Additional, after i get my venture, im going to trap people in black holes. for the giggles.
Wait what? How?
Well a venture might not work for it, but i plan on tricking AI to chase me into black holes.
I don't remember Alex saying anything about black holes. Neutron stars? Yes. But not black holes
Exploration and salvage, here are my posts and alex's response from that thread.
Spoiler
Oh my god i'm moderately on time for a blog post for once.
So other than my usual gushing I actually get to ask a few questions since not everyone has asked everything before I got here!
questions-
Do black holes actively pull you in?
If so is touching a black hole instant death? ( while this might seem harsh i think generally the population, especially those interested in sci fi games, know what black holes do by default, no tutorial needed on that one.)
Do black holes cause time dilation the closer you get to them?
Do automated security forces default to hostile? or can they be neutral/allied as well?
I'll hold the rest of my questions until we get to talk about outposts since I know you want to leave a lot about exploration for us to discover ourselves.
Alex's response
Spoiler
- Are you planning to replace the current post-battle salvage screen with debris field salvage operations?
No - that seems like it'd be a bit rough in terms of UI flow (win, then you always need to use an ability), and I don't think it's necessary.
- Do you intend to allow the player to interrupt the salvage operation and get a partial haul, or do you want the player to have to complete a full operation in order to recover stuff from a debris field or derelict?
I totally approve of the intend to make the salvaging a time consuming task on the campaign map: I think it will be great to build tension while balancing the fact that being able to salvage other fleets remains make the game much easier (as we saw with the old Tradewind mod)
Also, I'm assuming the old salvage screen is totally replaced by scavenging debris field? So you have to invest some time after each battle to get the spoils?
Will salvaging salvagefields take time ingame? or is it instant?
The debris field salvaging is actually instant - using the ability as the player brings up a somewhat modified salvage dialog.
I did mess around with making it gradual, but that causes ... problems.
One thing I'm thinking about now, though, is adding a few seconds worth of wind-up time to the ability before it fires, and making it be interrupted by combat. Right now it has a slight cooldown, but it might be interesting to put at least some of that on the front end.
- Are debris fields going to stick around for a while even after the player or a computer-controlled fleet salvages the field, and is this dependent upon whether or not there is still salvage left in the field after a fleet completes a salvage operation? E.g. I complete a salvage operation and decide I don't want everything, or am unable to fit everything I collected into my cargo bays; will this stuff vanish instantly, or does the debris field stick around for a little while?
Salvaging the field makes it look less dense visually, but won't make it go away any faster. They also act like ring system terrain 
As far as cargo: it'll vanish instantly, same as not picking up all the post-battle salvage. Thinking about possibly creating a "cargo pods" entity to handle these things, but ultimately it'd be created for another purpose and reused to handle this, if that makes sense. What I mean is "stuff vanishing" like this doesn't seem like a problem that needs solving, and if "solved" could create undesirable consequences. For example, would the player feel obligated to go back and collect every single thing that dropped? That could get pretty boring.
- Will computer-controlled fleets be competing with the player in some fashion for the salvage from debris fields (e.g. attempt to get to the most recent fields first, attempt to chase the player away from fields that both the player and the computer fleet are aware of, etc)?
- Will certain factions feel a degree of 'possessiveness' about debris fields, particularly if those fields are in "their" space or include derelicts which were once part of the faction's fleet? E.g. will Hegemony patrols attempt to chase off scavengers attempting to loot a debris field which was formerly a System Defense Fleet or something like that?
Mmmmaybe. Sort of tangential to the work going on now, but have been thinking about these kinds of things.
- Does exploration implies reworking the codex too?
Eventually, probably yes. I just keep putting it off because it's never urgent.
- I see the radar is back, is it related to a skill or hullmod??? Or a permanent UI element? Can it be improved by skills and hullmods?
"Back"?
It's a permanent UI element, but I could see something like, say, an ability increasing its range or moving its center for a bit. Not because that's the core benefit of an ability (the radar extends to the maximum sensor range), but because another effect of the ability makes it useful for the radar to change function in some way.
- something that entails a choice
does that hint at overarching quests, or ones that can start on a discovery?
It does hint at them, but there's nothing concrete there quite yet.
- 200 systems, the hyper map must have grown a hell of a lot. But will there be some "shortcuts"? The game mentioned whormhole could connect to hyperspace "or other places" so will we see super whormholes that directly send you to another part of the sector? Some form of optional hyper-lanes connecting constellations together??? Or will the performances issues force you to cut the sector in a few separate instances connected by hyper-wormholes?
I don't know right now. I haven't generated a properly laid out 200 system Sector yet, and so have no idea how that feels.
I did generate (and save) a 1000 system Sector at one point That went... surprisingly well. I don't think it'd hold up with every system having surveyable planets and stuff to find, but a lot can be optimized. But I digress.
So, yeah: sort of in the "putting together the whole toolbox" phase right now. I.E. you can plop down a constellation anywhere you like, but the code to "plop down a bunch of constellations in roughly these places" isn't in place yet.
(Going to probably entail reworking map things, too.)
Do black holes actively pull you in?
If so is touching a black hole instant death? ( while this might seem harsh i think generally the population, especially those interested in sci fi games, know what black holes do by default, no tutorial needed on that one.)
Do black holes cause time dilation the closer you get to them?
They do once you're inside the event horizon - which is, uh, being taken some liberties with in that you can escape from it. Once you get really close, though, escaping can be quite hard.
It's not instant death, but it drains CR *very* quickly, which causes accidents and loss of ships. I'd say within a few days of circling the drain.
No time dilation in the campaign, I'm afraid
Do automated security forces default to hostile? or can they be neutral/allied as well?
They default to hostile, yes. (Maybe? The answer will make itself clear during the Great Contenting.)
I'll hold the rest of my questions until we get to talk about outposts since I know you want to leave a lot about exploration for us to discover ourselves.
Appreciated
Now that we'll be braving the space-wilds and robbing space-tombs, will we also get cool ship equipment to find (in addition to commodities and those mysterious outpost/survey related items)?
It's always bugged me that there are no "rare drop" weapons in Starsector, nothing that would be exciting to find a provide a substantial advantage, because even the rarest and most powerful weapons are only moderately more difficult to acquire and more effective than the common junk. But digging through ancient derelicts means a lot of opportunities for finding powerful lost technology.
The issue with "rare drops" is that'd pretty much all you'd want to use once you found 'em. Usually you see those kinds of mechanics in games where there's a very explicit level-up treadmill, so your "rare drop" is at best a temporary leg up. In Starsector, your "reward" for getting a rare drop would be making other weapons much less viable, and reducing the "good" loadout choices.
What about proper automated stations that fire at you. And will we ever get use of the gates? I assume they act like supergates passing between systems.
Ah, you know, 
My guess for the new items: Neural skill-implants, red for combat-, yellow-green for leadership- and blue for technology-aptitude. Those little tails remind me of neuron dendrites
Hmm. Both very wrong and very right at the same time.
The mini map seems like a huge QOL improvement, pausing to game just to get your bearings is pretty annoying. Although I hope it's not the final design, doesn't look as polished as the TRIPAD UI (and why is it so often this WW2 era radar interface?).
Working through the icons ("exactly the same as the map" doesn't quite seem to work well), but wasn't thinking of updating the widget itself. Maybe David will come up with something, though.
WW2 radar: well, it needs to be round. And then the concentric circles indicate range - in the radar, they're spaced at 2000 unit increments, same as the map grid. Once you've got those things, that's pretty much the design right there... just seems entirely driven by its function.
Concerning debris fields and scaveneging; any plans to try an weave the boarding mechanic into it? Seems like a good place for a more active boarding scenario/decisions between salvaging hulls or cargo.
E.G, imagine you actually see when a chunk of the debris field suddenly re-activates engines and tries to leave it, instead of just reading it. And then you have to get to it and board/shoot it before it reaches the edge of the field or it becomes a real fleet again.
Was thinking about something along these lines, yes - a "special" finding a repairable hull inside the debris field, something like that maybe.
(BTW, the second paragraph of "What makes exploration fun?" ends with a ",.".)
Thank you, fixed that up.
I would love to try and play as/encounter a professional scavenger even in later game, someone with a big but really slow fleet that can't chase anything down, but lumbers near whenever a big battle took place any scares off all smaller vultures.
I'd love for that sort of thing to be viable - though I think you'd probably want to graduate to more "proper" salvage. But being a really big, slow fleet there should also work!
Aside from Missile Specialization, I focus on skills that give more speed (top speed, maneuverability, venting), range, and OP to afford everything my ships need. Kiting with long range weapons and fast dissipation is what works best. Add hull regeneration from Damage Control 10, and the flagship can stay as long as CR is high enough. The Ordnance Expert skill is useful mostly for Optimized Assembly perk at 10, which frees a ton of OP for ships, effectively making it an +OP skill. The faster shots perk is only useful for an IPDAI combo. The damage increase from Ordnance Expert is just a minor bonus to the Optimized Assembly perk. Target Analysis, a pure damage skill, is one of the very last skills I would touch.
Huge numerical advantage of the enemy means my AI ships will die; they get overwhelmed. This is like back in the day when I try to kill Hegemony Defense fleets with 40 OP worth of frigates, and the only way I could pull it off was to chain-flagship the frigates. Deploying all as a fleet got the frigates killed quickly by Onslaughts or what not.
(The hull regen will definitely go away, and the speed bonuses are getting significantly toned down.)
On the other hand, other than his reply to me, he has not mentioned black holes recently, it likely was a reply to someone else asking a question on one of the dev blogs, but im far too tired right now to go dig through all of those, however i distinctly remember him saying it somewhere, OTHER than his response to me.
edit* Unless he since removed black holes and has stricken all the mentions of it from the record he could find! /s.
Although why would i have asked in the first place if he never mentioned them....
Next day edit: found it, in the first image of this blog post,
http://fractalsoftworks.com/2016/07/17/exploration-salvage/# there is the black hole,
Quote from the first page of the thread on that blog post.
Spoiler
Also, is that a dark star I see in the first pic? Or a jumpgate?.
It's a black hole. When alone or in a black hole binary, it also (usually) gets an accretion disk, but in a close trinary situation, there isn't one.
Cool new systems with two suns, a black hole, and a tiny planet --> would never happen in vanilla .
Huh?
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Topic: When the patch finally hits, how're you gonna play? (Read 24139 times)