I'm not sure how I feel about a legacy fine being added to rebuy costs--that seems a little harsh. Luckily I play nicely in a private PvE group and have only ever lost 1 ship through a dopey mistake which won't happen again, so it may never affect me.
I also don't get the fuss about solo play. If someone wants to avoid running into a human asshole in a fully built Anaconda or some such, let them. There would be nothing more infuriating than returning from a multi-day exploration run just to get interdicted and immediately annihilated while minding your own business just because some other player had a bad day and feels like frying a few ants as it were. Obviously, different people want different experiences from the game. That's precisely why I joined the private PvE group--I want to run into other players now and then, but with the confidence that they'll be reasonable, like-minded Commanders who aren't out to ruin another player's day. Also, it's not like solo play is a safe zone. NPCs will still swarm you if you're wanted. You still risk interdiction practically anywhere within colonized space. There's no way to fully escape your bounties in any mode of play without paying them off or being destroyed. Who cares if an NPC or another player is ultimately responsible? I've also seen a lot of grief on other forums about traders running in solo play having an affect on trading in open play... and again, who cares? In principle it would be no different than NPCs carrying out trading and such while you do other things--it keeps the galaxy alive and volatile. It adds to the game. Besides, there are so many trade routes to take advantage of out there--if one gets soured, find a new handful of systems. Move along, yeah?
also, not impressed by these 2 million credit Gimbaled C3 beam lasers on my Clipper. Or...I just don't know how to feel about them. They do notably more damage to hulls (I think), but I think they're a downgrade in dispatching larger ships that I can assassinate relatively quickly with my old C3 gimbaled burst lasers. I feel like ~10 seconds or more have been added to my Anaconda killing time. While having a lower up-time at a 4x higher cost. I'll give them another day before I decided how I really feel about them, but I'm really not impressed thus far. And yes, my power distributor is the best money can buy.
And that's with full power to weapons? I gave those same beams a bounty hunting run in the Vulture last night with an A4 power plant and A5 coupler (both of those are smaller than what your Clipper can fit) and with full pips to weapons, they melted through an Anaconda's power plant in 2-3 full charges with both beams active, 2 charges with just 1 beam active. Smaller ships were a laugh--just one of the large beams could cut through a high-level Cobra/Viper's shields and cripple its power plant with just one full charge. Helps to remain within one km of your target or so. Either way, it's nice of Frontier to give us full value on part exchanges when outfitting, so you can go back to the bursts without losing any moneys.
On that note... I made what could've been a very costly mistake with my math when trading in my Asp for that temporary Vulture. The part exchange at trade-in didn't give me the full value I thought it did. Made the same mistake again before realizing it when trading the kitted-out Vulture back in for the Asp, and was wondering what the deal was when I was outfitting the Asp as it used to be and coming out with less money than I had before. Luckily the bounty hunting in the Vulture was lucrative and I nearly broke even, but I learned a new lesson at the cost of a couple hours:
always sell all your parts/replace them with E1 modules BEFORE trading in your ship. A quick google search leads me to believe this is common knowledge, but I learned it the hard way.
Before the Vulture trade-in flub, I'd finally made it back to civilization and cashed in my exploration data for around $3m after a round trip of 4,000 lightyears or so. Have completed just over 500 detailed surface scans now (denoted as level 2--I'm very curious to see what the level 3 scans will be in future updates--perhaps that'll come with the planet landings?). Loving the exploration game--just cruising around listening to music and relaxing is SO very nice. It sure does take a while, though. Does anyone know if better thrusters affect the acceleration in supercruise as well? Sometimes I'll just ignore distant stars or planets if they're 100,000+ light-seconds out... will leave those long trips for someone else with more patience.
I intended to write down all my original discoveries when selling the data, but there were just too many, so I'm only keeping track of the notable ones with large credit bonuses. I'd guess I've got close to 100 original discoveries now, with a small handful of terraforming candidates. No "true" earthlikes just yet, but I'm only just getting started. I'd really love to have a way to search for my original discoveries in-game, or at the very least have a counter for the total number of original discoveries in the Exploration section of the statistics list. Making such data viewable/searchable in-game in future updates would be a huge boon to those of us who get our kicks by finding new worlds.
