Elite: Dangerous Blog

I’ve done some research to ascertain some hopefully relevant information about the ten powers. Not just what cool toys they offer as perks to allies, but how far their homeworlds are from Founders World, what their goals are and what trade is like in their neck of the woods. Or not, in one case!

Perks are available to allies after four weeks where they have rating 3 (top 50%).

Trades were calculated using a Thrudd search for profitable trades of 30Lyr or less in a 30Lyr range of the ally homeworld.

What are the pros and cons of each power? I have no clear idea but after running around for Aisling Duval for a few days, I'm out of pocket and don't feel I've gained anything. Clearly the simulation of politics is working perfectly!

Zachary Hudson (Federation)

Ethos: Preparation/Combat, Expansion/Combat, Control/Combat
Perks: Pacifier Frag-Cannon (large frag cannon with decreased damage but increased range and tighter spread)
Homeworld: Nanomam – 82.03LY From Shinrarta Dezhra
Current best trade: 20.01Ly         2255 CR Total

Felicia Winters (Federation)

Ethos: Preparation/Social, Expansion/Finance, Control/Finance
Perks: Pulse Disruptor (medium pulse weapon, causes module malfunction)
Homeworld: Rhea – 56.03LY From Shinrarta Dezhra
Current best trade: 20.26Ly         2304 CR Total

Arissa Lavigny-Duval (Empire)

Ethos: Preparation/Social, Expansion/Combat, Control/Combat
Perks: Imperial Hammer (multi shot rail gun)
Homeworld: Kamadhenu – 135.68LY From Shinrarta Dezhra
Current best trade: 24.24Lyr       1661 CR Total

Zemina Torval (Empire)

Ethos: Preparation/Finance, Expansion/Finance, Control/Covert
Perks: Mining Lance (mining lase capable of inflicting combat damage)
Homeworld: Synteini – 27LY From Shinrarta Dezhra
Current best trade: 19.04Ly         2087 CR Total

Edmund Mahon (Alliance)

Ethos: Preparation/Finance, Expansion/Finance, Control/Finance
Perks: Retribution (small laser beam causes enhanced heat damage)
Homeworld: Gateway – 94.17LY From Shinrarta Dezhra
Current best trade: 29.42Ly         2250 CR Total

Denton Patreus (Empire)

Ethos: Preparation/Finance, Expansion/Combat, Control/Combat
Perks: Advanced Accelerator (specialist plasma weapon)
Homeworld: Eotienses – 123.55LY From Shinrarta Dezhra
Current best trade: 14.95Ly         2376 CR Total

Aisling Duval (Empire)

Ethos: Preparation/Social, Expansion/Finance, Control/Social
Perks: Prismatic Shield Generator (particularly strong shields)
Homeworld: Cubeo – 196.28LY From Shinrarta Dezhra
Current best trade: 16.42Ly         1970 CR Total

Li Yong-Rui (Independent)

Ethos: Preparation/Social, Expansion/Finance, Control/Finance
Perks: Pack-hound rack (medium seeker missile that fires a salvo of "drunk" missiles)
Homeworld: Lembava – 165.83LY From Shinrarta Dezhra
Current best trade: 9.36Ly           1044 CR Total

Archon Delaine (Undefined)

Ethos: Preparation/Combat, Expansion/Combat, Control/Social
Perks: Cytoscrambler (burst laser, highly effective against shields, but no hull damage)
Homeworld: Harma – 194.25LY From Shinrarta Dezhra
Current best trade: 29.42Ly         2250 CR Total

Pranav Antal (Independent)

Ethos: Preparation/Social, Expansion/Social, Control/Covert
Perks: Enforcer Cannon (reduced fire rate but improved damage)
Homeworld: Polevnic – 181.98LY From Shinrarta Dezhra
Current best trade: None

So three days into the Beta of 1.3 what’s it like? Well, lots of stuff had been tweaked. The sum of which means the game feels subtly different on many levels.

When in super-cruise, your shields now charge at the normal rate and the power management switches now function, so you can switch power around the systems. The audio is, well, enhanced. Travelling in hyperspace there’s a sub-sound like a tunnel echo and in super-cruise your ship makes an electric motor undertone, something like a tube train pulling away or breaking.

The new ships are very cool, but not top of the range examples. These ships fit nicely into the lower-mid range, between a Lakon-6 and an Asp, but are much smaller than I originally expected. More Cobra-sized. The Diamondback carries around 20T of cargo, so NOT a trade-ship.

The Imperial Courier is at least as sexy as the Imperial Clipper, in looks and sound. The cockpit is reminiscent of a Hawker hunter aircraft (The Red Arrow’s plane). It maxes out at Class 4, so the ships isn’t expensive to upgrade and while set to D rated internals, gets a jump range around 28Lyr with shields, which makes it a fair explorer. Where it really excels is as a fighter craft. Fast and agile, with three medium hard-points, it feels like an Eagle but hits like a Cobra. It doesn’t use much power for systems, so even with 15MW I can put three rail guns on it and make a flying sniper-rifle! Three shot kills are a hoot!

The Diamondback has four hard-points, two medium and two small, and is a little less agile than the Courier, but with a slightly greater jump range. Even A rated with weapons, it got 23Lyr range, which to my thinking makes it a very good bounty-hunter’s ship.

Navigation now includes the system maps, so you no longer have to fly to every planet to find that one water-world. You can now click on a planet in the system map and navigate straight there. You can even select the system map of a distant star system and plot a route to a planet within the system! You still jump to the star, but your compass is pointing to the right planet when you arrive.

Mine, Mine, Mine! Limpets (not the greatest name) now allow for prospecting and collecting. Mining is therefore a seriously easier process. Zap away at an asteroid and your deployed collector-limpets fly to the debris, and fly it back to your waiting cargo hatch! Limpets are bought as cargo from the munitions menu and you need a “controller” for collecting and another for prospecting.

I will go over the political stuff of Powerplay when I have had a chance to work out what the heck it all means.

Some updated ship size data started floating around on reddit yesterday, along with some awesome 3D renders of ships. Thanks to Prefim/Mat Recardo for these.
So I updated the pixel-to-metre scaled ships chart and here it is. Sizes are based on the table below.

It's not the size of your ship, it's what you do with it!

Ship Dimensions (in metres)

There's also a really cool video render of the ships to scale as well

Just an update from yesterday; after putting a long 4,500 light years under my belt last night (from 6pm) at just before 10pm I touched down at Zeta Trianguli Australis, by adopted home world, and cashed up my Cartographic exploration data.

A cash payout of 5.5M CR was a nice end to the evening.

I'm going to do a bit of trading now until I feel the pull of deep space once more!

I've been out of it this week. Well, several thousand light years out anyway.

I popped into my Stealth-fighter-skinned exploration Asp and headed out for parts unknown on Friday of last week. The idea was to head into the centre of the galaxy, as all my previous explorations had been outward rather than inward. The furthest I had been previously was 2,000 Light Years, making a total round trip of over 4,000Lyrs.

Initially I found all the systems I visited had been previously explored, but by the time I was out of inhabited space by around 500 Light Years, I started to find the odd unexplored planet – usually 100,000Ls distant from the hyperspace exit point! Gradually it became every third jump that I found a system unexplored, then every other jump, then I was in uncharted space.

This system was the largest I found, with 70 astronomical objects.

Just to say a little bit about my ship. My Asp is equipped with two heat sinks, no weapons (weight) and two auto-repair modules as well as a class 6 Fuel Scoop. When out in the deeps of space, scooping takes up a lot of time, so if you’re going out there, buy the biggest one you possibly can. My Asp has a jump-range of 34.16 Light Years. Something that sets it above the capability of most non-explorer ships. Only an Anaconda can jump further (so far).

After two days of jumping, scooping and scanning systems I had reached 8,000 Light Years from home. Nearly there right? Wrong! 18,000 Light Years still to go. Plus, due to a couple of sun-related collisions my hull was at 96% and my power plant was damaged.
Now, while auto-repair can fix most systems, it cannot fix hull damage and it can’t fix the power plant, because you can’t take it offline. With the damage to the power plant, I couldn’t raise the MW to run my heat-sinks, so I had to shut them down. With such a large distance still to go, I had to make a decision whether to forge on and hope for the best or turn back and return (alive) with all the massive amounts of scanning data I had amassed.

So last night, I turned my Asp around and headed back. Buy only stopping for fuel every third jump and scanning the star while my ship slurp hydrogen from the star, I made much faster time. I managed to put 4,000 Light Years under my belt in the course of three and a half hours.

Ironically after coming so far, it wasn’t until I had turned back, I found my first undiscovered earth-like world. I shall call this planet “Muffet” after my childhood pet guinea-pig which itself was named after the robot dog in BattleStar Galactica.

Within another thousand light years I had discovered a second. I haven’t thought of name for that one yet. I’ve found more than a few Water-World’s, but as my fellow CMDR Kalen said, “No sign of Kevin Costner anywhere!”.

When I finally parked up my ship last night, I was still around 4,500 Light years from my home system.

I have to get back to Quivira to collect my 6,000,000CR payout from the last community goal!

This week in Frontier's development diary the developers outlined plans in 1.3 to implement fines for people ramming other ships in the no-fire zones around stations. This was part of an effort to prevent “collision griefing”, where people were using their ships as an attack weapon, without firing, to kill other players without getting WANTED or incurring a fine, using the loophole that a crash wasn’t classed as murder.

However, the well-meaning proposal conflicted with a community activity - the demolition derby!

Social media (namely Twitter & Facebook) lit up with protest votes, which quickly became the Elite Dangerous Protest Goat. No. I have no bleating idea why either!

Anyway, Kate Russell and Mahdogg were leading the fray along with Fireytoad and many others, spawning a host of goat-related memes.

The social media protest and Frontier's response made headlines, when the community protest got a response from Sandro Sammarco saying

EDProtestgoat: I'll need to check with some clever coder folk on this, but I'm hopeful that we can have this crime not squawked with "don't report crimes against me": as long as all participants use this functionality then they would be safe to race near each other - though hitting spectators would still trigger the crime.