Salvage Mission near the Sun, advice?

[Louis Calvert]

I'm sorry is this question has been answered before. I've spent a while searching for the answer but haven't been able to find this specific problem.

I have this mission:

This mission came to me as a message (I didn't get it from a station). I've done the usual for salvage missions, went to Merope and scanned, it updated with the mission body as being the Merope Sun - all exactly as normal so far.

I'm pretty sure based on the massive reward and the non-usual nature of this mission, (and that I was doing Thargoid-related stuff when I got the message) that this isn't a 'normal' mission and therefore might not be as easy as the usual ones.

I've got 3ish days left on the timer. I'm willing to search around as much as I can for that time (I'm fine with it taking a while to find) however:

1) I'm not sure if the mission USS isn't popping up because I physically can't get close enough to the sun.
2) I'm not sure if it's a very rare USS, so it'll take longer, like finding a UP takes a while, so I just need to keep going and eventually it'll pop up.
3) I'm not sure if this mission is bugged and it might never pop up.

I have tried:

a) Google and find someone else that's done it, and their mission was around a planet, and they didn't suggest that it took any longer than usual.
a1) Googled Salvage missions and Suns and found a few people that have (normal) salvage missions around a sun and they seemed to have some troubles too, but no resolution.
b) I've tried packing my ship with Heat Sinks and orbiting the sun as close to the dropout line as I can for a long time (about 7.5ls or so).
c) I've tried various other 'normal' things.

If it was a normal mission I'd ignore it, but I really, really want to do this one I'm totally find with it takes hours or days to find it, I just don't want to spend hours or days on it if it's bugged!

Any advice fellow Commanders?

 

[IndigoWyrd]

A heat sink and a collector limpet controller are your best friends for this.
Keep your own heat low by turning off modules you don't need.
Get in, let things get hot (around 140-160%) and drop a heat sink.
By then your collector should be done. Drop a second heat sink and get out.

 

[Faded Glory]

I have also read on the forums that on occasions the mission specific USS doesn't spawn if the target body is a star, however I have had plenty of salvage missions around stars where the USS did spawn, so...

I'd keep trying.

You don't need to be as close to a star as you would with a normal sized planet, so I don't think it's that. My rule of thumb is to be within the million meter range for planets, but clearly you cannot get that close to a star, even some large planets and gas giants don't allow you to get that close.

It can take quite a while for mission specific USS to spawn, perhaps if you are getting too close you cannot stay long enough for this to happen, so stay further out and just idle in SC for a while with the star targeted. Reset the instance from time to time by dropping out of SC and then going back again, or in this case it might be worth jumping out of system and back in. On quite a few occasions when I've had a salvage mission around a star it has spawned moments after jumping into the system.

I'll caveat all this by saying I haven't had one of these as a ship delivered mission, but I imagine the mechanics are the same.

 

[Louis Calvert]

Thanks, I'll keep trying then.

It's good to know that the ones around the star do work and you don't have to be as close.

 

[Louis Calvert]

Wanted to update this for anyone else who has this same mission.

My conclusion - mission is bugged.

I've spent a total of about 5-6 hours play over the last 4 days and I've done the following:

- Orbit the Sun at various ranges, from literally just above the line where you drop back into normal space (about 7.5ls) using heat sinks to manage this to about 30ls out.
- sat at minimum speed at various ranges.
- Done the above at max possible speed (very hard to stay close to sun doing this!)
- "Sun Diving" where I start at about 30ls out and aim to skim the sun as close as possilbe (about 8ls), loop back and repeat, so covering a highly elliptical orbit.
- Done the above Sun Dive at various speeds
- sat in the "fuel scoop" zone for 30+ minutes at a time at various speeds. Done this repeatedly over three days.
- flown around there rest of the system, just in case.
- Dropped to normal space frequently around the sun (I'd read that doing this and then going back to FSD can force the mission to refresh (sort of).
- Hyperspaced out and come back to the system several times over the past few days.
- Dropped into dozens of normal USS of all types that appeared around the sun, just in case.
- Dropped into the Navbeacon and Capital Ship POI's, just in case.
- Docked at all bases/station that I have access to in Merope, just in case that triggers anything.
- Orbited the sun in different ways (looping around the equator, pole-to-pole, looping 'diagonally', reversed direction, did it all going the other way round)

I've done regular salvage missions a lot, and I've normally had no problems with the unique mission specific USS spawning at the target planet within a few minutes at most.

As I said in my original post, I've googled this and seen this same mission done (with pics) so I know the mission works, but their target body was not the sun.

Conclusion - bugged. I'll be submitting a bug report.

Very sad because I spent hours on this and this looks like a great mission (It's a Thargoid encounter from what I've seen from other people).

 

[Drelthar]

It's possible its not "technically" a bug.

The thing is, the way the system used to work is, there was no specific body to move to. It just ran a timer, and rolled a dice every X seconds/minutes.

This was obviously ridiculous, but was implemented like this anyway.


After a while, they re-did the missions, and realised this was silly! so they made it so you had to go to a specific stellar body to find the signal source your after.

However... they failed to remove the timer, or make it last less than a minute, maximum, and kept the random dice roll.

So, instead of making the mission now make more sense, waste less time wandering around doing essentially nothing, they added more time (traveling to the body) added a randomisation that the body could be thousands of light seconds away, and then left the randomisation of if you even find it every X seconds in anyway, achieving little in the end.


It is, definatley better, that there is a target body now, it makes sense, and gives the mission more flow. But not removing the silly timer (and preferably replacing it with a scanning mechanic, even re-using the planetary salvage animations would do!) was a bad idea.


It probly is bugged, but I'm just saying, due to randomisation, it's possible (but highly unlikely) any of these missions could actually never spawn the USS, for anyone, ever.