Imaginary Space Carriers

Hello everyone,

I've been playing a bit in the Elite beta today ...

Ooo - shiny ...

It's just in beta at the moment, so the carriers aren't part of the main game yet but it's been nice to check them out.

There we go. Different one, not quite in as pretty a location as the other one.

Circling back to go on approacch. That's the docking bay side, which seems actually to be the underneath although there does look to be a flight operations control tower at the end there.

There we go. Landed ! And about to go into hyperspace on a jaunt to another system. There's not much to see there though. You get put into a lockdown state in the hangar bay without a view of the outside.

And then you come out in a different place ! It's a bit different from the outside ...

Going :

Going ...

Gone !

Or it's melted into a cloud of something.

That's another from before a jump.

The asking price of 5 billion credits is way too steep for me. I haven't gone into that phase of grinding out massive amounts of credits yet. To be honest, that bores me ... I'd rather be out and about seeing stuff than staying in one place and exploiting the game mechanic that makes that possible.

The name of the place if I'd been able to get one though : House of Elliott. I wonder how many will get that reference ? (It's not related to a TV series about dressmakers ...)

What do I think about the carriers ? Nice to have them in the game. They're a bit like a form of player housing, acting as a base for repairs, trading, outfitting, shipyards and they can jump from place to place as well. You wouldn't want to go to the far side of the galaxy in one though. It takes 2 hours to jump up to 500 light years and an exploration fitted ship could do that distance in 8 jumps ... or 8 minutes.

I couldn't actually do much with the carriers that I landed on. I had a full cargo hold of stuff looking to be sold ... but couldn't sell it. I suspect that's down to the settings of the carrier, although I can't test that because the beta doesn't give the funds to buy the carrier for testing.

If they stay in the game as they are at the moment, they'll be a rare curiosity. I can't actually see the point of having one at the moment, especially if you have a tendency to disappear off round the galaxy for a few months at a time. There's no point taking the carrier with you. It would be good if there were refinery or other production services built in, so you could buy resources, add value by turning them into other things and then sell for a profit which would go back in to the carrier.

Bit like how the X games do starbases. They do feel a bit like a "what's the point ?" at the moment and they've come in at a cost of things like :

Keeping the galaxy story alive through the Galnet news service. This has gone silent.
Community Goals. These were very handy for giving something new and interesting to get involved in. There hasn't been one since Xmas.

It'll be interesting to see how the carriers develop. Later !

Stay safe everyone.