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Elite Exploration

JohnnyDioxin
Expert Trustee
Getting well  into my second month of exploration along this route:

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If you get fed up with bugs or mundane missions in the Bubble, it's well worth heading out into the black. Taking your time, doing a sesh whenever you feel like it, with no stress, no time constraints or targets - just cruise and do what you like. I'm out here with Commander Hazardous Matt and another companion, and so far my undiscovered system count is at 134. Yes, that's 134 systems that will have my commander name on them - and an awful lot top-up for the bank, and I'm nowhere near the end of the journey yet.

First, we met up at the "bottom" of the galaxy (or top, depends which way you look at it!) and then headed towards the Lagoon Colonia Highway stop. From there we headed out towards the NGC/War & Peace Nebula. There were quite a few undiscovered systems along the way - but not much that was spectacular or particularly noteworthy - just regular systems, 65 undiscovered in all. When we got to NGC, I found that all of the systems from 20LY out had been discovered.

Whilst we sat there, wondering what to do next, I came up with the route in the picture above, and Matt was keen - so off we set. Since leaving NGC, almost every system I have come across has been undiscovered and there has been lots of nice screenshot material. Planets of all kinds of colours, werid huge gas giants and silvery, mirror-like rings, not to mention very spectacular looking nebula clouds.

Here are some screens from along the way. I'm only at stage 2 - and there are another 11 to go yet! Seey sometime around Christmas.... maybe! 😉

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See these clouds on the galaxy map?:

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Well, they are there in the galaxy, too:

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Planets are often coloured based on the clouds around them - like this one:

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A typical system, ripe for scanning and imprinting with my name:

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...and in many cases, they are just a few light years from each other, all in a nice, tight cluster:

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You can see the nebulae we are heading for - it's almost like joining the dots:

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these are a couple of the nicer ringed bodies - the second one is actually a shining Brown (Tauri) star and was very spectacular in-game:

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This is where we are now - was a little reluctant to enter this aggressive looking cloud - but no worries, apart from cutting out some of the light and actually obscuring some of the neighbouring stars, it's quite harmless:

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All of this, not even half as far away as Colonia - so you don't have to go that far to find it, and find 'fame' in the form of your name spread across astronomical bodies in the galaxy.

And it's so much more relaxing... B)

i5 9600k @4.5GHz; 16GB DDR4 3200; 6xSSD; RTX2080ti; Gigabyte Z390D Mobo
Rift CV1; Index; Quest; Quest 2
648 REPLIES 648

MowTin
Expert Trustee



It would be awesome to come across a derelict alien ship, but even if they did put a few in there somewhere, your chances of coming across them are so miniscule because the galaxy is just so big. There is of course still the restricted area of space that they haven't opened up yet. My guess is that they have plans or are working on putting stuff in there. Probably Thargoid bases and homeworlds to attack at a guess.

You can solve the needle in a haystack problem by having a signal sent such that if you're within X light years of a site you get a signal and can find the location. The larger the signal radius the higher the probability that someone will find it. 
i7 9700k 3090 rtx   CV1, Rift-S, Index, G2

nrosko
Superstar
This thread has inspired me to try this game again. It is oddly one of my favorites VR titles but i struggle with it a bit as Voice attack doesn't seem to work well for me. I should probably just give up with the va & just map the keys & play it.  

Chazmeister
Rising Star
A handy tool for when you start mining. http://edtools.ddns.net/ It's a pristine metallics distance calculator.

As for multicrew, at the moment all you can do is either operate turret weapons or fly SLFs, and of course just sit there and watch and put your extra pip into something. They have talked about doing multicrew mining with the new mining update though and exploration update. So maybe with the Q4 updates multicrew might actually become more worthwhile. Right now however, if it doesn't involve combat in an SLF capable ship, then you're just along for the ride.

What multicrew really needs is the ability to let 1 or 2 crew members take out an SRV, which right now you can't do. Then one person could fly air support in base raids, whilst the other two go in, in SRV's. Ideally you should be able to drop off an SRV and launch an SLF or visa versa. They just need to add the ability for cmdr's to close the SLF or SRV bay. 

JohnnyDioxin
Expert Trustee

nrosko said:

This thread has inspired me to try this game again. It is oddly one of my favorites VR titles but i struggle with it a bit as Voice attack doesn't seem to work well for me. I should probably just give up with the va & just map the keys & play it.  


I have the Voice Attack HCS packs - ASTRA, another one-off release and the personal pack. I gave up on it because of all the voice recognition utilities I've used (since around 2011) it's the worst. It might be the best from a programming point of view, but for recognition I find it really sucks compared to everything else I've used (dwVAC, Voice Buddy, SimVoiceChecklists, and a couple of older ones I can't remember). They all use the Windows API - but some are obviously better optimised than others.

I used a database utility for Elite:D recently, which had numerous voice commands built in. There was an option to use it via Voice Attack, but you don't have to - I actually found it far better. I'll go and see if I can find it.

EDit: OK - it's called EDDI - in some places it's described as a Voice Attack plug-in, but I never used it as such, nor did any of the players I chatted to about it.
The one downer is that it blabbers on quite a bit. When you make a jump, for example, it starts telling you all the info about where you have arrived - to the smallest detail. It gets annoying very quickly so I switched it off (seems most do).

http://edcodex.info/?m=tools&entry=346

https://github.com/EDCD/EDDI



i5 9600k @4.5GHz; 16GB DDR4 3200; 6xSSD; RTX2080ti; Gigabyte Z390D Mobo
Rift CV1; Index; Quest; Quest 2

Chazmeister
Rising Star
Did a bit of mining in an asteroid field last night, which is something I admittedly haven't done for ages. I think the last time was with the release of the Keelback. It seems the rings have changed a bit since I last visited. There's a heck of a lot more variation in the rocks now, or so it seems to me since I last went out to a ring, both in size and shape and their spin rate, with some not spinning at all. Lining up with a roid so your drones don't get swatted isn't quite as much a pain in the arse as I remember either, perhaps I'm just getting better.

When you find the good stuff, there's generally more of it in the roids from what I can tell, but it takes longer to find the good roids and you'll use more limpets prospecting in a ring than in an asteroid field. So asteroid fields are a bit like fish in a barrel by comparison to a ring, the good stuff is easier to come by but the rewards are smaller and the resources are limited. In a ring you'll waste more time prospecting, but when you find what you're looking for the amounts more than compensate.

So basically I've been trying to mine gold specifically, to fulfill a mission quota of 90 units. In the asteroid fields I was getting about 14 units per session and that was visiting several fields. In a ring I was doubling that and getting about 32 units in the same amount of time, but I used all of my limpets compared to about half in the asteroid fields. Out of 55 limpets, a little under 3 quarters were used for prospecting. 

To start with I was prospecting in a metallic ring and wasn't finding anything I wanted and so swapped to a metal rich ring and got much better results when looking for gold, which is the opposite of what most people say on the forums, with metallics supposedly being a lot better. I guess that's just the RNG nature of it. Once I've hit my quotas and stuff like that I'll give it a proper go to see if I can make some good money from it. Might need a minor refit and adjustment first though as I could do with a couple more collection limpets to speed things up a bit and go see if I can't get me a big haul of Painite.


JohnnyDioxin
Expert Trustee
Can't you simply restock limpets with synthesis?

i5 9600k @4.5GHz; 16GB DDR4 3200; 6xSSD; RTX2080ti; Gigabyte Z390D Mobo
Rift CV1; Index; Quest; Quest 2

Chazmeister
Rising Star
Yeah but it takes 10 iron and nickel to restock just 4 limpets. I know iron and nickel are easy to come by, but it'll still burn through a large pile of materials to stock up a decent amount of limpets. OK I do have about 250+ of each of those materials, but with each limpet costing only 101 creds and that sort of money being easier to come by than any material you could care to mention, I'd rather spend the creds than waste an hour or more hoovering up rocks on a planet.

So it's OK in a situation where you're out of limpets and just want to finish mopping up a particularly good haul, but not great for doing a proper restock. Not when you're going out with 50+ limpets just for a quick 1 hour or so's session. And at the moment I only have 2 collectors operating at any one time, and I'm looking to up that to 4 and will probably also double the limpets I take out with me to about 100. So synthesis is OK for those moments when you just need a couple more limpets to finish the job, but otherwise realistically you need to restock at a station.

A lot of the synthesis is like that though. It's there for those emergencies where you just need a quick top up on the fly, especially if you're way out from any services, but it does not replace getting a proper refill at a station. It's the same with missiles and MC ammo, synthesis does not completely refill the weapons, it just gives you a small top up to keep you going. So whilst you can use it to completely refill, you will use up a lot of your materials.

Also last night tried mining at the pristine metallic ring again, and once again found the results were not nearly as good as the pristine metal rich ring in the same system. Yet all the advice on the forums is that the reverse should be true. Maybe the rings are labelled wrong, or maybe FD have changed the drop rates and now the forum advice is wrong, who knows? 

JohnnyDioxin
Expert Trustee
I actually use synthesis to replace my missiles etc because you can increase their effectiveness with it 🙂
Especially good with cannon. The only other thing I use it for (apart from AFMU refill when exploring) is FSD to increase my range, though not that often. Depends on the situation. Oh - and to repair my SRV, which I tend to get a bit wild with, y' know, for fun.

But I mentioned it because I thought that the situation you say they are good for is the very situation you were in. I didn't mean as a general thing to do - I meant because you said you ran out of limpets in that situation. Hence asking if you could have synthesised them.

i5 9600k @4.5GHz; 16GB DDR4 3200; 6xSSD; RTX2080ti; Gigabyte Z390D Mobo
Rift CV1; Index; Quest; Quest 2

JohnnyDioxin
Expert Trustee
Okay - his majesty has arrived! 😄 (well I am a 'King' after all!)


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Handed in the cartography data for the trip from highway stop 6 to Colonia via Sag A and got a nice 78,125,33 crdeits!

Very nice - makes the tedious stretches worth it. Now allied with Colonia - could swear I was last time, but probably dropped a bit if I killed off any of their faction pirates (never understood that silly rule).

So I have easily got enough to buy the Imperial Cutter I want, now. However, round here the best you can get these days is a Python - or, seeing as we have some new ships around - the Krait II, which is what I have treated myself to 🙂

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A couple of other things have changed since I was last here - the ferrying costs are nowhere near as expensive as they used to be (from the Bubble), though they are still quite expensive:

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...and there's also now a tech broker here, with all kinds of Guardian goodies, which I have no idea about!

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So, my longest exploration trip to date is over -gawd alone knows how far I've travelled, but it has taken me 3½ months and netted me a total of 221.7 million credits (after deductions for fuel/repairs etc) - oh and got my Commander name plastered over a large area of the galaxy! 😄

I hearby pronounce myself chuffed 🙂

No more exploring for me for a loooong time...

i5 9600k @4.5GHz; 16GB DDR4 3200; 6xSSD; RTX2080ti; Gigabyte Z390D Mobo
Rift CV1; Index; Quest; Quest 2

Roming22
Adventurer
I know what you feel. I came back from a galaxy tour that took me from the bubble to beagle point through SagA*, with the return trip along the galaxy arm. It took me about 7 months (with some cool down periods). Thank god for podcasts.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do next... Maybe rank up trading, or try mining for a bit.