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).
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Getting a tan - express edition. |
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.
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| 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".
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| 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.
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| 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.
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