PitTrip: Part 2 - Ridge Racing, Robins Egg Nebular and Oort

The Pit Trip started with a mass start on day one. For some excellent video material from CMDR Eagle131 see this link - and maybe give him a like. For the second leg of that trip the modus operandi is a little different. Everyone made the way to the next waypoint at his own pace and we met up there.

This part of the trip first led everyone to a star system named Pomeche: On planet 2C there are huge mountains and apart from other nice sights a long mountain ridge, known for the Pomeche Ridge Racing Challenge. There is a video of fellow CMDR PrimeTimeCasual elegantly hopping in his SRV along this mountain ridge. If you have not seen it, take your time to watch it now:

So while I was there I decided to also take a go at the beginners track - If you don't mind your eyes bleeding there is also some video footage of that try. As my driving skills do not attract camera teams I can only offer the cockpit view. Also my video editing skills are no match for what the Buurs do. But for those brave enough to watch it, here is the link anyway.

My next stop was the system CD-26 1339 - located inside the Robins Egg Nebular. This system contains 10 Stars and a black hole. Additionally the Nebular adds a nice background color to the sky. It is also called "Robins Nest Nebular" by those more into 80s TV shows than into astronomy as I have learned during this trip.

Parking spots among space pumpkins are a thing for me on this trip.

The Black Hole itself is not visible - you can only see it's graviational lensing effect on the light, especially when moving. If you are interested in the view here is a short clip I made on my way through that system, totally ignoring all advice from NASA regarding this kind of travel.

From there it was a little hard to find the way to the final destination, the Oort System. The reason is that there is a ton of "Permit Locked Systems" in between. These are systems that can not be reached, which is totally illogical from a game immersion standpoint... We can only guess why this is the case. My assumption would be that these systems play some role in the future storyline of the game and players are not supposed to get there in advance.

With a bit of an erratic course I found a way around those systems. As I was well ahead of time I did some space exploration in the nearer area. There were quite a few interesting planets not yet mapped by players, so I collected system information to hand in at the next space station - this will make the collected information available to all commanders ship computers in the future.

A Neutron Star I stumpled upon on my way

Finally reaching the Oort system I visited some stellar phenomenae my scanner had detected. Within Lagrange Clouds (clouds of space dust between two celestial bodies, that exist exactly in the area where the gravity (and other forces) from both are nullified; for Details see the Wikipedia article about Langrangian Points) all kinds of strange things are growing.

In one of the clouds I even met an alien life form just happily wobbling around. My request to be brought to its leader was completely ignored.

First contact did not go well - could not establish communication Cmdr Eagle131 sent a recipe for those - as an alternative approach to do something useful with it, but my ship has no kitchen either.

After all the exploration I looked for a place to rest. I had just found myself a nice little planet for the night when another participant of the trip arrived in the Oort System. CMDR Bob48 steered his Diamondback Explorer to the same landing spot, where we met.

Meeting at the campsite

We got out our surface vehicles to make sure our camp is safe and there are no wild animals around or something. Well actually we just had a bit of driving fun. Showing off my cool driving skills I tried to overtake Bob with a jump, so raced up to his back, used a small bump to take off and pushed the Turbo Boost button.

That plan was not perfectly well developed. As Bob still had his wheels on the ground he could casually steer around my ship parked in the way - me, being up in the air, not so much. So I crashed directly into the rear of my spaceship, ending up in the main thruster.

Stuck, head first, in the negative end of my ships digestive system, I could not get out, no matter how I wiggled the controls of my vehicle. The level of coolness of that maneuver is slightly reduced, when you have to ask the other driver to bump you out of that mess afterwards.

Also I noticed something unexpected while driving on this icy little planet: The game designers actually accounted for the different traction you get on ice. After a lot of drifting I went down a slope to gain some additional speed for those drifting stunts. Was great fun, but after you went down a slope you also have to go up again. So with engines screaming and wheels spinning like crazy I went back up at the speed of a crawling toddler.

After all the driving mayhem we called it a day and signed off - the next day would be the big meetup of all participants in this system before the trek moves on.

With some participants arriving on this final day, we had a bit of time for scientific experiments - like parking as many cars as possible on a spaceship and then launching the same. I was able to gather some important scientific data; as well on the parking abilities of SRV drivers as on a strange weather phenomenon where it is raining space buggys.

At the actual meeting we used our ships to get some scenic footage for all our talented video makers in the group. We performed mass starts and landings that sure will show up in future films which I will link in the coming articles. Also we tried something, that (to our knowledge) has never been done before - a scenic mass arrival. Turns out this does not work with the current game instancing, which may or may not be the reason why it has not been done before.

Line-up of all ships for a sequenced mass start ... I look so forward to the video of that.

Additionally we did a demonstration in our vehicles for pebble-free planet surfaces to make better racing tracks on them. Whether this has been noticed by the Elite:Dangerous development team is unknown at the moment.

"Autocorso" -- I always thought this is a thing in german culture only.

This is about it for this weeks Pit Trip report. This is CMDR Universallaie, currently docked at Wilson Port in the Tewanta system, signing off.