The (argh!) that just doesn't make any sense thread.

[Ryan P Bodfirst]

Love the game but....

• I find an escape pod out somewhere but there's no legal way for me to save their life
• police scan my ship and find I have illegal cargo but don't tell the station authorities....
• presumably systems want to sell their rare goods but I can only find them by accident in the game, and they are not advertised...

 

[Don Alvarez]

When you're an exalted warrior for the alliance without peer, your name is sung and your deeds told in taverns across the land and your fame stretches from sea to sea. Yet when you ride into some God forsaken backwater town and get greeted as the hero you are, the citizens somehow still expect you to run around town and gather sacks of cat feed because they are fleeing due to a pending invasion, and assign you other mundane tasks they are too good to do. Holy crap people do it your damn self. If I don't show up I guess nothing gets done, and you all will die waiting for someone to come along find the parts to fix the wheel on your cart! That doesn't make any sense!
.
Nevermind. Wrong game.

 

[DragoonKnight]

A game that i pay $60 for has me sit out for 5 days as a penalty for accidentally hitting a dumb ass cop that jumps in front of you. I could see a few hours maybe but 5 days is ridiculous.

You could just fly to a different system. There are tons of them. Its not really an issue unless you make it one.

 

[KellyR]

Things that don't make sense

Spaceflight faster than the speed of light
weapons exciting atoms to show lights when there is nothing to excite against
flight mechanics
Hyperspace
Supercruise
aerodynamic space ships
.
Oh hang on that's the whole basis of it
.
Maybe that's because its A GAME not a simulator

Faster than light spaceships make sense if you look at the Alcubierre metric. It's just compression/expansion of space.

Lasers and other weapons having visible fire is definitely a contrived mechanic but it is done for gameplay purposes.

Flight mechanics in this game make sense for the most part although there are a few exceptions. Maximum speed: The ship's computer has been programmed to engage thrusters to keep the ship's speed within safety margins even when on full manual control. Boost will temporarily override this, but it's only temporary and will still impose a maximum speed.

Hyperspace is another head scratcher but who knows what we'll learn in 1200 years.

Supercruise: See faster than light.

Aerodynamic spaceships. Only if you turn off computer assist. Which I do when turning in combat. Without flight assist on, it takes some practice and a fairly sensitive control device to stabilize a roll or pitch so you're in level flight. Looks like they got this one right. But even astronauts use computer assist for leveling and stabilizing the craft in space flight after a burn. You turn off flight assist (in real space) and you have a remarkable simulator. All except the maximum speed which was done for gameplay purposes.

 

[Deleted member 38366]

Sitting well over 1000LY in a System noone has ever visited (no 1st Discoveries), landing on its most remote planet to seek strange new worlds and weirdness...

...and finding out you're just playing "WALL-E" instead, cleaning up man-made trash littered all over the goddamn Planet.

(so much for tagging 1st Discovery... you currently don't need an Exploration ship for checking out POIs in Horizons - you need a fleet of Type-9's and Anacondas to clean out all the Cargo canisters dumped everywhere)

 

[Sapyx]

Sitting well over 1000LY in a System noone has ever visited (no 1st Discoveries), landing on its most remote planet to seek strange new worlds and weirdness...

...and finding out you're just playing "WALL-E" instead, cleaning up man-made trash littered all over the goddamn Planet.

(so much for tagging 1st Discovery)

Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay almost certainly weren't the first guys to climb Mount Everest. But they were the first guys to not die climbing back down again. So they get the credit. All those crashed spaceships and abandoned buggies you're finding kiloparsecs from inhabited space? Yeah, they all made it there before you, but didn't make it back. Which, I guess, must mean you're super-lucky or super-skilful to not be dead yet, too.

Maybe they all fell victim to those pesky pirates that you also find sitting out there in the middle of uninhabited space, in USSs and such.

Or maybe it was Thargoids that wiped them all out.

 

[Deleted member 38366]

Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay almost certainly weren't the first guys to climb Mount Everest. But they were the first guys to not die climbing back down again. So they get the credit. All those crashed spaceships and abandoned buggies you're finding kiloparsecs from inhabited space? Yeah, they all made it there before you, but didn't make it back. Which, I guess, must mean you're super-lucky or super-skilful to not be dead yet, too.

Maybe they all fell victim to those pesky pirates that you also find sitting out there in the middle of uninhabited space, in USSs and such.

Or maybe it was Thargoids that wiped them all out.

Sure, Traders hauling dozens of tons of all kinds of Commodities thinking You know what? I'm going to make a little detour from my 32LY destination.... a 15000LY detour and see if I can't find a better Trade hub to sell my 8 tons of tea

Hundreds of them. Thousands. Ten Thousands. And more. And more. And even more.

If there was a 100 year period in the ELITE lore where mankind went completely insane... it would make indeed sense.
Alas... it doesn't.

PS.
Imagine Neil Armstrong leaving the Apollo capsule, saying "one small step for man... *crunch*" and stumbling over a moon surface entirely littered with man-made trash ?!?
That sure would have been funny, now woudn't it ?

Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay didn't pass by thousands of dead people on the Everest. Neither did they have to remove all the man-made trash from thousands of previous people on the top to make space to at least sit down...

Do Explorers haul Tea, Battle Weapons, Consumer Tech or Animal Meat thousands of LY into the black? Nope, they're not stupid. It doesn't make any sense. None at all, not a single grain.

PPS.
Don't even get me started about USS junk... Ships in locations that they couldn't have even physically reached.
Pirate Clans and/or Bounty Hunters clashing it out... 1200LY away. Yeah sure, great place to meet and so tremendously practical. Nonsense, all of it.

All just reminders that the position of Common Sense Specialist is still painfully vacant with Frontier since well over a full year now. With all consequences.

 

[Muetdhiver]

Okay, while I get that some use the fact that this is an SF game full with tech handwavium as a handy strawman,
the game remains littered with internal incoherencies. The game is very immersive in terms of flight model, planets and
star systems. But once you start to play with the BGS and the markets, the immersion breaks down quick.

Stuff that makes little/no sense

• POI spawning wrecks every 10km or so 1000's of lyr away. Same for gold stashes and tea canisters.
• USS/WSS/SSS spawning whatever your speed and position are, just wait, and it'll happen.
• The whole trade profession being centered around 10 commodities or so (it could be argued that removing all the low value goods would have zero impact on trade gameplay).
• System state not affecting prices. You would expect war to drive weapon prices up, and plague would create high demand for medicine, allowing for trader to make a killing. Alas, not.
• System with 2K pop able to sustain RES spawning 100's of pirates. You would think that 1) at some point they would learn 2) everyone is dead in the system at some point. But nope.
• NPC's only spawn arround after a while when you get in SC. Apprently, we are the center of the universe and NPC's where waiting on us to get into SC.
• FDL NPC's able to jump 30 lyrs when chasing an ASP. With a combat fit. And through planets.
• When being a mass murderer in Sol has no effect in the next federation system. You would expect that after murdering 50 civilians, the FEDS would send in a crack team to hunt you down in the whole federation territory. But nope.
• Pirates being fine opperating in high security systems, while traders have no invective to trade in anarchy systems. Not that they would risk much there anyway.

 

[fennster]

• System state not affecting prices. You would expect war to drive weapon prices up, and plague would create high demand for medicine, allowing for trader to make a killing. Alas, not.

The very crude implementation of this is the 'Seeking Goods' signal sources. What they are seeking reflects the state of the system. But, yeah, markets stay the same.

 

[Strangepork]

Being free of mass lock at 2.5km when leaving a planets surface, and yet being mass locked at 35-40km if you drop out of SC and orbital cruise aborts... argh, now that's just infuriating, thoughtless game mechanics.

 

[Zueuk]

• FDL NPC's able to jump 30 lyrs when chasing an ASP. With a combat fit. And through planets.

Btw, how about Fer-De-Lance - the "favourite ship of wealthy bounty hunters" - not being able to actually hunt anybody, because of ridiculously low jump range?

Or maybe FD really thinks that bounty hunting = sitting in a RES and waiting for pirates to spawn? It's not bounty hunting, it's bounty fishing.

 

[Druid]

Having pirates and Feds text you . What no radio ? Is this an alternate universe of the future where space travel was invented without coms???

 

[EUS]

Dockhand: "Yes you can store your cargo ship with us, no you cannot store anything in your cargo ship, what do you think this is, a storage depot?"
Dockhand #2: What do you mean you want to transfer your cargo to your other ship before using it? Are you crazy? The answer is no!"