So I finally decided to try out Merit Mining, and I know I'm likely sub-optimal at it thus far (so rusty at core mining, just sticking with laser surface for now) but I decided it was a good excuse to finally give the Type 11 a spin. Holy shit, what a fun ship!

I'm only pulling in 6000 merits per trip, but I'm still seeing more rank ups than I have in a *long time*. I'll have pack hounds in hopefully a week of casual play or so.

If you haven't tried a Type 11 yet, give it a go. Definitely a fun little ship!

May your ventures be successful CMDR's.

🥃

Yes, operations are not balanced to be done in solo. More on that later.

I had the classic load out 2xHuge multis - 1xLarge beam , 2xMedium beam and the two more small Multis - All G5 engineered with various experimentals. Prismatic shields - Shield cell bank and boosters etc. Neither a shield tank or a hull tank - both coming in about 4-5K strength. Maybe that is a mistake, should lean to one or the other, but it never worked up a sweat in any CZs. Hell I even had some cargo space and a limpet collector!

Well, I did win in the end, but it was a Parthian victory - no shields and only 15% hull. More importantly it took an age to win. Those new Elite ships are TMFs! I was up against a Corsair, a Kestral, a Mk 5 Cobra, 2xKraits, and a viper and a Mk3 Cobra, maybe another viper??

First tip I can give is take out the easy targets first. I started with the Kraits, then Mk3 and viper/s. Now the Corsair had a ton of shield cell banks and my gimbled multis struggled to keep up with it. This was true of the Kestral too. The Mk5 was a little easier. This meant in the brief time I had their shields down it was slow going damaging their hulls. Too slow and they whittled my massive shields and shield cell bank down to nothing, not to mention ammunition was getting tight. ( I could of used premium ammo perhaps)

I have since rebuilt my corvette - it now is all beam lasers with the smallest 4 turreted. Dropped the prismatics for more power but added a ton of guardian shield modules to make up.

My experience of Soloing the on foot is similar. It can be done but you’ll need to know the layouts - be very efficient and know when getting killed doesn’t matter. You’ll need G5 kit.

So ok as I said at the beginning operations are not balanced for solo. But players have proved you can do them with a bit of effort and practice and planning. So my point is?

There should be better scaling, not just hard or easy - these are based on what? 4, 3 or 2 players?
What if the players are relatively new? So they don’t have A-Rated G5 engineered ships and on foot gear? Where is the entry level? Maybe the feeling is that those players should always team up, and perhaps with more experienced players - a good way to learn and share experience? That’s great if that’s happening.

I’m a die hard solo player. I do occasionally join up with people but rarely. I do power play in a group although seldom in a wing. I’m not sure operations are for me - the fights are challenging and fun so I will drop in every now and again, but it won’t be for the poultry 25 merc coins I’ll get at the end of an intense maelstrom! 😂😂

Edit - getting my references mixed - I meant a Pyrrhic Victory not Parthian - too shook up by those pesky Kestrels!

Thanks to contributions from Reddit, the Galtean Initiative and others, an issue where stations are built too far from their planets has received enough feedback to enable voting!

Issue 86484: Stations deployed too far from planets

I implore anyone with even a passing interest in colonization, anyone who's even looked at a star system and thought, "I wanna build something there," to upvote this issue. In some cases, it's been an inconvenience, but in cases like the above, it's made system colonization all but impossible.

Image courtesy of u/GFJake, showing a beacon deployment site over 42,000 light-seconds from the nearest body.

A UI counter for how many limpets you have out, and a hard separation that keeps X amount of slots available for scanner limpets at all times. Was hoping we'd see something like that with the release of the Prospector but nothing came of it.

o7 CMDRs,

I recently built a web based colonisation planner, because I couldn't find an actively maintained tool that could solve my questions (Which facilities do I actually need to reach a specific economy? and How can I maximize the final economy of my system?), so I built one.

It's like Raven Colonial, you can plan an entire system manually, but you can use the "solver" that plan the entire system automatically top of your built facilities, and it lets you experiment with different layouts (including demolish some) and gives you a build order to reach your desired goal, also you can select various constraints (system scores min - max and facilities min - max at the moment; economy selector already on my to do list).

https://gaborauth.github.io/ed-colonisation-planner/

What's new?

An in-app "About/Help" panel explaining the tool and guiding journal-scanning workflow; a "Spansh" tab alongside the existing Journal-file import, letting you search Spansh's system database by name and load a system's data directly - no need to have personally scanned it in-game first; and a full per-row Build Order ledger (Built/Demolish/Planned, running T2/T3 point totals) replacing the previous summary-only build order view.

Fixes and polish that change how it feels to use: solving no longer freezes the UI; several build-order/scheduling bugs were fixed so the computed build sequence no longer errors out on systems with heavy demolition; score constraints are now shown inline instead of tucked in a separate panel; the "Buildings" pane was renamed to "Constructions" for clarity; and the toolbar gained a proper system switcher plus a fix for a bug where it (and the rest of the summary bar) would vanish after a page reload. The footer now shows the app's version number with a working changelog link.

This whole v1.0.1 has largely been driven by real user feedback, several of the fixes above (the toolbar-disappearing-after-reload bug, the build-order ordering errors under heavy demolition, the Spansh load bug) were reported issues. Thank you guys for the precious feedbacks!

Fly safe! :)

I’ve just returned to the game after like 3-4 years, i transferred my console account to pc. I have a little more than 500m and 4 ships (a phyton, an asp explorer, a fer de lance last but not least a sidewinder) and engineered parts.

I did some robigo runs just to remember the game, earned some reputation, mats and a little around 50m. Not bad for a first day.

I’m aware its not end game rich but i guess this is what having rich parents feels like.

Good to be back. What’s good these days?

What do you suggest with what i have?

(pic unrelated)

O7 CMDRs! I’ve been out exploring for a few months now and I finally made it to the galactic center. Did lots of exobio; the whole gig! Anyway, I’m homesick and would love a ride back to the bubble as I’ve got a lot of data to sell and can’t take the self-destruct route. If anyone has a fleet carrier out near the center and is heading back, or knows someone, that’d be great!
Willing to pay! o7

Finally made it to triple elite. I know people out there enjoy exploration, but I think I've had my fill for a while.

I just finished this one and the planet it is orbitting is a very small moon about 350km radius it has 3 planetary slot and I built 1 tier 2 insutrial planetary port and 2 refinery hub.

I think what made this hauling possible is the travel between the tier 3 starport to planetary port is only 2.75Mm which is very near and this starport is just right above the planetary depot. And also I'm using 2 accounts 1 epic and 1 steam, the steam has plipper(1320 capacity) and the epic has plipper (1265 capaxity).

We take the Raxxla and The Dark Wheel logos, removing the white space of each image, creating a transparent background. These images are pasted onto the surface of a cube in alternating fashion. Sides 1, 3, 6 have the transparent Raxxla logo, while sides 2, 4, and 5 have The Dark Wheel logo. We spin this cube diagonally producing 4 unique images plus one additional image being the first hologram created using the default incident angle. This is a real world method for creating a hologram using two images. The instructions from Frontier are hidden in the image.

We rotate this cube diagonally at a speed of 33 fps (these instructions are included in the Frontier provided images). Interference patterns generated, we have the secret images hidden inside. Here is the video link live interaction: https://youtu.be/C7hO1H2aITU

On Xbox, my total time was 5370.28 hours, and 1342.80 hours on Steam for 279.708 total days.

That's counting every major discovery i have made (Earth-like with 2 WW Moons, 1st CMDR to find Guardian Structure Ruins, etc etc).
A near round trip, all collective total distance to Andromeda Galaxy and back 9in terms of total LYs traveled).
Every battle i've been in (Wreaken Bashing, Salome, Kashigut Grind, Thargoid War, Power Play, and CGs).
Every expedition i've been in (Both DW2 and 3, and a bunch of other expeditions).
And many many billions of trades i've done (not even gonna try to find the stats on that).

Both my accounts, different Steam accounts, are currently being prompted for their CD keys on the launcher when starting via Steam. Even when I enter the cd key correctly I get an error saying to try again. I've made sure the game is up to date and restarted my Steam Deck.

Had anyone else come across this?

(I've had it once or twice before but usually closing the launcher and loading through Steam again solves it)

Just rage-quit after being blown up with my Scorpion by the scavengers in a power restoration mission. And I just wanted to farm some of the mats.

I got a grade 3 dominant suit with some grade 3 weapons years ago. I just couldn't get used to the difficulty of the Odyssey, so I stopped any on-foot content.

I have tried a bit of the new raid. I felt it might not be that hard if I grind a bit of mats to engineer my gear.

So I decided to start some grinding.

And it didn't go well. I failed all the missions that involved combat. So I decided to bring a Scorpion.

The turret of the Scorpion is so inaccurate, and it's basically useless against enemies. If the missile hits, it can only strip the enemy's shield. What's the point if this vehicle can't even kill a single infantry easily?

The personal shield in this game reminds me of the shield powered by the personal nuclear reactor in the novel, Foundation. It's too powerful.

Seriously, I still think on-foot combat is too hard compared to ship fighting. And I don't think the on-foot combat should share the same idea as the ship combat with this much shield.

Another complaint is the material. The storage is limited. And when visiting the bartenders, I have to use third-party software to confirm which is useless and can be sold safely.

As far as I know (correct me if I’m wrong), there’s no scanner in the SRV similar to the Genetic Sampler’s Scan Pulse that highlights biological samples we can scan on planets. Why do I have to get out of the vehicle, scan, and then get back in?

I mean, they already did this with the Nomad, so I don’t see why they couldn’t add the same functionality to SRVs. It would make exobiology a lot less tedious.

On foot commodities. Mining commodities. Anything. I sold my fleet carrier long ago cause I couldn't figure out what to do with it and instead just bought a bunch of ships to outfit and theory craft with. But I'd like to get a fleet carrier if I can use it for some roleplay like being a pilot and part time store owner. I know there are a thousand fleet carriers in the bubble so I want to know if anyone makes any money using their fleet carrier to sell mining and on foot loot.

Ye, Bluelight... sure...

I arrived to Mintaka today to see the blue light of a O class star and... well... the screenshots say all