Elite Dangerous Catch-All

peanut3141 wrote:

I picked this up for free from Epic and it's been my #1 game during the holiday break. Started off doing a lot of space trucking, then pivoted into passenger missions out at Robigo to get my first billion. Since then I've been chasing the buffs, picking up another billion when there was the 3x payout for exploration data (elite from there too) and when the combat reward buff hit, I made a PvE Krait II that is a ton of fun to fly.

I'm now on the engineer train. Dirty drag drives are an insane buff to speed and maneuverability. Just unlocked Palin and look foward to taking my Krait back out to the Haz Res again. I think my next priority will be unlocking Guardian weapons as I already have all the modules unlocked and try my hand at Xeno killing.

Does anybody have a recommendation on VR setup for the game? I have a friend with an Index, but that's a bit much for me to justify. Anybody using the Quest 2 or the HP Reverb G2 that can give a review?

I usually play in the Veloxi group and would be down for any wing activities. I might go out to Colonia at some point to unlock those engineers, but I'll probably hang around the Bubble for a while finishing all the local ones first.

Edit:
Here's my Inara profile with my current builds
https://inara.cz/cmdr/297019/

So far I've found EDDiscovery and the Market Connector to be invaluable. Any other 3rd party tools that I should check out? Inara, Coriolis, eddb and spansh are mainstays as well.

For VR:
I use my Rift S for VR and I second Teneman's complaint about the maps. It's kinda awful to have to blindly, or peaking through around my nose, find my keyboard to do maps stuff. BUT it hasn't killed the VR for me, it's simply too amazing. Still one of the best VR experiences to date , in my opinion. What I do is just adjust my play to the task. If I am doing a lot of jumping and 3rd party tool using to gather materials or something, I play without VR, if I am planning to stay in one place or in a limited area(or have a distant goal I only have to plot once or twice) then I play in VR. Word of warning, for SRV use in VR, enable the thing that stabilizes the horizon. I have pretty solid VR legs and it got me. I can't speak to either of those two specific headsets, unfortunately.

Tools:
ED Engineer makes material collecting a LOT better. Can make a "shopping list" of sorts and pick all the things you want to engineer and it makes a total of all the stuff you need which is tied into your game data and updates as you collect or spend them.

peanut3141 wrote:

It's fairly trivial to make 100M/hr running passenger missions out of Robigo mines.

Robigo runs are still a thing?

*Legion* wrote:
peanut3141 wrote:

It's fairly trivial to make 100M/hr running passenger missions out of Robigo mines.

Robigo runs are still a thing?

Yep, and after the various mining nerfs, they're probably one of the most lucrative activities out there.

Wow, I headed over to the new CG location last night and there aren't any locations to effectively work on the bounty one. No RES sites at all. No beacon. Hoping they tweak that.

Yeah, its one of those where you're better off grabbing an interdictor and snatching them out of frame shift. If you need an alternate safe haven to escape to, I parked the Wanderer one system over at Hyades Sector GW-W d1-92. I'm pretty much ignoring the combat arm of this one because its such a pain, and just filled the carrier with 10,000 tons of grain back in Irukama and brought it as close as I could.

These are prime uses for Fleet Carriers. I am going to do some hauling for that side of the CG tonight/tomorrow and see if I can get into the top 75% (and stay there). Shall see. If enough people are using fleet carriers, that may be hard to do. (No hate on the fleet carriers or their owners, just a thing) I'm going to start working on getting myself one soon.

REALLY hope they pop a RES site or two into one of those rings though..

Yeah, they really need to adjust the CG mechanics now carriers are a thing, or introduce exclusion zones like permits to keep them out.

As it is you need to be pretty quick off the mark to get a parking slot; for this one the system was full within the first hour, and will likely stay that way for the duration

Not the best mechanic for a worldwide audience

In the Frontier forums people are saying there is a HAZ RES now and a comp nav beacon. YES

Confirmed. Juicy sites for bounty hunting now.

Those of you who have Fleet Carriers:

Do you feel like they are too much work to keep up?
What do you primarily use them for?
What is the best way you have found to make money with them?

Thanks in advance!

I'm interested too. I'm sitting at like, 2.3 billion credits and I need to decide whether to grind out what I need or not bother.

not sure if the numbers have changed, but last i recall, just letting a kitted out fleet carrier sit (no refueling) costs a little over a billion a year just in weekly fees. that's on top of the 5 billion that i think it takes to actually buy it and another couple billion to kit it out.

Yeah my goal budget was like, 7b for a carrier just to make sure I had a year of upkeep in case I didn't log in for a while. But I might just skip the carrier and wait for Odyssey. Depends on how fun they sound.

BuzzW wrote:

Yeah my goal budget was like, 7b for a carrier just to make sure I had a year of upkeep in case I didn't log in for a while. But I might just skip the carrier and wait for Odyssey. Depends on how fun they sound.

This was my thought exactly. I want a year of upkeep in the can already in case. I can make the weekly upkeep in half an hour easily but in the event I can't login or just get board for a while I don't want to lose it while I am away.

I am just curious if the payout from parking near a mining location to buy from miners at a bit below the market high and then jumping to the highest paying location to sell makes enough to warrant it. OR if finding something really cheap and buying a butt-ton and jumping to a site with a good price to sell would be worth it. That kinda thing.

I have a fleet carrier and it's hard to get a parking spot at systems paying out high amounts unless you're keeping a close eye on prices. What I've been doing is harvesting something like painite, loading up my FC with a couple thousand tons, then finding somewhere that has good, but not the best, prices in order to fairly easily jump in and make however many trips from my FC to the station to sell.

Asterith wrote:

I have a fleet carrier and it's hard to get a parking spot at systems paying out high amounts unless you're keeping a close eye on prices. What I've been doing is harvesting something like painite, loading up my FC with a couple thousand tons, then finding somewhere that has good, but not the best, prices in order to fairly easily jump in and make however many trips from my FC to the station to sell.

Thanks for replying. How bad is the tedium of the back and forth for the selling? And do you have to buy the limpets from yourself? Or can you just restock since you bought them already? I guess it doesn’t matter because it goes into your FC wallet anyway just curious.

Halsariph wrote:
Asterith wrote:

I have a fleet carrier and it's hard to get a parking spot at systems paying out high amounts unless you're keeping a close eye on prices. What I've been doing is harvesting something like painite, loading up my FC with a couple thousand tons, then finding somewhere that has good, but not the best, prices in order to fairly easily jump in and make however many trips from my FC to the station to sell.

Thanks for replying. How bad is the tedium of the back and forth for the selling? And do you have to buy the limpets from yourself? Or can you just restock since you bought them already? I guess it doesn’t matter because it goes into your FC wallet anyway just curious.

I am unsure on the limpets. You don't buy them from the FC you just load up your ship but there's a part of the FC upkeep that might be going towards any consumables you use. The back and forth isn't too bad if you can get a parking spot around the same planet as the station you want to sell at. Just have a ship you can load up for cargo and make a few runs back and forth. It doesn't have to be anything super powerful since the trips are short. It's nice because even if you don't have the outfitting or shipyard installed, as the owner you can still park all your ships and store/swap modules as needed, you just can't buy anything. Makes the upkeep more reasonable (I think mine is 9.5 million/week).

Hey all. So I got back from an exploration trip, and decided to kit out my corvette for some PvE. I never fully set it up before I stopped playing a few years ago, so it was pretty bare bones. Anyway, I've got it set with bi-weave shields, seven shield boosters (three heavy duty, two thermal and two resist), a guardian FSD booster, 8A overcharged powerplant, 7A dirty thrusters and an 8A Power Distributor. I've got a lot of empty internals to fill up, but that's fine.

My big issue is weaponry. For large ship combat, I'm used to my Anaconda, with a Huge Multicannon, 3x Large Pulse Lasers, 2x Medium Multicannons (all of the above gimballed), and 2x Small Pulse Lasers (turreted). All of these are Efficient, with most being oversized and one of the medium MCs being corrosive. I'm fairly capable in bounty hunting and CZs with this setup. When I set my sights on something it doesn't always die instantly, but things do tend to die fairly quickly.

For the 'vette I set things up with a Huge Beam Laser, a Huge Multicannon, a Large Multicannon, 2x Medium Pulse Lasers (all of the above gimballed), and 2x Small Pulse Lasers (turreted). Weapons aren't fully engineered yet, but the beam is long range/thermal vent, the MCs are Overcharged, and the lasers are efficient.

I just got done running some CZs and a bit of bounty hunting. The build is an absolute tank, I can sit and do nothing and barely take a scratch. But for some reason, Enemy ships seem to take waaaaaaay longer to kill than they do with my Anaconda. On top of that, I'm running capacitor dry even with four pips to weapons. I believe that's likely due to my shooting style, which tends to be "hold the trigger down until it dies" rather than short controlled bursts. I swapped my PD from charge enhanced to weapon focused and that helps on the weapons capacity, but of course sys and engines run dry.

Do I have the weapon loadout wrong? This is my first time using a beam rather than pulse, is the problem just my shooting style?

I'm considering swapping the huge beam for a huge pulse, and seeing if that helps. I may also swap the two medium pulse lasers for multicannons, to closer replicate my Anaconda build.

Any other ideas, or thoughts in general?

EDIT: Here's an inara link to the build. It it already has the huge beam swapped for the huge pulse, but everything else is the same.

You're loadout is energy heavy. Unfortunately many ships in the game are innately more hull tanky than shield tanky, so for PvE you want to focus more on hull weapons. Personally I'd run 2 huge MC, 1 large beam/pulse, 2 medium MC, and 2 small pulse. That should be pretty balanced to both rip through shields, and then absolutely destroy hulls.

Ideally I'd say go huge multis and smaller sizes beam lasers. Shields don't care about what size a weapon is but bigger size weapons do more hull damage so multis pay to be big (cheaper to reload too).
Also, consider long range on your beams,the corvette is so slow that you're likely losing alot of dps to range falloff.

Looks like enterprising CMDRs are using their capital ships to trap new players in indentured work camps. What is this, EVE online? Article

Even if they didn't make them sell jump drive they'd still be a long way from home and have to trek back. But that's extra cruel.

hmmm, i guess what we need is a few people with carriers to be ready for humanitarian relief/rescue missions.

I love that the Fuel Rats organized a rescue. That group may be my favorite thing about Elite: Dangerous.

My friend ran out of fuel once while playing and I can't tell you how excited I was to tell him about the Fuel Rats.

Worth noting that the article says it happened to fewer than 20 people, many of them kids. These dudes are jerks for sure, but I'm not convinced this is a widespread problem.

I'm up to 4.6 billion credits and I'm starting to feel the grind. But I'm so close! I was mining, but I got bored so I switched to Robigo runs, but that got boring so I switched to pirate massacre mission stacking.

Frontier's stance on bots and cheating on Elite.
Anybody know more about what activities people were using bots in? Like... Maybe the whole game can be automated to reduce the grind to get a fancy ship?

Honestly the credit grind is kinda gone. Depending on how efficiently you grind you can get an Anaconda on a new account in a couple of days maybe. A more casual or new player will take more time but missions pay out drastically more than they did.

From what I'm hearing, people are saying bots were being used by people to manipulate the background simulation in their favor and spread their factions. I'm not sure if anyone had hard evidence on that happening but I haven't been paying close attention.