Elite: Dangerous (Kickstarted Sandbox Space Flight Sim)

From the forums...

Time to cross the galaxy: 5 weeks

...Along the way I passed by three large areas of unreachable sectors, two of which are larger than human colonized space. I suspect these could be the eventual home-worlds of soon-to-be-added alien civilizations. One is on the far side of the outer core, the other two are on the far fringe of the Scutum-Centaurus Arm.

My ship was badly damaged when hyperspacing into a Red Giant binary pair (the first and only time I've seen such a system). 30% hull was burned off in seconds as I exited hyperspace in the corona of one of the giants. Wear and tear took its toll. Altogether I visited 2,765 star systems along the way and traveled around 72,000 light years in total.

On the galactic rim there is nothing but inky blackness outside your cockpit window giving you a real sense of remoteness. The Milky Way looks so distant, just a band of distant bright stars with little colour or structure. Outwards looking there are a handful of stars still further out but they're beyond the jump range of a long-ranged Asp, so may never be visited.

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65,000 LYs from home, on the fringe of intergalactc space...

And the videos he made:

Elite Dangerous - Distant Suns Part 1 (The Lagoon Nebula) - YouTube

Anyone want free money?

GoonNewsNet on Twitter:

#EliteDangerous Come out to Jotunheim on Saturday for a treat! #PalladiumClouds are being distributed. Details are atAnnouncing Palladium Cloud on January 24th, 3pm PST Come join the fun!

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I just watched the most beautiful thing, ever, on SkafsgaardPG stream

He's pirating in an Asp, taking out some Type 6 rare trader in LHS 21. That finally fills up his hold, so he returns to Quimper Ring.

Heat sink, silent running etc all that to get in without being scanned for his 700k bounty. Gets scanned anyways, so he rushes through the mail slot at full speed to avoid the scan.

TRESPASS WARNING
He forgot to request docking permission

He turns around, tries to rush out again, slams into the station above the mail slot, hull down to 95% and he starts swearing harder as he slowly maneuvers down to the mail slot. At 0:05, he finally clears the grid, but the cop is still outside with the half finished scan, completing it and the station opens fire.

UNDER ATTACK
The Asp instantly drops to 6% from the stations cheat gun, 5...4...3...2..1...

bam, insurance screen
managed to snap a screenshot

Quineloe_sl said:

I just watched the most beautiful thing, ever, on SkafsgaardPG stream
...

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Ha something similar happened to me a while back. I was carrying a cargohold full of Palladium and it was getting late so I decided this would be the last run of the night. Flew in fast into the station, only to realise as I was entering the mailslot I'd forgotten to ask for docking permission. My first reaction was to hit full reverse but the thrusters were fitted more for weight saving than power so I just kept sliding in, so I powered in anyway, did the fastest backflip turn I could in a fully laden trader and boosted back out with 1 second left on the clock.

In other news, the current exploration rate has been given as 17,585 new systems per day, which sounds a lot until they also revealed that means explored space now represents 0.00015% of the galaxy. There's some way to go...

There are permit restricted systems all over the galaxy. Hopefully the things that get put there are compelling. Aliens, we need them.

I disagree, if they set the stage to have large player migrations towards these locations that works for me too. I really want some kind of space armada gameplay that pushes players to leave the bubble.

Human colonised space on it's own is more than large enough for a conflict. The in-game storyline, thin as it is, seems to be leading towards that with the Emperor dying and bits of the Federation breaking away. I am hoping that comes in 1.1, as it would tie in with the collaborative missions.

The civil warzones are fun but AFAIK the only in-game impact they have is when you collect the kill rewards it benefits one of the factions involved, and as the rewards aren't great I suspect simple trading will make more of a difference in a conflict, which seems wrong.

Some more info on what's coming in 1.1 next month (and beta next week!) Colonisation is coming...

...First we have some good news for explorers. We're adding the discovered by tag to the system map so when you view a body's information you will see which commander first scanned and returned to sell the data for that body. Supplementing this we're also adding information when you sell exploration data of the bodies contained within the exploration data being sold for a specific system [When you sell the data you have collected for a system it shows you the bodies that you have scanned]. There's also a change to enable selling exploration data a page at a time to help those who have been on long journeys of exploration!

In last week's update I mentioned the community goals feature which will be added in the 1.1 update. Here we have two specific examples of what we will be doing with those goals. The first is a minor faction seeking to expand their military capability by constructing a capital ship (one of Farragut Battlecruisers or Majestic Interdictors) which is obviously a huge undertaking so they'll require a lot of support and resources to successfully construct the warship.The commander who contributes the most to the construction will have the opportunity to name the ship.We'll need to vet the name of course

One of the other community goals will be a more involved process enabling the expansion into an unpopulated system. This will be a three stage process. The first step is for us and the DDF to establish a short list of candidate systems. The aim for this initial colony is to support further exploration and to act as a hub for other expansion in the region. Once we have the shortlist players will be invited to map the candidate systems and whichever system has the most data about it sold will be the target system. A community goal will then start to gather the resources needed to build an Ocellus starport that will be deployed in the chosen star system.

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Dev Update 29.01.2015

That sounds sweet, I'm on the last 300 light years of a 2500 ly loop or so, I found 1 (maybe) 2 earth like, and perhaps 20~ water/terraformables. I hope its retroactive - and that some day I'll at least be able to see where I've traveled.

I still appreciate the sense of scale that this game gives towards space. I encountered my first Neutron Star, a bizarre experience in context of scale to say the least.

So I finished going to the Pleiades to the California Nebula I went away from the nebula a couple hundred light years and navigated to any intersting system towards colonized space. I ended up traveling I think somewhere around 150-170 systems. I did not get an exact system count. My Ship had a jump range of 17.4 and I navigated by furthest jump. I think I scanned around 8 blackholes, but only 1 earth like and 2 neutron stars. Nothing particularly exotic. So I kept track of my sell data and maybe someone will find this interesting. Formatting could use work, but I just scribbled this all down. I earned 3,489,791 CR Total. -


X Systems Worth < 10k All Systems Total (3489791) Unknown Total Systems (150~)
84 Systems Worth > 10K (3,119,250)
51 Systems Worth > 20K (2,681,457)
34 Systems Worth > 40K (2,193,773)
13 Systems Worth > 60K (1,134,603)
4 Systems Worth > 80K (487662)
3 Systems Worth > 100K (402759)
2 Systems Worth > 120 (296,858)
1 Most Valuable System (158,300) Before a 10% boost due to hitting friendly faction prior to the final system I sold - Its value increased to 175, 523.

4 Most Valuable
Price change of final system - My station reputation increased to Friendly (My Federation faction is still neutral)

Total Value of Systems within their sell range with the total number of systems sold to reach the value
(Systems less than 10,000k) (370,541) Uncertain
(Systems 10,000 - 19,999) (437,793) (33 Systems)
(Systems 20,000 - 39,999) (487,884) (17 Systems)
(Systems 40,000 - 59,999) (1,059,170) (21 Systems)
(Systems 60,000 - 79,999) (646,981) (9 Systems)
(Systems 80,000 - 99,999) (84,903) (1 System )
(Systems 100,000 - 119,999) (105,901) (1 System)
(Systems 120,000 - 140,000) (121,095) (1 System)
(Most Valuable Increased in Value (158,300cr->175,523 cr)

My ship integrity was down to 46% - The repair price was 191,788 CR -> Reduced to 95,854 CR when I returned after selling all the station data. My Rebuy is 188,000

Cost Before Faction
Cost After Faction

Dandain_sl said:

That sounds sweet, I'm on the last 300 light years of a 2500 ly loop or so, I found 1 (maybe) 2 earth like, and perhaps 20~ water/terraformables. I hope its retroactive - and that some day I'll at least be able to see where I've traveled.

...

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From Dev posts:
- discovery tags are supposed to be retrospective, so if you scanned and handed in the data first, your name will be displayed on the map in future.
- when the patch goes live, you will be notified when you hand in scanned data if you are the discoverer.
- they don't plan to have an in-game list of what you have discovered (presumably because it could quickly become very large) but they may add a mechanism to "export" the list. I'm guessing this could write the file out to your disk.

Finally got my triples up, desk still needs to be replaced and I'm swapping in an X-55 for the X-52 along with Saitek rudder pedals (will be using those and yoke for X-plane and FSX). I also like that original Elite can be seen even though I didn't stage it.

A couple of screenshots from the 1.1 beta

Parallax clouds - they put these in for the gas giants, but at the moment they look much better on normal planets.

City lights

Later today in beta we get this:

Jacques' Roaming station is readying to depart
We are looking to test moving an Orbis between systems
The station is Jacques starport in Alshain
We will be moving the station during Fridays update.
It would be good to have a mix of people docked at the station and parked outside before it moves.

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Welcome to Elite: Dangerous Update 1.1 Beta - Things we'd like you to do!

Some really cool explorer ui stuff I saw, gonna earn the last couple million to kit out my exploration asp and wait for the patch. Then I'm going to Sag A + Wherever.

Moving starports requires some big engines. The Python gives a sense of scale.

My name's CMDR Quineloe, and I'm a bounty hunter. Not a bounty farmer, a bounty hunter. My job doesn't pay very often, but when it does, it pays well.