Elite Dangerous Catch-All

So during an epic bout of insomnia last night I had a nice long potter about. My cash reserves were quite low since I lost everything when they changed my pilot name so I was doing low value trades back and forth. Coming into Chango Dock a PC Cobra pilot clearly went to hit his "deploy landing gear" button but missed and hit is "dump cargo" button instead. A dozen gold cannisters fanned out in a graceful and lucrative arc....

I quickly sold the supply of grain I was carrying and headed out to scoop up what I could, hoping the clumsy pilot wouldn't try to "discourage" me. I managed to get 3 cannisters and high-tail it out of there to Dahan's Gateway for a quick sale on the black market. Quadrupled my cash.

Picked up 2 gimbal mounted pulse lasers and scooted off to the Fed distress beacon.

This game shouldn't have been called Dangerous, it should've been called Elite: Gimbals.

So I finally got the hang of the Federal Distress Signal area. It is good money. Well, it's good when someone isn't taking advantage of the Eagle bug to kill players.

deftly wrote:

So I finally got the hang of the Federal Distress Signal area. It is good money. Well, it's good when someone isn't taking advantage of the Eagle bug to kill players.

What's the eagle bug?

What is your ship and weapon loadout?

I made enough to buy an eagle but not enough to load it out properly. Bought the eagle, got interdicted, foolishly tried to fight my way out. Lost the Eagle. Not enough money for the insurance excess. Back to the beginning with a free sidewinder and 201 credits.

Lesson learnt.

Went straight into the fed zone with my single borrowed fixed laser as I had nothing to lose and no better way to make money and have been building my way back up again.

Some thoughts having made around 50k in the fed zone now:

* Gimbals are easy but not that much better than fixed mounts once you get the hang of aiming.

* I haven't got a good read on how you "tag" a kill. Sometimes I get the credit, sometimes someone else does. I suspect it's something to do with net damage in which case you're gonna have a hard time making money if there's a fully loaded Cobra Mk3 in the zone one-shotting things.

* A jerk move I've discovered: Got the drop on a sidewinder and was on his six hammering him down to about 30% hull, he logged out. He rejoined 3 minutes later and immediately set about ganking me. Cheese.

Balthezor wrote:
deftly wrote:

So I finally got the hang of the Federal Distress Signal area. It is good money. Well, it's good when someone isn't taking advantage of the Eagle bug to kill players.

What's the eagle bug?

What is your ship and weapon loadout?

Sometimes an Eagle's thermal signature will drop to 0, even when fully powered up. So they can park right behind you and blow you away. They won't show up until they start shooting. Happened to me yesterday. I verified it by returning and flying around backwards. Same guy tried to get behind me, but he wouldn't open fire on me while I was facing him.

I'm still in a Sidewinder, but I added a second fixed laser.

deftly wrote:
Balthezor wrote:
deftly wrote:

So I finally got the hang of the Federal Distress Signal area. It is good money. Well, it's good when someone isn't taking advantage of the Eagle bug to kill players.

What's the eagle bug?

What is your ship and weapon loadout?

Sometimes an Eagle's thermal signature will drop to 0, even when fully powered up. So they can park right behind you and blow you away. They won't show up until they start shooting. Happened to me yesterday. I verified it by returning and flying around backwards. Same guy tried to get behind me, but he wouldn't open fire on me while I was facing him.

I'm still in a Sidewinder, but I added a second fixed laser.

Second fixed laser is good enough to do the Federal Distress Signal? I am saving up for the Gimballed before I head there.

Single fixed laser is good enough to do the fed distress signal tbh, so long as there's not a lot of other humans farming the place and you have a little patience. 5 kills and you've got enough for a second fixed laser which will do you just fine.

Gave the gimballed multi-cannon a try. No good. Useless against shields. Would maybe be useful as the 3rd weapon on an Eagle to supplement a laser weapon for shield-busting.

For any who seem to get into the Distress area and have problems with other 'real' pilots. Extraction zones (where mining is done) are usually empty of other 'real' pilots. Especially the ones that are off the beaten path and require time in Supercruise to reach. Lot of bounties and if you go in with no cargo- you can pick a lot up to sell. Nice way to load up on cash from bounties and upgrade weapons/ship. Also just beautiful to look at. As always you do have to scan before fighting. And if you have a bounty expect to be attacked by any real players in the area.

Keep in mind like all things in Elite, there are risk/rewards. Aside from navigating thru astroids- some computers/GPUs do crash after a while in these areas. [b]But at least try it, if not to shoot down bugs just to see how your system handles it. I try to save and re-load after a few kills continually, just to cover myself. Some of the bounties are over 1K so if you hit an area with no live commanders, you can make some real cash. New "wanted" ships seem to constantly drop in.

Hopefully an update and a wipe of stats will come next friday. Markets need to be re-set so trading becomes viable again. Not to mention any added bug fixs and new material. Oh and COMMS- we need comms!!

Loving the game so far- have not touched Battlefield 4 since I got in to the alpha of Elite and Wasteland 2 (nor been on GWJs much)… too much gaming goodness to be had with these two games. Late nights… wife yelling get off the comp! … So Hello to all the BF4 guys I have not seen since then! Hope you are well.

Anyone interested there is a lot of good info on the Frontier forums. And if you have not checked out voice attack, take a look- very nice program that makes the game more immersive. (Ex. I just 'say' GEAR and my landing gear drops, say GEAR again it comes up) Best 8 dollars I spent on this (and I read where it works for Star Citizen as well, though I have not played AC much after installing it).

Things I learned from this video:

The 150,000 star systems closest to Sol are modeled as accurately as we know of.

They're increasing the range to accurately drop out of supercruise to 1000km.

They're adding a distance indicator to the target info in the bottom left.

They're adding scoop and landing gear indicators to the bottom right.

Fancier space station in the next build (and at 17 Draconis, so presumably more systems to visit too).

The Resource Extraction Site in Dahan's rings....

IMAGE(http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130901202656/galaxyonfire/images/6/68/Jaw_Drop.jpg)

Maq wrote:

The Resource Extraction Site in Dahan's rings....

I gave that a shot yesterday. It was nice, but I kept crashing when I was out there.

Ran into some interesting bugs today. The Federal Distress Signal area had 4 dreadnoughts humping each other. I guess they all spawned in the same spot. Made the lag terrible. Or maybe the multiple dreadnoughts was a side effect of the lag. So it was pretty much unplayable.

I tried some of the other conflict zones, but it was mostly Anacondas, which take me forever to kill.

Went back to Azeban City, and lo and behold, a bunch of gold canisters were floating around in space. Grabbed 4, sold it on the black market. Oh hey, more gold keeps appearing around the station. For some reason, there were 4 cargo ships floating around dropping their cargo. Don't know if someone was triggering it somehow or if NPC pilots also accidentally hit the "dump all cargo" button, but there were a lot of players gathering up the goods.

Maq wrote:

The Resource Extraction Site in Dahan's rings....

Maq was that directed at me? I think there are extraction areas in each system, all work the same. The gold drops are just players trying to spread the wealth and test some things. Like to see how long canisters last and how many can be dropped. Happened during the alpha. Can cut FPS but it is a nice way to grab some cash.

The double Capital ship bug is back? I thought they said they fixed that. Causes a lot of lag for me... hopeful it is gone next update. Which rumor has it could be the end of next week.

Yeah I had more CTD than usual in the extraction fields since Friday. Should take my advice and save more often.
As is I have started to just get 4 or 5 bounties then get out before a crash. Sorry if my advice gave anyone grief, it does work though.
Also just found out in game if you hit control-F you get a FPS counter, no need for fraps... if anyone is interested.
Good luck.

The rings. They're beautiful.

Insomnia reaps rewards in the form of 62k farmed in the Fed Distress zone with my new Eagle. That ship is a hell of a lot nicer to fly than the sidewinder.

Leaving a spaceport last night, had cleared it and was in the nav screen, when I got a 'Shields offline' message, and started taking hull damage. Destroyed me. No one else on the radar, nothing.

Anyone heard of this happening?

Goo wrote:

Leaving a spaceport last night, had cleared it and was in the nav screen, when I got a 'Shields offline' message, and started taking hull damage. Destroyed me. No one else on the radar, nothing.

Anyone heard of this happening?

Yes, that has happened to me as well. I would say it may be a bug... but what were you doing at the time? In my case I was starting my JUMP engines then changed my mind, BOOSTED a few times then tried to jump again and saw my shields dropping! So I cancelled again and BOOSTED to get away from an unseen threat...sooo... I blew up! I was positive some one was cheating and shooting me or it was bug.

The next time was the pretty much the same set up. But this time I noticed my heat was building up a lot from the engines charging two or three times ( I kept cancelling and changing destinations) and boosting (why I boost while charging I have no idea...) so I am pretty sure it happens due to you letting heat build up. I was also on Stealth once and the same thing happened while in combat- no one shot me, I was in stealth too long and boosting... I blew up. Very embarrassing. Again I would say it could be a bug, but in most cases you somehow built up heat and did not drop a heatsink or let systems cool down.
Hope this helps.

OH another thing that tipped me that this may be the reason- there was no "You were killed by XXX" message. So no one received credit for my death- so no one shot me or hacked or anything. Just heat. Good luck.

Sounds similar. I can't really recall what I was doing exactly at the time - I think the missus was talking to me so I was sorta half on brain auto pilot. I do remember hitting the thrusters like you did, and I didn't get the 'killed by' message so I think we've had similar experiences

I did notice the other night getting a big heat surge and not really understanding what was going on, I just cut the motors and let it settle down. May have been a similar occurrence.

Hrrm.. Wonder if I had turned the heat sinks off or something like that? Not even sure how that works exactly but I had been fooling with keys and key bindings a bit earlier.

Did you inadvertently turn on Silent Running? If you do that and dont turn off your engines you will blow up eventually from heat buildup.

Seems possible yeah. Wasn't paying enough attention (until it became obvious something was going seriously wrong!) to be sure, but yeah, that would at least make sense

No biggie. By the time the thing gets released seems I'll have covered every possible means of accidental self mutilation!!

Yeah it sounds like heat did us both in. I use voice attack a lot, so I may have not realized I clicked a tab/button while playing. And like I had mentioned, I am forever tapping Boost so I always have some heat build up (have to break that habit). Just something to keep an eye on. I think I have a firm grasp on accidental self mutilation as well.

So I've been flying around in an Eagle for a couple of days now, and the zero heat bug happened to me today. On the upside, you can happily plink away at NPCs without having to worry about players.

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

New Beta release next week.

Probably should source that - From the latest newsletter issued by Frontier

http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=...

Yeah, Tuesday to be specific. Looking forward to the new systems. Not so much the new ship, unless they reset the economy again.

That newsletter also mentions that they'll stop selling the Premium Beta on July 15th if you're fence-sitting.

LiquidMantis wrote:

That newsletter also mentions that they'll stop selling the Premium Beta on July 15th if you're fence-sitting.

You mean I'm running out of time if I want to give them $150?! Oh noes!

Certis wrote:
LiquidMantis wrote:

That newsletter also mentions that they'll stop selling the Premium Beta on July 15th if you're fence-sitting.

You mean I'm running out of time if I want to give them $150?! Oh noes! :drink:

At this point I'm happier with the €120 I gave Elite than the €20 I gave Star Citizen. I paid an extra €20 for a month's gameplay when I really fancied a space game to play. Money's worth already received.

Not that, you know, I'd advise you buy in now or anything =)

Maq wrote:
Certis wrote:
LiquidMantis wrote:

That newsletter also mentions that they'll stop selling the Premium Beta on July 15th if you're fence-sitting.

You mean I'm running out of time if I want to give them $150?! Oh noes! :drink:

At this point I'm happier with the €120 I gave Elite than the €20 I gave Star Citizen. I paid an extra €20 for a month's gameplay when I really fancied a space game to play. Money's worth already received.

Not that, you know, I'd advise you buy in now or anything =)

Heck, I wish I'd paid for the Alpha. I think they got a lifetime 50% discount on ship insurance. I'm hoping we get something similar for the Beta. I was holding off on both Star Citizen and Elite until one of them actually showed some decent progress. Elite fit the bill. It's still crashy, but I've had a ton of fun with it.

I wish we get that 50% off insurance. That would be great. Ill take 25% off too.