Scanning Wakes = Devs Trolling

CMDRButtFace

C
Seriously, the most troll mechanic of the game I've encountered. It's already a huge time-sink gathering mats for the engineers, but for the devs to add such a trollish mechanic to the monotony is ing me right off.

For the love of God, they need to extend the time that the wakes exist. I am going to throw my warthog throttle across the room if another goddamn wake disappears when I'm just a second away from completing a scan. It's kinda funny and cute when one disappears while you're flying to it, but completely rage-inducing when it disappears mid-scan. Oh, you finally scanned a wake after 5 attempts? The next one has spawned 20km away, have fun getting there in time before it goes away!

I had the brilliant idea of buying a Viper Mk3, getting enhanced thrusters, and engineering them for maximum speed. Perhaps sprinting from one wake to another will be good enough to beat the ridiculous countdown? Only to find out that decelerating at that speed takes eons; so now I can hear the wake laughing at me as I fly right past it with my thrusters in full reverse while screaming curse words into my computer screen. Once I finally turn around and head back to the wake, the ing wake blinks from existence.

I swear to God the next wake that does this I'm just gonna keep flying, right past it, all the way to Windows Add/Remove, Uninstall Elite Dangerous, then keep flying to Steam, and installing No Man's Sky.
 

Maolagin

M
And here I just finished telling someone in another thread that they should be able to collect enough wakes to engineer an FSD in ten minutes or less. LOL, if only I'd known it's such an impossible challenge!

Seriously though, this is a problem you want to solve with technique, not brute force. Pick a location that yields lots of wakes in a relatively compact area instead of tens of km apart. Follow groups of ships out of stations so you're already in the right place when they jump out. Learn how much distance it takes for your ship to stop after a boost. Pay attention to the order the wakes around you appear so you're going after fresh ones instead of stale. Do that stuff and you don't even need a fast ship. I gathered most of my wake scans in a T6.
 

Northpin

Northpin
Bigmaec said:
1. Get a fast ship e.g. mamba with dd5
2. Equip g5 fast scan wake scanner
3. Fly to high traffic system like shinrarta or colonia
4. Scan the hell out of all ships
5...
6. Profit
Click to expand...

That ^

or get any ship and equip it with a long range A class wake scanner. position yourself at a distance of the station and turn&scan
but i do admit that zipping around in a really fast ship is less dull

otherwise, do come and tell us how NMS works for you :)

edit. Damn, ninjas everywhere
 

Bigmaec

Bigmaec
Yeah, the long range scanner thing works the same but at Jaques for example I combine wake scanning with shooting up targets of opportunity, so that I wont get bored so quickly. And my Mamba works for that.
 

Riverside

Riverside
I built a 600m/s sidewinder with a long range wake scanner purely to collect these wake scans because in my normal activities although several of my ships have a wake scanner it's vanishingly rare I actually collect any data from the very few pirates that escape.

But I never use that Sidewinder, I just swap them for the ones I get from scanning ships in supercruise.
 

[VR] Goooost

[VR] Goooost
I dont even know why wake scanners arent a default module. It's not worth having as a utility mount other than gathering mats. Even people who PVP arent chasing eachother down system by system.
 

Scoob

Scoob
This is very much location dependent. I've been near some stations and the wakes are all grouped together a few km from the station - easy to scan most of them before they vanish. Other stations are weird, with wakes 20+ km away from the station and spread out all over the place - even a fast / quick scan / long-range scan ship will miss some there.

Why some NPC ships fly so far before they jump away is a mystery to me, the same as how some NPC ships can jump away while still technically mass-locked by the station.

I do actually need to spend some time Wake scanning again...I equipped my old Asp Explorer for the task. Just need to research again what data I need and where best to get it. Fun sigh

Scoob.
 

Burke

B
Goooost said:
I dont even know why wake scanners arent a default module. It's not worth having as a utility mount other than gathering mats. Even people who PVP arent chasing eachother down system by system.
Click to expand...


Totally, it should be part of the FSS functionality. Spot the ship, switch to analysis mode and then pick up its signals by tuning the FSS. That would be so engaging.
 

VR SenseiMatty

VR SenseiMatty
Maolagin said:
And here I just finished telling someone in another thread that they should be able to collect enough wakes to engineer an FSD in ten minutes or less. LOL, if only I'd known it's such an impossible challenge!

Seriously though, this is a problem you want to solve with technique, not brute force. Pick a location that yields lots of wakes in a relatively compact area instead of tens of km apart. Follow groups of ships out of stations so you're already in the right place when they jump out. Learn how much distance it takes for your ship to stop after a boost. Pay attention to the order the wakes around you appear so you're going after fresh ones instead of stale. Do that stuff and you don't even need a fast ship. I gathered most of my wake scans in a T6.
Click to expand...
True, but OP is right too.
It's a very boring activity.
Encrypted data should be more a spionage activity rather than ship stalking.
For example chasing suspect ships through a couple of system and when you're in the target system launch a minigame to intercept the secret data transmission. Everytime you succed you get a lot of encrypted data (not just one or two common ones).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom