The slow orbital cruise approach causes a host of problems.

[B1rdy]

No, it's also a matter of looks and accent
But since there is no chance to lose them, it doesnt mean too much now.]

There is a chance, but risk/ reward got so much out of hand, rebuy is only relevant for the first couple of hours (or even minutes probably) having just started from a clean save.
Your example below shows, that risk and rewards were balanced in the complete opposite direction once.

Spoiler

Anaconda, hardened explorer build (1700 shields, 1700 hull, armed to the teeth), on the return leg from Explorer's Anchorage CG (Bubble, Explorer's Anchorage, Colonia, some 3k-5k away from the bubble).
I was enjoying the scenery right outside an asteroid base along the Colonia Highway - read as: i was just left the asteroid base and i was trying to position the ship in front of the asteroid's mail slot for some nice screenshots. I somehow drifted in the mailslot loitering zone, being in camera mode no messages reached me, so a brief but very vivid fireworks ensued followed by me starring at the rebuy screen.
I wasn't really fazed by this. Rebuy was not a problem and i just sold all the exploration data before leaving the asteroid base.

Then it hit me: My. ELITE. SLF. CREW. GONE.
There was this heat wave running down my spine and the feeling that i lost something really precious and sort of irreplaceable


along with this (finding a SLF crew was a laborious thing)
View attachment 320823

Now tell me, in what way made this incident the game more interesting?

However, it didnt seem to me that OP offered really meaningful choices, just some teleport options that will superseed anything else that came before them.

If I understood correctly, the drop zone would be fixed, no choice available as opposed to a manual landing.

And then we have the FDL. Is there any meaninful choice when it comes about high skilled pvp combat?
Nope.

Agreed, it is in general not beneficial for a game to have an obvious, superior choice, because in renders a lot of work an effort put into the related game systems useless. DB mentioned this an a related note, that he did not want to have one profession, that turns out to be superior over others.

 

[Northpin]

Now tell me, in what way made this incident the game more interesting?

Generally speaking, each rebuy that lead to me losing a SLF pilot seemed different than a normal rebuy
Having an Elite SLF crew with you meant you really need to be careful with the risk assessments and picking fights got a different meaning

Compared with a normal rebuy where i dont lose nothing... or a random death in an on-foot CZ. It's meaningless

Pretty much like if you didnt have a rebuy for your ship, you'd be more careful with your game endeavours
People are suiciding in AX CZ to replenish the premium ax munitions. Right!

 

[Ian Doncaster]

On the contrary, i'm of the opinion that supercruise is what gives Elite dimension (and the orbital cruise - glide - normal space seamless transition is a part of it) and it's a big part of the decision making process when deciding what to do in Elite.

But for activities within the bubble, especially missions, where your goal is at least one of credits, influence, rep, materials, commodities, or just the outright experience... when your decision point is:

• Do something a couple minutes away; or
• Have virtually the same experience, half an hour away.

...while yes, you're right, it's still a big part of that decision, the context of that decision is very different, especially when you're essentially at the whim of a random number generator, and if all your options look like the second, well, I'm more inclined to simply log off and play something else... and I might come back at a later day to see if I've been graced by the RNG gods this time.

I think both of these are mostly correct, because of what supercruise is and isn't good at.

For operations near objects - basically, if your current frame of reference is something other than a top-level star - supercruise is great: you have all sorts of ways you can improve your travel time, especially once you're getting to orbital cruise heights, it manages the scale transitions well while still letting you position yourself arbitrarily, it could have a bit of tuning but it's basically there. The difference between "trip to orbital station" and "trip to surface" isn't necessarily that large if you get the approach right. Frontier got this bit really well sorted.

For operations a long way from objects, supercruise is terrible. The optimal approach is to point in the right direction, set full throttle, then touch absolutely nothing for five minutes. You can't FSS (e.g. to check signal sources) since that requires you to be stationary. You probably can't be interdicted because the speed curves mean that you're only really vulnerable at the start or end of a trip. You can't send messages to stations to accept missions remotely, or check market prices, or read the local news, or insult their families. You can't even really watch the scenery because most of it is far enough away just to be a tiny white dot. (Apex formalises this all even further, of course)

For in-system operation this leaves a couple of minutes of dead time between each activity, which isn't ideal.
For heading between distant binaries, it leaves 10-20 minutes of dead time, which is just ridiculous, and even if there were more options it'd be tough to fill it.

So, I think a reasonable solution would be:
1) Allow hyperspace jumps to target any top-level star in a system, provided you've honked the system previously. It's a capability players already have with Fleet Carriers anyway; it's very noticeable that Frontier have basically never hand-placed a station around a distant secondary when there was any closer alternative, and most hand-placed stations are within 1000Ls of the primary. You'd still have to supercruise within the top-level star's gravity well.
2) Add a lot more things - at least in inhabited space - which you can optionally do from supercruise while flying in a straight line to kill a minute or two, and which are - unlike e.g. "reading Galnet" or "checking Squadron leaderboards" - renewable enough that you can do them every trip.

 

[Greasetrap42]

I like that there are a variety of missions making me decide what is the most worthwhile for my goals and style of gameplay.

Some missions are worth the effort while others are not. But it is not black & white. There are borderline missions that maybe if I can stack a 2nd or 3rd mission to the same destination (or whatever activity) it becomes worth it. Or all the good missions are gone(?-bad luck I guess) so I guess I'll take a crappy mission and maybe pick up a better one at the destination station. The different missions drive a decision making process for the player.

Edit:
** Ship based missions - not Odyssey foot missions **

 

[Jmanis]

I like that there are a variety of missions making me decide what is the most worthwhile for my goals and style of gameplay.

Some missions are worth the effort while others are not. But it is not black & white. There are borderline missions that maybe if I can stack a 2nd or 3rd mission to the same destination (or whatever activity) it becomes worth it. Or all the good missions are gone(?-bad luck I guess) so I guess I'll take a crappy mission and maybe pick up a better one at the destination station. The different missions drive a decision making process for the player.

The current variety of missions is a whole other bag that is, honestly, also becoming a big problem for that aspect of the game, but diving into that gets pretty OT.

To pull it back to the Op's topic though, there's several problems with the above statement specifically about Odyssey missions.

There are borderline missions that maybe if I can stack a 2nd or 3rd mission to the same destination (or whatever activity) it becomes worth it.

The problem is that can't happen in Odyssey. Unlike the Horizon's game, you're actively prevented from taking a second or third mission to the same destination... you can only have one active mission per destination[1]. The fact that going to and departing the planet adds to that idle time significantly (approx 2-4 minutes, dependent on a host of considerations) meaning the amount of idle time vs active time is skewed in favour of idle time... suddenly Odyssey missions become a fair bit less appealing.

Or all the good missions are gone(?-bad luck I guess)

That's not actually a thing, but to go into that also gets pretty OT.

So I guess I'll take a crappy mission and maybe pick up a better one at the destination station.

That's a big problem with Odyssey missions, with the exception of doing the activity for activities sake, they're all crappy compared to Horizons.

The different missions drive a decision making process for the player.

That decision making process needs to be meaningful though... something FD has been poor at integrating into their game. There's a lot i could roll into that statement, but to sum it up, a good decision making process needs to be a decision of "Why do I want to do X, instead of doing Y", instead of the current decision point of "Why do I want to do X, instead of just not doing it at all" which isn't a decision, or at least, is a completely meaningless one in the context of game design, and FD suffers from that a lot, being that a lot of decisions where things like travel time factor in, are ones of "Can I be bothered suffering the idle time to achieve this thing that could be otherwise achieved with less idle time?"... that's not a great design choice.

[1] I found a slight bug with that the other day where you can stack one, if you get it from one of the mission providers standing around the concourse.

 

[Greasetrap42]

To pull it back to the Op's topic though, there's several problems with the above statement specifically about Odyssey missions.

I was referring to Horizons ship missions. Not Odyssey foot missions. Guess I should have specified that.

I thought that was what the OP was talking about based on the Original Post:

One of the biggest problems with Elite, which has existed since Horizons..... ..... surface content just innately takes an additional 3-5 minutes to reach. This means that, given the choice between two identical missions, players will tend to choose the space-based mission, because they can simply supercruise in and drop directly at the content, rather than needing to do the whole orbital insertion every time.

 

[Jmanis]

I was referring to Horizons ship missions. Not Odyssey foot missions. Guess I should have specified that.

I thought that was what the OP was talking about based on the Original Post:

I took it as surface content writ-large, which included Odyssey content.... i went for that since it's closest to the edge... i think the issues get a bit worse if you look at Horizons missions, for a bunch of reasons that get off topic.... distance and time is a catalysing factor for other issues... suffice to say if they don't get resolved, the same issues will still exist to varying degrees.

For some Horizons surface content, that factor is less exacerbating, for others, i think it's actually worse.