Elite: Dangerous Kickstarter Launched

hahaha touche. I guess they’re using the correct AI for the police in Elite.

Picked up first mission where I have to find a Black Box in the system. Spent hours flying around and can’t find just the one I need. Anyone have hints? Or is it just keep checking out every USS I can find?

Whoa! Nearly got burned up while warping in to a desolate white dwarf system. Normally, I just quickly steer away from a sun when I warp in, this time I noticed there was a yellow line but no sun - the sun was way inside the yellow line, tiny and white, white, white, my jump drive had jerked to an emergency stop, and I was burning up fast, the fraction of a second delay due to my puzzlement had cost me some time and I had to wrangle the ship away from there pronto! Stuff was steaming on the control panel.

As I started to cool down I maneouvred towards the next system in my route and tried to jump - no, systems still too hot, had to pootle along at normal max speed for a bit while heat went down a few more percent. Then I could switch the jump drive on, and still got a heat warning, but I reckoned it wouldn’t be too bad and I wanted to get out of there (no stations anyway for repairs), so I took the risk, jumped, heat went up to 157% and I got a critical heat warning, but everything was ok, pulled off the next sun and got to a station, and everything cooled down to normal. Total damage wasn’t too bad, but it sure was a bit of a surprise!

That’ll teach me to check the solar systems I’m going to!

Had a crack at mining and it was fun. Just went to the local planet and extraction belt. Tooled around to to try the mechanics. Scored some Urandite and then found a rock dropping Silver. Unfortunately I lost the rock while picking up pieces. Is there really no way to tag a rock you want to keep an eye on? That seems ridiculous.

After that I just ended up going from rock to rock hoping to find another silver deposit with no luck.

On the bright side, snagged a wanted Cobra taking on a miner on the way home and picked up a 15k bounty on him. Forgot which button I mapped to secondary fire, so had to to all the work with a single pulse laser. Thankfully the miner had done most of the work for me!

I realy realy need you guys o stop posting awesome elite stories as I am currently locked in with the in-laws 200 fucking lightyears from my cockpit.

In other news, tylertoo, you might want to update your list of awesome withthis link. It’s a fine discussion including some nice laid out routes of how to make much and more spacebucks doing the spacetrucking thing like a boss. I want to get home and be gone lol.

I have to share something I learned yesterday in mumble from Harkonis and Cortilian that was huge for me. I had trouble where every USS I would go into would be empty and I had no idea what I was doing wrong. At first I figured there were just a lot of empty ones, but the other guys told me almost all of them should have something in them.

Turns out I was trying to drop out of supercruise as close to the USS as possible, like <5km and many times this meant that the USS would swing around out of my view by the time I jumped out of supercruise. Turns out you have to actually be facing the USS and can even do it once you are at the safe exit speed and even multiple hundreds of km away! This was huge for me and has saved a ton of time and frustration.

Another trick is you can just go to supercruise and set your speed at minimum and just wait for a USS to spawn, then point at it, select it, and immediately exit supercruise into it with no waiting (many times they will spawn in your view, but check the navigation pane every so often to see if it is close, but just not in view). Awesome! I was wondering how some of you were farming USS so quickly and now I know what I was doing wrong. Hopefully this helps someone else.

Anyone have the issue of when clicking the ED launcher icon nothing seems to happen? It is running (i can see it in the task manager under the Processes tab, EDLaunch.exe) but that is about it?

I don’t think i’ve seen this mentioned before on the official forums? Ho hum. It might be ‘servers too busy’ kind of thing? But yeah as i don’t actually have the game downloaded yet, this ‘stall’ on the very first step is a little sad. Back to FM2011 for now :)

Oh, i’ve allowed everything related to ED to run on the firewall, even suspended my AV (and used ‘game mode’ on both), but still no cigar. This seems odd though? no messages or anything, nothing downloading, just the EDLaunch.exe sitting there…doing nothing.

Unless this sounds familiar to anyone here, i’ll try it again later and then probably do a support ticket on the official forums. Don’t fancy trying to get a clear answer on there currently!

Added, thanks! Also added Kelan’s post above about farming USS.

The launcher probably isn’t trying to connect to the server at that point, not until you tell it to log in.

@Zak
You do have the latest version of the launcher, right?

This can be difficult to troubleshoot. I had a similar issue with other games and the culprit turned out to be Teamviewer (I wasn’t running it, there was a background task trying to draw buttons onto windows).

Maybe the launcher has a startup log you can check?

Also, there’s an option to “validate game files” in the Launcher (after you log in), might be worth a shot.

Thanks for the suggestions guys, and so i did try it later (as in 2hours ago) and it then did something. I’m downloading (painfully slowly!) the single player combat module thing first, it will probably take all night, then tomorrow i’ll have a shot at the game (which if comes down at the same speed will take all day and night!). Getting there, but in truth i’m just scouting the game right now, it will probably be another few months before i get ‘serious’ with it and learn to fly as well as Isinona and all FA Off.

Do you have a Samsung SSD at all? I find their Magician software can occasionally cause that to happen with games.

Today, with the day off and no obligations, I have had a bunch of playing time and am finally getting the hang of the basics – supercruise, hyperspace, docking, landing, etc etc. I am also finally getting the hang of my new HOTAS with the keyboard-less binding setup I found on the official forum.

I sold off my Sidey’s two puny lasers and shield since I’m not now trying combat, and wanted to free up the weight and space. Bought an additional cargo hold to boost capacity to 6. And in one mission I nearly doubled my meager earnings. Somebody wanted four Auto-Fabricators and was offering over 25K for the lot. I found a place selling them for 3500 each. I bought four for 14K, and then flipped them for 25 and change. I know that’s chump change to many of you but I was so frigging happy. A few more of those missions and I’m going to save up to buy a hauler. Profit!

Aargh n/m I should read people’s posts before I ask silly questions.

I picked up a bounty yesterday to look for Julie Steiner in 3 nearby systems. It was a 42 hour bounty, so I was doing other stuff yesterday, and I was in no hurry to search for Julie.

Today I went to one of the systems, and got a lead that she was actually in the original system where I got the bounty. As soon as I got there, I ran into her. In an Adder, status Elite. Holy shit. She was deploying Hardpoints. Uh-oh.

I tried firing on her, but no matter what angle I came in at, she had a turret that was firing on me and messing me up the whole time. My shields were toast so fast.

I decided to get the hell out. Looked at my left panel, chose the next nearest star system and activated jump drive.

But my hard points were still deployed. Damn it. Retract those weapons! Frame shift Drive charging.

Sparks flying everywhere in my cockpit, I was down to 10% hull integrity, and my shields were a long way from recharging.

Just then… “Incoming Missile Detected”. WHAT?!? Oh shit. Frame shift drive activated.

4… 3… (I could see the missile as a white triangle get closer and closer… 2… I wasn’t going to make it. That white triangle was going to get there first… 1…

I made it.

Word to the wise. Don’t mess with Julie.

Julie Steiner will fuck you up.

-Tom

Be very wary of playing right now, the server backend seems to be having serious issues. Exploration is oftentimes requiring 3-4 scans per planet to actually take and selling said data often results in not actually getting any money. I also just dropped about 600,000cr on a pair of beam lasers. The game happily took my money, disconnected me, and didn’t actually give me the beam lasers I paid for. Looking at the forums, I’m not the only one having the problem. Yeesh.

Ouch.

Yep, servers are seriously screwed up. ~250k lost in faulty transactions.