Tip Off - Crashed Ship data core

[DocPossible]

I've finally got round to taking a tip off mission and having skipped across the bubble, found the planet, navigated to the correct Lat-Long have indeed located a crashed ship. Much excitement - it has a data core too, so I scan it in my SRV and the contents are decrypted. This is pretty cool. Up to that point...

All it contains is a scanned message, saying that the crash survivors are setting out in their SRV, hoping to find a settlement and get rescued... I've had a search around the area - there are no tracks to follow and no other wreckage. The wave scanner's not showing anything interesting either? So what have I missed if anything? Is there more to it?

 

[Anubite]

I have seen burned out SRVs before. Maybe there was actually one tied to the site, or more likely the narrative is there in case one randomly spawns (or food for thought as to what happened to the burned out SRVs you find in the future).

 

[Pville_Piper]

How'd you get the data core to scan? I locked it up but nothing happened...

 

[DocPossible]

It was just marked as a contact - I targeted it and scanned it with the SRV's data link scanner. It popped up a mail message and that was it. I did scout out the surrounding area for a while, but nothing else turned up. Bit of an anti-climax really.

 

[DocPossible]

It turns out it's an Intel Package worth 79165 credits : a 'Ship Wreck Data Package !!!

This is not going to help me retire DD Guess that's that then.

 

[Schmack]

It turns out it's an Intel Package worth 79165 credits : a 'Ship Wreck Data Package !!!

This is not going to help me retire DD Guess that's that then.

ED still stuck in the 1800's as far as thinking 100K Cr is a lot.

lol..

You get a delivery mission for 20K, get offered a 200K bonus to get it there soon.

That's 10x the price of the mission. Just make the mission 220K and you'll have plenty of people getting it there soon since 20 of those is 4m Cr for basically a hop, and 4m back. 8m Cr for a round trip with even a small ship is pretty decent. Add rank, rep and any commodities you might think you need.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

It turns out it's an Intel Package worth 79165 credits : a 'Ship Wreck Data Package !!!

This is not going to help me retire DD Guess that's that then.

. These use to be a million.

They were so much fun too, especially with planetary coordinate search i wonder why they were nerfed (not like you didnt earn it somewhat). Wish they had buffed the reward and lowered the drop rate instead.

 

[d8veh]

I used to do a few of these, and I found that if you scout around, you can often find some good materials. I don't know whether that's their purpose, but the promises of riches never come to anything..

Out of curiosity, I tried one yesterday. I was well within the time allowed, but there was no sign of the crashed ship, nor anything else and I was definitely at the correct location.

 

[Devari]

I've finally got round to taking a tip off mission and having skipped across the bubble, found the planet, navigated to the correct Lat-Long have indeed located a crashed ship. Much excitement - it has a data core too, so I scan it in my SRV and the contents are decrypted. This is pretty cool. Up to that point...

All it contains is a scanned message, saying that the crash survivors are setting out in their SRV, hoping to find a settlement and get rescued... I've had a search around the area - there are no tracks to follow and no other wreckage. The wave scanner's not showing anything interesting either? So what have I missed if anything? Is there more to it?

That's all you get from a Tip Off, after you get the message there isn't any more "content". When they first appeared I thought that the Tip Offs were part of some sort of coherent story arc serving as a prelude to the Thargoid return so I did all of the crashed ship Tip Offs that I received (I didn't bother with the base scan missions which just got you bounties). I figured at the time it would lead into something with the storyline so I even bookmarked the Tip Off locations to see if there was some sort of pattern to the locations that would correlate with the Thargoid activity. It turns out there is only around a dozen or so total Tip Off missions (around 6-7 of them are crashed ship versions) and eventually they will repeat when you finish them all. I think they are triggered by completing a certain number of missions/rep/rank grind as they tended to pop up when I was doing a lot of mission grind activities in a given location.

The missions with a crashed Anaconda actually motivated me to grind for an Anaconda at the time since the message described what sounded like a long-range exploration mission and the idea that you would go out "exploring" in a large ship and hire a crew added to the immersion for me at the time (this was around 2.2). It's a shame they didn't do more with them, it was actually one of the few missions that I thought added really well to the "atmosphere" of Elite as they were more about exploring and finding something than they were about a repetitive "grind" of some sort. I actually do think they planned to make them more relevant or connect to some part of the storyline but were probably limited in terms of the dev resources they had available so I suspect they're part of a "dead end" that was just not fully developed how they originally intended. I would still do more of the Tip Off crash site missions if there were new ones available but I haven't seen them in a while and I've done all the missions I've received so far but they really were one of my favourite "mysterious" parts of Elite at the time.

 

[Watcher]

Meanwhile I've been trying to do one of these and haven't found a ship (or anything much else) at all..
I'll continue my search for a bit but I'm wondering if there is anything to find at this point.

I've done one of these before and that was kind of fun but this time it is proving more frustrating than anything else. Ho hum.
We still could really do with planetary book mark setting too, I can navigate manually but a bookmark would be much easier and more sensible surely.

 

[IndigoWyrd]

It turns out it's an Intel Package worth 79165 credits : a 'Ship Wreck Data Package !!!

This is not going to help me retire DD Guess that's that then.

Nope, but it should cover your fuel costs, wear-and-tear and leave you enough for a beer when you get back.

It would be nice if there were much more to these, but once you find the wreck and the data core, the ride is over. I think it would be grand if these spawned off mission updates to track down the survivors, perhaps find a blown out SRV husk or two to indicate we're getting closer, maybe even have some data cores on those SRVs to scan for further updates, and perhaps find one or more of those survivors either cocooned in escape pods, or perhaps holed up in some little settlement building, eager to come aboard as Passengers in whatever cabin space I have available to be returned somewhere for the promise of rewards....

And additional wrinkles could be triggered while they're on board - any thing from standard issue pirate attacks to thargoid sprout swarms, just to make things more flavorful.

Unfortunately we're not at a level for that sort of mission complexity yet.

 

[hems303]

Unfortunately we're not at a level for that sort of mission complexity yet.

I know absolutely "diddly" about computer programming....but surely it isn't too hard to link several diverse missions together depending on the participants actions when at the ship crash site for example...all the missions are ??scripted (??correct term??) so why not use more than a single lonesome one at these trigger sites....dunno what I'm talkin about but it sounds better than all the single dead-end missions on offer. I'm not really talking about the chained missions as such as they do make some sort of sense. Thoughts?

 

[IndigoWyrd]

I know absolutely "diddly" about computer programming....but surely it isn't too hard to link several diverse missions together depending on the participants actions when at the ship crash site for example...all the missions are ??scripted (??correct term??) so why not use more than a single lonesome one at these trigger sites....dunno what I'm talkin about but it sounds better than all the single dead-end missions on offer. I'm not really talking about the chained missions as such as they do make some sort of sense. Thoughts?

I do know a bit about programming and scripting, and you're not terribly far off the mark - where most normal games are concerned. Elite, on the other hand, has its own unique way for creating, generating, initiating, branching and resolving missions that, from what very little has ever really been said about it, seems incredibly convoluted and perhaps not entirely understood by those who created it - or at least by those who are tasked with working with it.

Personally, I'd LOVE a good look under the hood of Cobra, the engine that runs Elite, especially the mission system, if for no other reason, to satisfy my curiosity, but I suspect I might be able to offer up some useful, informed information to the folks who do have to work with it. I somewhat suspect that mission creation looks a lot like a really long SQL query, rather than any sort of GUI interface, and probably has some interesting syntax, which is why sometimes missions go really bonkers. But that's just speculation on my part.

 

[lojames22]

I know absolutely "diddly" about computer programming....but surely it isn't too hard to link several diverse missions together depending on the participants actions when at the ship crash site for example...all the missions are ??scripted (??correct term??) so why not use more than a single lonesome one at these trigger sites....dunno what I'm talkin about but it sounds better than all the single dead-end missions on offer. I'm not really talking about the chained missions as such as they do make some sort of sense. Thoughts?

It’s actually incredibly complex. The main reason for the complexity here is the procedural programming that ties missions on planets to in-game procedurally generated assets.

I’ve done procedural programming along the lines of a single planet (with atmosphere and water) creation, with a dynamic asteroid field rotating around it, AI, a single sun, and flying a ship around in that space... it was thousands of lines of programming and took two straight weeks of development. Add in missions and tied-in procedural assets, very complicated stuff. Then the debugging... a nightmare.

Just a quick perspective

So after all that I decided programming wasn’t fun for me and just stuck to Mechanical Engineering lol.

 

[space voyager]

There is IIRC a data bank lying around, too. It is supposed to be scannable but there is a bug report thread that right now that says it is not. The current value of tipoffs will never make me travel again but if that data bank turns out to be of high (data?) value...

 

[Valorin]

These kinds of missions would be a great opportunity to tell little stories that are common enough to happen more often than once and could be very nice to experience, if there would be a trail to follow. I'd hate to see anything like a "story mode" in Elite, but chaining up story elements leading from a crash to perhaps a broken down SRV or an escape pod or something would be very nice indeed. Same with simple things like those NPCs who ran out of fuel in some of the Signal Sources. If you don't have fuel transfer limpets the only thing you can do is fly away and leave them to their fate. Being able to fetch limpets to come back later would be awesome. Or calling in a rescue team... Just some way to react other than blowing up the ship to gather ressources, which I wouldn't do because my Pilot is not a murderer.

 

[Yure]

After you scan it, log out, log in and see if it is persistent. If it is persistent it might be worth flying around looking for those SRVs... If Alshat taught me anything, is that SRVs are a pain to find.


...still wish there were more things like Alshat... That was cool as hell.

 

[space voyager]

It is persistent, but it has a cool-off (I didn't wait to see how long).

EDIT: Oh, I see you were talking about an SRV. The tip-off location (a ship or a station) is persistent.

 

[foxwalker]

CR Ship Wreck Data Package 155,315 (Inflation!)

 

[aRJay]

CR Ship Wreck Data Package 155,315 (Inflation!)

It only took six years to double.