I have enough credits to buy a Vulture, but not enough to outfit it yet, so I’m still flying a Diamondback Scout.
I was hoping to pick up an Imperial Courier as an interim upgrade. I’ve been running missions to improve my ranking, but I’m still stuck at outsider. No idea if I’m even close to serf, and at this point I may be better off raising credits for the Vulture than raising faction for the Courier.
On the plus side, the Scout is a nice ship for the price. More maneuverable than the Viper I was flying, nearly as fast, and the same hardpoint options (same as the Courier for that matter). Same shields as the Cobra though, and not as much internal capacity. Not good as a bulk trader, but decent for smuggling missions and bounty hunting.
I am still knocking about in the sidewinder in my new-ish fresh start. I upgraded to the Adder for a while, but losing the expansive cockpit view was a bit of a deal-breaker for me. What’s the upgrade path to more capable ships if you want to admire the scenery?
Crater
4623
I went from a Viper to a Diamondback Scout, and I really liked it. Not quite as fast, but a lot more maneuverable. I really enjoyed the ample fuel supply and jump range, which was great for the scanning based community goal. I found the shields to be really lacking, though - that was the main reason I got rid of it.
I’m now in a Viper, and while it’s a little slower than I’d like, it really is a death machine.
I finally got it too, and dug out the Sidewinder FF2 as well. Haven’t booted it up yet.
Ship upgrade from Cobra strictly depends on how you play ED.
If you’re looking for a good multi-role ship that provides customizable flexibility in trading, exploring, and space murder, I believe the Asp is the natural upgrade from the jack-of-all-trades Cobra. Then you have the Vulture – because of its horribly short legs it’s not so hot with exploration and trade, but it excels at space murder. I’m a little bummed that I just can’t skip across the galaxy at will like I did with my Cobra, but those regrets fade when I’m melting fools beneath two C beams in my Vulture.
I’m now in a Viper, and while it’s a little slower than I’d like, it really is a death machine.
Upgrade the thrusters in a Viper, and you essentially have a ED F-104 Starfighter; e.g. a missile with a man in it. It’s the boom and zoomer of the ED universe.
I’m going to throw this out for those of y’all dusting off old joysticks to play this.
Radio Shack sells contact cleaner for about $10 a can. If the joystick is suffering from spiky potentiometers, which can happen over time, then spraying some contact cleaner into the pot will probably clear the problem right up. It worked wonders on the twist axis pot in my X52, though prying open the stick was an ordeal in itself.
Crater
4627
Whoops - I meant “Vulture” in that last paragraph, not Viper. I wish my Vulture was as fast as my Viper!
Squee
4628
A rank thrusters aren’t too shabby on the vulture, either. IIRC I’d hit a hair over 380 while boosting. Not as fast as a cobra or clipper but not too bad.
Speaking of which, I’m kinda hitting the wall in Elite. I think the biggest thing that’s dragging me down is that while there’s a sense of progression in buying new ships and upgrading them, there’s almost 0 sense of progression in what I actually do with them. Bounty board missions are really time consuming for the pay, and having higher combat and trade rating doesn’t increase the reward and difficulty on them enough to make them worth it. RES farming is still the best way for me to get money, and I tried some trading with my clipper fitted for it (Bit more cargo room than a fitted type-7) and that’s not particularly great either.
Kinda hope they add some higher difficulty and higher reward options. Like difficult bounty board kill missions which will still take you half an hour to find the target in the first place, but the payoff is a few million or something. And as for trading all I can think is increase the number of NPC pirates who will interdict juicy targets and subsequently increase the profit of trade goods. Would also encourage flying in a wing with escort ship(s), though they’d need to make the AI better at interdicting since it’s really hard to lose to the computer at the minigame.
Definitely do like flight model and graphics and sound and the whole nine yards, just striking me the more I play and get better ships how little that changes beyond “Do exactly what you were doing before only now a little bit faster”. Which you’d think I would be ok with since I play games like D3 and PoE, but Elite hasn’t got any slot machine item drops. It’s either murdering people in a RES at 100k a pop or trading and making 600-700k per loop. The item drops are finding undiscovered earthlikes while exploring, I guess.
conVurt
4629
As you progress in the elite rankings for combat/trade/exploration, the bulletin board missions do scale up in reward at least. Supposedly one of the earlier patches was to add more flexibility to the mission system, and while they didn’t actually revise the missions themselves much, hopefully at some point in the future the missions will get more interesting.
To deal with the lack of sense of progress, I set for myself little mini-goals. One week it was to explore around Barnard’s Loop and take in the sights of the various nebulae and stellar nursery there. Another week it was to see how many credits I could make mining. Right now I’m seeing if I can snag some permits for closed systems while putting my newish imperial anteater through it’s paces.
Take a break Squee. Nothing wrong with that. I do it all the time. Take a break for a few weeks then come back and WHEEEE. I did that with Jumpgate too. Play it HARD CORE for months then not touch it for a while.
Squee
4631
Yeah, might do that. Might just play enough to tread water in powerplay so that in a few weeks I’ll get a new toy from that, then maybe the big announcement will be the immediate launch of something big like planetary landing and I’ll get pulled back in.
Speaking of powerplay, damn. Didn’t think of it when I signed up, but it makes trading mildly more annoying. When I was trading the vast majority of my interdictions were powerplay related rather than space pirates.
Once I found out powerplay merit vouchers disappear at the end of the cycle if you don’t turn them in, I pretty much gave up on power play my own self. Shame, really, I was enjoying undermining a lot.
Squee
4633
It is kind of a pain. Plus you can’t cash them in at any old station of your power, you have to check out the powerplay map to find a “Regional HQ” system to turn them in at. Which might not be too bad for some ships but if, for example, you’re getting merits by space murder and you aren’t running an A rank FSD in your combat ship yet long distance travel is pretty pokey.
I guess what you could do (Again assuming space murder and not space piracy involving cargo or anything) is dock in a station where you’re a-murderin’, buy a hauler, load an A rank FSD on it (Costs like 190,000 credits for the ship and A rank FSD combined) and use that 21ly jump range (26ly if you want to bother stripping it down but probably don’t need to, and 32ly if you want to get D rank internals along with selling everything else) just to shuttle yourself to the nearest merit collection point, then fly back get back in your original ship and sell the hauler. You’d lose maybe 20k credits but that would get you to your destination and back fairly quickly.
That’s exactly the sitch I found myself in. Was in a Vulture 100+ LY away undermining one of Delaine’s control system, racked up maybe 300-400 merits, then next time I logged in, poof, gone. SO frustrating and silly.
My Murder Box and I deliver 8 units at a time from relatively close control stations to Gateway. We stop when we get over 100.
I should probably switch to a more murder-oriented Power than Edmund’s trade Power.
How to get better graphics in Elite: Dangerous, because it is shocking the in game aliasing is so poor in this day and age, and the recent downgrades to the visuals might not be to everyone’s preference?
Edit: i’ve never heard ‘forum’ spoken like it is in that vid! - Fore-room! rather than the more normal ‘for-um’. It might be a british local dialect thing, or possibly some cockney-slang?
Edit 2: as per the video caution, precede with caution (back up files before editing etc), as it does not work for everyone and might break ED!
SweetFX includes SMAA, so you if you use it you may want to disable the in-game SMAA then. Not sure which implementation is better, prolly just need to try and see.
There’s a ‘supersampling’ option in the graphics settings. I think it works the same way as Nvidia’s DSR, rendering the entire scene at a higher resolution then downscaling it to the output resolution. I played around with it a bit while floating in front of a station. My GTX 970 handled 1.5x handily; at 2.0x, the frame rate dipped below 60 FPS, the rotation on the station became jerky and the temp on my card shot up 10 degrees. The option requires a fairly powerful card, but even 1.5x was a noticeable improvement.
From their latest newsletter:
“We’re almost in place to make a colossal announcement at Gamescom in two weeks’ time.”
Hopefully they aren’t making a colossal mistake by overselling whatever they have to reveal, but I sure am heck eager to see what it is.
I think it’ll be planetary landings. Maybe rocky planets and asteroid bases as a first step, but fingers crossed that it’ll be more than that. And, hopefully it’s not one year out or something.
Asteroid bases would ROCK (especially flying into them, as long as they looked all rustic inside, like hewn out of the rock). BTW, has anyone ever seen one of those “roadside diner” looking outposts that were in some of the newsletters back when? I’ve never seen one like that.
I would love asteroid bases.
