Scanning, Docking & 3.1 Hotfix
Welcome to some more Star Citizen FAQs & updates from Calling All Devs and from Spectrum.
“Blind” Jumps
They’ve talked more about Blind Quantum Jumps. They do want shipping lanes to be a more sure bet between places tho.
They said you would be able to “blind jump” travel towards an object for exploration purposes, you see a gas cloud or asteroid field, you should be able to go there, there will be limits imposed by your quantum drives range, this is where certain ships will have an advantage.
BUT it’s my personal understanding of what they were also trying to say is you will have to set waypoints and scan items down to travel to them accurately. Knowing something is there by seeing it, should allow you to set a waypoint there, maybe appear on your mobiglas if it’s a large enough object without even scanning.
They are going to be working on Quantum Linking in the shorter term.
Scanning
They are currently working on scanning features, rather than a mini-game it’s going to be more closely tied to the radar mechanics.
Active Scanning will allow you various functionality. You can do a 360 ping for some basic info in a large area. Or you can go for a more focused narrow cone for more info and resolution in a particular direction.
You’ll also be able to actively scan specific targets and objects to get info on them such as cargo, vital statistics, owner, armament, composition. This will be used for scanning asteroids and mining deposits too.
Environmental effects may cause types of scan to be ineffective or obscure signals.
You’ll be able to detect IR, CS and EM and it’s all signature based.
The first implementation of this may make it in 3.2 in June.
Docking
Ship to Ship docking is planned again, you’ll be able to dock certain ships together for the transfer of people and cargo. You’ll also be able to dock large ships to stations too.
They are also working further on ships docking inside each other too.
The Cutlass is still not having a docking collar tho.
Other Info
With the Schedule they may leapfrog over features if others become more important to prioritize and it’s recommended that you get involved with the 3.2 feature survey. This helps choose which features get prioritized and more polished for the next major patch.
Ship Cockpit flair will be more than just bobble heads and there should be some variety, they will all attach to various item ports of different sizes. These small items are aiming to be available before the end of the year. Then they will expand this out further, like big bennys machines and pianos.
They are planning a much more in depth multi-crew experience BUT there is a backlog.
More Item System 2.0 features that are currently being looked at for 3.2 may make this a lot better as this includes the systems communicating with each other on ships correctly and each of the items shields, power and more will have more functionality, lending to another player being able to interact and actually make a difference when using them.
3.1 Hotfixes
Some other news, 3.1 is LIVE but does have some issues, I’ll be getting a state of the game video up covering various points BUT there is issues with Ship Insurance Claims, expediting fees & times being too high, with some players having to wait 8 hours to get their only ship back for example & CIG’s Zyloh has responded to this: