Author: johnk

Are Elite:Dangerous ship interiors worth doing?

Fleet Carrier Camenecium visiting a precarious three-body barycenter.
Is her interior a ship interior or a station interior?

The long-awaited “space legs” feature has been announced for the next major update to Elite:Dangerous: Odyssey. Commanders will get to walk around stations and planets, shoot and be shot by things, and … practice xeno-botany with a hand-held probe-ulator. The community has been up in arms since that announcement also said that ship interiors would not be included in the first release.

Frontier can learn something from Cryptic here. Star Trek Online stopped doing elaborate interiors because they were expensive/resource-intensive to make and added very little gameplay. They only do bridges now if they use them in missions.

With dozens of ships to backfill and assuming they would all have unique interiors beyond existing cockpits, Frontier could better spend their time and money crafting social areas (fleet carriers?) or actual gameplay. Except for VR players, who I’d guess are a minority, who’s going to walk around their ships just to walk around their ships more than a handful of times? No gameplay would be a terrible waste.

Worse would be punitive gameplay like interiors meaning you have to repel boarding parties or it takes longer to get in and out of your ship without any gameplay added. Interiors should not be a tax I pay to play the parts of the game I like.

The best bet for making interiors worthwhile would be including optional beneficial gameplay like mini games inside to provide long-lasting buffs or find/fix damage without an AFMU or repair limpet. Still doesn’t seem worth the cost as a goal at launch.

The one interior I’d love to see at launch is my fleet carrier’s. I want to be on a super-star-destroyer-style bridge when she jumps. It’s really a station in its own right, can have many of the same features like shipyards and stellar cartographics, and could be a mobile social zone.

Bridge (starship) | Wookieepedia | Fandom

See Also

Elite Dangerous: Fleet Carriers are Live

After a few extra hours of downtime, Elite Dangerous is back up. The big deal with this release is fleet carriers, but there are plenty of small tweaks and fixes that are worth noting. Here are the highlights from the patch notes of changes I expect to improve my gameplay:

Exploration

  • Locations discovered using the DSS will now be listed in the System Map correctly after returning to a system.
  • Fixed a problem which could cause Surface Data to generate in the background at such a low priority that it would stop.

Factions

  • Updated how Faction influence adds up to 100% in a star system to keep more of a Faction’s trending direction.

Mining

  • NPC mining ships will now have a more appropriate cargo based on contents of the rings in their system, including Low Temperature Diamonds.
  • Implemented a fix that will stop Core Mining Fragments from penetrating into Asteroids.
  • Sub-Surface Mining Deposits can now eject multiple resource chunks from one successful hit.

Missions

  • The ‘Total Units Needed’ will now update in the Commodity Market as Collect Missions progress.
  • Delivery Mission Cargo is now marked as ‘Mission Specific’ to prevent the Commodity Market showing the commodity as mission required.
  • Added depot support to Solo mining missions.

Networking

  • Increased the chance of players meeting previously encountered players when revisiting systems in a session.
  • Players can now block any player, not just friends or pending friends.

Supercruise

  • Corrected the ETA numbers when approaching targets in Supercruise.

Previous Changes From Beta

  • Squadron bookmarks made for a Fleet Carrier location now move with the Carrier when it jumps.
  • Inbox message notifying the player that their transferred ship has arrived will now arrive at the same time as the ship, rather than being sent instantly.

Missing Manual Changes

  • Quick Action menu added to repair, refuel, and rearm from docking screen.

What is Star Trek anymore?

Understanding the evolution of the Star Trek franchise requires equal parts historian, lawyer, and conspiracy theorist. The clearest picture emerges thanks to Midnight Edge. The TL;DR is that all Star Trek after 2005 has been produced under the Paramount “alternate” license. That license requires any product to be at least 25% different than cannon under the original license (which includes all Star Trek between 1966 and 2005 including TOS, TAS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT, and the first ten movies). Even new Star Trek projects from CBS, the holder of the original “cannon” license, have or will be produced under the alternate license Because Lawyers. Sort of.

One thing Midnight Edge did not consider is Star Trek Online (STO). Launched in 2010 by Cryptic Studios, the project actually began under a different studio, Perpetual, in 2004 [ The Game Archaeologist: Perpetual’s Star Trek Online ]. The MMO clearly operated under the original license, including assets from the entire cannon timeline and even having former Trek actors guest-star as their original characters in voiceovers. The game has also added material from the JJ-trek movies and Discovery, so it’s a single property under both licenses which must keep Cryptic’s lawyers quite busy or at least well caffeinated. Having no plans to produce under the original license might also explain why CBS may have allowed Cryptic to continue doing its own thing while JJ and CBS All Access did their own things under the alternate license.

Watch the full video from Midnight Edge for all the twists, turns, and sleuthing since Gene first pitched Wagon Train To the Stars, or check out Egotastic Funtime’s summary for a less legalese, more (anti)fan-friendly assessment.

Midnight Edge — The PRIME Deception
Egotastic Funtime — Discovery is a Lie

The Undiscovered Country

If Midnight Edge is right, it’s about to get even more interesting: CBS and Paramount may be merged back into one entity, and that might mean that the two Star Trek licenses will become one as well. What that might mean for the franchise is anybody’s guess. If we’re lucky, the franchise will revisit the cannon timeline and it will do so without a paywall.

I also hope it won’t chill Cryptic’s creative freedom. On the surface, Cryptic appears to have had a good relationship with CBS and Paramount. But Cryptic recently side-lined a planned follow-up to the ambitious DS9-themed expansion “Victory Is Life” for a rushed Short Trek of its own, “Age of Discovery”, timed to drop just before Discovery’s second season premiere. Maybe there was a cross-promotional deal Cryptic couldn’t pass up. Maybe that was the dying gasp of old CBS trying to claw back the license since deciding to make its own content again.

Will a new Viacom post-unification see all of Star Trek as its prestigious heirloom, its golden goose? If so, they may take back more creative control. In my happy fantasy wonderland where New Viacom buys the best fan-based projects and produces them for television, our next season in STO would be “Return to Axanar”.