Elite Dangerous Catch-All

I bought a type 6, did a couple of runs with it, made some credits.... I sold a type 6.

Upgraded my Viper to class B kit, slapped on the Australian Flag paintjob and went hunting. That was fun, although I need to get better at avoiding stray fire so I can stay out there longer.

Best way to make money is still doing rares runs in my long range Cobra, but bounty hunting is a nice change of pace.

polypusher wrote:

If Im not mistaken, Voice Pack uses Voice Attack, which uses Windows' built in Speech Recognition. As a result, if you haven't been through the Speech Recognition training and the extended training, it doesn't have much of a chance of recognizing you.

If you have done that, consider doing it again or re positioning your mic or something. (unless we're talking about a genuine bug in the code I guess)

I did that twice, the commands in the pack itself were a bit off.

I make the mistake of buying some rares and trying to fill my Type 6, and now I'm on some kind of epic roadtrip to try to get far enough away to sell them. I have enough spare cargo space that I'm doing some extra trading on the side, but I don't know if this trip will really pay for itself or not, compared to what I could be doing.

Maq wrote:

I bought a type 6, did a couple of runs with it, made some credits.... I sold a type 6.

Upgraded my Viper to class B kit, slapped on the Australian Flag paintjob and went hunting. That was fun, although I need to get better at avoiding stray fire so I can stay out there longer.

Best way to make money is still doing rares runs in my long range Cobra, but bounty hunting is a nice change of pace.

I left CD-34 9020 for Lave, and came blasting out of Back Enterprise at top speed. I almost ran face-first into a Viper coming the other way. After I went past, I targeted the ship and it was "CMDR Maqusan". Sorry I was going too fast to notice your new paints.

I left the game last night due to all the server weirdness (I had ghost cargo). I had read that going to another station can fix this, so that's why I left for Lave. When I got there, sure enough, I could sell the 4 crop harvesters in my hold. Unfortunately, afterward the system said I still had a full hold (4/4). I looked in the cargo tab, and now I have 4 wine. The Commodity Market would in fact allow me to sell that, but I decided not to push my luck by taking advantage of the situation. Hopefully FD will fix this soon, but I guess I should not expect that to happen before Monday.

My EDTracker is ready!! My EDTracker is ready!! I am so excited, I just hope it arrives quickly from jolly old' England.

I'm still out exploring, found a couple more neat planets including one "metal" planet that was 100% metallic instead of "Metal-Rich" which is only 33%. I also came across another supergiant star which set a new record for the biggest I've seen so far, 53.3 times the size of the Sun!

Has anything new been going on in the galactic news feed? It's been several days since I was docked at a station.

Veloxi wrote:

My EDTracker is ready!! My EDTracker is ready!! I am so excited, I just hope it arrives quickly from jolly old' England.

Ooh, so's mine. I'll have to get the PayPal stuff sorted tomorrow. I'm not going to try and make that happen on my phone.

I've been trying to get some Empire rep the past week or so. Attempting this by missions had proved very slow, so I'm going to go back to rare testing for a bit to get my cash up a bit so I can buy a type 6. I clearly need to be able to afford the A class kit to be able to do things properly.

DudleySmith wrote:
Veloxi wrote:

My EDTracker is ready!! My EDTracker is ready!! I am so excited, I just hope it arrives quickly from jolly old' England.

Ooh, so's mine. I'll have to get the PayPal stuff sorted tomorrow. I'm not going to try and make that happen on my phone.

Hah, I'm in the exact same boat. Away from home for much of the day and do not wanna sort out the PayPal on my phone either.

Veloxi wrote:

My EDTracker is ready!! My EDTracker is ready!! I am so excited, I just hope it arrives quickly from jolly old' England.

i'm eager for a review

So is this game basically Escape Velocity in first person?

Because I'd be totally all over that.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:

So is this game basically Escape Velocity in first person?

Because I'd be totally all over that.

Er...sure? It's a first person space sim set in an open universe, so yeah, sure, I guess they're similar?

Regardless, it's awesome and you need to play it.

cabdodger wrote:
Veloxi wrote:

My EDTracker is ready!! My EDTracker is ready!! I am so excited, I just hope it arrives quickly from jolly old' England.

i'm eager for a review

Likely not as eager as I am to use it! The more combat I engage in, the more I realize how freaking useful head tracking will be. So excited to finally take the plunge.

deftly wrote:
Tamren wrote:

8 seconds is the butter zone where any closer than that and you won't be able to slow down in time for a safe exit from supercruise.

That's interesting, I've always settled on 6 seconds. Maybe it varies a bit based on ship type or components.

LiquidMantis wrote:

Yeah, I shoot for 6. I always overshoot at 5 but 6 works. Once speed is in the blue and dropping I throttle back up to full. That probably shaves a second at most but it makes it feel like I'm more involved.

It's hard to tell, I've been flying a Cobra for so long I've forgotten how the other ships handle. Or do all ships handle the same in supercruise?

8 seconds out is pretty reliable for me. I tried using 7 and 6 as a test today. 6 resulted in me overshooting about half the time, 7 only a couple times. I think 8 is the safe bet.

So I've just completed a really long exploration trip out to the coalsack nebula and I came back with some neat pictures. The game actually renders the starry background using the actual stars around you, this includes other objects like nebulas.

Now the Coalsack isn't much to look at on it's own, it's basically a big ink blot in space.

IMAGE(http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/55500119873596122/F69F526586DB9ED342B1A9B49E5EF780A1D07251/)

If you get closer to it or inside it, the nebula appears as patches of darker space on the otherwise bright background.

IMAGE(http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/55500119873601322/732ADD55CB2DF613F182C71AACC7127861355C10/)

So to take a good picture of it I decided to go to the side opposite the galactic core so I could use the Milky Way as the backdrop and contrast. I think the pictures came out pretty good!

IMAGE(http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/55500119873606343/E4C8A76D5BA4252257050E19540FD5D638B78B81/)
IMAGE(http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/55500119873610517/A5E079B672253532AA7758247C5053CC668C7108/)

Your next mission, Tamren, is to find a black hole.

Got rid of my bounty and cashed in a couple I had in the independent system. Thanks to polypusher for the suggestion of hugging the station. It seems the AI can't scan you if you are super close to the station. I winced a couple of times as I bumped into it, but managed to enter and land without getting blown up.

Tried out the new beta of the voice commands and it's better but the more complex commands are still giving me trouble after flying around a bit (mostly commands to dock and others that use the side panels), but it's improving slowly.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:

So is this game basically Escape Velocity in first person?

Yes.

More pedantically, Escape Velocity was a spiritual successor to the original Elite, so maybe it's like the Fallout to Elite Dangerous' Wasteland 2. (Maybe specifically Fallout 3 in this analogy, because of the changed-perspective factor.)

There are some things you could do in Escape Velocity that you can't do in Elite Dangerous, but the sandbox is drawing from the same inspiration.

Nice images, Tamren.

BTW, the Coalsack nebula figures prominently in one of the best science fiction books of all time: The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

Tonight's adventure was a brief stop at the Lave nav point for some bounties. After taking out a Sidewinder, I ran across a Wanted Eagle. The guy turned on me and blew open my canopy, so I only had 5 minutes of air. I managed to disengage enough to charge my FSD and broke away after a minute or so.

Getting out of SC at the station is something I still don't do consistently, and this time it was made harder by the lack of HUD right in front of me. Somehow I got lucky, though, and was in front of Lave Station with about 1 minute of air left.

I requested docking, put 4 pips to engines, set throttle to full and started to boost. I thought I was going to crash into the toaster rack thing, but just missed it and burst into the station with seconds of air remaining. I was in such a hurry that I had all kinds of trouble landing, such as coming in crooked and hitting the landing gear button twice.

Apparently I didn't need to worry since there was air inside the station, so I was safe as soon as I got through the airlock.

So my exploration roundtrip to the Coalsack nebula turned up a bunch of interesting finds. It's hard to say how far I had to travel in LY because I made a lot of detours and didn't go directly there and back. A rough estimate would be 800-1200 LY of hyperspace jumps.

I made some decent money doing this trip. I earned a total of 1.6 million credits for about 3 days of exploration. In terms of profit per hour exploration is not nearly as lucrative as trading. The key is to find interesting things that people care about. Most planets you come across are only of "academic" interest, lots of boring gas giants and ice moons and stuff like that. What people want to hear about are the planets with amospheres, life forms, terraforming possibilities and mineral resources. I only stopped and examined in detail those systems that looked interesting, doing absolutely everything would take too long.

Probably the weirdest thing I ever came across was a small ice planet with a 100% neon gas atmosphere. For simply jumping into a system, discovering all the planets on the scanner and scanning the parent star I could make about 1000-2000 credits. Terraformable planets and metallic planets netted the most money, the highest profit I made from a single system was 100.5k credits, but a good haul is anything north of 10k.

This list is missing all the other systems with less than 30k profit. Cashing in these exploration bounties is very tedious because you have to do them one at a time and it takes a few seconds to authenticate.

IMAGE(http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/55500119877202825/FE8B195457EBE13682B608DF2509614A1F8B2AD9/)

Oh and I ran into a certain star on the way home and couldn't resist making a detour.

IMAGE(http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/55500119877198396/482E6C38B49E9B4911D806D17EC7C51580F4FC53/)

Veloxi wrote:
cabdodger wrote:
Veloxi wrote:

My EDTracker is ready!! My EDTracker is ready!! I am so excited, I just hope it arrives quickly from jolly old' England.

i'm eager for a review

Likely not as eager as I am to use it! The more combat I engage in, the more I realize how freaking useful head tracking will be. So excited to finally take the plunge.

Ooh, saw the recent posts about the EDTracker and I am planning on making one next week. It helps that I work in a University Electronic Engineering Dept...

So, I have another question...

Are you supposed to manually write down all the prices at each station? In Freelancer, once you had been to a station, you had the prices for that station and so could plan routes as long as you had already been somewhere... I understand that prices changes in Elite in real-time, but it would be very helpful to have data on the prices as 'last seen'. Am I missing this information in game? All I can find, by clicking the down arrow on the 'Galactic Average' column is information about established trade routes e.g. X imports this and that, and Y export this and that - I guess this info gives you a hint about a trade run that will at least make a little profit...

If such price data is not available in game, is there a way of harvesting it out of the game into a spreadsheet? I guess yes, as I have found references all over the web to various trade tools although most seem to not be up-to-date or maintained anymore...

Any answers or tips gratefully received.

Do you just go to various planets and scan them to get Cartographer stuff to sell? I've shaved about 30 LY off the trip from LHS3447 to Lave but all my Cartoographer fees are minimal.

Should I be going to every planet in a system and scanning them?

Shymlark wrote:

If such price data is not available in game, is there a way of harvesting it out of the game into a spreadsheet? I guess yes, as I have found references all over the web to various trade tools although most seem to not be up-to-date or maintained anymore...

Any answers or tips gratefully received.

There are various third party tools available now to make trading easier. But I find the best way is to simply keep copious handwritten notes. I have charts and tables written out telling me all the places where I get certain items in the Lave area for instance.

Finding a profitable trading route is pretty simple, just find a place with high supply, buy one of each item they can sell to a place with high demand. Then repeat the process in the opposite direction and figure out the most profitable commodity. This is how you set up a trade route, using tools will simply make this easier but it still comes down to finding the highest profit.

Carlbear95 wrote:

Do you just go to various planets and scan them to get Cartographer stuff to sell? I've shaved about 30 LY off the trip from LHS3447 to Lave but all my Cartoographer fees are minimal.

Should I be going to every planet in a system and scanning them?

Exploration is pretty simple once you figure it out:

1. To explore you need a scanner, the only difference between the basic/expert/advanced scanners is the maximum range of detection. Scanners work like a sonar pulse, you fire it off and the pulse detects all objects within a certain radius of your ship. The basic scanner is limited in this regard while the advanced scanner has no maximum range and can detect things hundreds of thousands of light seconds away.

2. Step 1 simply finds the objects, the next step is to move up to them and scan them in detail. To do this you don't need but will want to have a detailed surface scanner, this gives you more specific detail about the body in question. Detailed scans are required to find things like life forms and atmospheres so you should always have one when exploring.

3. Multiple people can "discover" the same objects. The first person gets a large bounty but the next few people only get a small reward for corroborating their data. I can get 1-2k credits for simply scanning a new system, but re-scanning somewhere people have already been can net as little as a hundred credits. For best results you should simply go out into uncharted space.

Tamren wrote:
Shymlark wrote:

If such price data is not available in game, is there a way of harvesting it out of the game into a spreadsheet? I guess yes, as I have found references all over the web to various trade tools although most seem to not be up-to-date or maintained anymore...

Any answers or tips gratefully received.

There are various third party tools available now to make trading easier. But I find the best way is to simply keep copious handwritten notes. I have charts and tables written out telling me all the places where I get certain items in the Lave area for instance.

Finding a profitable trading route is pretty simple, just find a place with high supply, buy one of each item they can sell to a place with high demand. Then repeat the process in the opposite direction and figure out the most profitable commodity. This is how you set up a trade route, using tools will simply make this easier but it still comes down to finding the highest profit.

Thanks Tamren!

I'm planning on starting a rare trade run, probably from Orrere to somewhere a long way away. Bast and Zeessze seem to be suggested around the web. I only have a cargo bay size of 8 and a jump range of about 9ish so this trip may take me ages... Is this a good idea?

What ship are you in?

My rares run goes like this;:

1. Stock up on rares from Leesti, Diso, Lave, and Orrere until I have 32 tonnes.

2. Plot a route to 39 Tauri with elitedangerouscentral.com.

3. Load the in-game galaxy map and plot a route to the furthest waypoint the game will allow from the previous step.

4. For each star on the route, if the star is unknown then scan the star and ping the discovery scanner. Deep scan the whole system if the mood takes me.

5. Fill up the tank and make the next jump.

6. If the next destination is the final waypoint, SC towards it while plotting a new waypoint in the galaxy map.

7. Unload rares at 39 Tauri for aroud 500k-600k. Load up on Tauri rares.

8. Decide if I can be bothered with the long SC run out to Geras to get the abundance of rares there, otherwise stock up at Fujin, Witchhaul, and Momus.

9. Return to Leesti using the same process.

10. Before logging out, make sure to buy all the available rares at the station as it will restock in time for your next login.

For this I'm using a combat-ready Cobra with 32 tonnes of cargo, d-scanner, surface scanner, A4 FSD, and an A2 fuel scoop but started with much lower tech originally. I think I had a range of 10-11 when I started.

omni wrote:

What ship are you in?

Sidewinder. I am only a few hours in. There are hardly any trade missions around and trading rares seems to be a good approach.

I'd actually recommend bounty hunting in a Startwinder. So long as you carefully pick your targets you'll pick up some decent cash and, far more importantly, a lot of skill. You stand to lose no cash as your replacement ship is free and you've no cargo investment to protect. Plus even if you die you've learnt some combat chops.

I just took anything going that was above maybe 2k. 3k credits for a one jump trade mission? Sure. The next station may have a trade missions for 10k carrying 2 silver. I think with the low cargo capacity of the sidewinder, rare good trade runs are going to take a very long time, for now all that much profit, comparatively. If you can do any kind of mission to get up to a hauler, for around 45k or so, maybe a few more for the upgraded FSD and an extra cargo rack, then Rare runs will be much more profitable and worthwhile.

Having said that, it is a game, just do whatever you have fun doing