issues of territorialism are kept where they currently are, and not expanded outside the bubble confines.
Cyclically, i expect FD i cave because they always accede to this sort of thing... and then i look forward to all these issues surfacing.
I just had a thought if we were to make a cellular automata of the expansion of ten light years with the rule that any populated system will expand to systems within 10 ly. We can run it until there are no new populated systems created. This would give us a mp of the limits of growth.
We could repeat that with different ranges,
Come to think of it we know that 30ly or so will get you almost anywhere in the galaxy. But it would simply take hundreds of years to get to the other end with colonies.
I was chatting about this on Bluesky with CMDR Jarenstad and he was suggesting that it should be much higher to give as many people as possible a chance to to have their faction expand. Even 50ly or 100ly could take decades to get as far as beagle point but it would allow people to get out of the bubble away from rival factions who would take over them. ( I know you retain ownership, but your faction might not be the controlling faction anymore)
Lets say you went 50ly and were more than 20 from the nearest faction then they would have to build a colony close enough to yours to expand into it.
Lets say you went 50ly and were more than 20 from the nearest faction then they would have to build a colony close enough to yours to expand into it.
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Hmm that sounds interesting, I'll see what I can cook up.
If you can produce coordinates for each wave of colonisation I can put it on a map
Regarding consistency, let's face it, that first colony is always going to be the hardest because you have to haul everything in. As it should be. and think about it, a person or group having to haul stuff OUT to deep deep space, will present enough of a challenge, but if they want to colonize the end of a galactic arm, then more power to them.
In terms of your implied, "supply system" for daughter colonies and creating a larger game mechanic out of that. honestly, awesome, develop that, and I wish you luck on it. It's out of the scope for this conversation, but I like where you're heading.
Right now, I just want the initial iteration of this idea, to be solid, before we start suggesting all the ways to improve and make it deeper. I like complicated, I was a veteran EVE Online player and ex-QA lead for CCP, so complicated was my bread and butter.
I just want people to be able to finally stake their claim, plant their flag, whatever the fantasy in the way they want. And yeah, there should be one global beacon per account. All the subsequent ones based off the 10 LY bubble mechanic. Because an account only NEEDS one.
This suggestion doesn't conflict with what they suggested on the stream.
Thinking on it even more and sleeping on it. I've even thought of a more refined version. When you go to the contact to buy the beacon, you should be able to choose to use either your one global beacon, or buy one of "normal" 10ly beacons. (of which are unlimited.)
That way if you have a buddy, whose helping you out, they don't end up wasting their "global beacon" on your colony space. (It had occurred to me in my sleep, a buddy would end up doing that trying to help you out if we didn't delineate between the two. so let's not penalize them.)
So it makes it simple, if a person just wants to build off existing bubble space, they can. If they want to use their global beacon to start a new one somewhere, they can and build off from there.
BTW to any Fdevs reading my post, My resume is on linkedin and I am open to a design position to help you out with this. as always. o7
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This is what I was able to cook up quickly note, I'm using system data from a spansh dump from like 2-3 years ago and obviously it gets less detailed the further out from the bubble you go which might be affecting the results too. What surprised me here was that despite the exponential growth of the surface here the number of systems colonized per iteration remained at 15k which in hindsight makes sense since the Z axis thins out. Also note I only had data for ~1k around Sol so the final iterations run out of systems because of that and that's really not far enough to get into the shape/grain of the galaxy.
FDEV thinks 10Ly is a long distance because they do their minimal playtesting/troubleshooting in an ungineered Mamba
Source: https://x.com/EliteDangerous/status/1854451575260934230?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1854451575260934230%7Ctwgr%5Ea5e8398b8820ee719b564d1d3bbef805e9b78981%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fforums.frontier.co.uk%2Fthreads%2Felite-dangerous-ascendancy-now-live.629020%2Fpage-15
Source: https://x.com/EliteDangerous/status/1854451575260934230?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1854451575260934230%7Ctwgr%5Ea5e8398b8820ee719b564d1d3bbef805e9b78981%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fforums.frontier.co.uk%2Fthreads%2Felite-dangerous-ascendancy-now-live.629020%2Fpage-15
As of February 28, 2024, only 0.06% of the galaxy had been explored. (from Frontier Unlocked Feb 28, 2024- (per Elite Wiki "Galaxy" page).
Its taken 10 years to explore 0.06% of the galaxy or around 6 million systems per year (wow that's quite a lot if true-17,000 systems per day?).
It assumes 100 billion systems in the galaxy.
Colonizing will be a lot harder than just jumping into a system for a D scan. I'd like the colonization range eventually to be at least say 2 carrier jumps or more (1000LY) from the nearest inhabited system. The time limit and resources needed to build the station should weed out those that try to setup too far out without the proper support and planning.
I'd be surprised if we colonized 0.001% of the galaxy in the next 10 years. That's around 1,000,000 systems . I believe there's around 20,000 systems in the bubble. So 50 times the size of the bubble in 10 years or 100,000 new systems per year or around 2,000 systems per week. So lets get to the places we really want to be relatively quickly. It really doesn't matter what we do. Nothing will be noticeable in such a vast expanse. Its so vast that some of my percentages could be out a decimal place or more and it still doesn't matter. The galaxy is huge!
My apologies if someone has already posted something like this before as I haven't had time to read the entire thread.
Its taken 10 years to explore 0.06% of the galaxy or around 6 million systems per year (wow that's quite a lot if true-17,000 systems per day?).
It assumes 100 billion systems in the galaxy.
Colonizing will be a lot harder than just jumping into a system for a D scan. I'd like the colonization range eventually to be at least say 2 carrier jumps or more (1000LY) from the nearest inhabited system. The time limit and resources needed to build the station should weed out those that try to setup too far out without the proper support and planning.
I'd be surprised if we colonized 0.001% of the galaxy in the next 10 years. That's around 1,000,000 systems . I believe there's around 20,000 systems in the bubble. So 50 times the size of the bubble in 10 years or 100,000 new systems per year or around 2,000 systems per week. So lets get to the places we really want to be relatively quickly. It really doesn't matter what we do. Nothing will be noticeable in such a vast expanse. Its so vast that some of my percentages could be out a decimal place or more and it still doesn't matter. The galaxy is huge!
My apologies if someone has already posted something like this before as I haven't had time to read the entire thread.
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There were a lot of good arguments in the previous posts that the galaxy is big and an expansion rightly doesn't affect it. Let me use that argument in defense of a 10ly (ok, let it be 20ly) colonization range: There is no need to colonize beyond that starting range because there are already enough systems inside and on the fringes of the bubble so that it isn't necessary to have a larger range for the ships
There were a lot of good arguments in the previous posts that the galaxy is big and an expansion rightly doesn't affect it. Let me use that argument in defense of a 10ly (ok, let it be 20ly) colonization range: There is no need to colonize beyond that starting range because there are already enough systems inside and on the fringes of the bubble so that it isn't necessary to have a larger range for the ships
As I already mentioned, there's only 1 uninhabited system within a 10LY range of my home system, and it has no planets. Not worth expanding into. 20LY isn't much better.
And really, the desire to colonize further out for many of us who want this is because we want to colonize far from existing systems, otherwise its just another system surrounded by others more or less just like it.
Maybe not, but without a big player like Sirius Corp having an interest in in doing so (an interest which has not been demonstrated at all), they're not going to actively prevent anyone from settling in places like BP either, just to satisfy a handful of explorers with particular ideas about the development of remote areas.
That's just a failure of your imagination. There are at least two whole player groups who've been RPing a player-founded bubble for some years now, all in spite of lack of colonisation mechanics thus far. Space colonisation is a thing in science fiction, and it's hardly surprising that some players have aspirations towards taking part in such activities within the context of a video game.
People really don't grasp astronomical scales. The response (the cynical might call it a goalpost-shift) I've seen to people pointing out the vast scale of the galaxy is to complain that extensive colonisation would mean that sharing the same galactic region with a player-led settlement hundreds of light years away would somehow disturb their peace and isolation, in spite of the fact that map filters are a thing and they would still have to be actively looking for it in order to see it with their own eyes.
There were a lot of good arguments in the previous posts that the galaxy is big and an expansion rightly doesn't affect it. Let me use that argument in defense of a 10ly (ok, let it be 20ly) colonization range: There is no need to colonize beyond that starting range because there are already enough systems inside and on the fringes of the bubble so that it isn't necessary to have a larger range for the ships
But if you didn't see your country does that mean you should go abroad for a trip? This is not about needs, this is about follow the dreams.
that's "how the West was won"
No intent offend you and I understand that depending on the starting point, it may be a tedious procedure.what does it have to do with 'my country'?
Trip? That's for explorers and tourists they use a ship to go somewhere or a carrier.
My dream is that beautiful spots in the galaxy are not cluttered with settlements. I want to follow that dream.
Made a few more useful visualizations of the colonization progress - these have the same caveats as the previous ones (old data, only 1k around Sol etc) but I also tried to show unpopulated systems that never get colonized using some transparency which are the vast majority of systems actually and something that's hard to get across, esp with how much video compression destroys this.
Source: https://youtu.be/mSFFHtLRH6c
Source: https://youtu.be/8MDQ3p7acjw
I can also make it spin.
I can also make it spin.
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Kinda missed the background on these. Thought it might be interesting to mention them on Lave Radio but could you briefly explain what they're illustrating?