Return to the Crab Nebula and Exploration Elite

[Ozric]

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The very first day we were set free 22 November 3300 I jumped into my Cobra and recklessly plunged off to the Pleiades without any real idea what I was doing. Once I got back I worked myself hard trading goods until I could afford myself a more suitable craft to go back out exploring again, I had the bug, and I had soon earned enough credits to buy and modestly fit out an Asp Explorer. This is the same ship that has served me 90% of the time for exploration up to where I stand today. I had been planning my first true exploration journey while trading and knew I wanted to head out to the Crab Nebula. It was an uncertain journey in those early days, none of these newfangled AFMUs, and it earned me some recognition at the time, though it paled in comparison to that of my peers.

I have revisited the Pleiades many times in the intervening years, to see the changes, for science and once even for racing, the two things that take my time when I'm not off wandering... but I've not been back to the Crab Nebula. Well now in April 3303 it was time, there had been whisperings of a station inside an asteroid out in the Crab Nebula and so I set off to see if they were true. Things are much different now, with the advancements in FSD upgrades by the engineers and the ability to supercharge them through Neutron Stars the 7.5k Ly journey which originally took me a couple of weeks, took me a mere 5 and a half hours.

Things didn't look too different out here in the intervening years, though I did.

Spoiler

Sat withing the Crab Sector DL-Y d9 system, which itself gives stunning views of the Crab Nebula, there is indeed a station nestled in the asteroid belt surround in the secondary star. It is ominously called Station X...

Spoiler

There was an initial disagreement with the station while I was taking pictures to document it and my ship was destroyed for "loitering" outside the station... Which resulted in me having to make the journey again the next day, making sure to exactly retrace my steps... but the second time we got on much better and it is a very well supplied station too. Unfortunately though I have too many things that need to be done and so my stay at the station and the nostalgic return to the nebula couldn't last and I raced back home...


And this is where my Cmdrs story ends and my story of the journey to Elite begins. I've never really cared for getting Elite ranking in any of the professions, I see it as an added bonus of doing what I enjoy, which probably explains why exploration is my first one after 29 months and my combat rank is Novice I have seen a lot in that time, including Sagittarius A*, Beagle Point, Colonia, Ancient Ruins, Unknown Craft and countless wonders along the way. I've lost an immediate family member in a sudden and tragic way that Frontier have shown great kindness and grace in remembering

Spoiler

I've met some amazing people and made friends with lots more and this community has helped me out a lot over the last few years, and for the most part without even realising how much they were. Although it can sometimes send you crazy out there, the beauty and wonder that has been created in this game has given me the solace I have needed on occasion.

And so after all this time I was at 92% towards Exploration Elite and trying to work out how best to push myself across the line, well that decision was taken out of my hands. With 2.3 being released there has been a massive boost to the rewards for terraformable worlds, so much so that a system with only 4 objects in sold for 1.7mill credits I wonder why they could be boosting those rewards so much... why would we need to know which worlds are terraformable..? atmospheric landings My little quick journey out to the Crab Nebula earned me 21 million credits and granted me Elite status.

Spoiler

Source: https://youtu.be/t6-I90lWr_s

The decision of what journey to make to mark the occasion was taken out of my hands, but the one that was chosen could not have been more fitting. For the first long range exploration that started me off on this journey, was also the one that ended it. As always, thank you so much Frontier!

 

[Thunderstruck]

Congratulations on reaching Elite Explorer.
Nice touch from FD.
Thanks for the story, I may check out that asteroid with the space station!
Fly safe.
Cmdr Zugswang.

 

[[VR] optimal_909]

Congratulations for the well deser ed rank and the... atmospheric write up.

Elite is indeed a masterpiece, I guess the very best game of all times to me.

 

[thundernuns]

+1

I loved the bit about early exploring, I really like the thought of true pioneering, before the community knew what nebulae and stars were around, long before anything like the Galactic mapping project. The fact we can go from Sol to Beagle Point in under a day shows how tiny the galaxy really is now (not being a Debbie Downer or anything)

 

[Goobertech]

+1

I loved the bit about early exploring, I really like the thought of true pioneering, before the community knew what nebulae and stars were around, long before anything like the Galactic mapping project. The fact we can go from Sol to Beagle Point in under a day shows how tiny the galaxy really is now (not being a Debbie Downer or anything)

Well, jump ranges have gotten pretty massive but I don't think it's made the galaxy feel small. Traveling and exploring are not the same thing.

 

[marx]

Nice write-up. Congrats again!

And +1 to Goobertech. Travelling is getting from A to B, and it has indeed been made considerably faster. Exploration is finding new stuff, which takes the same time as before: it's just that getting to where you want to be searching takes less time. Personally, I'm glad for this.
Although I'm a bit sad that with the massive increase in jump ranges, finding routes through sparse regions became much less important. With the 55-70 ly ranges that are possible now, we can just zoom through those.

 

[Nerwan]

Thanks commander! Out exploring again after a while and I've just passed the Rossetta Nebula. You've just given me a new destination

 

[Kenneth McGrew]

+1

I loved the bit about early exploring, I really like the thought of true pioneering, before the community knew what nebulae and stars were around, long before anything like the Galactic mapping project. The fact we can go from Sol to Beagle Point in under a day shows how tiny the galaxy really is now (not being a Debbie Downer or anything)

Not as small as that other well known space game eh?

Now that is a small galaxy!!!

But ED galaxy is immense when you think how much is actually "explored"

 

[thundernuns]

Well, jump ranges have gotten pretty massive but I don't think it's made the galaxy feel small. Traveling and exploring are not the same thing.

My original point was saying how there isn't as many things that are really surprising to find now, unless FD give us more alien stuff on the 29th...

 

[marx]

My original point was saying how there isn't as many things that are really surprising to find now, unless FD give us more alien stuff on the 29th...

Given that it's a player-organized event that was promoted by Frontier, I would set my expectations accordingly. The alien stuff is already there, it just hasn't been found yet. (And yep, I know that the HIP 22460 system that was found based on the trailer was locked, but I'd say that was probably because Frontier didn't want players to discover something big just based on the trailers again.)

As for your original point: having been there at early exploration, I'd say it was always less about "hey, I didn't know there was a nebula there" and much more "hey, I wonder if I'll be the first one to make it there". Nebulae are easy to spot (except planetary ones, of course), and non-procedural stars can be searched for by name. (If you happen to know them.) There are still undiscovered ones of those, at least.
As for the galaxy feeling smaller: it only does so if you're travelling. When I'm exploring and searching for, say, Guardian ruins, I still have the same amount of systems to check (thousands), and the jump range increases didn't affect that in any way. But yeah, you can get to any arbitrary point faster now, which also means being able to get to Colonia faster, which I do like.

 

[thundernuns]

Given that it's a player-organized event that was promoted by Frontier, I would set my expectations accordingly. The alien stuff is already there, it just hasn't been found yet. (And yep, I know that the HIP 22460 system that was found based on the trailer was locked, but I'd say that was probably because Frontier didn't want players to discover something big just based on the trailers again.)

As for your original point: having been there at early exploration, I'd say it was always less about "hey, I didn't know there was a nebula there" and much more "hey, I wonder if I'll be the first one to make it there". Nebulae are easy to spot (except planetary ones, of course), and non-procedural stars can be searched for by name. (If you happen to know them.) There are still undiscovered ones of those, at least.
As for the galaxy feeling smaller: it only does so if you're travelling. When I'm exploring and searching for, say, Guardian ruins, I still have the same amount of systems to check (thousands), and the jump range increases didn't affect that in any way. But yeah, you can get to any arbitrary point faster now, which also means being able to get to Colonia faster, which I do like.

The fact that it was who gets there first, everything has been got, other than minor POIs, we know loads about the galaxy

Anyway, this thread should be about Ozrics achievements, I'm gonna stop commenting on it

 

[Ozric]

Hehe that's fine, nothing like a good discussion that you know (for once on these forums) won't end in an abusive slanging match

I'm a mix of the 2.

I didn't go exploring to be the first one to some places, mainly because none of us even knew about the first discovered tag when we were planning journeys in the Beta. I started because there was a place I had been waiting to go since after the first couple of weeks of playing the game, it's my favourite object you can see in the night sky and it is the Pleiades. I didn't mind if I made it there first or not, which is probably demonstrated by the lack of planning and sheer naivety on my part I started because I just love discovering the variation in the galaxy and I still do, though it really does hamper my racing over long distances. I probably could have shaved an hour off one of my trips to Jaques if I hadn't of kept stopping to scan interesting looking systems.

Which brings me on to travel. It's a tricky one it really is. I personally think that it's far too fast now. We have 3 ways of making travel quicker, engineered FSD, Neutron Star, Synthesis. Now it is true that if you want to use all of those then you'd need to spend a reasonable amount of time gathering materials, but I think you do that naturally for the most part anyway. The original record for flying a pre-engineered ship to Sag A* was 7 hours 56, in the unlimited class it is 3 hours 59! Effectively halved the time to travel 26k Ly That's obviously racing spec, but even to Jaques, I've taken a Grade 4 FSD boost, fully laden Python out there a few times and done it in around 8-9 hours, where as before it all I did it in the same Python in 11 hours 15.

But, I can see why it's been done, it's all about convenience. Someone started a thread a while ago asking Continuity vs Convenience and it will always be convenience because it's an evolving game (LOTRO is a prime example), the worry is people's desire for convenience forces changes to quickly be put in place which actually hurt the overall development.

 

[Nerwan]

Ozric, I visited that asteroid station you mentioned last night, thanks for the tip. May I ask, how did you find it? Did you find it by chance after traveling around the nebula's systems or did you find it some other way?

 

[marx]

I'm a mix of the 2.

I didn't go exploring to be the first one to some places, mainly because none of us even knew about the first discovered tag when we were planning journeys in the Beta. I started because there was a place I had been waiting to go since after the first couple of weeks of playing the game, it's my favourite object you can see in the night sky and it is the Pleiades. I didn't mind if I made it there first or not, which is probably demonstrated by the lack of planning and sheer naivety on my part

Oh, I didn't count the times before launch, my bad. Yeah, first discovery tags weren't actually present in 1.0, but they made it in soon afterwards. Personally, I've always liked going to hard-to-reach places, but when farther ones become accessible (due to jump range increases) you can bet they'll be discovered within days. This only really counts for stuff that's easy to find on the galaxy map though: I've discovered real (non-procedural) planetary nebulae months after they became reachable, and right now, I'm surveying a cluster of non-procedural systems of which very few have been tagged yet. But it's not like these stand out on the map.
I guess you could say that all the low-hanging fruits have been picked by now. Which is quite natural.

Which brings me on to travel. It's a tricky one it really is. I personally think that it's far too fast now. We have 3 ways of making travel quicker, engineered FSD, Neutron Star, Synthesis. Now it is true that if you want to use all of those then you'd need to spend a reasonable amount of time gathering materials, but I think you do that naturally for the most part anyway.

Hm, maybe you do, but most people I know go hunting for jumponium rarely, if ever. Yes, you can shave some hours of travel if you use up a lot of FSD boosts, but since you also need to spend hours gathering the materials for that, you don't really save much time. You just spend a good portion of it looking for metallic meteorites instead of jumping to more systems.

The problem with travel is that it's not really interactive, and hence, becomes boring quickly. Increased jump distances have helped with this a bit, by making getting from A to B take less jumps, but they haven't addressed the root cause at all. Neutron stars could have helped a bit, but getting the boost from them isn't difficult, and can quickly become routine. Plus they don't give that large of a boost anyway. And not to mention that they weren't intended to make travel easier in the first place.
A possible solution to this could be an alternative way of travel that would be more interactive, longer reaching and more risky. Think of a galaxy drive where you'd actually have to fly in witch-space, avoiding obstacles at high speed, and the time you'd have to spend in there would scale with how far you want to jump. Plus it should get more difficult the longer you are in there. Wouldn't this be much better than the current "hit jump and stare at the loading screen or look at anything other than the game"?

But, I can see why it's been done, it's all about convenience. Someone started a thread a while ago asking Continuity vs Convenience and it will always be convenience because it's an evolving game (LOTRO is a prime example), the worry is people's desire for convenience forces changes to quickly be put in place which actually hurt the overall development.

Hm? How does it hurt the game's development? I don't really see this.
Plus convenience isn't necessarily a bad thing. For a recent example, imagine if multicrew only worked if Commanders had to be docked at the same place to initiate it.
Mind you, convenience isn't the same as difficulty. For instance, travel is not difficult to do at all. Also, difficulty doesn't necessarily mean enjoyment: finding, say, a barnacle with your eyes only is difficult, but enjoyable only to very few players. However, if we had more interactive tools (not just passive / magical scanners), then would that added convenience be bad?

This isn't entirely relevant to your original point, but I thought I'd mention this here: the chief problem with exploration updates isn't that there hasn't been new content nor faster travel, but that there haven't been any new tools to find said content, nor different ways of travel. The last time was when 2.0 introduced the wave scanner, which was done well. Here's hoping the MetaDrive storyline will lead to something new, and not just "hey you guys can get 100 ly jump drives now".

 

[Ozric]

Ozric, I visited that asteroid station you mentioned last night, thanks for the tip. May I ask, how did you find it? Did you find it by chance after traveling around the nebula's systems or did you find it some other way?

I found out about it because they were all found in the Beta Most of them were found (I believe) by using the population slider in the Galaxy Map to scan for populated systems in the black (just knock the minimum slider up by one). Shame they were found that way, but it's hard to stop it and there are 400 billion stars, though the vast majority of them are in Nebulae. I went out there to record it for the Galactic Mapping Project and also because I hadn't been back out there in over 2 years. You can see them all on EDSM

Hm, maybe you do, but most people I know go hunting for jumponium rarely, if ever. Yes, you can shave some hours of travel if you use up a lot of FSD boosts, but since you also need to spend hours gathering the materials for that, you don't really save much time. You just spend a good portion of it looking for metallic meteorites instead of jumping to more systems.

My times to Colonia didn't use jumponium, purely a Grade 4 FSD boost and Neutron Stars.

Hm? How does it hurt the game's development? I don't really see this.

This isn't entirely relevant to your original point, but I thought I'd mention this here: the chief problem with exploration updates isn't that there hasn't been new content nor faster travel, but that there haven't been any new tools to find said content, nor different ways of travel. The last time was when 2.0 introduced the wave scanner, which was done well. Here's hoping the MetaDrive storyline will lead to something new, and not just "hey you guys can get 100 ly jump drives now".

I meant specifically exploration's development. Over the last 8 months or so there's been a couple of things happen in the game that have pushed a raft of people towards what they call "exploring", it's boring, it takes too long, doesn't pay enough, nothing to do... They forget to whine about combat and engineers for a few weeks and turn their attention to exploration. This is going to happen again over the coming months as 2 of the big storylines are pushing people out, so if you give people a way to get places quicker and get more credits for having to do no extra work, then that will please the vast majority of them. Which means there's less impetus to improve the exploration mechanics because, apart from anything else, they're soon going to be moaning about combat again.

Your last paragraph is everything that is wrong with exploration, as I've been saying for a long time now too. In 29 months the only addition exploration has had to the mechanics has been the Wave Scanner. Every other part of the game has had far more improvements and additions to it. I've long given up of anything being done to exploration until they see a need to do it, which I don't think will come until we get atmospheric landings, although I now think that's closer than I did after the last couple of updates. We'll wait because we always do, but it does get frustrating when the part of the game that shows it's best and most creative side, is the part that is ignored by the team!

 

[Flash_Baggins]

o7
What a fitting way to make elite