4Game

Before anyone asks… Yes I crashed my ship with a bunch of exploration data and I'm still a little salty about it.

For the last couple days I have been on a voyage outside the bubble. I've only done this once before so I knew going into this that I was going to make some mistakes… Which I did.

I was half way to the California Nebula, I had been honking literally every system along the way and scanning every planet that hadn't been already. I was having a grand time. Before stopping for the night I decided to land on a rather interesting looking planet just for the fun of it.

As I'm landing I realize that the ground is coming up rather fast… I panicked… Pull up on the stick… Nothing happens… Panicked some more… Ground coming up even faster… Impact…. Ship destroyed.

I learned a valuable lesson, one that many others have learned as well… Always check planet gravity before landing.

After getting over the initial anger I took it as a learning opportunity and moved on. Then I had a thought.

Why don't player ships drop black boxes when destroyed!?

I looked this up and the only relevant post I could find was from 2017, but this commander had the same idea I did. Upon ship destruction your ship should drop a black box with all of your expiration data in it allowing you to go back and collect it.

In the same article other people were expressing concerns about allowing this game mechanic for the fear of other players taking advantage of it. The solutions people came up with, we're to only make the black box available to the player who ship it belong to, that way other players couldn't grief you and then steal all of your data. You would then have to make the same journey all the way back to where you died, but you would be allowed to collect your data and carry on.

I was just wondering, is there an in-universe explanation, or have the devs said anything about why there's absolutely no way to collect exploration data when you die?

Already in universe we have black box recovery missions so we know that the technology exists, I think it would be a fun and interesting game mechanic to allow players as well. Implementing it this way would allow nobody to take advantage of going out into the black and scanning everything, and then self-destructing and selling all the data, because you would actually have to go all the way back to where you were to collect it again. It also doesn't take any of the fear out of exploring outside the bubble because you would have to make twice the effort for the same amount of data.

Thoughts fellow commanders? Frontier?