Elite: Dangerous

[PhilboSE]

grenpayne said:

I need to go back to trading for a while to make some cash, any recommendations for a decent trade route?

See my post from 30th August, but don't go to Huichi (that route got factioned), go to LTT 9455 O'Leary Vision. Come back with Progenitor Cells, Land Enrichment Systems or Consumer Technology, depending on what is cheap (prices fluctuate quite a lot).

If you play in Open then you'll see me there, just 20 hours away from "triple"...

Edited by PhilboSE on Monday 28th September 19:31

[grenpayne]

Thanks Phil, much appreciated!

[grenpayne]

Had a go of the route tonight Phil, it works well, thanks again

Although smuggling 216T of imperial slaves in to the station with a Type 7 is not exactly easy! You have to be quite slick getting the silent running on, the heatsinks deployed, the docking request in, all whilst boosting accurately through the gate and not smashing in to the end of the docking bay It took me a couple of goes to get it right but so far so good

[PhilboSE]

Glad to hear it's working for you - most profitable route I've found yet. Trick with the smuggling is to try and come out of supercruise with the slot in view, if you have to crab around from the back or the side then the feds usually scan you. I drop a heat sink about 4k out then get in the slot quickly. I find I don't need to boost in, a steady cruise seems to do it OK. I think being Allied to the controlling faction results in fewer scans as well. This is all with a 'conda but it probably handles similarly to a T7. I get scanned about 1 in 20 trips. The prices on the route have recovered recently, it was really busy a week ago but is much quieter now so the margins are back up. I try and get a complete round trip done in less than 11mins. This route only works because of the PowerPlay dynamics changing the market prices, so it could go all Pete Tong if Archon Delaine loses control of Huichi - something that other PP factions are working on. I've been trying to milk it while it is still present, looks like it's good for another week at least.

Edited by PhilboSE on Tuesday 29th September 21:56

[castex]

I fear I'm not up to it. Perhaps it's the flying by keyboard-tappy-tappy-oh-fk-panic that's letting me down.
In other news, I tried the CQC stress test and, well, it was stressful.

[grenpayne]

PhilboSE said:

This route only works because of the PowerPlay dynamics changing the market prices, so it could go all Pete Tong if Archon Delaine loses control of Huichi - something that other PP factions are working on. I've been trying to milk it while it is still present, looks like it's good for another week at least.

Ok, I best get some hours in this week! Are you saying Huichi is actually better for picking up the slaves than LTT 9455?

[PhilboSE]

grenpayne said:

Ok, I best get some hours in this week! Are you saying Huichi is actually better for picking up the slaves than LTT 9455?

No, Huichi was an alternative to LTT 9455 for selling them.

The effect of PP is that Zemina Torval has made Imperial Slaves legal in her areas - and LFT 37 is an Agri economy which means they're cheap and available. Archon Delaine ensures everywhere has a black market AND it pays 10% more than usual. These 2 PP powers have areas of influence that "touch", which is what leads to the route being so short and profitable.

Huichi used to pay considerably more for Imp Slaves and so was more profitable, but an independent faction (with 1% influence!) took control some weeks ago and made Imp Slaves legal, which bust the route (losing the 10% Archon Delaine bonus).

If Huichi ever shows Imp Slaves as being illicit then it may become the preferred route again. The profits on the return trip to LFT 37 are better from LTT 9455, however, and O'Leary Vision is really nice and close, so LTT 9455 may still be the optimal option. There probably isn't much in it either way.

Huichi is the PP control system for that area of space, and it's under constant pressure from other factions, although the Archon fans are doing enough each cycle to retain control. If Huichi falls and stops being under Archon control then the next best option to smuggle slaves is Lusonda; the profits on the slaves are huge (4800 Cr/t) but it's twice as far away from LFT 37 and the station is much further away from the jump in point and it's very close to the planet it's orbiting and a real ballache to approach.

[grenpayne]

Phil, great stuff, many thanks for the detailed explanation. I shall grind this one out for as long as is possible!

[br d]

Phil is a route like that worth doing on a smaller scale? I have a Cobra with 36 Cargo space and I have a little route thats making me about 1 million an hour with rares. It's an 8 jump jobbie so gets annoying and is prone to interdiction, would it be worth having a crack at your one with so little space?

[PhilboSE]

br d said:

Phil is a route like that worth doing on a smaller scale? I have a Cobra with 36 Cargo space and I have a little route thats making me about 1 million an hour with rares. It's an 8 jump jobbie so gets annoying and is prone to interdiction, would it be worth having a crack at your one with so little space?

I think with that cargo space you would be better off on the rare route. The Cobra is one of the best rare traders because once you make the jump up to something like a T7 you can't fill it up with rares. On my route you could do 36 tonnes * 4500 profit/loop * 5 loops/hour = 816,000 Cr/hour so no quite as good as your rare run.

In my Cobra days I followed a route much like this one http://imgur.com/gallery/lkRWdtw which served me well.

[br d]

PhilboSE said:

br d said:

Phil is a route like that worth doing on a smaller scale? I have a Cobra with 36 Cargo space and I have a little route thats making me about 1 million an hour with rares. It's an 8 jump jobbie so gets annoying and is prone to interdiction, would it be worth having a crack at your one with so little space?

I think with that cargo space you would be better off on the rare route. The Cobra is one of the best rare traders because once you make the jump up to something like a T7 you can't fill it up with rares. On my route you could do 36 tonnes * 4500 profit/loop * 5 loops/hour = 816,000 Cr/hour so no quite as good as your rare run.

In my Cobra days I followed a route much like this one http://imgur.com/gallery/lkRWdtw which served me well.

Thanks.

Been trying that rares route you posted tonight, good grief that's hard! I got interdicted 3 times by 3 different ships carrying 1 ton of eggs to Lave!
I haven't the skills to fight off interdictions even though my cobra is A rated so I think I will struggle with this. I normally SC away from my target then come in at odd angles to lessen interdictions but this failed completely tonight. Will try again tomorrow in case I just got unlucky but if it's that hot on this whole route I'm going to scurry back to my boring Altair/HIP 80364 run!

[grenpayne]

Small update, after two days grinding Phil's trade route, the T7 (with 216T of cargo space) has been sold and I'm now in a nice shiny Python with 284T of cargo space However, I'm also skint

[PhilboSE]

br d said:

Thanks.

Been trying that rares route you posted tonight, good grief that's hard! I got interdicted 3 times by 3 different ships carrying 1 ton of eggs to Lave!

Interesting, was that PvP or NPC? When I last did the rare run I don't think I ever got interdicted, but that was in 1.1 days and I was in Solo.

There are some PvP pirate groups that hang out in Lave and Leesti, some will demand a cargo drop and let you go but others are just griefing.

[MissChief]

I've been interdicted dozens of times but only ever lost a fight maybe two or three times and that's in Open play. It's got to the point where unless it's the Feds and I'm carrying illegal cargo I submit, turn around and explode them into little pieces of space debris, get a wee reward as they're inevitably wanted and carry on with my journey. This is a pretty well tooled up Cobra Mk. 3. Generally they're NPC's rather than players though.

[br d]

MissChief said:

I've been interdicted dozens of times but only ever lost a fight maybe two or three times and that's in Open play. It's got to the point where unless it's the Feds and I'm carrying illegal cargo I submit, turn around and explode them into little pieces of space debris, get a wee reward as they're inevitably wanted and carry on with my journey. This is a pretty well tooled up Cobra Mk. 3. Generally they're NPC's rather than players though.

Can't do it mate, I've got a highly tooled up Cobra and I just get smashed by everything, trying to earn the credits for a lethal Vulture so I can learn some combat skills.

This sodding game!

I completed the first run of the rares route (Zaonce to Witchhaul), had loads of trouble, just about scraped it and made 630K profit. I thought that was okay, my normal route makes more than that in the same time but I thought I could probably do it quicker once I got accustomed. Set off on the return journey, really struggled to fill the hold, got interdicted a lot, took me forever, I finally topped up at Altair and headed back to Zaonce. After a couple of jumps I came out really close to a star, started rapidly overheating, got in a spinning panic and the cargo hatch blew and dumped all my fking rares! Christ that's frustrating!


Couple of questions.

Why does the FSD take so long to charge when you're being interdicted? By the time I jump away I'm completely smashed, it's costing me a fortune.

And are the amounts of rares allocated depending on your ship? I can barely fill a 36 ton hold on the trip, how are people doing this with huge transporters that carry hundreds of tons?

[PhilboSE]

br d said:

I completed the first run of the rares route (Zaonce to Witchhaul), had loads of trouble, just about scraped it and made 630K profit...got interdicted a lot, took me forever, I finally topped up at Altair and headed back to Zaonce.

This amount of interdiction seems unusual in my experience, unless FD have changed something since my day (maybe something related to carrying rares?). Are you being interdicted by NPC or players? If NPC, are you aligned to a PP power? If so and in a different PP system, you will be interdicted a LOT.

br d said:

Why does the FSD take so long to charge when you're being interdicted? By the time I jump away I'm completely smashed, it's costing me a fortune.

I'm sure there is a "watched clock" factor as well, making it seem longer...

If it's an NPC interdiction, then you get the warning it's coming and you can often change direction to make it harder for them to get behind you. If I want to dodge the interdiction, I aim *away* from my jump target and change direction a lot, looking at the target on the radar, to prevent them getting behind me. Then when the FSD is fully charged, I can then maneouvre to face my jump and bang I'm gone.

Alternatively just throttle down to submit to the interdiction, this reduces your FSD cooldown time significantly, then 4 pips to engines and boost away from the interdictor until your FSD gets charged.

br d said:

And are the amounts of rares allocated depending on your ship? I can barely fill a 36 ton hold on the trip, how are people doing this with huge transporters that carry hundreds of tons?

Yes, there's a maximum number of each rare any one player can carry at a time. Doesn't matter how long you wait, you'll never get more than the quota. Maximum credits/hour usually obtained by doing a rare trading loop like the one I linked before; a Cobra is perfect for this because you can usually fill it up just by visiting each station the once, grabbing whatever allocation you can get, and then immediately moving on. No point hanging around trying to get the maximum quota at each point.

Once you get above 80t of cargo carrying capacity, rares don't make much sense because you just can't fill up the hold. You can get more Cr/hr doing traditional trading in bigger volume.

[MissChief]

When being interdicted there are two bars on the screen, one on each side of your HUD, a red and a blue. The more you're on target of the escape vector the more the blue one fills and if you can fill it then you'll escape the interdiction attempt. If you can't fill it up before the red bar fills up you'll be forced out of warp and your FSD cool down will significantly increase making things hairy at times.

[8bit]

br d said:

8bit said:

Any suggestions as to a weapons loadout for a Cobra Mk.III? I've got two pulse lasers (class 2 rating E I think) on the medium hardpoints which seem to work fairly well and I tried a pair of beam lasers on the small ones but they didn't seem great. They didn't do much damage, either to shields or hull, and took forever to become active again once they'd overheated or whatever.

Also, would upgrading either or both of the power plant or power distributor help beam lasers recover between uses? Does it matter if I put more pips to the weapons or not?

My Cobra is maxed out on everything but thrusters, that way I can keep inside the power limits. When I was shopping I filtered the map to show only High Tech worlds and searched around the Lave area, picked up everything without too much trouble.

Ah ok, thanks for that. In your opinion, is the maxed-out Cobra worth it? Capable in combat etc.? Also what weapons have you got fitted?

[jains15]

Pulse lasers are always going to be the best balance between shield dmg, hull dmg, heat & energy usage. Beams are good if you want high 'alpha' but the damage per second soon drops off. Bursts are pulse lasers but with 3x dmg per trigger pull but heat up your ship badly.

So for the Cob3, a full pulse setup might work, you could try fixed on the mediums and gimbals on the smalls to get all 4 lasers to bear with max dmg.

The best approach is a 'mixed' setup where especially for 1.4 releasing today you will need better ability to chew through hulls. This is because they are altering the way powerplant damage results in an instakill - it is now far less likely and ships will more often die when hull is at 0%.

So a possible setup might be 2x medium multicannons for the hull & 2 small lasers to take down shields. Or Vice Versa depending on whether you want to prioritise shield over hull dmg. Always gimbal the small weapons on a cobra because they are in an awful place on the ship.

Or you could take my suggestion from above and go for an 'assymetric' loadout. So go for 1 fixed medium pulse, and a gimballed small pulse for shields. Then go for a medium gimballed and small gimballed Multi for hull dmg.

[y2blade]

Just received this email:

Happy launch day fellas.

Today's new letter.

Dear Commander,

Elite Dangerous has officially landed today for Xbox One!

We’d like to thank you for playing the demo of Elite Dangerous for Xbox One in the Game Preview Program. We appreciate you joining us to trade, fight and explore in our galaxy.

There will be a few changes that as we transition from the Game Preview Program over to the full game, so head over to our community forum post to find out more.

To celebrate the launch of Elite Dangerous for Xbox One, we have a whole day of events planned. There will be an AMA with members of the Elite Dangerous Xbox One team on the Xbox One Official Subreddit from Midday to 3PM BST. Afterwards, Community Manager Ed Lewis will be hosting a four-hour live stream bringing in even more guests from the development team, including Frontier CEO and Elite co-creator David Braben. We will also reveal a new exclusive Community Goal for Xbox One players and a competition hosted on the Xbox One Subreddit.

Fly Safe, Commander.

Regards,

The Frontier Team