Elite Dangerous Catch-All

O.O
Wow. Thank you!
That's a very good writeup, and I appreciate it!
I think I'm going to go with the Imperial Courier, Clipper, and then (eventually) Cutter, because I'm a sucker for that sleek design work. It's good to know that both will work (albeit poorly) as trade or combat.
Now to earn up that money!

Taharka wrote:

O.O
Wow. Thank you!
That's a very good writeup, and I appreciate it!
I think I'm going to go with the Imperial Courier, Clipper, and then (eventually) Cutter, because I'm a sucker for that sleek design work. It's good to know that both will work (albeit poorly) as trade or combat.
Now to earn up that money!

The Clipper makes a good trader -- the Courier, not so much. You'll have cargo space for light smuggling/trade missions from bulletin boards, but nothing else.

But yeah, the Clipper is a hell of a good ship.

Are Large ships still scanned very frequently coming into stations? I generally prefer trading at outposts, but if I move up to a tradeaconda those are out and my best routes frequently involve smuggling Imperial Slaves into Archon Delaine space for huge profit. Other than the time I was stupid and got stuck in the toaster rack, I've never been scanned going in in my python, but I thought I read that large ships get scanned frequently. I also know it helps being allied, which I am for Federation and Empire stations.

Did one run form Sothis, 3 missions and I made 14 million. It was long (35ish jumps). Once that was done, I hit Diaguandri for some outfitting.

Asp, Current outfit. I upgraded as much as I could to A grade (all but the shield generator) and figured out that I put Reinforced Bulkheads on the ship. Once I got rid of those, I hit a 27 ly jump range.

These trips are going to get much shorter

athros wrote:

I'm also contemplating pledging to a faction again. Very likely Sirius Corp for the Packhound missiles. I'm not interested in the Empire or Federation factions and if FDev gets to enforcing the PP mechanics, the bottom 3 are going to fall off.

I actually decided to do that last night, for the first time.

I've been spending a lot of time in Fed space, and despise Hudson, so went with Felicia. I will honestly be surprised if I ever earn enough merits for the next rank, but who knows. Right now I am flying around in my Vulture with its 4T cargo space, so I don't thing I'll be flying pamphlets around.

Please refresh my memory.

If someone from another faction interdicts me, and he is listed as ENEMY but not WANTED, will I get a bounty for vapourising his sorry self?

That happened twice tonight and I sadly held my trigger (he did likewise).

I think that if I am going to actually participate in PP, I will need to run up to Back Enterprise and fetch my nice Asp.

No, if you're interdicted you never incur a bounty if you kill the guy doing the interdicting. Interdiction incurs a bounty and tags the interdictor as wanted.

Honestly its not really worth the effort to kill though. Maximum bounty you will get is 400cr regardless if its a sidewinder or an anaconda, and unless you are killing the opposing faction guy in that specific faction's control space you won't even earn PP credits. Even if a sidewinder interdicts my python, I'm usually in a hurry to get to station so I just surrender and boost away. the 30 seconds it takes for me to kill a sidewinder isn't worth the 400 credit bounty I can cash in.

Carlbear95 wrote:

No, if you're interdicted you never incur a bounty if you kill the guy doing the interdicting. Interdiction incurs a bounty and tags the interdictor as wanted.

That's what I thought, except after I did a KWS it still said he had no record.

Carlbear95 wrote:

Honestly its not really worth the effort to kill though. Maximum bounty you will get is 400cr regardless if its a sidewinder or an anaconda, and unless you are killing the opposing faction guy in that specific faction's control space you won't even earn PP credits. Even if a sidewinder interdicts my python, I'm usually in a hurry to get to station so I just surrender and boost away. the 30 seconds it takes for me to kill a sidewinder isn't worth the 400 credit bounty I can cash in.

On one hand I agree that my time isn't worth that 400 CR. However, when it's late and I'm planning to go to bed after getting to the next station, sometimes I just want to punish the little #$%!@ who delays me.

I think I was in a system either Controlled or Exploited by my own faction, not the other guy's, so there would have been no PP merits.

Reposting since it may have gotten missed:

Anybody know a system near Orcus where we can turn in Alliance Bounties?

So I spent all my time in E:D last night getting that Excel Tracker thing up and running.
I can already tell it's going to be super powerful, but could do with some better training materials. I was following Yokai's guide, and I always felt like I had more questions about how it was working, and what it was doing.
Guess that's the engineer in me.

Asterith wrote:

Reposting since it may have gotten missed:

Anybody know a system near Orcus where we can turn in Alliance Bounties?

I'll have to check. I'm not there right now because I took my Asp to Sothis. Closest that I definitely know about is the Lave area, but hopefully there's outposts a bit closer.

athros wrote:

Did one run form Sothis, 3 missions and I made 14 million. It was long (35ish jumps). Once that was done, I hit Diaguandri for some outfitting.

Asp, Current outfit. I upgraded as much as I could to A grade (all but the shield generator) and figured out that I put Reinforced Bulkheads on the ship. Once I got rid of those, I hit a 27 ly jump range.

These trips are going to get much shorter :D

So, I did one run as well. 9 missions but only 22 million or so in rewards. The whole process took me maybe two and half hours, and ultimately I only used maybe 42 or 44 tons of my available 84 or 88 or whatever because I got tired of refreshing the board for missions.

So, the good news is, even at broker, you'll see missions worth over 5 million. The bad news is, even if you are using the relog trick to refresh bulletin boards, you can get pretty unlucky on what missions pop up. Of course, the higher your trade rank, the quicker this process will be, since you'll see fewer missions on the board that you don't qualify for.

As a result, I ultimately got impatient and started taking cheaper missions as well. (Incidentally, I believe I took at least one with a rank requirement of "penniless" that was still over 1 million.) Basically, I figured if I was making more than a million per delivery it was still worth my time, since the delivery points remained reasonably clustered (once you made it the 400 ly or so back to inhabited space, of course).

All told this first run was certainly not as profitable as Anaconda trading on a good route -- but, it still wasn't terrible -- probably better than Python trading on all but the best routes. And, I had terrible luck getting good missions spawned for me -- I imagine that with better luck (and/or a higher ranking), I could easily pick up 9 or 10 missions worth 35 million or more, and do the whole process in closer to two hours, which definitely would be one of the more profitable activities I could do right now.

More importantly, though, it was a hell of a lot more fun than running the same route over and over as fast as possible in a clunky giant boat. Also, I picked up a few percentage points of exploration experience, and a huge amount of trade experience -- speaking of being higher ranked, it pushed me up to entrepreneur, which should help with the next round.

So, I'll definitely be making at least another trip or two back this weekend -- and, my recommendation from earlier stands: if you have an Asp (or maybe even just a rare trading outfitted Cobra or Type 6), take some time to fly out to somewhere on the outskirts of civilization and see what kind of money you can make from long range smuggling missions before they get rebalanced. Even if you have a relatively low trade rank you should still be able to make a nice little chunk of change, and higher ranked folks should find it a fun diversion from whatever their current money making scheme is.

Also, another quick tease video from debug machines posted by David Braban this morning:

David Braben wrote:

This is another quick-and-dirty unedited video capture from Horizons on a dev machine (the same GTX 770 as before). It was taken on a rocky moon (somewhere between Earth and Mars in size). Adam is driving this SRV, Eddie the other one. A few things still need work – the display to the right (‘mass lock’ etc) is still to be changed, some audio and visual effects are missing, eg buggy texturing and motion-blur on the tyres are not working, and Eddie’s SRV was not showing on the scanner in this build. The point is it is still in development, but it is already great fun to drive.

Sorry about the abrupt cut at the end, but something came into view shortly after this, that we’re not showing yet… ;-)

Definitely taking advantage of the coronation community goal to get those ranked Imperial Ships. Finally get to trade out my T7 for the Clipper without dealing with the ranking system.

https://community.elitedangerous.com...

JeremyK wrote:

Definitely taking advantage of the coronation community goal to get those ranked Imperial Ships. Finally get to trade out my T7 for the Clipper without dealing with the ranking system.

https://community.elitedangerous.com...

Wow. Thanks for pointing that out. I'm going to get into that tonight.

I really hate that there is no way to move a ship without flying it. I bought a second ship for my son and now my foot is nailed to the floor within a region because I have to fly back to Ing Ring so he can switch to his ship.

Nevin73 wrote:

I really hate that there is no way to move a ship without flying it. I bought a second ship for my son and now my foot is nailed to the floor within a region because I have to fly back to Ing Ring so he can switch to his ship.

Yeah, I considered buying another account just to use for exploring. I enjoy exploring but I like to switch around often. Once you're out in deep space you're kind of there for the long haul.

JeremyK wrote:
Nevin73 wrote:

I really hate that there is no way to move a ship without flying it. I bought a second ship for my son and now my foot is nailed to the floor within a region because I have to fly back to Ing Ring so he can switch to his ship.

Yeah, I considered buying another account just to use for exploring. I enjoy exploring but I like to switch around often. Once you're out in deep space you're kind of there for the long haul.

This week's answers from the developers post actually tangentially commented on this:

Do you think that having the ability to have a ship delivered to a station of my choosing would be possible in the future?

This is something on our radar and is something we’re keen to implement in the game as part of a future update, but we have nothing to announce on that at the moment.

It's a bit on a non answer for sure, but it indicates a bit more activity and interest in such a future than past comments on the subject have.

----

And, not that it helps with the two players on one account scenario, but CQC does at least provide some variety for the "I want to explore but also not lock myself out of other types of gameplay" use case.

Taharka wrote:

So I spent all my time in E:D last night getting that Excel Tracker thing up and running.
I can already tell it's going to be super powerful, but could do with some better training materials. I was following Yokai's guide, and I always felt like I had more questions about how it was working, and what it was doing.
Guess that's the engineer in me.

Shoot me a note if you have any questions. Yokai's guide is good for setup, but its a bit dated in how to use it. Namely, its now very easy to get station data, like distance and types of goods sold, very easily from the system map, so the whole notion of having to visit each station to determine its distance is dated.

Also, assuming you are using EliteOCR... definitely, absolutely check the prices as they get put in. Its kind of a coinflip on whether it sees 6 or 8, and that can screw up the trade route calculator. If you edit the prices, make sure you push enter key after each edit. Don't just click around changing multiple prices without hitting enter, it will only save a price if you hit enter key after you type it in, even if you hit save.

Lastly the best tool TCE has isn't necessarily the trade route calculator, its the ships log where you can record all your activity. I just found this out this week, after using TCE pretty much only for trade caclulation for the last few months I started using the log and I love it. There are lots of other tools that help calcualte trade routes, and since the database starts empty, it takes a while for TCE to become valuable for trading. It definitely takes time to log all your activity but its quite rewarding to see what you've accomplished.

Orphu, one more Trade Dangerous question. I was using the TDUI thing and trying to update prices. The TD web UI, just uses the "trade.py update [station name] -G" command to pull up the editing UI to drop in black market prices, but it kept pulling the wrong price list for the station, so when I closed/saved it it overwrote existing price data with the wrong station. Thinking it was just the front end UI thing breaking it, I did it via command line and the same bug cropped up. If I use the -notepad flag, it pulls the correct station data, so it looks specific to the -G built in UI that's in TD.

I went to the bitbucket repository and didn't see this listed as a bug, and the thread on the frontier forums is way too long to try to track it down. Before I embarass myself asking, do you know if this is a known bug or if I'm doing something wrong?

It looks like I'm going to grind a bit on the Sothis missions in order to take advantage of the new Emperor's generosity. Mainly, I'm going to buy one of each of the iShips (Courier, Clipper, Eagle) and move them out to a more neutral location, buying a Sidewinder to get back.

All I'm going to change on them is an A rated FSD and the biggest Fuel Scoop I can. This should ensure I can get to a good, neutral station (like Saunders Dive in Wolf 1301)

Costs:

  • Clipper: 30million - 4A Fuel Scoop, 5A FSD - jump range 19.52 LY
  • Courier: 4 million - 3A Fuel Scoop, 3A FSD - jump range 20.82 LY
  • Eagle: 896k - 3A Fuel Scoop, 3A FSD - jump range 18.34 LY
  • Final Credits Total: 35,040,740

That credit goal is 2-4 runs give or take. Using roughly 27 LY jumps, I should be able to do those in 3-4 hours without Bulletin Board refreshing.

It's nice to have a goal

Carlbear95 wrote:

Orphu, one more Trade Dangerous question. I was using the TDUI thing and trying to update prices. The TD web UI, just uses the "trade.py update [station name] -G" command to pull up the editing UI to drop in black market prices, but it kept pulling the wrong price list for the station, so when I closed/saved it it overwrote existing price data with the wrong station. Thinking it was just the front end UI thing breaking it, I did it via command line and the same bug cropped up. If I use the -notepad flag, it pulls the correct station data, so it looks specific to the -G built in UI that's in TD.

I went to the bitbucket repository and didn't see this listed as a bug, and the thread on the frontier forums is way too long to try to track it down. Before I embarass myself asking, do you know if this is a known bug or if I'm doing something wrong?

Oh that is interesting. I don't use the -G option, so I'm not sure.

Looking at the code, -G takes a completely different path for fetching prices than all the other editor options. It's also "experimental" so I'm surprised TDUI uses it.

Seems like a bug!

zeroKFE wrote:

Elite:Dangerous Rocket League anyone?

ButtonMasher wrote:
zeroKFE wrote:

Elite:Dangerous Rocket League anyone?

That's CQC 2.0.

I hope to get my PC back today, so I hope to put some time into this this weekend for the first time in ages.

So to do these fun runs, one heads to Sothis and takes a mission, right? I've got time to kill tonight and I wanna dive in.

Veloxi wrote:

So to do these fun runs, one heads to Sothis and takes a mission, right? I've got time to kill tonight and I wanna dive in.

My understanding is that what's going on is that there are a number of outposts way outside normal space that have lucrative smuggling and courier missions (because they're so far from the rest of settled space) that are mostly in the same direction (because they're so far away that there's only one direction to go: back). Sothis is just one of these systems.

I saw missions up to 5 million in payouts, though I think that depends on your trade rank. 1-3 million was easier to find. These are illegal smuggling missions, so beware of both security scans and interdictions along the way. You'll likely try to stock up on them before you undertake the 400 ly trip back to the human-settled bubble, but I was seeing 3 people chasing me at once and dodging interdictions got trick. Be prepared to fight or run.

I did find some trips between Sothis and Ceos (which is next door). Missions involving outposts are easier, since you're less likely to get scanned. But beware of ambushes at the outpost itself. Sothis has an outpost station, which may be easier to access. Do pay attention to how much time is left on the mission timer, I accidentally took one that had 30 minutes left and had to hurry to drop it off. Some of the missions will only unlock if you're friendly enough with the factions or high enough trade rank.

It's a higher rate of return (I got about 20 million in a couple of hours or so) but also higher risk and more running around. I had fun, but watch your six.

There may be CGs that help with this, but someone who is more in touch can get you up to date on that.

Hah, welp, I'm 116 jumps from Sothis, this'll be interesting.

Veloxi wrote:

Hah, welp, I'm 116 jumps from Sothis, this'll be interesting.

I sincerely hope you've got an Asp, not a Viper.

Oh yeah, in an Asp with a 21-22ly jump range.

Veloxi wrote:

Hah, welp, I'm 116 jumps from Sothis, this'll be interesting.

Ouch, I probably wouldn't recommend it then. You want to be in a good jumper for this -- like, an Asp, or at the least a rare trade outfitted Cobra or Type 6.