Elite Dangerous Catch-All

zeroKFE wrote:
Orphu wrote:

The multi-crew demo in the stream today looks like fun. Some neat features in there.

Yeah, I liked what I saw too. A bit bummed to hear than SRVs wouldn't be supported for multicrew (at least at first) though, but I expect that a lot of folks will get a lot of fun out of the new features even still.

I suspect it has more to do with the fact that there are no large SRVs with multiple seats yet. They've said there will be more types of SRVs in the future. (not sure when they will get around to it...)

I wouldn't want to multicrew an SRV unless they fix the handling to be not complete and utter garbage. All they really need to do is give SRVs 360 thruster control so that they can stabilize on all axis and driving one would be more like driving a ship. Currently how it works is you can only control your horizontal orientation by turning tires and the game just pretends that it doesn't have lateral thrusters. This leads to many an out of control spin, but an SRV obviously DOES have lateral thrusters because the moment you leave the ground the game automatically yanks you to a halt to stop any spin.

zeroKFE wrote:

Resistances have always had diminishing returns. After you hit a boost of about 45% (for shields at least -- not sure if the same number applies for boosting hull resistances) or so, you'll see progressively lower gains there.

Good to know. I just did some testing through the shipyard and the diminishing returns kick in pretty hard after 50%. Adding another +25% only provides half of the bonus, so a total of 75% is only 62.5% in effect. 100% to resistance becomes 68.4%. So 50% is clearly the point to aim for.

It was nice to put my Sol permit to use at last and visit Earth, and take a look at home from space.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/hRl6z9x.png)

I like the term "renewbie."

So, after bouncing off the engineers (figuratively) and off the surface exploration (literally) I've decided to do some trading and save up enough money to trade in my Vulture for the "Mur-De-Lance" build mentioned earlier in the thread. I've got a Type-9 and about 90 million credits to go. 86 mil for the A rated build, another 15 for an Asp to do my scanning and mining in and about 50 million in walking around money.

The Type-9 is as bad as everyone says. Too sluggish in supercruse to shake interdictions a lot of the time and slow enough that out running pirates long enough to recharge the FSD can get hairy. (Got down to 4% once.) I'm really getting a bit tired of the trading grind but I'm getting close to Elite trader and looking forward to getting back into PvE and missions.

Al wrote:

I like the term "renewbie."

So, after bouncing off the engineers (figuratively) and off the surface exploration (literally)....

That did make me chuckle. Keeping an eye on the gravity is essential, I too have pancaked my shielded full health Asp to about 3% hull strength just by tapping the downward thrust key on a 1.5 grav planet.....

Carlbear95 wrote:

The thing about Distribution Centers is interesting. Will have to find one of those.

Have you had any luck with that? I'm busy bouncing from from [edit: famine] system to [edit: famine] system with no luck. Should I be looking at a certain population in EDDB or any other settings [edit: besides famine] I might want to try?

[edit: This is what I get for posting when I'm hungry.]

Al wrote:
Carlbear95 wrote:

The thing about Distribution Centers is interesting. Will have to find one of those.

Have you had any luck with that? I'm busy bouncing from from system to system with no luck. Should I be looking at a certain population in EDDB or any other settings I might want to try?

Look for systems in famine state

Al wrote:

Have you had any luck with that? I'm busy bouncing from from [edit: famine] system to [edit: famine] system with no luck. Should I be looking at a certain population in EDDB or any other settings [edit: besides famine] I might want to try?

When you're looking for "points of interest" like conflict zones, convoy beacons and distro centres they only show up within 1000 light seconds of your ship. So if you jump into a system and all of the planets are within 1000ls your list will be populated immediately, if not you may have to fly around a bit and check out various planets in the system. A trip over 50000ls is generally not worth it solely on a hunch so if there is no easily available place then try the next system listed on EDDB.

Hello everyone! I took the old Cobra out for a spin for the first time in 2 years last night and before you ask, yes, I got stuck in the the docking corridor and blown up.

So I've not played this until just after it went Gold and I have very little idea what's happening. There's voice acting! There's Factions! There's "Engineers". Apparently I can land on planets. Also I appear to have won a Viper MkIV in a raffle because it's waiting for me at Bernard's Star.

Can anyone give me a bullet point rundown of what I should start checking out? If there's grinding that needs doing how do I get on the path? I suspect I have a lot of reputation and influence to level up. I used to mostly just do rares runs with planetary surveys in between but obviously in the 2 years I've not been playing pretty much everything local has been mapped already.

Also do we still have a goodjer server that everyone plays on?

Your's re-noobly etc.

I'm on a bit of an ongoing break (burnout) but when I log in I'm either in Veloxi's server or the Mobius PVE group. The Viper MK IV was for purchasing Horizons before 2/2016.

Bookmark INARA, it's pretty useful with looking up the engineer info, just note that the commodity costs of upgrades has been taken out for the time being. I'd start with unlocking and rep'ing up with Falicity Farseer, as the upgraded FSD range helps you get around and saves you time with everything else. Early on it's the best bang for your buck on upgrades. I'm sure others will chime in beyond that... I've been out for a while myself and just keeping up with the thread. I'll probably hop back in soon to start grinding the alien ruins stuff to finish that mission, I just haven't been up to the grind of it yet.

If you need alien artifact fragments there is a location on a specific planet where 3 artifacts spawn on the ground and you can just go there and refresh the instance until you have enough. The whole process took me about 10 minutes, vastly preferable to getting artifacts from USSs. Shortcuts like this are almost mandatory to prevent engineer burnout.

Wondering if I should just sell the Viper Mk IV to help buy an Asp.

Felicity Farseer is definitely the place to start, as better FSD range makes everything better. To get the upgrades, you need components, which means surface mining. Which means landing on a planet for the first time. Which totally does not mean OH SH*T I WAS GOING HOW FAST OH MY PRECIOUS HULL.

Basically, you're going to need minerals from surface mining, data you get from scanning ships (just having them targeted and letting your basic scanner do the work), scanning wake echoes with a wake scanner, plus materials you pick up from USS wreckage, or from wreckage you cause yourself; my first foray into piracy was I needed something dropped by transport ships, so I flew into an anarchy system and spent a few hours blowing up AI transport ships. I'd say start with surface mining to get a feel for that, as most of the upgrades will require that. The early FSD ones are wake scanning data, so hang out outside a popular station for a bit and just scan some wakes.

Maq wrote:

Wondering if I should just sell the Viper Mk IV to help buy an Asp.

My general take is the Asp Explorer is a phenomenally great ship for all sorts of things, so, if you can nab one, most definitely. I've got a heavily-engineered and fully A-rated Python (and I'm heading rapidly towards Anaconda or Corvette), and I still use my AspX all the time. I got a pretty decent RNG roll on my FSD upgrade, and it's got a 45ly range. It's small, easy to fly, has a huge jump range, decent cargo . . . it's just a great ship.

I'm using my Cobra as a multirole right now. I think I'll sell it once I can buy an Asp outright and use the proceeds to handle upgrading. Asp is always the ship I've had my eye on as my next upgrade.

MilkmanDanimal wrote:
Maq wrote:

Wondering if I should just sell the Viper Mk IV to help buy an Asp.

My general take is the Asp Explorer is a phenomenally great ship for all sorts of things, so, if you can nab one, most definitely. I've got a heavily-engineered and fully A-rated Python (and I'm heading rapidly towards Anaconda or Corvette), and I still use my AspX all the time. I got a pretty decent RNG roll on my FSD upgrade, and it's got a 45ly range. It's small, easy to fly, has a huge jump range, decent cargo . . . it's just a great ship.

I've been on a break similar to PurEvil, but have to agree with this. I have three ships: My long-range Asp Explorer, my engineered multi-role Python, and my Fer-De-Lance (which is still a work-in-progress).

The Asp is a great for hauling stuff around due to it's range and its decent cargo capacity. It can also hold its own in combat if you fly smart. I don't usually fly smart, though, so I tend to avoid combat when I'm using it. Other commanders are far more successful with it.

Maq wrote:

I'm using my Cobra as a multirole right now. I think I'll sell it once I can buy an Asp outright and use the proceeds to handle upgrading. Asp is always the ship I've had my eye on as my next upgrade.

The Asp is rather great - if I hadnt spent so much time on engineering my Python I think I would trade it in for an Asp as Im a one ship person and loved the multi-role bit that it does so well (though as Hrdina said In not a combateer)

Sold. Next trip by Porta station I'm trading my Cobra in for an Asp then I'll start investigating the whole engineering thing which of which I'm only tangentially aware.

Maq wrote:

Sold. Next trip by Porta station I'm trading my Cobra in for an Asp then I'll start investigating the whole engineering thing which of which I'm only tangentially aware.

Not sure if anyone already mentioned this, but try and buy the ships with discount. In Li Rong Yui controlled systems such as Diaguandri or Lembava you can get 15% off ships and modules, and that lower cost is ultimately reflected in the buy-back cost of the ship if it gets destroyed ... saving you money.

Edit: Ah, Porta is in a Li Rong Yui system by the looks of it, so you should be good

Last time I checked Porta was cheaper than anywhere else I'd seen an Asp which is why I mentioned it.

What seemed to work for me to find a distribution center was to go to famine systems with a population of at least a billion. That got me one in the Alicarl system where I was able to get 150 atypical disrupted wake echos and about 35 datamined wake exceptions.

I had read that you can spam grade one blueprints to work up to rank 5. Is that still correct or should I be hitting every grade on the way?

Maq wrote:

Can anyone give me a bullet point rundown of what I should start checking out?

I followed Masark's trading guide to finance my quest to get a souped up Fer-De-Lance. If you're looking to make money (relatively) quickly and rank up in trading, it works.

Al wrote:

I had read that you can spam grade one blueprints to work up to rank 5. Is that still correct or should I be hitting every grade on the way?

It is far easier to just hit every grade because it only takes 3 rolls to get to the next level. You'll have plenty of materials to do this with because if you look up a level 5 recipe, in the process of getting the super-rare ingredients you will find plenty of basic materials as well. Just keep about 10-15 of every material you find.

If you absolutely must, it IS possible to get to at least level 3 with abundant materials like sulfur and other very common surface minerals. But the further you go up the less each upgrade is worth until you only get about 1-3% per roll.

Al wrote:
Maq wrote:

Can anyone give me a bullet point rundown of what I should start checking out?

I followed Masark's trading guide to finance my quest to get a souped up Fer-De-Lance. If you're looking to make money (relatively) quickly and rank up in trading, it works.

Thanks but that's all stuff I already know. I was more interested in stuff like Factions, Planetary Landings, Engineers, That whole Concordia thing....

Just a grrrr last night when I saw two short distance delivery missions at my home system offering 2.3 and 1.4m in payments...

.... I accepted them and but the marketplace thing must have refreshed at that very moment as both failed to register and then disappeared.

Or was this the Elite equivalent of "iphone 7 for $50" website adverts?!

I just finished some calculations on the optimal type of armour to use. This will look like gibberish at first but it will make sense later. Skip to the end for the TLDR.

military -20 +00 -40 -20 -60
heavy -14 +05 -33 -09 -42
Kinetic +28 -10 -54 +14 -36
thermal -32 +40 -54 -08 -46

mirrored -75 +50 -50 -25 -75
heavy -66 +52 -42 -14 -56
kinetic -05 +45 -65 +40 -25
thermal -93 +70 -65 -23 -88

reactive +25 -40 +20 -15 +05
heavy +29 -33 +24 -04 +20
kinetic +55 -54 +12 +01 +13
thermal +17 +16 +12 +33 +45

Each group of numbers represents the resistances of a type of ship armour, mirrored, reactive or military. I didn't include reinforced and lightweight as they have the same resistances as military. In order the first three numbers are kinetic resistance, thermal resistance and explosive resistance. The top line is the base resistance stats for that type of armour, the lines below are the adjusted stat line when the heavy duty, kinetic resistance and thermal resistance engineer mods are applied. The fourth number on each line is the sum of the kinetic and thermal resistances, the fifth number is the sum of all three types of resistances.

At a glance you can see the differences between the armour types. Mirrored is obviously much better against thermal, but military is not far behind. Reactive is the most balanced because it doesn't have a glaring weakness to explosive damage. I'll draw some conclusions on this data later.

The next thing I did was look at hull strength. An Anaconda with the default lightweight hull has 954 hull points. There is absolutely no downside to putting the heavy duty upgrade on lightweight armour because the weight penalty multiplier has no effect. Heavy duty lightweight Anaconda armour has a hull strength of 1228 and superior resistances. If you want to have a little more hull without too much of a weight penalty you can also use lightweight modded military armour which gets you 1764 hull points at a cost of only 27 tons of weight. This is negligible in terms of speed and manoeuvrability loss, unless you are somehow riding the line in terms of your engine's optimal mass ratio. This may be an issue for smaller ship in terms of jump range but larger ships with larger FSDs of size 6 and 7 are much less affected by small increases in weight.

If you're not expecting combat then heavy duty lightweight is where the story ends in terms of armour selection, if you ARE expecting combat then you always have some hull reinforcements mounted because base hull strength is often not enough. Each hull reinforcement gives you extra base hull points and increases your resistances across the board by .5% per slot size.

There is only one engineer mod that's worth anything for hull reinforcements, Heavy Duty. Heavy Duty increases resistances across the board by 15%, even for size 1 reinforcements. There are more specialized mods like thermal resistance which adds 40% thermal resist but subtracts 10% from kinetic and explosive for a net gain of only 20%, this pales in comparison to heavy duty which adds up to a 45% bonus. On top of this Heavy Duty is the only mod that increases the hull points you get from the reinforcement, so it's the obvious choice unless you have a very specific build in mind.

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I'm looking for the best armour configuration for PVE. You might say that you don't need to "care" as much about PVE but it can still be highly dangerous even for death fortresses engineered to the gills. You don't encounter things like triple anaconda assassination missions on a regular basis but I want to be able to complete them for variety's sake if nothing else. I've decided that the best option is thermal resistant reactive armour, especially when you account for hull reinforcements. Reactive armour is BY FAR the best in terms of overall protection, just examining the stats I listed above none of the other armour configurations even come close.

Assuming the stats in the edshipyard are accurate, one thing that isn't immediately obvious is that diminishing returns take effect AFTER any mods to the base armour type. So if you take mirrored armour with it's +50% thermal resistance and mod the armour to further resist thermal by 20% you end up with 70% thermal resistance before hull reinforcement mods. However if you start with basic mirrored armour and try to raise the thermal resist from 50% to 70% using modded reinforcements it takes far more than 20%. This is why thermal reactive armour is the best, it doesn't start with any weaknesses and while it's resistances are relatively low across the board they are all positive. There's no reason why you can't exemplify one type of resistance over all others and get 80% resistance to one damage type, but in the process your other defenses will suffer with resistance penalties of -75% or more, and because of diminishing returns it's that much harder to drag them out of the pit even with huge bonuses.

So here is my optimal scenario:

- Thermal resistant reactive armour has a resistance statline of 17/16/12 and a hull point total equivalent to military armour. To increase the resistances and hull points further, heavy duty hull reinforcement are added.
- Each hull reinforcement adds 15-17 points of resistance to all types. The extra hull points are not subject to diminishing returns, but the resistances are. So the first one will only add about 12%, the second will add another 11%, but the third will only add about 5%. So two heavy duty reinforcements of any size is the optimal point for resistance increases
- It takes five different heavy duty hull reinforcements of size 1 to buff kinetic, thermal and(!) explosive resistance to at or just under +50%. This can also be achieved with two size 5 reinforcements and two size 1 reinforcements. This is simply a minimum guideline, you should be mounting as many reinforcement as you have slots for.
- Past +50% the diminishing returns hit HARD, if you want to tweak the numbers you must change the type and mod of the base armour, not the hull reinforcements.

This results in an Anaconda hull strength of 4141 and resistances of 52/51/48 which increases my effective hull points against kinetic/thermal/explosive to 8534/8381/8000. I could further max out my slots with hull reinforcements but this configuration allows me to carry 36 cargo and a 3A limpet controller for material salvage. Just as an example if I swap the armour type from Thermal Reactive to Kinetic Reactive my resistances become 74/9/48. Thermal Mirrored is -13/82/3 and Kinetic Mirrored is 38/68/3.

--------

So TLDR:

1. When combined with hull reinforcements, reactive armour modded for thermal resistance is the best overall armour choice with +50% resistance across the board. The ONLY downside is price, reactive armour can cost almost 60-75% as much as buying an entire ship!
2. For all noncombat uses, including exploration, heavy duty lightweight armour is the best.
3. Heavy duty is the only mod for hull reinforcements that's any good, ignore the others unless you have a very specific build in mind.
4. For diminishing returns, two heavy duty hull reinforcements of any size is the "sweet spot". Any more than 3 and the further resistance gain drops to a trickle (but you still get the hull points).

I'm going to tackle shield optimization next, which should be easy considering the fewer options involved.

Thanks for doing the heavy lifting there — that's some good data and analysis, and it checks out with my own half assed research and anecdotal experiences.

A few small thoughts:

- As I've noted previously, in my experience heavy duty modded lightweight is more than good enough for most PvE combat, particularly in an Anaconda or Corvette — up to and including high intensity combat zones. I definitely would take your advice for crazier stuff, though, such as big ticket assassination missions or probing into high threat signal sources — those can be unbelievably dangerous even for the most prepare ship and pilot. I'd also take your advice if I was a bit shaky about my piloting skills, or had enough money to afford the upgrade but zero tolerance for risk.

- As such, when outfitting for combat and making the choice between heavy duty lightweight and and upgraded hull (thermal modded reactive armor, as we've just learned) the cost is the big consideration for most players, but for people who have tons of cash there is still a very real consideration of how the added weight affects thruster performance and FSD range.

- The advent of ship transfers obviously makes the FSD range a bit less of an issue if you have the cash to spend (for example, I was more than happy to just spend the 10 million or whatever it cost to send my Corvette out to 17 Draconis rather than jump it there myself), but when you are only planning on doing routine, predictable combat (i.e., combat zones and bounty hunting) there is still a an interesting and meaningful choice to be made between added confidence in your emergency defenses and your every day speed and maneuverability.

Very interested to see what you come up with for shields, and whether it lines up with the extensive research and testing that was done in the summer by various players just after engineering became a thing. I suspect you'll still find that the thermal mod is still pretty undeniable for the base shield as well, but things have changed a bit with regard to booster mods, so it will be interesting to see if stacking broad spectrum resistance modded boosters still makes more sense than using the recently improved specific resistance mods.

Oh, and also the numbers for regen have changed recently too, so it will be interesting to see how you might evaluate the relative benefits of bi-weave, standard, and prismatic mods. Here my suspicion is that despite the small balancing tweaks, the final picture with be the similar: for sustained periodic engagements (i.e., bounty hunting and combat zones) bi-weave will probably still prove to give you the most combat uptime, but for focused, heavy intensity combat (PvP, assassination, high thread signals) you'll want the never-ending well of never-returning shields offered by prismatics. Meanwhile, non combat ships will prefer either standard shields or prismatics if they don't mind the added weight or want to use a lower size compartment and get more bang for their storage buck, since their primary concern is shields staying up until they can run away.

zeroKFE wrote:

Very interested to see what you come up with for shields, and whether it lines up with the extensive research and testing that was done in the summer by various players just after engineering became a thing.

All I know about shields at the moment is that I prefer bi-weave over regular and that un-engineered shields without boosters are nowhere near enough for CZ combat.

Once I figure out what I want in a shield I may also have to re-evaluate my armour spec. Currently I can say with some authority that thermal reactive is the best overall setup, but it may turn out that thermal damage is a bigger threat in which case mirrored and military armours might be more viable. We'll see, I already have Lei Cheung leveled up to rank 5 so all I need now is to find some refined focus crystals. They're one of the few mission reward-only materials and they're pretty hard to get.

As for the added weight affecting performance, honestly it hardly matters if you use dirty tuned engines. The anaconda build I'm basing these calculations on has a pitch speed of 36 degrees per second and a 360 turn time of 10 seconds. If I reduce the armour back to lightweight, dump all of my cargo bays and hull reinforcements AND my shield. I reduce the weight of the ship by about 300 tons, but it only equates to a pitch speed difference of -.4 seconds for a 360 rotation. Peanuts essentially, even fully loaded and armed to the teeth I'm still fully 800 tons under the optimal weight for my thrusters, so nothing I add or subtract is going to make much of a difference.

Now FSD range is another matter because every last ton counts. I consider 25LY to be the minimum acceptable range for in-bubble travel when you assume that everything has a rank 5 range mod on it. I consider a trip out to Sothis, Maia or 17 Draconis to be inside the bubble, but everything outside of that I would accept no less than 30LY. My fully loaded combat anaconda build can still jump 26LY so that's fine, and all of the ships that I currently own can jump 25LY or better, except for the Ferdelance, Vulture and (my future) Corvette. These can only muster about 18-20LY of range because of their undersized FSDs. Moving them around is definitely a pain and ship transfer would be very helpful there.

Pretty sure refined crystals can be found in signal sources too. Not that it makes them super common, mind you, but they aren't the biggest pain in the ass ever.

It's the exquisite ones (needed for grade 5 charge focused power distributors) that are super rare and mission only. Good luck with those -- I've only ever found three, so I use grade 4 on most of my ships.

Exquisite crystals look to be a HUGE pain in the ass. I have a few in my inventory just from all the missions I did to unlock various engineers but I am not looking forward to finding more if I run out.

Tamren wrote:

Exquisite crystals look to be a HUGE pain in the ass.

Fun fact: the adjective "exquisite" actually has nothing to do with their quality; it's actually a descriptor of how unpleasant an experience it is to try to acquire them.

So it turns out Selene Jean does support the full set of level 5 engineer mods, apparently INARA hasn't been updated in a while. So since the level 5 thermal resistance mod is available for reactive armour my original math is correct.

The recipe requires phase alloys, proto heat radiators, molybdenum. Phase alloys are easy to get, any RES or CZ is going to generate hundreds of them because they come from combat ship salvage. Molybdenum is semi-rare on paper but easy to come by in terms of drop chance if you can find the meteorites. Proto heat radiators are one of those USS-only items that are probably the easiest of the three to get, but the most annoying.

I spent some time gathering chemical manipulators in a convoy beacon, ran into a couple issues which I didn't experience the last time I did this. For starters outbreak systems seem to have a habit of spawning two convoy beacons, but only one of them will actually have any ships in it, the other is simply empty. Secondly when you destroy a type-9 sometimes it leaves behind big chunks of wreckage, the materials it drops can get stuck inside this wreckage where limpets can't pick it up. What's worse is that if the type-9 was moving when it was destroyed the wreckage could get flung away from you faster than you can catch up! At the very least I did figure out that you can shoot the wreckage a couple of times to bounce it around and this will usually free the materials trapped inside, still highly annoying.

Also if the convoy only has a few type-9s in it you may want to try another one. The first one I found only had 3, but I went to the next system listed on my EDDB search and it had 8 of them in it.