3081

Spreadsheets are useful but just in case you (or anyone else in this thread) doesn’t know, the game does provide some information to you. When you’re in a station at the Commodities Market, notice the Galactic Average column header has a little drop down menu. Click on it, and you can select different systems you’ve visited to get the related trade data.

As a complete aside, just because I’m on the subject of useful things people might not know, I see a lot of complaints on various forums about docking at the large space stations and trying to find the entrance. The general advice I see is that the entrance faces towards the planet. It’s easier than that, though, because if you have the station targeted and request docking, the target hologram of the station has arrows that point towards which side has the entrance.

Apologies if I’m just repeating well-known information. :)

3082

And if you can’t be bothered to read the arrows, just find the face that’s rotating anti-clockwise.

3083

LOL, caught myself in a right Pavlovian moment there, slaving away and drooling over the hamster wheel - just … one … more … trade.

Got an Adder now, lots of fun apart from the hinky view - plenty of options with it, you can make a serious essay into trading, exploration or fighting. I’m now trading so I can get some decent fighting kit on the Adder and do some combat stuff for a change (I’ve been practicing the combat so I’m now much more confident about what I’m doing combat-wise, ready to face the big, bad world). It’s got D and C gear apart from no guns yet (been mostly hauling with it).

The thing I noticed about the Adder is its turning rate, along with the Sidewinder, is second only to the Eagle. That’s got to mean something. Thinking of arming it with gimballed lasers (pref. beam but that might not be possible) to take down shields quickly on the two smalls, and some sort of big missile thump on the medium to take chunks out of hull. Or maybe the “shotgun” equivalent, the shard shooter thingy.

3084

Also, the corners of the face with the entrance have small, flashing green lights, and the opposite side has small, flashing red lights.

3085

http://elitedangerous.com/news/galnet/

And no, gaining ranks with the Feds doesn’t lower your standing with the Empire.

3086

Though supposedly the higher ranks are/will be mutually exclusive

3087

random fyi, gimballed beam weapons are very wonky and I don’t recommend them. Fixed Beam work fine, gimballed most other things are fine.

Also dumbfire missiles are amazing

3088

I like a mix of fixed lasers and gimballed multi-cannons. It’s pretty easy to keep your crosshairs on target from laser range, much harder at cannon range (assuming normal combat manoeuvering). It also means that if they chaff, you can still hit them.

3089

I used: Top gimballed medium multicannon
Bottom: 2 small gimballed pulse laser

I don’t like beams since i can’t sustain fire more than a few secs at most and pulses take down shields faster in short bursts, the medium multicannon will tear hull apart.

3090

I ground out enough credits to put some teeth on me tub. Four, count 'em, 4 gimballed burst lasers beneath the cockpit and two big honking gimballed autocannons on either side of the cockpit. You wanna interdict me mr pirate? allright, throttle to zero, do your worst motherfucker. muahahah get some! get some!

Have I linked that post from the official forum where two english lads did some serious science on shields? Turns out having four pips to your shields does a LOT for their strength. Like 2.5 times as long to melt as with no pips. Another thing they found is that fitting oversized shields does not improve things and that having a good power regulator is very important for your shield strength. This thread should be linked in our OP.

3091

Question on the standard scanner you start off with. I mapped it to weapon group 2, but nothing seems to happen when I press the rt. mouse button. Should something be happening, or is this the scanner that just automatically gives basic information that you access from the com screen?

3092

Need to be in supercruise and you have to hold to button until it fully charges to scan, also it should be somewhere that is unexplored otherwise nothing new will show up.

3093

You should see and hear the scanner charge as you hold it down. Did you assign it to your second weapon group or your secondary weapon?

3094

Are you sure you mapped it to weapon group 2? The screen can be confusing. Each column is a separate distinct fire group - in each fire group (that is, reading down each colum), weapons are marked ‘1’ and ‘2’ for primary and secondary fire. While the current group is deployed, you use whatever keys are mapped for primary/secondary weapon fire (for me it’s left/right mouse).

If you mapped your scanner to a secondary fire group, that means you have a second column in the fire groups screen. In that column, you need to map weapons to primary/secondary fire controls (i.e., marking them with 1s or 2s). So it’d probably be marked with a ‘1’ if you want to turn it on with a left mouse click, and ‘2’ if it is activated with a right mouse click.

If it’s really in a second fire group you need to switch fire groups (I think the ‘X’ key rotates through fire groups) and THEN deploy the fire group (‘U’ I think), and THEN press left mouse button. You’ll see a small progress bar of sorts in the lower left-ish of your screen. When that fills up, you get the INCEPTION HORN which lets you know you scanned, or something!

3095

I may have assigned it as secondary weapon.

3096

Thanks for the tip.
I did click around on that but found the sorting and how it worked really counter-productive so I went to excel instead.

Was thinking that maybe a external app that hooked into the game memory to read the values as you visited stations, and then wrote a overlay on the screen would be best but that isn’t something I want to spend time on, even if it would be interesting exercise :)

Did two missions today and got around 8k in total from them. Now I have 20k credits, and I see the adder is around 87.000, so I am far off yet.

A bit annoying that I get offered missions to destroy lots of ships; considering I’ll probably die in the process with my ghetto Sidewinder; and that there are hardly any missions on offer on the stations I’ve visited. Seems like I need 8 cargo slots to be offered some of the missions, but not sure the 10k reward on the one I saw would be worth it, considering how far you needed to travel.

3097

Maybe, but don’t chase the numbers/money as much as you chase the fun/experience, the money will come along with it and you’ll have a much better time.

3098

Real-life lessons from space.

3099

How mouse-keyboard friendly is this? Joystick required?

3100

From what I’ve seen, lots of pilots are having fun with the keyboard and mouse.