Elite: Dangerous Blog

With the addition of the Beluga Liner and the new Taipan fighter, I have created a revised version with the new ships added.

For those of you with big screens, the 1080p version (above) and a 4K version are on an Imgur.com gallery here.

By request of CMDR Cullingworth on the , here is a PDF version. Be warned - it's a big file!

elite-ships-11.pdf (35.61 mb)

UPDATE: I had the Hauler and Adder's function transposed. This is now fixed. Well spotted CMDR Orpheus.

In previous posts I’ve pointed out the limitations of the Engineering element of the game and how particularly the mission reward commodities cause major road-blocks.

I have been chipping away at these obstacles and with the help of members of the community providing both cargo and practical advice, I have some solutions.

Commodity storage

This isn’t going be an option for most players, but it is an option all the same. One CMDR told me his son is a lapsed player, so he has been using his son’s Type 6 as commodity storage. How does that work? The player logs in on two PC’s using two different Elite accounts and goes to the same location and game mode, then drops the mission reward commodity on one screen, the (on the laptop in this case) the CMDR scooped up the canister in his son’s Type 6, then logged out.

He now has storage for up to 100T of cargo.

Obviously not everyone has access to a second account, but maybe you have a friend who can hold on to your cargo for a while?

Upgrading ships that don’t have cargo racks

My Federal Corvette is built for combat and doesn’t have any cargo racks. What’s more once my Python has picked up a mission reward, I have to sell those commodities before I can switch to my combat ship. A major pain if I need the said commodity to upgrade my Corvette’s FSD to a level 3. So what’s the solution? Well, I have an Anaconda, which does have cargo racks and has identical internals to the Corvette, so I can fly the Anaconda out to Farseer Inc and get the Class 6A FSD on that ship upgraded by the Engineer. I then fly back to where my Corvette is stored. Here comes the “tricky” part.

• I have to sell the modified FSD and buy a lesser model.
• This puts the modified FSD in the outfitting “cache”.
• I can then swap ships to my Corvette, in outfitting, using the “buy back” grab the modified FSD.
• I then swap back to my Anaconda and rebuy the vanilla 6A FSD.

My Corvette now has the better FSD and my Anaconda is none the worse for wear – neither is my bank account!

Why is that “tricky”? Because the server controls the outfitting cache and it resets every five (or maybe ten) minutes. This means if you start doing this at 14:39 (server time) and take longer than a minute when the clock strikes 14:40, the “cache” may reset and bye! bye! goes your modified FSD. So don’t start until 14:41 and get done before 14:44 to be safe! Avoid minutes divisible by 5.

This option is permitted by Frontier, but not officially supported, so while it works now, it may not always work.

Finding tricky mission reward commodities

I have slaved, explored, worked and jumped game modes. But I could not for the love of anything get a mission with Modular Terminals as a reward. I went to stations where people had seen them (or even were at that moment) but zip! The mission board is random and my dice were cursed.

So how to get that one final ingredient to the FSD Jump range spell?

Trading with other players.

CMDR TheArmysRedNeck mentioned to me that he had some Modular Terminals, but needed some Osmium and Praseodymium but didn’t have a mining ship to get them.

I did have a mining ship and knew the exact pristine ring system where these items were plentiful.

I gave him my location, went mining in the ring and by the time Red arrived, I had half what he needed already.

We then made a simple exchange and were both on our way with what we needed for our respective blueprints.

So my advice is, if you have an excess of Praseodmium or you have a bunch of mission reward commodities you don’t want, advertise the fact! Go to FaceBook groups, the Frontier forums – wherever and let others know you want to trade.

I have completed my ship manufacturer brochures for LaveCon.

Click on a brochure cover to view the set.

UPDATE: IMGUR gallery links are in comments.

PDFs  core-dynamics-brochure.pdf (10.05 mb)

falcon-delacy-brochure.pdf (4.26 mb)

gutamaya-brochure.pdf (1,008.52 kb)

lakon-spaceways-brochure.pdf (6.75 mb)

saud-kruger-brochure.pdf (1.83 mb)

zorgon-peterson-brochure.pdf (17.54 mb)

And here are the full IMGUR albums:

Core Dynamics http://imgur.com/a/3Lmmu
Falcon DeLacy http://imgur.com/a/Z7urs
Lakon http://imgur.com/a/Y7L6F
Zorgon Peterson http://imgur.com/a/y424S
Saud Kruger http://imgur.com/a/JZ7zJ
Gutamaya http://imgur.com/a/jNxKd

Long term members of the community have been expressing frustration and dismay with the latest update to Elite, like Titus Balls https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/267381-My-Elite-Dangerous-inflection-point, Thrudd (author of Thrudd’s Trade Tool) https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/263684-The-Engineers-is-turning-into-a-deja-vu-for-me?p=4070730&viewfull=1#post4070730 and Obsidian Ant

This isn’t the AI changes that came into 1.6 and 2.1, what we’re talking about here is the Engineers.

What’s the problem?

To “unlock” most Engineers (so you can visit them) you have to reach a certain level with other Engineers. This means a certain level of grind. Either repeated upgrades to unlock higher levels or some form of trade (if you know what that engineer wants).

To get an Engineer to modify something, you must provide all the ingredients from the blueprint. Initially these are just materials or data, but higher upgrades include commodities (cargo).

Most of which cannot be bought, but must be earned as mission rewards. If you get a reward of cargo you can’t swap to a ship that doesn’t already have a cargo rack fitted. It also means you cannot apply these mods or use any ship that doesn’t have a big enough cargo rack for the items you need to hang on to for upgrades. So you might have to jettison rare cargo, just so you can carry on playing the game. Currently there is no way to locate a mission offering the reward you need, other than just visiting the Mission Board at every station and reading every mission.

Now assuming you do have everything, you go to the Engineer’s (remote) hideout and you request an upgrade, hand over the beans and pull the handle. The lights flash, the wheel spins and you get… numbers. Mass, Integrity, power draw, optimised mass. You have no idea what it all means. So, you won’t find out if your top speed or jump range is better until you apply the upgrade. It’s then you find out if the results are in fact worse. A level 5 upgrade can easily prove worse than a level 3! Now during the BETA when all the Engineers wanted was fish it was inconvenient and puzzling; now when you might struggle for a month to find the items for a blueprint, only to have it produce bad results, it is very disheartening, knowing you've got to start the search again and when you finally get back to where you started, the results may (again) be just as random.

So what?

Engineers is part of a paid expansion and was supposed to add more game play. It shows a lot of promise and the Engineer modifications are interesting, but are let down by an illogical and random delivery system.
Like a chocolate bar stuck half-way out a vending machine, the goods are in sight but blocked by mechanical failure!

It’s easily fixable.

Short term improvements

• More transparency with upgrades i.e. "Your FSD max range is 12Ly and with this modification would be 14Ly. Apply Y/N?"
• The ability to deliver cargo/data/materials to an engineer in advance of using blueprints, no longer making it mandatory to have cargo racks for most mods.
• Change the randomness on modifications so it is within tiered bands, not a 0 to 100% range, so that a level 5 mod should always be better than a level 4, even if it isn't the best. i.e. level 1 = 1-20% improvement, level 2 = 20-40%, level 3 =40-60%, level 4 = 60-80% and level 5 = 80-100%.
• Find a better way to communicate where materials etc. can be found on blueprints. The Galnet news post was a quick-and-dirty fix.

These would make a significant improvement to the existing mechanic making it more logical, transparent and progressive (rather than pot luck).

In the long term

A player market in materials would allow all players to sell on items not required and you could purchase that oh-so-hard-to-find material or cargo if you have more credits than time. These could be like rare goods, but in reverse. Materials would cost the most (and sell for the most) close to Engineer outposts, but get cheaper further away from Engineers. Materials would gravitate towards where they are needed.

The ability to apply same upgrade to multiple items with the same result. i.e. If I have enough materials for 3 blueprints, I should be able to apply the same upgrade to all three multi-cannons with the same outcome (if done together).

Expand cargo and material storage to all stations (not just Engineers) and add module storage, so you can refit your ship for another purpose without losing the upgraded modules you own.

This is an opinion piece, so nothing in it is official, confirmed or in any design documents – it’s just a culmination of ideas.

Currently if you want to be bad in Elite: Dangerous, you kill people. Players or NPCs. Currently there is no recognition for being good at it, or consequences for being too bad.

Piracy and/or smuggling is supposed to be a career path in Elite, so I would like to see some changes on how this path is presented in the game.

Firstly, successful criminal behaviour should gain status. If we can have a rank for CQC then we sure as heck can have a “Criminal Rank”.

Okay, that sounds cool, but how would it work?

Other career paths grade you on how much you trade, or how much exploration data you collect, or how much kill-bounty you amass. The criminal career path would take into account the quantity of smuggled, stolen and black market goods, weighted by the security of the system they are sold at (high security systems score more than low security systems).

This would be augmented by the bounty on your head, which adds to the total, however if you are killed this goes down, so you could lose criminal rank. Only the most hardened and dangerous pirates and killers would make Elite.

That’s where consequences come into play.

A cargo scanner should add a “demand cargo” function to the communications panel, so pirates can easily send a message to prospective marks. This is something that should be key-bound. That way getting this message the victims know how to respond.

“A pirate is demanding you drop some of your cargo. Failure to do so will result in your ship being attacked”

If you kill someone currently, you get a 6,000CR fine and wanted status in just the local system for a period of six days, after which you can pay it off. You can kill ships (human or NPC) then avoid the “scene of the crime” and unless you get scanned with a Kill Warrant Scanner, you’re home free.

To change this, I would propose that if you kill someone the first time, the same mechanic is employed, but if you kill a second person while you have an outstanding warrant, then the outstanding fine becomes a permanent bounty and cannot be paid off. This would be repeated for each subsequent kill.

Any permanent bounty is attached to your rebuy, so if your ship is destroyed you have to pay your own bounty plus the normal rebuy to get the ship back. This means being killed as a bad guy carries a lot more risk, but it doesn’t mean you can’t still be a bad guy.

Once the local plus permanent bounty reaches a threshold value (1M CR), if you are in a Federation or Empire system the warrant would then go Federation or Empire wide.

High security systems should become just that. Any interdictions or attacks should attract an immediate and robust security response in seconds. This will push piracy into low security systems where the response is minutes, and killers into anarchy systems where they can kill pilots without any bounty on their head. Making anarchy systems dangerous and shady places.

I would at the same time, raise the value of legitimate goods (by 10% and 20%) in those systems. Best commodities markets are also in the most dangerous systems. Don’t want danger? Stay away.

Rather than a list of bad guys in stations that tells you nothing, bounty hunters should get a live feed in GalNet of the top five criminals in the area online in the same game mode - including NPC bad guys where no humans are around.

“CMDR Braben has been spotted leaving White City at Zeta Trianguli Australis eight minutes ago”

The game should generate a few persistent NPC pirates and griefers that are each local to a handful of systems. So you know if you visit the Leesti area you may well run into the mad-dog killer “Captain Ed Lewis” who’ll blow you away for kicks. Or the dread pirate “Don Antonaci” who’ll take 20T of whatever you’re carrying or else!

Finally the game needs NPC Wing Men and a method of hiring wingmen (human or NPC) at stations for a fixed fee (hourly rate) with human CMDRs getting their rebuy discounted by 25% if they die during a contract. NPC Wingmen cannot differ greatly from whatever AI is being written for ship launched fighters, so I see no insurmountable obstacles to getting this added.

Since the weekend I have had the chance to add a better graphic of the Imperial Majestic Class Interdictor.

I have also had the time to lay out the ships by their category of combat, freighter, passenger or multi-purpose.

On request I have included the Scarab SRV (which is a measly 4.7m). Also on the revised diagram is a Boeing 777, because it's something large that most people have seen. The "Oasis of the Seas" which at 362m long is the world's largest cruise ship and carries 6,296 passengers, is probably the largest thing anyone may have seen and shows just how massive the larger Elite ships really are.

Place holders for the coming Elite: Dangerous ships; the Dolphin, the Beluga Liner and the Panther LX have been added with estimated sizes.

I have added the pad sizes and colour-coded ship names by pad size. There is also a scale representation of the station access corridor.

UPDATE: I've re-drawn the whole thing from scratch as vectors, so no bitmaps at all! This means I can re-draw at any resolution, so see the 4K edition of the chart below.

Click HERE for full size 4096x2896 (4K) image.

Click HERE for full size 2560x1440 image.

With the release of the 1.5 Ships update, Elite has had an additional five ships added to the game and the previous scale diagram I'd done was was both outdated and missing several keys ships - so especially for you, I have re-drawn the whole thing using all new graphics and the most up-to-date size information.

The diagram uses a scale of 1 pixel to 1 metre.

Credit goes to Mat Ricardo (Prefim on Reddit) for creating the ship renders.

UPDATE: Now with more capital ship goodness! Thanks to ElitePvE group Mobius for helping me hunt down the Imperial Capital Ship.

The ship sizes are taken from here

The claims of XBOX exclusivity were greatly exaggerated.
It seems the PS4 version will follow along after the XBOX version in due course.
But it has also come out that the PC Elite community won't be able to pew-pew with their console cousins, mainly due to the constrained and limited nature of console software updates in Microsoft's and SONY's walled gardens.

David Braben, speaking in an interview with games website PC Games N said “I think the challenges for us, which sort of fights against it, is we’ve also said that we’ll continue to do updates across all platforms, and what we didn’t want was PC updates to be held up for whatever reason, like if there’s a delay on another platform."

It's pretty clear that if the PC community were told an update was on infinite hold while SONY or Microsoft signed off on the console version, the news would go down like a cup of cold sick.

Frontier have announced the XBOX One version of Elite: Dangerous.

Is this good or bad? Well, from my point of view, it’s like hearing there’s going to be a new MacDonalds burger available in France. Good for them. The question is “will they be using my beef to do it?”

In all likelihood, it shouldn’t make any difference, as it’s the Cobra Engine being ported more than anything – the game content is already created. PS4 players will miss out though, as this is going to be an XBOX “exclusive” (except it’s on the PC and soon the Mac too – so exclusivity means “PS4 excluded”).

Frontier have said “Elite: Dangerous on Xbox One will be the complete and authentic Elite: Dangerous experience. It will not be "dumbed down". We’ll be working with an all-new audience, but that doesn’t mean a change in direction for the game, and nor does it mean slowing development on the PC version.”

The trailer for the XBOX version is here:

I took the original graphic and added (most) of the ships.

Then spotted the Adder was missing, so added that.

For the last revision I've added in Imperial Courier.
1.2 promises two new ships. Which of the green ones do you think it'll be?

Click on the image below to see the full size version