PitTrip Day 1: To the Spirograph Nebular

The start of our Grand Adventure was planned for 1800UTC at Wilson Dock starport in the Tewanta system. Everybody was really excited and had no idea what to expect. Elite Dangerous is a game with multiple hundreds of billions of star systems, many of them home to multiple planets - so in normal gameplay it is quite unusual to actually meet another player.

About an hour before the start ships started to show up in front of the starport - space got crowded. The number of hollow rectangles on my radar screen rapidly increased (a hollow rectangle is another player, ships controlled by the Elite game servers are filled rectangles).

Unacceptable spaceship parking discipline

I have never seen so many players in one place... and everyone had to start flying close to other players ships to take a look at what they have brought to the trip. So it was a lot of eratically flying around and occasional bumping into each other. A bit of bumper car driving in space.

We tried to line up all ships for our first jump into the trip - and have a group start. CMDR Rheeney was the only exception - she was left behind to film our mass jump into the dark. Here is a first glimpse from the cockpit of one of the participants.

So off to our first destination: Beetlejuice (in the star map they call it Betelgeuse, but I am sure that is a mistake from the developers of the game). I made two hyperspace jumps in the general direction when the first commander had a very important note on the expeditions comms channel: "Important Announcement to all Commanders: I know this is not a race, but I am leading". A valid point - as soon as two starships meet and fly roughly in the same direction it can be considered a regatta.

On the Galaxy map I could see those parts of the regatta field I had in my friends list at least.

The green icons indicate position of players in friend list

Soon enough we started reaching Beetlejuice: This is a red supergiant class star -- and it really is mindblowingly big. Let me quote Wikipedia to give you an idea how big it is:

If Betelgeuse were at the center of the Solar System, its surface would extend past the asteroid belt, engulfing the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and possibly Jupiter.

I am sure this would ruin all fire insurance companies on earth instantly. So all commanders put on sunscreen factor 9,000,000 to protect themselves and we landed on planet number 2 of that system. Got out our spacebuggies and lined up for a picture. Because of strange game-instancing sadly not all commanders ended up in the same simulation instance of the planet - I myself had no way to see the others, so I will show you a screenshot taken by CMDR Snert who was in the big group. Obviously game developers did not expect such large scale events to happen and have not designed their game logic around 30+ players trying to be in the same place at the same time.

So here is a red supergiant rising and a lot of space explorers enjoying the view in their space cars.

Getting a tan - express edition.

After some driving mayhem I sadly could not see (but I heard the chaos in comm) we went on. To the Witch Head Nebular and further to the spirograph nebular. The destination for our first day out on the trip was a star system called BD-12 1172 (very astronomical name, that). This system has multiple fascinating sights.

First there is a scientific station placed in this system - a huge installation we all wanted to take look at. It has two rotating rings to provide artificial gravity to its inhabitants - and I felt a pressing urge to race my ship through those ringes on a slalom course.


Everyone knowing me in real life knows that I am not exactly used to anything moving fast, so sure enough I bumped into one the spokes of a ring...  as it is with large turning things, the absolute speed in the outer ring is quite high and so I got hit fairly hard. A good decision to equip my ships with shields for the trip. But I was spinning so fast that my ships thrusters just could not get me free again. After taking a few rounds in that space carousel a fellow commander took a bit of an inrun and bumped into my ship, sending me back out into space in a whirling ship. Thanks to you, CMDR Sanderling.

Image taken by Cmdr Rheeney - from the outside it looked as if I am not even touching the station, but still going in circles with it. My ship is the one with the pink thrusters, trying at full engine power to get out of that mess.

All that bumping into stations and being rammed by other ships wore down the hull of my spaceship quite a bit. Time to bring in team "WeeWoo". We have a few bigger ships with us carrying repair and refuel drones to come and help idiots like myself, who do not so clever things while being far away from repair facilities. So I got my ship repaired in space (great service, team WeeWoo!) and we had reached our target system for the day.

While many others already called it a day in my timezone I had a bit of time left before finding a camp for the night. So I visited something that showed up as a "notable stellar phenomenon" in my ships navigation panel. Actually an asteroid ring around a planet with fascinating crystals growing in it. The scientifically correct name, as far as I know, are "the spikey things" and "the not so spikey things".

The green and purple background is from the nebular

After that I headed to a planet, that according to my scanner had biological signals on it. I landed in a field of bio luminiscent space pumpkins, turned of the all modules not required and went to bed.

Lots of space pumpkins - A nice place to rest for the night

This is commander Universallaie on board the "Indesctructible 3" landed in BD-12 1172 system signing off.

Elite Dangerous Content Incoming

Back in the late 80s there was that computer game I played a lot of hours in: Elite. It was a flight simulator for me mainly - but in space. You got to fly spaceships- SPACESHIPS!. Back then I hardly noticed the game actually has a lot more complex stuff in the background going on.

A few years later (30 or so) someone I read stuff from on the Internet for almost the same amount of time mentioned he is playing a game named "Elite: Dangerous". I had the feeling I need to take a look at that.

Elite: Dangerous is a space flight simulator. Many of the iconic elements of the original game are still there: The design of the "radar screen", the base design of the stations etc. But graphics have improved a bit. Actually graphics are really impressive now - as a non-gamer I was not aware of the fact just how much graphics had improved.

So I played that game for a bit - and mostly was just blown away by the beauty of space. It is awesome - just for the view, the game is worth it's money. Just two examples:

But the new version of that game offers something more: Multiplayer! There are communities doing all kinds of activities the game makes possible - trading, political powerplay, piracy, exploring (there are 100s of billions of starsystems in the game, most of them never visited by a player before) - and a lot more.

Through their Youtube channel I had noticed the existence of "The Buur Pit". And I noticed in the Elite Dangerous Starmap (also a community driven project, BTW) that they plan something. So I started researching how to participate in such a thing - ended up joining their discord (a chat tool) and I think these are great people. So I will be joining "The Pit Trip - A Grand Adventure" and go out to space with group of equally crazy people (I will elaborate on the crazy part in future posts). I am very excited about this... it will be pretty much be my first multiplayer experience in Elite.

And I thought, why not re-activate this blog for that? The posts will be in english, as the Buur Pit is an international community. And maybe some of the other participants also want to read my reports on the trip. Additionally I will place articles about general stuff in the game - very basic stuff mostly, as I am a beginner and maybe others also plan to start the game.. or don't want to start, but want to be able to understand what I am writing. So I will always try to explain stuff, that can not be considered "common ground" for anyone not playing this game.

This is Commander Universallaie, currently docked in the Tewanta system, signing off!