General Personal storage in stations!!

[Ian Doncaster]

Sure currently running missions in trade or combat are very lucrative now, but they are lucrative for the people that are already elites and have nice engineered ships.
Not for the nooblet that got just barely got an Adder.

The right trade route can get you 60k/t profit, without missions, for a fairly small upfront investment.

20t of cargo in an Adder at that profit is a million credits and you've got yourself a Cobra III
48t in the Cobra III is another two million credits for a nice Type-6
It escalates pretty quickly from there, of course.


Equally, you could still mine 20t of core gems in the Adder and still sell them for 600k+/tonne, for an instant 12 million and a cheap mining Asp, then fill the hold on the Asp for another 96t and 50 million credits.


Either way you'll be up to 30 million trade profits and broker rank in a couple of hours, and then the high-end trade missions start being available.

(Combat, agreed, the high-end combat earnings need more setup. Equally, hanging around a high RES stealing kills from the cops will get you a lot of money in a Freewinder)

 

[Northpin]

The right trade route can get you 60k/t profit, without missions, for a fairly small upfront investment.

20t of cargo in an Adder at that profit is a million credits and you've got yourself a Cobra III
48t in the Cobra III is another two million credits for a nice Type-6
It escalates pretty quickly from there, of course.


Equally, you could still mine 20t of core gems in the Adder and still sell them for 600k+/tonne, for an instant 12 million and a cheap mining Asp, then fill the hold on the Asp for another 96t and 50 million credits.


Either way you'll be up to 30 million trade profits and broker rank in a couple of hours, and then the high-end trade missions start being available.

(Combat, agreed, the high-end combat earnings need more setup. Equally, hanging around a high RES stealing kills from the cops will get you a lot of money in a Freewinder)

None of that changes the fact that post "balance" things are harder for noobs than they were before and at the same time it makes little difference for well established vets

 

[Ian Doncaster]

None of that changes the fact that post "balance" things are harder for noobs than they were before and at the same time it makes little difference for well established vets

I'm not sure that's really true either.

It's possible for a fresh account - via basic trading or core mining, nothing rank-dependent - to have the funds for a well-equipped Anaconda in six hours, and a decent trade rank too. (Sure, it won't be engineered. But that's not changed with the recent balancing). It's not quite the "trade Elite in six hours" that was possible pre-balancing, but I reckon it's still easy enough to do in twelve.

Most beginners don't do that - and beginners who were hoping follow a walkthrough to do that may well be finding that the guides they find are now out of date - but there's nothing stopping them in theory. Meanwhile, the basic trade payouts and basic bounty payouts that they can easily stumble across at that level without a walkthrough have been significantly boosted.

Agreed it makes no difference to vets, but they could push things back to 1.0 level payouts and most vets wouldn't notice for years, so that's neither here nor there

 

[Decksmeck]

What is the hardship for storage?

There is x number of commodities (rows) and y number of ships (columns).

Plug in amount owned into that field. Maximum storage is x*y*32 bits (or 64 bits). Right? What does that come to?

Edit: maybe even 16 bits per field if they have a variable type for it.

Edit: Even more storage saving if you use more than 1 table. Some ships hold 256 or less so 8 bits could represent the field.

But if you were going that far into saving, why not just have an appropriate length stream of bits with a stream reader tailored for it, because a few ships might even need less than 8 bits per field so why waste space.

I am not trying actually figure it out but generally, suppose you have a bit steam that is 1024 (example number) bits long and a reader that reads the appropriate chunk based on commodity and ship. The reader program is just hard coded to read the correct chunk. Then your memory storage is 100% efficient but how fast?

Edit: As for station storage (and supposing a simple table for storage and no fancy reader which would have to have reader configuration data stored for each player since players own different combinations of types of ships so a fancy reader might not even be helpful):

If the column header is your ship ID, then when you add a thing to station storage, you add the station ID as a new column. (Or a seperate table for stations) (Limit number of this type of column perhaps) Let us suggest 20 stations max to be used as storage.

Then memory requirement is number of commodities (rows) * (number of owned ships + number of station depots) * bit length of the field. What is the maximum storage requirement for each player's cargo then?

Edit: actually row 1 is probably the ship ID so you need 1 additional row to be added to the memory requirements. (I don't program for a living so I don't know the best implementation. Point is that the ship has to be related to the correct column in the table that holds the cargo amounts)

Edit: I guess if you did need to configure that reader you could just create a simple array. Number of elements in the array corresponds to the number of fields. Each element holds a value representing the bit length of the field. Then you have one additional variable that stores the number of elements in this array which corresponds to the number of ships/depots.

The reader first looks at the number of ships, then reads the configuration array, then reads the cargo data appropriately.


OK, I will stop. I know they don't need me to figure out how. I don't even know how. Lol.

 

[Maximillian Forrest]

Since you (developers) have nerfed the economy in mining, it will take us newcomers a very long time to afford a carrier. Its the only personal storage option i know of, but correct me if i am wrong. It should be possible for all of us, to have access to a storage facility, It would give us an option for a bit more strategic gameplay, and a QoL feature i think all players would like.

Even the wealthiest of commanders nowadays were ‘newcomers’ at some stage, but they had to grind for what they have now. We already have free module storage, and if you want the storage given by a carrier, then you have to grind for it like everyone else. As for blaming FD for nerfing mining, and therefore depriving people of obtaining a carrier, I didn’t buy mine using proceeds from mining.