Testing the Fleetcarrier as an Exploration Platform

One option for the newly released fleetcarriers in Elite:Dangerous would be using it as an "long distance Exploration Platform" - so I went out on a short trip, a few thousand lightyears from civilization to test this out.

TL;DR: Not a viable option for me.

The long version: For this test I wanted to play it safe so I went with the carrier filled with tritium fuel to the max. This way I was sure to make it back, if self supply out in the black does not work out. As tritium was sold at very low price in one of the systems controlled by our player faction it wasn't too expensive to do this, so now was so perfect time. 

I decided to chose a direction other than the main routes because my goal was to explore, find new stuff... not to go to the beautiful places already found by others. And not even 1000 lightyears from my starting point I started running into the first undiscovered systems. Great!

So how did I incorporate my Carrier: I always plotted routes <500 Lightyears with my exploration ship. When reaching the end of the route I looked for an interesting system nearby and then ordered my carrier to jump there. While waiting for the carrier to arrive I either scanned rings, mapped planets or landed and collected materials at a geo/bio site.

This was actually great fun and it was nice to have the safety of the carrier in the back, handing in exploration data every 500Ly. But would this scheme be sustainable for a long distance exploration? As much fun it might be, I wouldn't want to get stuck with a carrier far out in deep space.

So first: The financial aspect. Each carrier jump costs 100,000Credits for repairs required afterwards. Additionally it has an weekly upkeep. With my loadout this is about 17MCr per week. This money, I think, can be cashed in when exploring, but requires some intense gameplay. It takes more time out there to cash in this amount, then it does in the bubble. For me personally and my gaming speed and game time per week this would be doable, in the end there wouldn't be much left over probably, but at least the trip wouldn't be a loss. 

Second: Fleet Carrier fuel, Now here comes the problem: A fleet carrier requires fuel to jump. And no matter how rich you are and how much money you are making through exploration, out in the black there is no one selling it to you. So you have to mine it yourself.

I brought a python equipped for mining for exactly this task - I wanted to check what it takes to mine enough tritium to sustain myself on this trip. And couldn't do it. A fleetcarrier jump takes about 200t of fuel (they way I did the trip). I am no expert in mining, so professionals may be faster, but for me that is 2 - 2.5 hours of mining, if I am lucky and have a tritium hotspot in the system. Without I guess it might even be more. This clearly wouldn't be something to do for me every day - after all I am out there to explore, not to mine.

So realitically speaking, when exploring alone and with a fleetcarrier, I think I could sustain about one fleet carrier  jump per week. So it would take a very long time to get to the really far parts. And I am not ready to commit myself to a multi year exploration trip, to be honest. 

That doesn't mean a fleet carrier is not good for exploration. It actually is fantastic. It just not good for "long distance, with limited time and me". Tweaking any of the variables can make it sustainable:

- Do slow exploration, 500Ly a week, investigating everything around before moving on. Actual exploration, instead of racing across the galaxy.

- Stay nearby, so a full tritium tank can get you to where you want to go and back to the bubble - the rest is just a money issue, and we all know this can now be generated quick enough that it is not relevant anymore. And an hour of Diamond mining and selling those, will save you 20-30 hours of Tritium mining. The balance of Low Temperature Diamond mining is THAT broken.

- Don't go a alone, so the tritium supply job is done by many. The carrier does not use more fuel when more commanders are travelling with it and the effort of mining can be shared among those coming. The more people group up, the easier it will get. 

Thoughts on the Odyssey Announcement

Frontier, the company behind Elite:Dangerous, dropped quite a bomb this week. They put out the first announcement of the upcoming "new era" of the game with the "Odyssey" release. Watch the trailer, containing pre-alpha footage from the new game engine:

So the big new thing is what the community calls "space legs", the ability to actually play your commander as a person outside of the pilot or vehicle seat. But there is more in the video that is not explicitly stated there: It seems like landing on planets with an athmosphere would be possible. The graphics of the environment seem to have significantly improved. And I think even the ship models look a lot improved to what they are now. 

I personally am very excited about the improved graphics and the athmospheric landings. Space legs are not important for me personally, but it is a very much requested feature by the player community. And I can see possible ways to have fun with this new gameplay myself. I am somewhat neutral to that change myself at this point in time - how much I will like it will depend much on the details how they can/must be used.

Some players noticed though, that on Steam this upcoming extension is listed without VR-Support and asked on the forums about that. And Frontier answered (which is great in itself, given how quite they were over the last year). The answer is: "No VR support at launch of the expansion". 

Wow, that is a second bomb dropped. This time one that really hit me hard. I love the VR-Experience of the current game. A spaceflight sim is just the perfect environment for the combination of VR and me. And Elite:Dangerous today has it implemented in a great way. Some of the newer features seemed to get not much VR-love (FSS-Scanner, I am looking at you!), but the overall game experience is just mindblowingly good.

But I guess the VR-market just did not develop enough over the last years to still be worth implementing for. It is an understandable decision, commercially, to not implement for what is still a niche market as it seems. It might backfire, if VR grows but in the end it is a strategical decision and in this case it seems to be made against the implementation of VR-capabilities. 

There has been a clarification afterwards, that you will still be able to play the current version in VR, even if the upgrade does not support it, but to me this is pointless. Another important puzzle piece making this game so good is the community. And keeping the VR-Players on Horizon and giving the 2D-Players Odyssey will de-facto split the community - and therefore not be an option.

I assume it will still be possible to fly together, sure. But I also expect there will be an incentive to upgrade (after all Frontier must sell the new expansion, cause that is their business). So I expect, like with the horizons upgrade before, there will be something you need to stay competetive in the new expansion. In horizons it was engineers. Sure you can play without them, but who does, honestly?

Also there will be community events that require the new expansion - and thus those not having it, because they want to play in VR, will be left out.

At this point I am very disappointed by the announcement to ditch VR, as you can probably tell. Will I leave the game because of that? I don't know yet. It is still a long time until the expansion is actually there and we don't know much about it yet. I will have to wait and see. I guess it is still a long way away - my believe in the announced date is not strong.

Fleetcarriers Defense Has Issues

In the recent beta for fleetcarriers I also took a look at them. Back in the first beta period I was filming one and being too close to it I blocked a landing pad. Being in outside camera view I did not notice the warnings and so the fleet carrier shot me down. That is not unexpected, but while that happened I had the feeling the first shots missed me. That was strange.

So now in the second beta I tried to reproduce exactly that. Find that spot where the automated lasers on the carrier just fail to shoot you down. After a few tries I found out, that you just need a fairly small ship and be really low above the main landing deck to be out of reach of the carriers guns. Here is a video showing how you can just sit there while the carrier tries to kill you:

There is a little additional trick to it: It works best with shields turned off - I only found that out after making the video, here you see my shields coming up and being shot off again. Every time the shields come up the hitbox of the ship gets a little bigger and the lasers hit, taking down the shields and causing a little hull damage to the ship. If the shields are kept down they never hit and you can sit there forever.

To get a nicer lasershow we tried this with multiple ships last weekend - and learned something new: The carrier does not try to fire at everyone. Until the first target is destroyed it continues shooting at whoever was there first. The others can pretty much do whatever they want around the carrier, it doesn't switch target. Bad for our planned graphic effect, but good to know. I once again have to thank all those great commanders of the Buur Pit community who always show up when there is a prospect to get blown up for science. Be sure to follow the linked youtube channel, I am pretty sure there will be some video of this experiment showing up soon.

This might become an interesting detail for gankers, I guess. If they bring a friend (do gankers have friends?) he could attract the gunfire of the carrier. And I asume this allows the actual ganker to happily do his mischief without being bothered by the powerful guns.

Fleetcarriers: Post Beta-1 thoughts

This article is written for people actually playing Elite:Dangerous - if you are not playing you can probably stop reading here, as it will mean nothing to you.

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The first beta for fleetcarriers in Elite:Dangerous comes to an end. Time to update my thoughts on them.

At this point we can buy a fleetcarrier which comes with a commodities market pre-installed and add modules to outfit this beast of a ship with, enabling it to do other things - like offering repair facilities etc. And the carrier loses much of its value darn fast - it is expensive to buy and you only get a fraction of the money back when selling it.

I don't think we already are at the end of the line currently.

I believe shortly before the start of this beta FDev said: "we want the purchase of a fleet carrier to be a meaningful decision" (no exact quote, it's from the top of my head). This sentence left me thinking a lot.

I will now enter the field of wild speculation and nothing I will predict is by any means provable... I am just thinking here. So don't expect any of that to be correct - I will try to point to the reasons for my thinking - but I may be utterly wrong with anything or everything I come up with in this article. So, I'll pop open a bottle of beer and just think into the keyboard from here on.

Take a look at this video CMDR Rheeney has created, if you haven't done so already. It shows different looking carriers in the docks within the Beta:

Rheeney says in the title we may see "Livery Options" for carriers here. While this is entirely possible I think - and somewhat hope - this is only part of the truth. Another part that made me think a lot was how quickly FDev was in stating Universal Cartographics will be available in the future as if it wasn't something difficult to do, almost as if it were planned anyway. And with that news something clicked and my speculations started:

In the current beta the Drake Class Carrier can be purchased - that is a very specific name for the only type of carrier there is. I think what we see in above video are entirely different carrier classes, not only livery options for the Drake Class Carrier. Painting and thruster colors could be livery, but there may be more to the actual shape of the carrier.

Also remember the old Idea of different carrier roles? Maybe that idea is still current.

Imagine the additional modules we can buy now could be purchased for all carriers, but one module is standard - and can not be exchanged except by selling your carrier and buying an entirely different one. You can only have one of those "core modules" on your carrier at any time, depending on the carrier class. With the depreciation this would really be a commitment, wouldn't it?

I guess the Drake Class Carrier is actually the "Trader Role" of carriers. That's why it comes with a market place installed as default.

The one with the ball-shaped bow may be the science-carrier - the exploration role. It could come with cartographics installed instead of the commodities market. That's why they were so fast in saying it will come... it was planned anyway, just not in the carrier class released in the first beta.

The pink one: I think by others already sometimes referred to as the "Hammerhead" could be the mining role - probably offering something completely new like additional refineries or contruction sites that allow to actually build further stuff from what they have mined. Whatever this will be.

Search and Rescue carriers? Bounty Hunter carriers? Smuggler carriers? These all were roles annouced back last year - I currently have no idea what their special module might be, but it could be possible to think of something I would believe.

Maybe we do not even get all carrier types on the release in June, but just the first few models - and additional carrier classes may be added whenever they are ready for market. I think this would be an exciting development perspective for the game - and maybe a reason not to jump at the first carrier that becomes available to players.

I guess in a few months we will know if these are just dumb ideas of a slightly drunk gamer or there is something to it.

Pre Fleetcarrier Thoughts

After quite a few optimistic annoucements of "Fleet Carriers" (thank you for this great wording, CMDR Wotherspoon), now there was another one. This time with a level of detail that almost looks like they might really be implemented.

The annoucement was made last week "live on tape". If you want to see the complete one hour not-so-live stream, here it is.

Maybe a short introduction for people not yet playing Elite Dangerous. Within this game you have exactly one commander you are playing. You can have many space ships - but have to park a ship in a station to be able to switch to another ship, which obviously has to be parked in the same space station. If you are in an area far out from inhabited space, there are no stations - and therefore you can not change ships. Spacestations are stationary (hence the name), you can not move them anywhere else. Believe me on this one, I have rammed quite heavy spaceships into stations, they did not move a bit.

So here come Fleet Carriers now - they can be owned by players and are personal space-non-stations - They can offer most services Space stations have without being stationary.

With the annoucement youtube, reddit and the game forums at Frontier Development (FDEV) went crazy. I couldn't say it better than  our CMDR Bob Lowkey said it on our discord, so here is the quote:

Fleet carrier reveal there's so much salt on the stream already makes the Dead Sea seem like spring water.

And I would like to thank FDEV for that alone. All that whining and yelling on all those platforms by themselves provided an excellent entertainment value. Chapeau!

Most of those complaints seem to orbit around the idea, that people wish to play the game exactly like they did without the carriers, and that carriers don't change that playstyle now - or something like that. All in all logic is in short supply in most of the complaints. It almost seems like those players believe, they are forced to buy a carrier and use it all the time. I am pretty sure this is not the case, if you wish to continue playing like you did before, you should be able to do that.

I personally see those carriers as a massive increase in options how to play this sandbox game I like so much. To be honest I have so many ideas how I want to use this thing, that the hardest part will be deciding on what to try out first.

Sure, I am also not 100% in line with all the design decisions and they are not completely arranged around the play styles I enjoy, but I am able to accept, that this asset maybe has not been designed for my own personal preferences, but had to be a bit of a compromise to also appeal to other players.

So, what I want to do with these? A few examples:

They, for the first time, allow to play markets in Elite Dangerous. The ability to buy and sell goods and set prices on your carrier is total new gameplay. Galaxy-Tycoon style, being the boss on your space-flying farmers market. This is like a new game within the game by itself. I want to try this out - and taking into account how bad I am in trading sims, probably lose a fortune while doing so.

BGS support vessel is the next big thing: When our in game faction is at war, can I place this thing near one of the combat zones to provide refuel, repair and re-arm services to our combat ships? That'd be a great addition.

Will there even be respawn on the carrier in case of ship destruction occuring? I sure hope so, then this can also become the hooning base our community always wanted. So when doing racing events in narrow canyons on some planet, you can place a carrier in orbit to ensure respawn near by. All those wonderful canyon rich worlds outside the bubble can now turn into playgrounds of speed addicted low altitude flyers (yes, I am looking at you, CMDR Sanderling).

Exploring the galaxy 500ly a time: So I can jump my carrier somewhere and just have a light weight scout ship analyse the systems around it. If I find something interesting nearby, I can easily pick up the fitting ship to exploit that point of interest - and at some point jump the carrier on to the next center of exploration.

Ohh, and the most important part: FDEV said, the carriers are "indestructable" - I say: CHALLENGE ACCEPTED! I see hours of fun ahead of me trying to get this massive ship I have into the most dangerous places I can think of.

Please file all your further ongoing whining about the announced carriers directly here in the comments, where they will go mostly unread by the public. Thank you.

And for the time being, turn up your subwoofers and watch this fleetcarrier megajumping (yes, this is the technical term, don't ask)  into another starsystem:

We just wanted to do some mining...

At the end of 3305 some commanders of The Buur Pit that - for reasons not comprehensible to this writer - actually like mining, founded the BPMC: The Buur Pit Mining Company. With their company slogan "Making Billionaires since 3305" they are not exaggerating. 

As I have learned through the course of the economic adventure this article is about, there are "Leaderboards" for squadrons within Elite:Dangerous. And so the madness started. Those leaderboards are reset every two months...

Sometime in February someone noticed we are actually in the Top 50 of squadrons in the trade category. We were very proud of this as we are a fairly small squadron and found that to be quite an archievement. Only a few weeks later someone noticed our crazy mining folks have somehow pushed us into the top 10 of miners. From there it went down the drain pretty much and more people started to mine as they learned there are a lot of credits to be earned.

Sure enough we were in the Top three soon after. At that point we realized, that we are not competitive game players, we just wanted to win. Early March spreadsheeting started to happen and soon enough the whole squadron was just focused on making money. Especially as there is a trophy to be won, so we really wanted to stay in the Top 3 places and at least get the shiny bronze trophy for our spaceship dashboards. See here you can see how it ended:

Spreadsheet Magic provided by CMDR NeokeVenice

You can nicely see the race with Dark Enterprise (DE), another player faction in the game, at the last days. With our international community we basically had people mining 24/7 somewhere - from Europe to the Americas on to New Zealand and Australia... We could create a continuous income for this. It was completely crazy, some time mining with 10 or 15 ships together, on the way learning new mining techniques to optimize outcome. 

After those last few days I can say one thing for sure: I dont want to mine an asteroid for quite some time anymore. 

We do not plan these things, but if we get to the point where this community has a common goal, we are a bit on the unstoppable side of things. #ForTheBobblehead

PitBowl

Conservation ov Momentum shall not be denied to any man, regardless ov his race, status, gender or creed. -- https://totl.net/Rights/

I have tricked the BuurPit into a bit of scientific research. Some time ago commander Snert and myself did a few experiments of ramming ships and pushing away the other with that. Already then I noticed that the physical concept of "Conservation of Momentum" is implemented rather badly.

So I brought a relatively low massed ship and rammed his heavy Imperial Cutter. With this different masses, according to physics as we know it, I should hand over some momentum to the heavy ship and myself bounce backwards. Only if both ships have the same mass, the incoming ship should exactly come to a stop and hand over all of its momentum to the other. If you want to read up about that a bit, I recommend the all-knowing trash heap (does anyone else remember where this reference comes from, BTW?): Wikipedia - it has an article with nice illustrating animations.

But in Elite:Dangerous something else happens: My smaller ship always comes to a complete halt and tries to hand over all momentum to the heavy target, that shoots away. Except, it again hits something (like the ground), then it will give up all momentum again.

Also, I guess due to the netcode behind the game, it can take some time for the momentum to arrive. This is actually a noticeable delay, so after ramming I stand still and the target starts moving a little later.

So last weekend I accumulated my willing guinea pigs to try this: Arrange a lot of space ships like bowling pins and get someone to crash into that, to see the momentum distribute through the group. It turns out the first part is already extremely hard: herding a fleet of mad spaceship commanders to actually just park close enough to each other. It is even much less possible to archieve a dedicated formation, so we gave up on that relatively fast.

To have a reference at least in one of the three dimensions, we did this on a planet, just above the surface. Also it looks better seeing ships tumble in gravity. So here is some video footage of what happened:

Most parts are rather irrelevant for the science, but "Act 4" of this video actually shows the effect - even though just at the side of the screen because of my bad camera works. You can see the purple-pink-ugly-thing being crashed into...  it starts moving, shortly after that hitting the next ship. That stops the purple ship and accelerates the next.

Act 3 should actually have worked, but it did not - I can currently only assume that this is because the purple ship is trying to distribute its kinectic energy between multiple ships and this is just too much for the in-game physics model and it gives up.

So generally one could build upon this, but honestly: herding commanders is hard. Sadly the "just turn everything off and do nothing" part always fails to reach someone.

As the final we tried another idea we had in mind - and having so many people with the same type of ship in the same place was an opportunity: We played spaceship Jenga, by stacking all ships on top of each other, then switching all flight assist systems off and letting a ship at the bottom of the tower boost out of it. It is also in the Video.