General Overhauling Engineering: A Family's Request for a Streamlined Upgrade System

[Brrokk]

Something else I'll add is the first ship I used seriously for combat and the thing that did most of the work in unlocking my first Cutter.

Coriolis EDCD Edition

A ship builder, outfitting and comparison tool for Elite Dangerous

s.orbis.zone

It's absolutely riddled with basic mistakes and even the choice of ship is questionable here (Do NOT copy this). That's before we consider that it's basically unfinished because I couldn't be bothered unlocking Selene Jean and Lei Cheung, among others.

Absolutely dominated every combat scenario I put it in (PvE only of course).

It's interesting how experience changes your ideas. This week I got out my old battle Anaconda. It was OK, but after a while I realised its weapon loadout made no sense at all; did I do this? I'd basically filled it with a mixture of lasers and multicannons without thinking at all about how they would be used in an engagement. Now it has a huge long range beam and a load of short-range multicannon turrets it makes much more sense.

 

[Brrokk]

... No you can't gather mats in any meaningful way while just passively doing stuff despite what people say. ...

You absolutely can.
OK, you might have to carry a collector controller instead of another HRP.

I pick up stuff all the time, and just today visited a material trader because too many of my material stores were full, causing limpets to be wasted.

 

[angusmadmac1]

I think once you are at a certain stage you don't need to engineer ( I haven't in two years ) so my stocks will naturally grow . But if are starting off ??? You don't have the stocks so need to build them . I think I've done around 7,500+ upgrades and traded 65,900 mats in my game . But I've G5 maxed cos I've been around for a while and it's what I do .
So we those numbers it's can be daunting for starters . But you don't have to do everything straight away and with the bought modules with engineering you need even less .

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

You absolutely can.
OK, you might have to carry a collector controller instead of another HRP.

I pick up stuff all the time, and just today visited a material trader because too many of my material stores were full, causing limpets to be wasted.

You need a collector and a cargo bay and to visit a station that sells limpets,
You can only reliably do it after combat when there's nothing with point defence around (so in CZs sometimes),
You still need to slow down for the limpet to not expire due to being out of range
You need to flag goods to not be picked up in certain situations
You only get a subset of materials based on the ship type which means you'll have to do some other activities still (like killing tourist/trader ships if you usually don't)
You don't get raw materials which you need for engineering the first few grades.
There are probably other complications because this is Elite.

All to randomly pick up some G1-G2 mats where picking up a single G5 in the same category gives you more than enough to fill the entire storage for the material.

So let's be super generous here and say you only need manufactured materials and everything has an equal chance of dropping/being picked up and you only want to engineer your big ship (many modules) to G3 which means you need no G5 mats and ~50/30/20/10 of the G1-G4 mats you need the most of (assuming these are the bottlenecks).

Lets even round it down some more so it's a multiple of 3 to calculate how many you need to pick up (16/10/6/3) lets also assume material drops between grades are evenly distributed so we only need to worry about the highest number there which is 16.

There are 10 categories of manufactured materials which means there's an 1/50 (2%) chance of getting the material you need every drop but G4/G4 material drops are rarer so let's go with 1/30 (a massive increasse to 3.33%!).

Based on some quick simulations you need to return ~540 limpets to have a reasonable 75% chance of ending up with what you need (and hundreds of other random things). This is also maybe a bit generous in that it doesn't factor in that you need to also get lucky (to a lesser degree) to get at least the necessary amount in about 30 other manufactured materials.

All to get pick up an amount of a single G1 mat that is less than a single G5 mat is worth at a material trader (and a single G5 mat pickup is 3 of those).

That is obviously ridiculous and mat traders do exist so let's ignore the G1 stuff which means you need ~350 of those pickups for G2 and ~220 for G3 - trading those gets more expensive and you need multiple materials so you probably(?) won't have enough unneeded mats to trade for everything and in practice the higher grade stuff will be slightly rarer anyway.

So how long does it take you to fire and return those 540/350/220 limpets? It's tempting to calculate it as something like 30s extra time spent throttled down loitering while waiting for per limpet to a return and we do get numbers that are "less effective", but it's probably better to go by how many of those limpet returns you can get per hour of gameplay including travel and killing whatever you're picking the stuff up from. I'm guessing less than 10/h so we're looking at 20-25h of passive material gathering gameplay. Double or triple that for actual non-grindy gameplay where you do other random activities that don't reward mats like trade/exploration/sightseeing or when you spend a couple of hours flying out to an engineer 200Ly away in your unengineered ship to upgrade stuff and pin blueprints only to realize I steelmanned this a bit too much and you still have 0 raw mats so you can't actually do anything at all.

also I remember something about NPCs killed by other NPCs not dropping mats so you can't as easily leech off cops with your stock-except-for-limpet-collector sidewinder when starting out.

So as a new player you obviously don't want to wait that long and do all your upgrades at once. It's way better to see what the best engineering you can do with the meager amount of materials you managed to scrape together after a few hours of combat. Yeah that's going to require a guide since the information isn't really accessible unless you fly out to the engineers and that takes a long time in a non-optimal ship. The guide will probably only talk about the best-in-slot G5 mods and start you on the path of wickedness and devilry that is the engineering meta and grinding for materials.

I'm not 100% confident in my math but even if I got it wrong there's no way the actual numbers fit a reasonable progression curve and I was unrealistically generous every step of the way.

 

[Brrokk]

...

We reach a familiar impasse. You're telling me it's impossible to do something I've been doing for a few years.

 

[aRJay]

You need a collector and a cargo bay and to visit a station that sells limpets,
You can only reliably do it after combat when there's nothing with point defence around (so in CZs sometimes),
You still need to slow down for the limpet to not expire due to being out of range
You need to flag goods to not be picked up in certain situations
You only get a subset of materials based on the ship type which means you'll have to do some other activities still (like killing tourist/trader ships if you usually don't)
You don't get raw materials which you need for engineering the first few grades.
There are probably other complications because this is Elite.

All to randomly pick up some G1-G2 mats where picking up a single G5 in the same category gives you more than enough to fill the entire storage for the material.

So let's be super generous here and say you only need manufactured materials and everything has an equal chance of dropping/being picked up and you only want to engineer your big ship (many modules) to G3 which means you need no G5 mats and ~50/30/20/10 of the G1-G4 mats you need the most of (assuming these are the bottlenecks).

Lets even round it down some more so it's a multiple of 3 to calculate how many you need to pick up (16/10/6/3) lets also assume material drops between grades are evenly distributed so we only need to worry about the highest number there which is 16.

There are 10 categories of manufactured materials which means there's an 1/50 (2%) chance of getting the material you need every drop but G4/G4 material drops are rarer so let's go with 1/30 (a massive increasse to 3.33%!).

Based on some quick simulations you need to return ~540 limpets to have a reasonable 75% chance of ending up with what you need (and hundreds of other random things). This is also maybe a bit generous in that it doesn't factor in that you need to also get lucky (to a lesser degree) to get at least the necessary amount in about 30 other manufactured materials.

All to get pick up an amount of a single G1 mat that is less than a single G5 mat is worth at a material trader (and a single G5 mat pickup is 3 of those).

That is obviously ridiculous and mat traders do exist so let's ignore the G1 stuff which means you need ~350 of those pickups for G2 and ~220 for G3 - trading those gets more expensive and you need multiple materials so you probably(?) won't have enough unneeded mats to trade for everything and in practice the higher grade stuff will be slightly rarer anyway.

So how long does it take you to fire and return those 540/350/220 limpets? It's tempting to calculate it as something like 30s extra time spent throttled down loitering while waiting for per limpet to a return and we do get numbers that are "less effective", but it's probably better to go by how many of those limpet returns you can get per hour of gameplay including travel and killing whatever you're picking the stuff up from. I'm guessing less than 10/h so we're looking at 20-25h of passive material gathering gameplay. Double or triple that for actual non-grindy gameplay where you do other random activities that don't reward mats like trade/exploration/sightseeing or when you spend a couple of hours flying out to an engineer 200Ly away in your unengineered ship to upgrade stuff and pin blueprints only to realize I steelmanned this a bit too much and you still have 0 raw mats so you can't actually do anything at all.

also I remember something about NPCs killed by other NPCs not dropping mats so you can't as easily leech off cops with your stock-except-for-limpet-collector sidewinder when starting out.

So as a new player you obviously don't want to wait that long and do all your upgrades at once. It's way better to see what the best engineering you can do with the meager amount of materials you managed to scrape together after a few hours of combat. Yeah that's going to require a guide since the information isn't really accessible unless you fly out to the engineers and that takes a long time in a non-optimal ship. The guide will probably only talk about the best-in-slot G5 mods and start you on the path of wickedness and devilry that is the engineering meta and grinding for materials.

I'm not 100% confident in my math but even if I got it wrong there's no way the actual numbers fit a reasonable progression curve and I was unrealistically generous every step of the way.

Stop lying to people about passive materials gathering.

STOP SHOUTING you big bully.

Well if the guides are so unsuitable perhaps you could produce one that is suitable.

Instead of ignoring G1 mats or G5 mats perhaps the best approach is to gather any mat you find no matter how you found it and assuming that you are in a position game and time wise to do so.

My attitude to engineering and the activities to enable it are do the things you enjoy doing and do something else when you aren't enjoying them anymore, after all the game is not a race so take all the time you want.

No doomsters need to respond to that, we know you don't agree.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

We reach a familiar impasse. You're telling me it's impossible to do something I've been doing for a few years.

I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying it's untenable to suggest people play the game without any meaningful engineering progression* for longer than most singleplayer games take to complete, at an impossibly generous minimum estimate to upgrade their ship to what according to how the game displays it is about halfway.

It might work for you but it's bad advice to others that are more goal oriented - which is probably the kind of people that would ask or look for that advice in the first place. It's not obvious that the advice is bad since Elite can be so counter-intuitive so it has to be called out.

* the calculations I did should apply to single module upgrades too since it's the bottlenecks that really matter (since you can't substitute mats) and those bottlenecks are likely to occur on weapons even if you don't want a tanky hull/shield with lots of HRP/Boosters since mixing weapon engineering is not a common/sane choice and you're going to engineer multiple of the same weapon at which point passive gathering or sustaining trading via passive gathering becomes less viable. If you only want internals for a trading/exploration build it might be a lot more relaxed, but in that case you're not picking stuff up passively from combat anyway if you're doing the gameplay you enjoy most.

Well if the guides are so unsuitable perhaps you could produce one that is suitable.

I hinted at that earlier in the thread - any full guide that doesn't just tell you what the best option is will just be explaining why most choices are trap choices in a needlessly complex manner and there's very little actual gameplay benefit to knowing why most engineering options are bad.

Instead of ignoring G1 mats or G5 mats perhaps the best approach is to gather any mat you find no matter how you found it and assuming that you are in a position game and time wise to do so.

It's a drop in the ocean. It might feel like it makes a difference but for anyone asking how to get more mats it's bad advice because of how trivial the amounts are compared to what you need.

 

[Rat Catcher]

I hinted at that earlier in the thread - any full guide that doesn't just tell you what the best option is will just be explaining why most choices are trap choices in a needlessly complex manner and there's very little actual gameplay benefit to knowing why most engineering options are bad.

I suppose the best guide would start with "spend 500 hours doing stuff you don't want to do"?
Or perhaps, more generously "Don't bother and play a single player game instead"?

 

[Brrokk]

I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying it's untenable to suggest people play the game without any meaningful engineering progression* ...

Lucky I didn't suggest that then. (Was that "whoosh" the sound of the goal posts receding?)

What I did and always do suggest is that materials should always be collected whenever they're available in gameplay, so that they're available for engineering when needed.

 

[Rat Catcher]

What I did and always do suggest is that materials should always be collected whenever they're available in gameplay, so that they're available for engineering when needed.

My most junior alt spent a couple of hours flying around visiting a bunch of HGE & USS locations a while back... Yes, it was playing just for mats (a concious choice) but I picked up enough G4/5 mats / data to trade for a lot of lower grade, and needed, mats / data.
A bit of mining in various ring types picked up a selection of raws also, as well as making a reasonable profit.

ED isn't that difficult to 'progress' in, it just takes time and playing through each of the occupations. This, naturally, is unacceptable to some, such is gaming

 

[DemiserofD]

Lucky I didn't suggest that then. (Was that "whoosh" the sound of the goal posts receding?)

What I did and always do suggest is that materials should always be collected whenever they're available in gameplay, so that they're available for engineering when needed.

I've talked about this in the past. It's a good idea in theory, but in practice, it just doesn't make sense mathematically.

Example 1: You go to a Hazrez and fight pirates, collecting mats after each kill. You spend about 45 minutes fighting, and 15 minutes collecting, and collect about 5 units of G5 mats.
Example 2: You go to a Hazrez and fight pirates, ignoring the mats after each kill. You spend 45 minutes fighting, and then stop and relog farm an HGE for 5 minutes after spending 10 minutes looking for it. You collect 15-30 units of G5 mats.

I've actually tested this ingame before. It takes a significant amount of time to navigate near a wreck and collect materials after a fight. It also takes a significant amount of cargo space, because point defense typically picks your current ones off. What ends up happening is, you end up sacrificing small chunks of time which, in aggregate, end up being worse than just grinding the mats from HGEs or other grindy sources.

Bear in mind, this is the WORST CASE for the HGEs, because it assumes you're leaving before it expires. If instead you go grind that HGE for its full duration, you can easily get 100+ G5 mats, limited only by how fast your PC can fire up Elite again.

In theory, the purpose of HGEs is to sacrifice fun for the sake of faster resource collection overall. IE, you get loads of G5 mats, but you don't get any combat. But the reality is, you actually get BOTH: Both more mats AND more fun/combat, in the same amount of time.

That's a problem.

 

[tolm]

The thing is …

• Combat is part of the game
• Mining is part of the game
• Trading is part of the game
• Cargo and passenger missions are part of the game
• Travelling huge distances via multiple hyperspace jumps is part of the game
• Engineering is part of the game

And - yes …

• Material gathering is part of the game

Complaining that you can’t do high level combat (High CZ / Haz RES / Thargoid) without doing the other things is like complaining you can’t take on the final boss in Mario without doing the first level …

Don’t get me wrong - I mostly do combat (not that I’m particularly good at it!) but I knew going into Elite that I would need to do other things as well and I have enjoyed doing those other things.

 

[DemiserofD]

The thing is …

• Combat is part of the game
• Mining is part of the game
• Trading is part of the game
• Cargo and passenger missions are part of the game
• Travelling huge distances via multiple hyperspace jumps is part of the game
• Engineering is part of the game

And - yes …

• Material gathering is part of the game

Complaining that you can’t do high level combat (High CZ / Haz RES / Thargoid) without doing the other things is like complaining you can’t take on the final boss in Mario without doing the first level …

Don’t get me wrong - I mostly do combat (not that I’m particularly good at it!) but I knew going into Elite that I would need to do other things as well and I have enjoyed doing those other things.

The question is, should sitting there for 60 seconds waiting for materials to be collected be a part of the game? This is, after all, a game. We can remove unnecessarily annoying elements if we want to do so.

Take Minecraft as an example; imagine if, in order to collect any dropped item, you needed to stop, aim at the dropped item, and activate a 1-time-use 'gloves' item, which then caused a 60 seconds cutscene to play where you pick up the item and deposit it in your backpack.

Does that sound fun? It certainly doesn't sound fun to me. Which is why it's a good thing that instead, minecraft just lets you suck in the nearby items by running near them.
This is why I have suggested in the past, and still advocate for, a different collection method for engineering materials.

IMO, mats are small and light enough, you should be able to just open your cargo hatch while nearby, and it would automatically fire grappling hooks at any material within 500m to suck it in, not taking more than a few seconds. That is, in my mind, MORE than enough sacrifice to realism, while also making the game far more fun; this being a game, fun is a critically important feature.

 

[tolm]

The question is, should sitting there for 60 seconds waiting for materials to be collected be a part of the game? This is, after all, a game. We can remove unnecessarily annoying elements if we want to do so.

Take Minecraft as an example; imagine if, in order to collect any dropped item, you needed to stop, aim at the dropped item, and activate a 1-time-use 'gloves' item, which then caused a 60 seconds cutscene to play where you pick up the item and deposit it in your backpack.

Does that sound fun? It certainly doesn't sound fun to me. Which is why it's a good thing that instead, minecraft just lets you suck in the nearby items by running near them.
This is why I have suggested in the past, and still advocate for, a different collection method for engineering materials.

IMO, mats are small and light enough, you should be able to just open your cargo hatch while nearby, and it would automatically fire grappling hooks at any material within 500m to suck it in, not taking more than a few seconds. That is, in my mind, MORE than enough sacrifice to realism, while also making the game far more fun; this being a game, fun is a critically important feature.

You can scoop them up without using limpets you just have to fly over to them and position the “hoover” correctly.

(But, yes, reusable short-range limpets, tractor beams, etc would obviously make it easier if FDev wanted to do that)

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

I suppose the best guide would start with "spend 500 hours doing stuff you don't want to do"?
Or perhaps, more generously "Don't bother and play a single player game instead"?

If that is the truth of the situation then yeah. Luckily a good guide will probably help you plan things out and gather the necessary materials so it takes a 2-3 hours (including travel time) instead of 10-20 of bumbling around being frustrated if people hang around for that long.

What I did and always do suggest is that materials should always be collected whenever they're available in gameplay, so that they're available for engineering when needed.

At some point this becomes equivalent to mindlessly picking up every lootable item in a bethseda RPG even if it sells for 1 money and hoarding it in a single chest (without having unlimited carry weight). It's certainly a playstyle, but it's not how most players want to play.

Elite hides the value of materials so players get tricked into essentially picking up junk as the (time)cost-benefit for picking up low grade mats is very much at that point unfortunately.

This was more obvious with on-foot engineering materials because there's more items with zero uses, worse trading and people haven't memorized the set of actually valuable materials - the limited materials pool for odyssey mats (which I absolutely hate for other reasons) actually is helpful here to force players to think about it more.

Take Minecraft as an example; imagine if, in order to collect any dropped item, you needed to stop, aim at the dropped item, and activate a 1-time-use 'gloves' item, which then caused a 60 seconds cutscene to play where you pick up the item and deposit it in your backpack.

This could be similar to my example too, mining out every block in the game could be a goal to set for yourself but not how most people want to play and strip mining the entire world doesn't actually achieve that much in terms of resource gathering compared to more targetted mining. Except in minecraft the intended gathering gameplay is a fun gameplay element in addition to building I guess.

Does that sound fun? It certainly doesn't sound fun to me. Which is why it's a good thing that instead, minecraft just lets you suck in the nearby items by running near them.
This is why I have suggested in the past, and still advocate for, a different collection method for engineering materials.

It's not fun to do as many times as you need to do it to get anywhere with engineering, but not having a magic tractor beam enforces the hard-sci fi simulation atmosphere/vibe of Elite and scooping up stuff manually is a decent way to learn to fly the ship and use the radar and get more precise at controlling the ship.

But that's all there is to it. The gathering gameplay stays the same and eventually gets boring and old and the game asks players to engage with it way pst that point. There's a few twists to gathering goods/mining with limpets but that's more emergent gameplay that doesn't involve materials/engineering.

Having an upgraded scoop that sucks stuff in or some combination of kit that lets you pick stuff up stuff without having to slow down as much while requiring some skill to pull off would be a good start to making the actual gathering process fun, but there'd still be a whole lot more tweaks needed to improve engineering.

 

[SteveWW57]

The question is, should sitting there for 60 seconds waiting for materials to be collected be a part of the game? This is, after all, a game. We can remove unnecessarily annoying elements if we want to do so.

Waiting 60 seconds some would call immersion. To make collection faster, use more limpets and get closer to the wreckage.

I do welcome you suggestion about the ability to removing unnecessarily annoying elements. What they are varies from player to player. Me, interdictions by npcs (when you can easily evade them most of the time, they are a time waster) and non consensual PvP.

Steve

 

[Brrokk]

Waiting 60 seconds some would call immersion. To make collection faster, use more limpets and get closer to the wreckage.

I do welcome you suggestion about the ability to removing unnecessarily annoying elements. What they are varies from player to player. Me, interdictions by npcs (when you can easily evade them most of the time, they are a time waster) and non consensual PvP.

Steve

Yes. There are far too many different sorts of materials.

 

[Felix DiCestria]

For myself my main went through the unlocks and engineering.My alts did not and only use Tech Broker modules as a departure from vanilla.
Raws were normally well stocked, I collect them almost every time I get the SRV out and the mat trader is normally used to free up space in storage.
Whilst investigating a particular system type I found a reliable source of HGEs so manufactured mats weren't an issue.
Thus the only mat type I had issues with was encoded.
At the time my principal source of encoded mats were the Horizons surface sites.
Having equipped my alts with Tech Broker modules I'm considering replacing a number of my main's ships FSDs with the 5AV1s.
I wouldn't consider the experience of unlocking the engineers wasted even when I found it grindy at the time.
It taught me more about the game and how I like to engage with it than I would have found without that impetus.
Allowing Cmdrs to trade mats from carriers might be an interesting option though having seen how buying mats for credits works in SF I'm not sure it would be a good addition to ED.

 

[DemiserofD]

Waiting 60 seconds some would call immersion. To make collection faster, use more limpets and get closer to the wreckage.

Immersion is always good, but waiting is never good. This is, after all, a game; there should never be a point where the best thing to do is nothing at all.

But that's how the limpet system is. You can't really even try to scoop manually at the same time, because it will just interfere with the limpets and slow them down.

Here's the deal; materials are rewards. Rewards should be a universal good. There should be absolutely nothing annoying about getting a reward.

---

Engineered Materials.​

Engineered Mats are easy. Your cargo hatch should have an automated grappling hook that fires a high-speed wire at nearby engineering materials and sucks them in. This does not take any mad science or alien technology, just a wire with a claw at the end.

The reason this works for materials and not for cargo is because cargo is much heavier. Canonically, your SRV can hold hundreds of units of any material, while it can only hold 4 tons of cargo, so canonically, materials weigh barely anything, and this is justified. Players would simply fly PAST materials(no need to slow down), open their cargo hatch(while pointing the right way, of course), and it would fire out as many hooks as necessary to reel them all in. Rather than taking 60+ seconds and dedicated modules, it would happen almost instantly, and players would get to engineering with a significant stockpile already accumulated.

Data Materials​

Data materials are gonna be really hard to fix. They're acquired in a stupid way, for starters. Shield scans are absurdly easy to get and you barely even notice they're happening, to the point they might as well not exist at all. Wake scans, by contrast, are frustratingly grindy to acquire, because wake scanning is never used in normal gameplay. And the data you get from Horizons settlements are even worse. Data Mats are a total mess in every way. The fact 90% of people get all their mats from the Jameson Crash Site is an abomination.

But as far as fixing them is concerned, I haven't the foggiest idea. It seems to me it would take a complete revamp of many types of gameplay to make getting data mats more common, but the problem is, none of those things are particularly fun.

I guess I'd start by letting you scan wakes just by flying through them. They should be a slight shimmer in space, not just a target, and when you fly through, you get the data, but not the wake scan. A wake scanner would let you scan them from a distance, instead. That at least lets you get some data without needing to waste a utility slot on a useless wake scanner.

Leave shield scans as-is. They suck, but at least people get them.

Settlement scans are terrible, and I have no idea how to fix them.

Raw Materials.​

For the most part, raw mats are fine atm. They're not great, but you get some via mining, and collecting from brain trees/etc isn't terrible. My only change would be making the scooping process not require targeting. Just drop the scoop and run them over. Would make collecting much less tedious.

Make these changes and mats would already be in a much better state, then we can work from there.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

Engineered Mats are easy. Your cargo hatch should have an automated grappling hook that fires a high-speed wire at nearby engineering materials and sucks them in. This does not take any mad science or alien technology, just a wire with a claw at the end.

The reason this works for materials and not for cargo is because cargo is much heavier. Canonically, your SRV can hold hundreds of units of any material, while it can only hold 4 tons of cargo, so canonically, materials weigh barely anything, and this is justified. Players would simply fly PAST materials(no need to slow down), open their cargo hatch(while pointing the right way, of course), and it would fire out as many hooks as necessary to reel them all in. Rather than taking 60+ seconds and dedicated modules, it would happen almost instantly, and players would get to engineering with a significant stockpile already accumulated.

This still sucks with large/slow ships.

So why is limpet collecting so slow? According to the 200m/s speed it shouldn't take more than 15s to collect a thing at max range (still too long)

Limpets take a long time to initially deploy due to cargo scoop issues - there's ways around it by spamming the fire button for multiple limpets but the first one will always be slow. And the picking up/pathing to the cargo scoop takes extra time too.

Do material collector limpets actually need to return to your ship though? They could just pick up the stuff and drift to the nearest station/collection point at sublight speeds even if it takes months/years and you'd be given the materials on credit - maybe they don't have to be stored on the ship. Then collector limpets for materials could be fire and forget - unless you want to be efficient and re-use limpets. It wouldn't make the gathering itself more fun - imagine if a fun looting game like diablo was only the part where you click on loot.

The goal of making the looting timings faster would be to get a better rythm of kill ... ... loot ... kill by removing the huge delay from limpets.

Settlement scans are terrible, and I have no idea how to fix them.

It could be fixed but it'd require redesigning the settlement encounters and for players to enjoy doing the ground/srv stuff.

It can be done and FDev has kinda done it with the spire missions which while great unfortunatley are only able to provide a small subset of G5 mission-reward materials (which is good for consistency so you don't rely on RNG as much for those mats at least) and it can be a bit demanding on the skill side if you're doing it solo which makes it less accessible.

Dodging flak while trying to scan a ground based thingy from your ship in human settlements could work as a fun challenge and if you can't fly good or want more mats you could go on SRV/foot to face off against ground based targets.

Even the old paradigm of timed ground based beacon-scanning could work if fighting stuff in a SRV was more fun/skill based, the enemies didn't respawn infinitely and the layouts were less confusing (or the radar was more useful in planning a route though the settlement without maybe failing a few times and memorizing the locations)