Speedbowl 3: Going Hypersonic at Margulis Depot

„If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough.“

Mario Andretti

Speedbowl 3 took place this weekend at Margulis Depot. This is not about bowling, while on speed, because that would be totally irresponsible. This is about bringing your spaceship to hypersonic speed and passing the residential area at Margulis Depot at low altitude, preferably between two condo towers. Which is a very adult thing to do.

I have heard some people hung out at the Depot to film, so I will have to check for video footage of the event. In case I find something good, I will include it in this article later. During the event I did not have time for watching, as I wanted to participate myself.

Many ships were destroyed by means of  not being able to accomplish the art of flying: "Throw yourself at the ground, but miss" was the basic idea in one of Douglas Adams' books. The missing seems to be the hard bit.

Also many ships crashed into the towers at the Margulis Depot installation. All in all it was a weekend of great fun for all participants. And while it seems that CMDR Sanderling may not be cashing in the fastest run this time, he definetely has won by doing the seemingly impossible: He did a valid run. Backwards. This shouldn't even be legal.

During the many tries I had to make, to even get close to the target (forward), I think I fell in love with the traffic control lady at the station greeting me "Zorgon Peterson Bravo-Papa-Tango, priority access will be granted upon request, welcome to this federal port...". By the time she said welcome I was usually already 45km away again, trying to slow down. But she never gave up and said it every time.

You can see my final approach on Youtube.

Find the Leaderboard of this years Speedbowl here.

Pit trip: The final - high gravity, high speed moon and a high mountain

I started the final part of the Pit Trip by travelling to the Chi Hydrae system. On the way there I stumbled upon a planet with nice deep canyons.

Low altitude, high speed flying optional

After some fun in those I went on to the first waypoint: Planet A7 in the target system was advertised as a high gravity world. So some Speedbowling was obviously in order. Roughly 9g of gravity helped my little ship to quite some speed. At 7777m/s I remembered, that I would lose millions worth of exploration data if I crashed and therefore aborted this run.

Mach 22 ought to be enough for everyone

Landing on this planet was easier than expected though - the on board flight computer can handle high gravity quite easily. So off I went to something that is harder to land on.

The moon named "Mitterand Hollow" is a bit of glitch in the game. For generating the celestial bodies inside the game a system named the "Stellar Forge" is used. It tries to generate objects in space that would also be possible in the real universe. Sometimes it fails.

Mitterand Hollow is such a case: The moon is placed so close to the planet it is orbiting, that one circulation only takes ninety seconds. The moon is racing around the planet and that makes for an interesting landing on it.

Another glitch has to be used: The system changes the reference system of speed when getting close to stellar objects. So you can actually sit at speed zero (relative to the central planet) on the orbit line of Mitterand hollow and wait for the moon to crash into you - once it is close enough the reference system changes and you now have speed zero relative to the moon itself.

I have made a little howto video for those who wish to try it themselves. Pardon my bad video editing skills.

The last tourist spot was to be visited afterwards: Planet 3A in the Nervi system has the highest mountain within the known Elite:Dangerous galaxy: Mount Nerverest goes up 50km into the sky. Us meeting at a high plateau quickly turned into an involuntary study on the effect of gravity on surface vehicles.

Most of the evening was spent trying to fish commanders in their space buggies out of the mess they had driven themselves into. Turns out it is not easy to use three spaceships to push a small vehicle back up a cliff - who would have thought?

Some call  it rescue - some call it malicious damage.

The grand finale (for those that had not already destroyed their car beforehand) was a base jump off Mount Neverest. Falling for minutes and enjoying the view we were a bit sad: The Pit Trip has ended. I will miss the weekly sunday evening madness this trip has brought - we had a lot of fun in playing the game in a way the developer surely had not intended.

I actually wonder, if Frontier Development team has a monitoring that shows "statistically unlikely events" ... and the operator staring at the monitoring by now ignores sunday evening, closing the monitoring event with the comment: "It's just those stupid Buurboons again".

Thank you to all participants of the trip: You are a marvelous crowd, it is great being part of this friendly, positive and helpful community.

Cmdrs Rheeney and Buur have not only organized these events, they also have released the first part of their Pit Trip documentary, making my video editing skills look even worse. So, open in full screen, turn up the sound and watch this video (made by someone who knows how to do this).

This is CMDR Universallaie, currently docked in Wilson Port, signing off.