Newcomer / Intro What are you up to?

The Cobra didn't work out. The hard points were not to my liking. Back to Santanico Pandemonium.

EDIT

Just did my first sabotage mission. Great fun but many humans were killed during the making of these four manufacturing instructions. Wanted in -system now and they want me to hand nyself in. No way, José.
I'm using a Cobra in Colonia for dabbling in on foot ground missions. The underside small hard points are 'ok' for gimballed lasers, but the medium hardpoint in front of the pilot is the only one that works for dumb fire missiles used to blow up ground troops. It does work well for that there. The worst thing about the Cobra is that it's wide and flat and has a habit of autolanding over little hills on the ground which means I can't drive the SRV back under it to board the ship. I prefer my DBX in the bubble for this type of activity. Large central hardpoint for dumb fire missiles and lots of ground clearance to get the SRV under it even on rough ground.
 
Why is it, when you're in a sector where all the stars are, say, Wregoe something-something, you suddenly get a HIP? Something already discovered in the 18/19/20/21st etc. century?

Enquiring minds want to know...

EDIT

While I was exploring, this made me come over all unnecessary:

ix86m0F.jpg
 
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Why is it, when you're in a sector where all the stars are, say, Wregoe something-something, you suddenly get a HIP? Something already discovered in the 18/19/20/21st etc. century?
The Hipparcos catalogue was one bunch of real world stars that was imported in the game on top of Stellar Forge procedural generation, to make the Galaxy that bit more accurate representation of the real thing.
 
I got promoted to Taxonomist today. So there's progress there. I saw some pretty nice sights today, too.

A surprisingly colored airless moon, with some decent mountains:
werwe.jpg


The Cactoida were in bloom:
wef.jpg


Lovely pastels on this planet, and a few lone Osseus plants:
hyu.jpg


Hunting in the Magenta Forest (that's the most pink I've ever seen in this game :) ):
mm.jpg


A pretty amazing looking sky:
ewrewr.jpg
 
By the way, I was looking at my Graphics settings today and discovered that "Terrain Checkerboard Rendering" was turned on somehow. This setting degrades your textures in the name of performance (it only draws half the texture and interpolates the rest).

I don't have any performance issues, so I want that off. I know I turned it off at one point.

I was wondering why the planet textures looked off to me recently -- I thought I just hit a few ugly planets.

Anyway, if it came on by itself for me, it might for you guys too. Worth checking, perhaps.
 
By the way, I was looking at my Graphics settings today and discovered that "Terrain Checkerboard Rendering" was turned on somehow. This setting degrades your textures in the name of performance (it only draws half the texture and interpolates the rest).

I don't have any performance issues, so I want that off. I know I turned it off at one point.

I was wondering why the planet textures looked off to me recently -- I thought I just hit a few ugly planets.

Anyway, if it came on by itself for me, it might for you guys too. Worth checking, perhaps.
Funny you should mention that... I noticed mine on a couple of weeks ago so turned it off. Wonder if was U11 that autoset it?

Gratz on taxonomist!
 
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I got promoted to Taxonomist today. So there's progress there. I saw some pretty nice sights today, too.

A surprisingly colored airless moon, with some decent mountains:
View attachment 304516

The Cactoida were in bloom:
View attachment 304515

Lovely pastels on this planet, and a few lone Osseus plants:
View attachment 304514

Hunting in the Magenta Forest (that's the most pink I've ever seen in this game :) ):
View attachment 304513

A pretty amazing looking sky:
View attachment 304517
You have a talent for finding interesting flora!
Best I've managed to find recently:
XhgTcqA.jpg
 
Travelling through The Abyss is the space sim version of hacking through the jungle with a machete.
Every jump is manual, and running down your fuel to lighten the ship to try and make the next jump level 2 instead of level 3 FSD injection becomes part of the routine.
Never let anyone convince you jump range isn't that important to an exploration ship.
One amazing thing is I have only been first discoverer of one system in here. There aren't many systems and they have all been found before.
It has been fun finding treasures like this:
TALHdoQ.jpg

FTsi7EL.jpg


The next challenge is to escape from The Abyss heading south.
 
Travelling through The Abyss is the space sim version of hacking through the jungle with a machete.
Every jump is manual, and running down your fuel to lighten the ship to try and make the next jump level 2 instead of level 3 FSD injection becomes part of the routine.
Never let anyone convince you jump range isn't that important to an exploration ship.
One amazing thing is I have only been first discoverer of one system in here. There aren't many systems and they have all been found before.
It has been fun finding treasures like this:
TALHdoQ.jpg

FTsi7EL.jpg


The next challenge is to escape from The Abyss heading south.
What I find interesting is that there are 400 billion stars and I keep hearing how people keep running into already discovered areas.

It seems most explorers seem to travel to the same places - which is understandable but, when I do my next excursion into the black, I'm going to try and find a road less travelled. Hopefully.
 
What I find interesting is that there are 400 billion stars and I keep hearing how people keep running into already discovered areas.

It seems most explorers seem to travel to the same places - which is understandable but, when I do my next excursion into the black, I'm going to try and find a road less travelled. Hopefully.
There are certainly paths more commonly travelled, and I'll post a link to a YouTube video below that illustrates this. I recon Beagle Point is about the 3rd most commonly visited location outside the Bubble (you can judge for yourself when watching that video) after Sag A* and Colonia. Circumnavigating the galaxy around the edge is done by a fair few commanders. The Abyss is part of the galaxy circumnavigation route close to the busy Beagle Point location and the star density so low it becomes feasible to visit all those systems, especially when you have an event like distant worlds involving 1000s of commanders going there and Beagle Point to explore it in the past.
Sagittarius A* is probably the most common destination outside the bubble, maybe tied with Colonia. The star density in the centre of the galaxy is so high even an army of 1000s of commanders cannot hope to visit even a fraction of them all. Most systems you visit there will be undiscovered. The orange target pin is Sagittarius A*. I don't worry about running out of fuel here, because there are always fuel stars within about 6-8ly.
lZQiL3e.jpg

And here is the The Abyss to roughly the same zoom level, although zooming out further makes no real difference to the picture. I don't worry about running out of fuel here, because every star seems to be scoopable and I'm much more focused on finding a star I can jump to at all, with a level 2 or 3 FSD injection.
eKR96ZR.jpg


Take a journey to Sagittarius A* and / or Colonia and it won't take long to start seeing more undiscovered systems than discovered ones. Don't be surprised to still run into discovered systems on these well travelled routes, especially around points of interest you find on edsm.net.
Look out for commanders travelling just to draw pictures in this image!
 
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Take a journey to Sagittarius A* and / or Colonia and it won't take long to start seeing more undiscovered systems than discovered ones. Don't be surprised to still run into discovered systems on these well travelled routes, especially around points of interest you find on edsm.net.
Look out for commanders travelling just to draw pictures in this image!
Also spot the permit blocked systems/areas as the lights go on around them leaving a hole in the map.
 
Also spot the permit blocked systems/areas as the lights go on around them leaving a hole in the map.
Yes they are conspicuous. That one 'south' of the bubble gets in the way sometimes.
Another feature I've noticed, is that you see squares of intense activity, many near the centre of the galaxy. I think that will be commanders Earth Like World Hunting. They filter to F and I think A class stars and use the system naming convention to identify a 'boxel'. Then they visit 500 F and A class stars. If they find around 10+ Earth Like Worlds, it's considered a good boxel and they'll 'fish' out the whole boxel to find all the ELWs they can. Not sure this is my idea of fun game play, but each to their own.

Boxel = A subsector (of varying sizes) within a sector of space. The term comes from "pixel", but refers to a 3D cube of space. This usually refers to procedurally generated star systems with shared letter codes and mass codes, in the form "XX-X n", where "n" is the mass code.
 
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