Elite: Dangerous QoL Ideas, part 2

More Quality of Life ideas for players of Elite Dangerous.

Systems with suns more than 10,000ls apart have extra destinations/nav beacons around the secondary & tertiary suns to jump to – as a sub menu when selecting the system in the Galaxy Map, plot route tab.

Slip Drive : optional internal size 3 (for Small Ships), Size 5 (for Medium), Size 7 (for Large ships) allows 10,000ls “teleports” that create FSD cooldowns (~15 seconds) each. If you Slip Drive teleport quickly, 5 times, the FSD will be on cooldown for ~75seconds. If ships is hit with an interdictor and pilot engages the Slip Drive will dump you instantly causing module damage to the Slip Drive and the FSD.

Multi-limpet controllers or all types need to be available in A rated of all sizes.

Scorpion SRV is a great start. Add a high carry capacity (16+ containers) SRV with mild laser turret, weak shields, and good hull armor.

Fire Groups: allow extra buttons to be set. Eg. using a multi-limpet controller with only button 1 or button 2 is a huge pain.

Purchase the exotic ammo types with CR and big markup instead of only being able to synthesize it. Eg. G2 ammo is times 10 and G3 ammo is times 50.

At Interstellar Factors allow fine payment if in anonymous access without handing self in.

Open auction markets with minimum prices set by FDev for materials (raw, encoded, manufactured, etc.) and engineered modules. Bids are put in holding/escrow until auction ends. Winner’s funds are transferred to seller. Rest of bidders have funds instantly returned (perhaps on next dock if the coding is too awkward).

Have “no target” button to deselect any & all targets.

Overhaul ground/on-foot weaponry to get rid of necessitating two weapons.

Plasma repeaters, like SRV weapons as standard: low absolute damage per shot, high ROF, velocity ~800m/s
Balance decisions: pistols, concealed, quiet, low-capacity 10-20
Carbines: higher ROF, less quiet, high capacity 40-60, damage not much more than pistol per shot.
Rifles: lower ROF than pistol, noisy; attracts attention, capacity 20-40, at least double pistol damage per shot.

Railgun as alternate: very long range, near instant projectile travel (~10,000m/s), damage profile like ship railguns, very noisy, small charge up delay, very expensive (3-5 times cost of plasma repeater), more recoil unless crouched
Balance decisions: rail pistols, concealed, noisy, damage is very high, charge time per shot 0.6-0.9secs, very low capacity 4-8
rail carbines: very short charge delay 0.2-0.6secs, damage a little less than pistol, ROF is about 3x pistol, very noisy, low capacity 8-12
Rifles: long range, highest damage (one shot G1 armor + shields via head shot), charge time 0.7-1.0secs, low capacity 8-12

 

Elite: Dangerous QoL Ideas, part 1

Elite: Dangerous is a great space-sim by Frontier Developments, affectionately called FDev. It’s often on sale and has a new DLC called “Odyssey” or space-legs at the time of writing.

Some features for players to get a bit of Quality of Life.

Open market to trade engineering materials, special cargo, or even mission items, for CR or other cargo. Escrow service with a shipping component like Ship Transfer.

Percentage readout of shields.

Turn off ALL menu animations except the “Stand by”.

Advanced Limpet Controllers: can reconfigure to any limpet type in 2minutes, since all the controllers use the same limpets there ought to be an all-in-one controller.

Collector limpet fine control:
-Filter out Illegal goods
-Filter out Materials by grade, eg. only G3+
-High-speed mode with 50% chance per run of dying.
-More ideas can fit here.

End of Part 1.

Recovering Ubuntu after turning on firewall

AWS has heaps of flexibility. A lot of that comes from so many features. If you turned on the Ubuntu firewall and then can’t reach your instance you can recover it with the System Manager.

sudo ufw enable
That turns it on and if you haven’t configured your ports correctly you can block port 22 preventing SSH connections.

Wouldn’t it be great if you can push the command to the instance to turn it off?
You can.

Get the instance included in System Manager.
Once it is use the “Run Command” option.
In there put in:
sudo ufw disable

Run the command with a short timeout (say 30 seconds).

Worked a treat, today.

Omega Weapons and why they bother me

Omega Weapons Revision

Omega Weapons in Battlelords of the 23rd century always niggled at me as being a bit wrong. I just rolled with it and continued because they are pretty damned fun. Recently I’ve been writing more material for BL and reading the in-game explanations of how the technology works. Omega weapons fire a flux shield at the target. When it strikes targets the energy transfers through armor’s hard exterior, without damaging it, and can only be stopped by absorption liners. They go on to say that on large things like buildings and tanks omega weapons do damage the hull. So they break their own internal consistency. It ignores hull except on big things. Mechanized Battle Armor is a big thing, and so are Gemini druids, but it ignores those Thresholds and hits absorption. When we flip it, flux shields can stop hard things like bullets and reflex missiles hitting them without concussion damage penetrating the shield which strongly implies that they would also be stopped if rammed against hard things without shock waves getting through. It’s also stated that they are the cutting edge of weapons technology but there are Tech Level 4 (same as many firearms) Omega weapons.

Now what can one do about this?

The Magnetic Disruptor halves damage of Omega and Pulse attacks. Flux shields counter them point for point. However, there is no dedicated defense against Omega attacks.

Technology Option 1

Dedicated Omega defense technology as armor option. Provides decent Threshold against Omega attacks similar to Kinetic Energy Shield (can make the Kinetic Energy Shield work against Omega).

Technology Option 2

Flux shields can be damaged by many attack types. Without a projection unit backing up the Omega pulse they are vulnerable to counter-attacks (inflict double damage). CIWS type systems can shoot down Omega attacks with any attack type that affects flux shields. The CIWS inflicts double-damage on the omega pulse, if it hits, and if the damage equals or exceeds the damage the pulse would have inflicted it is nullified.

Rules change option 1

To make Omega weapons consistent across all scales we redefine them as “flux shields launched as magnetically contained projectiles that inflict kinetic concussion damage”. We reduce the THR from the damage. This amount is halved and applied to the AI of the armor or vehicle struck represented as the buckling & twisting of armor as described in the existing rules. The remainder of the damage still strikes the absorption as normal. Same is applied to all concussion damage such as grenades and Omegatons.

Rules change option 2

This is the minimal change that I prefer. It only alters omega weapons against spaceships.

• Buildings – omega has to exceed THR and damages AI
• Flux – omega inflicts damage normally, one for one
• Spaceships – hull is immune to omega while engine is running
• Vehicles – omega has to exceed THR and damages AI only

Battlelords of the 23rd Century – LITE

Battlelords of the 23rd Century is one of those games that is presented as slightly gonzo and cheesy. Yet, it has a solid setting that makes a decent amount of sense and a system that scales better than RIFTS across the same scope. It is old-school in that you have to add and subtract numbers greater than 20 in one pass, be able to choose values from large tables of numbers, and combat is pretty darn lethal.

So I figured why not cut down the crunch and try streamline it… and I did.

Here’s a PDF of a way to play Battlelords of the 23rd Century as a LITE version. You will still need all the books for gear, species, and setting information.

Battlelords LiteDownload