The Universal Protection initiative: a system to provide protection to CMDRs in need against gankers. Contributors of all kinds welcome.

[Northpin]

This is incorrect. Trade ships can be built to protect themselves. It requires a bit of knowledge of the game and engineering. If you want to get any advises on how to build trade or mining ships with capability of evading gankers contact me. Exploration ships on the other hand want to have as much as LY as possible and it is extremely hard to find a ganker away from bubble. You can even build combat or self defense capable exploration ships sacrificing some LY...

Yea, i know perfectly how to build ships that will have a chance to survive a gank. Meet My Conda - did some exploration and took part in the mining and combat CG that resulted in building and commissioning Explorer's Anchorage near SagA* It can have even better shields, but i wanted something with 67+ ly jump range plus the full range of toys

But, as i said above - if you build gank proof ships, then you dont need escorts. Them escorts would be useless anyway.

However, building gank proof ships means those ships will no longer be optimal for their job.
That's my beef with ED combat system.You need to compromise any miner/trader/explorer/mission runner ship to be able to survive in Open.

The outfitting system is the one that allows murder boats.
IF it gets changed and murder boats are a thing of history, then people might enjoy a better organic Open system and combat would be as rare and meaningful as envisioned by DBOBE many years ago.

 

[Sensei Jacksama]

@CMDR Sari Sari may I make a suggestion? The other commentors are correct in that a deep space exploration ship will likely be killed in seconds however there is a way to negate this. You need to split your escort team into 3 sections. 1st section is the scout regiment. You send the scouts ahead of your convoy to see if the next system has any players or not in supercruise. If there are players you send in the 2nd regiment that will then directly contact those players and ask them to either leave the system or drop out of csupercruise. If they dont comply then they will be interdicted. If there are no players in the system then the second regiment will hover near the main star to monitor for any new players entering the system. The 3rd Regiment will act as direct escort for the target as they enter the system. Once the target enters the system proceed to repeat this process with the targets destination starport. If your undermanned you could probably have a single pilot act as the 1st and 2nd regiment's role but preferably you would want 2 full wings to do this.

Edit: You could call each regiment scouts, interceptors, and guards.

 

[CMDR Sari Sari]

@CMDR Sari Sari may I make a suggestion? The other commentors are correct in that a deep space exploration ship will likely be killed in seconds however there is a way to negate this. You need to split your escort team into 3 sections. 1st section is the scout regiment. You send the scouts ahead of your convoy to see if the next system has any players or not in supercruise. If there are players you send in the 2nd regiment that will then directly contact those players and ask them to either leave the system or drop out of csupercruise. If they dont comply then they will be interdicted. If there are no players in the system then the second regiment will hover near the main star to monitor for any new players entering the system. The 3rd Regiment will act as direct escort for the target as they enter the system. Once the target enters the system proceed to repeat this process with the targets destination starport. If your undermanned you could probably have a single pilot act as the 1st and 2nd regiment's role but preferably you would want 2 full wings to do this.

Edit: You could call each regiment scouts, interceptors, and guards.

Hoenstly, if you could join UP and help us out with figuring all of this out, that would be great.

 

[Sensei Jacksama]

Hoenstly, if you could join UP and help us out with figuring all of this out, that would be great.

I'm actually a console player so I don't think I would be much use to you. I can join your discord and offer feedback though.

 

[CMDR Cknarf]

The best defense starts with the individual.

1. Have a sturdy enough ship (difficult, but possible without engineering)

2. Understand how high waking works

3. Recognize danger before it becomes an issue.

All of these are more effective than escorts 9/10 times— if you can’t help yourself, how can the good guys help you?

Once you submit, or fail an interdiction, there is very little anyone can do to peel off an attacker— most gank boats are going to have plenty of shields to tank anyone from stopping them.

If you want to help new people at all, the best thing you can do is educate. Stop bad behavior (like running shieldless) early on. Cover evasion and escape basics. Give them the tools they need to survive out there.

 

[CMDR Kraag]

I like the idea in theory, the enthusiasm behind it, and the effort to create opportunities to bring players together in more meaningful ways in the game. However, I would have to agree with many of the constructive criticisms offered to date. It's going to be extremely difficult to nigh impossible to protect a trader, miner, or explorer once successfully interdicted by a fully kitted out combat ship / bounty hunter. I think the suggestion of running scouts to check the system ahead would be the most successful strategy after the recommendations offered by Cknarf. Which in itself may be an interesting experiment to witness the counter-interdiction strategies that will organically evolve as the most effective.

There may be some extremely specialized and engineered builds that may pull it off (some niche combination of Concordant Sequence, Regeneration Sequence, Dispersal Field, Force Shell, and Target Lock Breaker experimental effects) if the pilot has complete mastery of the timing and piloting required to bring all of it to bear. However, such a ship build would be so sub-optimal for any other purpose I don't see too many players willing to commit the engineering materials required for such a one trick pony.

Assuming you press forward with your initiative, two additional suggestions:

1) Reach out to the Fuel Rats. They've already done the legwork of figuring out how to match players together on short notice and in extremis (players out of fuel, adrift in space, with only a few minutes remaining of life support; yet they have a remarkably high success rate of refueling ships in time). They have it down to a science. No need to reinvent the wheel.

2) Big NO to real-world money crowdfunding. Don't do it...just don't do it. It will incentivize the worst elements to game the system in their favor. There's so many ways it could be abused. Again, look to the Fuel Rats for inspiration. They've been refueling players who've run out of fuel for years with an all-volunteer force of Commanders. They're well-established, well-respected, effective, and managed to pull all that off without pay. Reach out to them for advice.

If you insist on pursuing reibursement for Commanders who serve as bodyguards, recommend to the trader, miner, explorer who was escorted they jettison a cannister or two of high-value commodity for the bodyguard to cargo scoop (which is more in keeping with the roleplay aspect, anyway). Long-term you could attempt to prevail upon Frontier Developments to allow gifting of ARX between players in-game. But that's a long shot and unlikely they will acquiesce.

Good luck and I'll be curious to see how this evolves.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I myself have little experience with combat. I therefore don't have any specific idea on how to address this issue. That is why I am looking for pilots with combat experience to go through the logistics of protection and escorts, if such a thing can be achievable. Have all options truly been explored?

Back when I was an active escort pilot for Iridium Wing, the primary principles were simple:
- no-one can attack the returning explorer if they don't know they're there
- NPCs don't need to know that but are very easy to deal with
- don't let hostile players get to the same instance as the explorer
- really don't let hostile players get to the same normal space instance as the explorer!
On that basis, we ran hundreds of missions without a single loss, including coordination of mass escort of an entire trade convoy, missions to Deciat and other hotspots, CG protection, etc.

So for any particular escort mission:
- good operational security, make sure the number of pilots knowing where and what the mission is gets reduced to "need to know"
- enough forces that you can at least temporarily clear supercruise of player hostiles who aren't specifically after your escortee by distracting them into a long-running fight. Depending on the system that might be "one" or "multiple wings". You don't need amazing PvPers for this, but you do need people who can build a very resilient ship and keep it alive for several minutes in a fight. (And also blow up any NPC interdictor quickly and efficiently, of course, but that shouldn't be difficult)
- lots of practice at exactly how things like "nav lock" work and other more niche wing features
- a good clear concise procedure for the escortee and a pre-escort briefing.

Nowadays the sensible thing to do would be to use a carrier: dock the escortee with an unbranded carrier in a safe anonymous location, move the carrier right next to the destination station, no-one will have time to threaten them before they reach it if you keep your eyes open.

There are three practical problems:
1) Logistics and economy. Assembling an escort wing and moving it to the correct point of the bubble will take an hour even if you have a massive pool of trained active pilots. In practice for Iridium Wing we generally asked for 24 hours notice (though we'd do our best to scramble some sort of escort with less). Obviously if a trader is waiting an hour for their escort - or a day! - they could just trade somewhere safer and marginally less profitable multiple times, and make more money. Exploration escorts are more viable for this reason, of course.

2) Advertising. No-one is going to have heard of you, and those that have will probably also know about how to build a ganker-proof ship without sacrificing much primary capability, because that sort of information is in the same places you can advertise. What we found in Iridium Wing is it started off really well back in 2.0ish with several escort requests a week ... but then as NPCs became less and less dangerous to explorers, the number of escort requests dried up to one a week, then one a month, and then most of our pilots got bored and wandered off because there was nothing to do. Most explorers in 2.0 were at much more danger from NPCs than the rare player. Now only very specific explorers are at any risk at all from NPCs, and they're still not at much risk from players, and they can always sell their data at some deep space carrier. Well, it was fun while it lasted. Traders have much more NPC risk so maybe you can make that work ... if you can solve the logistics problem.

3) Vetting. If you're doing trade or mining escorts, you can keep a carrier with several billion credits aboard, and if one of your pilots turns out to be an infiltrator, you can compensate the failed escortee with the value of their rebuy and cargo afterwards. If you're doing exploration escorts, you cannot compensate someone for the lost first discoveries, even if you can repay them the exploration data. We had enough senior pilots connected to the PvP community that no-one made a serious attempt to infiltrate in the first place, and we spotted the two or three that tried over the years.

Anyway, good luck.

 

[Sensei Jacksama]

Back when I was an active escort pilot for Iridium Wing, the primary principles were simple:

• no-one can attack the returning explorer if they don't know they're there
• NPCs don't need to know that but are very easy to deal with
• don't let hostile players get to the same instance as the explorer
• really don't let hostile players get to the same normal space instance as the explorer!

On that basis, we ran hundreds of missions without a single loss, including coordination of mass escort of an entire trade convoy, missions to Deciat and other hotspots, CG protection, etc.

So for any particular escort mission:

• good operational security, make sure the number of pilots knowing where and what the mission is gets reduced to "need to know"
• enough forces that you can at least temporarily clear supercruise of player hostiles who aren't specifically after your escortee by distracting them into a long-running fight. Depending on the system that might be "one" or "multiple wings". You don't need amazing PvPers for this, but you do need people who can build a very resilient ship and keep it alive for several minutes in a fight. (And also blow up any NPC interdictor quickly and efficiently, of course, but that shouldn't be difficult)
• lots of practice at exactly how things like "nav lock" work and other more niche wing features
• a good clear concise procedure for the escortee and a pre-escort briefing.

Nowadays the sensible thing to do would be to use a carrier: dock the escortee with an unbranded carrier in a safe anonymous location, move the carrier right next to the destination station, no-one will have time to threaten them before they reach it if you keep your eyes open.

There are three practical problems:
1) Logistics and economy. Assembling an escort wing and moving it to the correct point of the bubble will take an hour even if you have a massive pool of trained active pilots. In practice for Iridium Wing we generally asked for 24 hours notice (though we'd do our best to scramble some sort of escort with less). Obviously if a trader is waiting an hour for their escort - or a day! - they could just trade somewhere safer and marginally less profitable multiple times, and make more money. Exploration escorts are more viable for this reason, of course.

2) Advertising. No-one is going to have heard of you, and those that have will probably also know about how to build a ganker-proof ship without sacrificing much primary capability, because that sort of information is in the same places you can advertise. What we found in Iridium Wing is it started off really well back in 2.0ish with several escort requests a week ... but then as NPCs became less and less dangerous to explorers, the number of escort requests dried up to one a week, then one a month, and then most of our pilots got bored and wandered off because there was nothing to do. Most explorers in 2.0 were at much more danger from NPCs than the rare player. Now only very specific explorers are at any risk at all from NPCs, and they're still not at much risk from players, and they can always sell their data at some deep space carrier. Well, it was fun while it lasted. Traders have much more NPC risk so maybe you can make that work ... if you can solve the logistics problem.

3) Vetting. If you're doing trade or mining escorts, you can keep a carrier with several billion credits aboard, and if one of your pilots turns out to be an infiltrator, you can compensate the failed escortee with the value of their rebuy and cargo afterwards. If you're doing exploration escorts, you cannot compensate someone for the lost first discoveries, even if you can repay them the exploration data. We had enough senior pilots connected to the PvP community that no-one made a serious attempt to infiltrate in the first place, and we spotted the two or three that tried over the years.

Anyway, good luck.

A long time ago I trained to be an Iridium Wing pilot in hopes I could apply to join them; but by the time I got to a point where I had a somewhat decent pvp ship they were already defunct.