Testing the Fleetcarrier as an Exploration Platform

One option for the newly released fleetcarriers in Elite:Dangerous would be using it as an "long distance Exploration Platform" - so I went out on a short trip, a few thousand lightyears from civilization to test this out.

TL;DR: Not a viable option for me.

The long version: For this test I wanted to play it safe so I went with the carrier filled with tritium fuel to the max. This way I was sure to make it back, if self supply out in the black does not work out. As tritium was sold at very low price in one of the systems controlled by our player faction it wasn't too expensive to do this, so now was so perfect time. 

I decided to chose a direction other than the main routes because my goal was to explore, find new stuff... not to go to the beautiful places already found by others. And not even 1000 lightyears from my starting point I started running into the first undiscovered systems. Great!

So how did I incorporate my Carrier: I always plotted routes <500 Lightyears with my exploration ship. When reaching the end of the route I looked for an interesting system nearby and then ordered my carrier to jump there. While waiting for the carrier to arrive I either scanned rings, mapped planets or landed and collected materials at a geo/bio site.

This was actually great fun and it was nice to have the safety of the carrier in the back, handing in exploration data every 500Ly. But would this scheme be sustainable for a long distance exploration? As much fun it might be, I wouldn't want to get stuck with a carrier far out in deep space.

So first: The financial aspect. Each carrier jump costs 100,000Credits for repairs required afterwards. Additionally it has an weekly upkeep. With my loadout this is about 17MCr per week. This money, I think, can be cashed in when exploring, but requires some intense gameplay. It takes more time out there to cash in this amount, then it does in the bubble. For me personally and my gaming speed and game time per week this would be doable, in the end there wouldn't be much left over probably, but at least the trip wouldn't be a loss. 

Second: Fleet Carrier fuel, Now here comes the problem: A fleet carrier requires fuel to jump. And no matter how rich you are and how much money you are making through exploration, out in the black there is no one selling it to you. So you have to mine it yourself.

I brought a python equipped for mining for exactly this task - I wanted to check what it takes to mine enough tritium to sustain myself on this trip. And couldn't do it. A fleetcarrier jump takes about 200t of fuel (they way I did the trip). I am no expert in mining, so professionals may be faster, but for me that is 2 - 2.5 hours of mining, if I am lucky and have a tritium hotspot in the system. Without I guess it might even be more. This clearly wouldn't be something to do for me every day - after all I am out there to explore, not to mine.

So realitically speaking, when exploring alone and with a fleetcarrier, I think I could sustain about one fleet carrier  jump per week. So it would take a very long time to get to the really far parts. And I am not ready to commit myself to a multi year exploration trip, to be honest. 

That doesn't mean a fleet carrier is not good for exploration. It actually is fantastic. It just not good for "long distance, with limited time and me". Tweaking any of the variables can make it sustainable:

- Do slow exploration, 500Ly a week, investigating everything around before moving on. Actual exploration, instead of racing across the galaxy.

- Stay nearby, so a full tritium tank can get you to where you want to go and back to the bubble - the rest is just a money issue, and we all know this can now be generated quick enough that it is not relevant anymore. And an hour of Diamond mining and selling those, will save you 20-30 hours of Tritium mining. The balance of Low Temperature Diamond mining is THAT broken.

- Don't go a alone, so the tritium supply job is done by many. The carrier does not use more fuel when more commanders are travelling with it and the effort of mining can be shared among those coming. The more people group up, the easier it will get. 

Thoughts on the Odyssey Announcement

Frontier, the company behind Elite:Dangerous, dropped quite a bomb this week. They put out the first announcement of the upcoming "new era" of the game with the "Odyssey" release. Watch the trailer, containing pre-alpha footage from the new game engine:

So the big new thing is what the community calls "space legs", the ability to actually play your commander as a person outside of the pilot or vehicle seat. But there is more in the video that is not explicitly stated there: It seems like landing on planets with an athmosphere would be possible. The graphics of the environment seem to have significantly improved. And I think even the ship models look a lot improved to what they are now. 

I personally am very excited about the improved graphics and the athmospheric landings. Space legs are not important for me personally, but it is a very much requested feature by the player community. And I can see possible ways to have fun with this new gameplay myself. I am somewhat neutral to that change myself at this point in time - how much I will like it will depend much on the details how they can/must be used.

Some players noticed though, that on Steam this upcoming extension is listed without VR-Support and asked on the forums about that. And Frontier answered (which is great in itself, given how quite they were over the last year). The answer is: "No VR support at launch of the expansion". 

Wow, that is a second bomb dropped. This time one that really hit me hard. I love the VR-Experience of the current game. A spaceflight sim is just the perfect environment for the combination of VR and me. And Elite:Dangerous today has it implemented in a great way. Some of the newer features seemed to get not much VR-love (FSS-Scanner, I am looking at you!), but the overall game experience is just mindblowingly good.

But I guess the VR-market just did not develop enough over the last years to still be worth implementing for. It is an understandable decision, commercially, to not implement for what is still a niche market as it seems. It might backfire, if VR grows but in the end it is a strategical decision and in this case it seems to be made against the implementation of VR-capabilities. 

There has been a clarification afterwards, that you will still be able to play the current version in VR, even if the upgrade does not support it, but to me this is pointless. Another important puzzle piece making this game so good is the community. And keeping the VR-Players on Horizon and giving the 2D-Players Odyssey will de-facto split the community - and therefore not be an option.

I assume it will still be possible to fly together, sure. But I also expect there will be an incentive to upgrade (after all Frontier must sell the new expansion, cause that is their business). So I expect, like with the horizons upgrade before, there will be something you need to stay competetive in the new expansion. In horizons it was engineers. Sure you can play without them, but who does, honestly?

Also there will be community events that require the new expansion - and thus those not having it, because they want to play in VR, will be left out.

At this point I am very disappointed by the announcement to ditch VR, as you can probably tell. Will I leave the game because of that? I don't know yet. It is still a long time until the expansion is actually there and we don't know much about it yet. I will have to wait and see. I guess it is still a long way away - my believe in the announced date is not strong.

Fleetcarriers Defense Has Issues

In the recent beta for fleetcarriers I also took a look at them. Back in the first beta period I was filming one and being too close to it I blocked a landing pad. Being in outside camera view I did not notice the warnings and so the fleet carrier shot me down. That is not unexpected, but while that happened I had the feeling the first shots missed me. That was strange.

So now in the second beta I tried to reproduce exactly that. Find that spot where the automated lasers on the carrier just fail to shoot you down. After a few tries I found out, that you just need a fairly small ship and be really low above the main landing deck to be out of reach of the carriers guns. Here is a video showing how you can just sit there while the carrier tries to kill you:

There is a little additional trick to it: It works best with shields turned off - I only found that out after making the video, here you see my shields coming up and being shot off again. Every time the shields come up the hitbox of the ship gets a little bigger and the lasers hit, taking down the shields and causing a little hull damage to the ship. If the shields are kept down they never hit and you can sit there forever.

To get a nicer lasershow we tried this with multiple ships last weekend - and learned something new: The carrier does not try to fire at everyone. Until the first target is destroyed it continues shooting at whoever was there first. The others can pretty much do whatever they want around the carrier, it doesn't switch target. Bad for our planned graphic effect, but good to know. I once again have to thank all those great commanders of the Buur Pit community who always show up when there is a prospect to get blown up for science. Be sure to follow the linked youtube channel, I am pretty sure there will be some video of this experiment showing up soon.

This might become an interesting detail for gankers, I guess. If they bring a friend (do gankers have friends?) he could attract the gunfire of the carrier. And I asume this allows the actual ganker to happily do his mischief without being bothered by the powerful guns.

Fleetcarriers: Post Beta-1 thoughts

This article is written for people actually playing Elite:Dangerous - if you are not playing you can probably stop reading here, as it will mean nothing to you.

---

The first beta for fleetcarriers in Elite:Dangerous comes to an end. Time to update my thoughts on them.

At this point we can buy a fleetcarrier which comes with a commodities market pre-installed and add modules to outfit this beast of a ship with, enabling it to do other things - like offering repair facilities etc. And the carrier loses much of its value darn fast - it is expensive to buy and you only get a fraction of the money back when selling it.

I don't think we already are at the end of the line currently.

I believe shortly before the start of this beta FDev said: "we want the purchase of a fleet carrier to be a meaningful decision" (no exact quote, it's from the top of my head). This sentence left me thinking a lot.

I will now enter the field of wild speculation and nothing I will predict is by any means provable... I am just thinking here. So don't expect any of that to be correct - I will try to point to the reasons for my thinking - but I may be utterly wrong with anything or everything I come up with in this article. So, I'll pop open a bottle of beer and just think into the keyboard from here on.

Take a look at this video CMDR Rheeney has created, if you haven't done so already. It shows different looking carriers in the docks within the Beta:

Rheeney says in the title we may see "Livery Options" for carriers here. While this is entirely possible I think - and somewhat hope - this is only part of the truth. Another part that made me think a lot was how quickly FDev was in stating Universal Cartographics will be available in the future as if it wasn't something difficult to do, almost as if it were planned anyway. And with that news something clicked and my speculations started:

In the current beta the Drake Class Carrier can be purchased - that is a very specific name for the only type of carrier there is. I think what we see in above video are entirely different carrier classes, not only livery options for the Drake Class Carrier. Painting and thruster colors could be livery, but there may be more to the actual shape of the carrier.

Also remember the old Idea of different carrier roles? Maybe that idea is still current.

Imagine the additional modules we can buy now could be purchased for all carriers, but one module is standard - and can not be exchanged except by selling your carrier and buying an entirely different one. You can only have one of those "core modules" on your carrier at any time, depending on the carrier class. With the depreciation this would really be a commitment, wouldn't it?

I guess the Drake Class Carrier is actually the "Trader Role" of carriers. That's why it comes with a market place installed as default.

The one with the ball-shaped bow may be the science-carrier - the exploration role. It could come with cartographics installed instead of the commodities market. That's why they were so fast in saying it will come... it was planned anyway, just not in the carrier class released in the first beta.

The pink one: I think by others already sometimes referred to as the "Hammerhead" could be the mining role - probably offering something completely new like additional refineries or contruction sites that allow to actually build further stuff from what they have mined. Whatever this will be.

Search and Rescue carriers? Bounty Hunter carriers? Smuggler carriers? These all were roles annouced back last year - I currently have no idea what their special module might be, but it could be possible to think of something I would believe.

Maybe we do not even get all carrier types on the release in June, but just the first few models - and additional carrier classes may be added whenever they are ready for market. I think this would be an exciting development perspective for the game - and maybe a reason not to jump at the first carrier that becomes available to players.

I guess in a few months we will know if these are just dumb ideas of a slightly drunk gamer or there is something to it.

Pre Fleetcarrier Thoughts

After quite a few optimistic annoucements of "Fleet Carriers" (thank you for this great wording, CMDR Wotherspoon), now there was another one. This time with a level of detail that almost looks like they might really be implemented.

The annoucement was made last week "live on tape". If you want to see the complete one hour not-so-live stream, here it is.

Maybe a short introduction for people not yet playing Elite Dangerous. Within this game you have exactly one commander you are playing. You can have many space ships - but have to park a ship in a station to be able to switch to another ship, which obviously has to be parked in the same space station. If you are in an area far out from inhabited space, there are no stations - and therefore you can not change ships. Spacestations are stationary (hence the name), you can not move them anywhere else. Believe me on this one, I have rammed quite heavy spaceships into stations, they did not move a bit.

So here come Fleet Carriers now - they can be owned by players and are personal space-non-stations - They can offer most services Space stations have without being stationary.

With the annoucement youtube, reddit and the game forums at Frontier Development (FDEV) went crazy. I couldn't say it better than  our CMDR Bob Lowkey said it on our discord, so here is the quote:

Fleet carrier reveal there's so much salt on the stream already makes the Dead Sea seem like spring water.

And I would like to thank FDEV for that alone. All that whining and yelling on all those platforms by themselves provided an excellent entertainment value. Chapeau!

Most of those complaints seem to orbit around the idea, that people wish to play the game exactly like they did without the carriers, and that carriers don't change that playstyle now - or something like that. All in all logic is in short supply in most of the complaints. It almost seems like those players believe, they are forced to buy a carrier and use it all the time. I am pretty sure this is not the case, if you wish to continue playing like you did before, you should be able to do that.

I personally see those carriers as a massive increase in options how to play this sandbox game I like so much. To be honest I have so many ideas how I want to use this thing, that the hardest part will be deciding on what to try out first.

Sure, I am also not 100% in line with all the design decisions and they are not completely arranged around the play styles I enjoy, but I am able to accept, that this asset maybe has not been designed for my own personal preferences, but had to be a bit of a compromise to also appeal to other players.

So, what I want to do with these? A few examples:

They, for the first time, allow to play markets in Elite Dangerous. The ability to buy and sell goods and set prices on your carrier is total new gameplay. Galaxy-Tycoon style, being the boss on your space-flying farmers market. This is like a new game within the game by itself. I want to try this out - and taking into account how bad I am in trading sims, probably lose a fortune while doing so.

BGS support vessel is the next big thing: When our in game faction is at war, can I place this thing near one of the combat zones to provide refuel, repair and re-arm services to our combat ships? That'd be a great addition.

Will there even be respawn on the carrier in case of ship destruction occuring? I sure hope so, then this can also become the hooning base our community always wanted. So when doing racing events in narrow canyons on some planet, you can place a carrier in orbit to ensure respawn near by. All those wonderful canyon rich worlds outside the bubble can now turn into playgrounds of speed addicted low altitude flyers (yes, I am looking at you, CMDR Sanderling).

Exploring the galaxy 500ly a time: So I can jump my carrier somewhere and just have a light weight scout ship analyse the systems around it. If I find something interesting nearby, I can easily pick up the fitting ship to exploit that point of interest - and at some point jump the carrier on to the next center of exploration.

Ohh, and the most important part: FDEV said, the carriers are "indestructable" - I say: CHALLENGE ACCEPTED! I see hours of fun ahead of me trying to get this massive ship I have into the most dangerous places I can think of.

Please file all your further ongoing whining about the announced carriers directly here in the comments, where they will go mostly unread by the public. Thank you.

And for the time being, turn up your subwoofers and watch this fleetcarrier megajumping (yes, this is the technical term, don't ask)  into another starsystem:

We just wanted to do some mining...

At the end of 3305 some commanders of The Buur Pit that - for reasons not comprehensible to this writer - actually like mining, founded the BPMC: The Buur Pit Mining Company. With their company slogan "Making Billionaires since 3305" they are not exaggerating. 

As I have learned through the course of the economic adventure this article is about, there are "Leaderboards" for squadrons within Elite:Dangerous. And so the madness started. Those leaderboards are reset every two months...

Sometime in February someone noticed we are actually in the Top 50 of squadrons in the trade category. We were very proud of this as we are a fairly small squadron and found that to be quite an archievement. Only a few weeks later someone noticed our crazy mining folks have somehow pushed us into the top 10 of miners. From there it went down the drain pretty much and more people started to mine as they learned there are a lot of credits to be earned.

Sure enough we were in the Top three soon after. At that point we realized, that we are not competitive game players, we just wanted to win. Early March spreadsheeting started to happen and soon enough the whole squadron was just focused on making money. Especially as there is a trophy to be won, so we really wanted to stay in the Top 3 places and at least get the shiny bronze trophy for our spaceship dashboards. See here you can see how it ended:

Spreadsheet Magic provided by CMDR NeokeVenice

You can nicely see the race with Dark Enterprise (DE), another player faction in the game, at the last days. With our international community we basically had people mining 24/7 somewhere - from Europe to the Americas on to New Zealand and Australia... We could create a continuous income for this. It was completely crazy, some time mining with 10 or 15 ships together, on the way learning new mining techniques to optimize outcome. 

After those last few days I can say one thing for sure: I dont want to mine an asteroid for quite some time anymore. 

We do not plan these things, but if we get to the point where this community has a common goal, we are a bit on the unstoppable side of things. #ForTheBobblehead

PitBowl

Conservation ov Momentum shall not be denied to any man, regardless ov his race, status, gender or creed. -- https://totl.net/Rights/

I have tricked the BuurPit into a bit of scientific research. Some time ago commander Snert and myself did a few experiments of ramming ships and pushing away the other with that. Already then I noticed that the physical concept of "Conservation of Momentum" is implemented rather badly.

So I brought a relatively low massed ship and rammed his heavy Imperial Cutter. With this different masses, according to physics as we know it, I should hand over some momentum to the heavy ship and myself bounce backwards. Only if both ships have the same mass, the incoming ship should exactly come to a stop and hand over all of its momentum to the other. If you want to read up about that a bit, I recommend the all-knowing trash heap (does anyone else remember where this reference comes from, BTW?): Wikipedia - it has an article with nice illustrating animations.

But in Elite:Dangerous something else happens: My smaller ship always comes to a complete halt and tries to hand over all momentum to the heavy target, that shoots away. Except, it again hits something (like the ground), then it will give up all momentum again.

Also, I guess due to the netcode behind the game, it can take some time for the momentum to arrive. This is actually a noticeable delay, so after ramming I stand still and the target starts moving a little later.

So last weekend I accumulated my willing guinea pigs to try this: Arrange a lot of space ships like bowling pins and get someone to crash into that, to see the momentum distribute through the group. It turns out the first part is already extremely hard: herding a fleet of mad spaceship commanders to actually just park close enough to each other. It is even much less possible to archieve a dedicated formation, so we gave up on that relatively fast.

To have a reference at least in one of the three dimensions, we did this on a planet, just above the surface. Also it looks better seeing ships tumble in gravity. So here is some video footage of what happened:

Most parts are rather irrelevant for the science, but "Act 4" of this video actually shows the effect - even though just at the side of the screen because of my bad camera works. You can see the purple-pink-ugly-thing being crashed into...  it starts moving, shortly after that hitting the next ship. That stops the purple ship and accelerates the next.

Act 3 should actually have worked, but it did not - I can currently only assume that this is because the purple ship is trying to distribute its kinectic energy between multiple ships and this is just too much for the in-game physics model and it gives up.

So generally one could build upon this, but honestly: herding commanders is hard. Sadly the "just turn everything off and do nothing" part always fails to reach someone.

As the final we tried another idea we had in mind - and having so many people with the same type of ship in the same place was an opportunity: We played spaceship Jenga, by stacking all ships on top of each other, then switching all flight assist systems off and letting a ship at the bottom of the tower boost out of it. It is also in the Video.

Low Gravity Speedbowling?

Because there is so much to find out about this game, some commanders of our squadron decided to found a dedicated science division.

Where questionable ideas lead to great explosions…. Meet the

Boonlabs Scientific Suicide Squad

(B3S)

   

We are planning an event on the planet right below our home station on the next weekend.

Today I had a bit of time to work on one of the questions that came up in our discord (I assume it was CMDR PrimtimeCasual): Can I speedbowl there?

The B3S deployed one of its highly trained monkeys (me) to find this out. I have picked the obvious ship to analyze this question, an unengineered stock Anaconda. This thing can usually reach speeds that are otherwise only seen in plate tectonics.

Roughly 200km above ground I switched off all flight assist system, pushed the thrusters to "full up", pointed the nose roughly 60° to the ground and started accelerating.

Speed increased a lot slower than on the usual speedbowling worlds and the angle of accelaration felt a lot tighter, but you can speedbowl on worlds <1g it seems - just a lot slower. But still you reach speeds your ship is normally not capable of getting to.

Picture of proof:



As you may be able to see on this picture I have reached 1005m/s at the time of screenshooting. After that I was a bit busy to not crash into that mountain right in front of me. Not the best choice of speedbowling alley here maybe.

So I am now looking very much forward to see commanders showing up to next weeks event at multiple times the speed of sound.

Further research is required from dedicated speedbowlers to find out whether the mediocre speed I have reached is due to me being bad at this, due to the questionable choice of ship or due to low gravity. I can't wait to see your reports on this.

Virtualize Everything

Working in IT, the trend to virtualize everything can not be ignored. For example, all Google has is a single Raspberry Pi dangling from the wall outlet in some californian office building - everything else you see are virtual machines running on that bugger, and we all really hope they have a spare SD-Card somewhere.

Following this trend I decided to virtualize my reality. Last week I got my Oculus Rift S delivered and started testing it for example for playing Elite: Dangerous. Sure, there are other uses, but honestly: Who cares?

The setup started with some anger management requirements on my side, as my f...riendly USB port just wouldn't work with the headset. I sure have a USB 3.0 controller and why the f...rag does the headset always complain about the port not being usb threeish enough for it to run. That makes no sense. Well it didn't at first, until I learned that some of my ports are obviously on another controller, that is USB 2.0, of which I did not even know I owned it. Put it into a port marked as actually being USB 3.0 and it workes like a charm.

After some setup (log in to facebook! Aye! --- Measure your room for your safety! Aye, it's facebook, nobody has privacy concerns there --- Look, what the cameras are always seeing, when you are playing! Wait, what? this device is connected to my Facebook account; ah, whatever. --- and so on) it worked. The setup, though somewhat concerning for the IT-savvy, was excellently guided and easy to do.

And then it began: Find out how to start the game in VR. I expected this to be very hard, so put on my headset, ready to wrangle Steam and watch growing blue bars for hours. Okay, Steam, how do we go. And steam said: "Oh, you are wearing a VR headset. Should we start your game in VR mode?". Ah, yes. That's it, it worked. Instantly.

And then, the game is in 3D, you can look around and it feels as if you are in the hangar. For the first time I got a sense of scale in the game. And my Spaceships are huge. Not big, literally huge - I was blown away and just had to stare at my ship for a few minutes in awe before entering the cockpit.

And since then I spent all the time of rather dull flight looking around and it is so much better. I start noticing the details of my spaceships, and the level at which these are done in game is amazing. For example the "Krait Mk2" I own, is from now on and forever the "Hobo Ship" in my mind. Cables are just fixed to the ceiling with Ducttape or lying around openly.

This red cable going into that vent opening there? Why? I mean this is a space ship and this kind of cable management raises questions about the quality of the ship that is supposed to keep me alive at multiple times the speed of light in space.

But VR does more: It tricks your brain. Looking down, I got to see myself in game and my first thought was: Hey, you've lost some weight, this is great. Only a few seconds later I noticed, I am not looking at real-me, but some digital dude. 

I have a joystick and a thruster on a table - and these in game move precisely the way I move the real things. So the brain totally believes what it sees.

You may notice on that last picture, that the zipper of the jacket is a bit of to the left at the bottom. You won't be believe how often I already tried to shift it into the middle by pulling my real-world sweater sideways. 

As a summary: VR is fascinating, though expensive. And I feel a followup purchase of a new and better graphics card approaching - My GTX1060 can handle it, but in some situations reaches it's limits. 

Rescue Operations For Damaged Space Stations

In October 3305 I visited the space station "Titan's Daughter" for the first time - and warned about the dangerous location this has been built in. You can find my comments on that in the Article about the third part of the PitTrip. All warnings have been ignored and so the inevitable happend: The station got hit by something really hard and is now being evacuated.

With the increasing speciesism in the galaxy this was obivously blamed on our thargoid neighbours instantly. Even though no one has seen an attack happening news outlets around the galaxy know who is to blame for the damage from the first second; even though it is much more likely that a space station that close to an asteroid belt has just been hit by a rock. The green stains could even be hinting to the thargoids trying to extinguish fires in a disaster relief effort.

But we, as humans, have nothing better to do than attacking the helpers at first sight, forcing them into yet another war that will have no winners.

Titans daughter early 3306

Instead of playing wargames (It's a strange game... The only winning move is not to play) I decided to help in evacuating the station in distress. My Saud Krüger Orca class ship is perfectly equipped for this kind of operations, so I transferred it to the Taygeta System and started rescue operations by transferring passengers from Titan's Daughter to a nearby Rescue Megaship.

During operations like these radio comms a critical for success of the operation. Therefore it is of great importance for all commanders to keep radio discipline in voice channels and reduce the usual chatter. Prompt communication and efficient operations allowed me to do a roundtrip, evacuating 70 civilians from the station, within roughly five minutes. If many commanders participate in these missions, it should be possible to rescue all inhabitants from the station quickly.

Here is a video of such an operation

------ Game immersion barrier -------

Really, the in game athmosphere around these burning station is great. The voice acting from station personell really gives the feeling of a distress situation. And all the fire and explosions... WOW. If you are playing E:D, you should go there, it is a great part of the game.

And with the ongoing improvements of voice recognition I really hope we will be able to have in game bi-directional radio comms soon... the dialogues in this video are faked.

MAKE TEWANTA GREAT AGAIN

Corporations have been founded in Tewanta to organize asteroid mining - sounds innocent, doesn't it?

The truth is, that beautiful asteroids are hit with heavy industrial lasers, taking them apart and leaving behind loads of unwanted materials littering space around them.




The wanted materials (these days, that is mainly Low Temperature Diamonds) are not picked up by the self proclaimed miners. No, robotic slaves (so called Limpets) are sent out into the mines to do the hard work of collecting the materials from the cold darkness that is space. Most of these have to work until they die from exhaustion. Those few that survive this torture chamber of a workplace are then left behind in the cold darkness without anything to charge their batteries, thus dying a slow lonely death while spaceship commanders are trying to sell their cargo hold full of blood diamonds (or should it be oil diamonds due to the robotic nature of the slaves?) at the highest price possible and only for their own benefit.

At the same time the Tewanta System in the Elite: Dangerous galaxy is in an emergency situation. The system is in the state of "Infrastructure Failure" and markets there only buy desperately needed goods. Rumors, that I myself am hauling these goods there to sell highly above usual market prices are FAKE NEWS placed by those evil corporations. The price I am requesting hardly even makes up for my costs (purchasing the goods, fuel costs, space ship depreciation, insurance costs, repairs etc.)

Grade 8 Weapon size: Ramming with a large ship

On November 11th this year I wrote about Speedbowling and how I thought it should be:

Speedbowling was born. First I heard of that title I was hoping to see 10 other ships in a triangle and one pilot crashing into that group as hard as possible, but that's not what it is.

Well it seems the great Captain Flint picked up on that. He is producing a series explaining the different weapons in Elite and how to engineer them for different effect. It seems he is finally getting to my favorite weapon: The ship itself. Obviously ramming the opponent as hard as possible is also delivering quite a bit of damage (to both participants of the fight).

But for science you need to try in a controlled environment. There are many big communities in Elite, but if you are looking for as many volunteers as possible to play sitting duck in a small spaceship being run over by a fully armored imperial warship the Buur Pit is the place to go. While many communities might be reluctant to the idea of being mass-killed repeatedly for science the most discussed question among the Buurboons was "what color should the my sacrificed ship have for you to get the best video footage?"

The standard paintjob on a sidewinder fits the job as a bowling pin nicely, I think

So this weekend we all lined up our ships to get repeatedly rammed - sure I had to capture some footage of that. So here is a bit of video:

It was great fun - and many thanks to all participants, that showed no sign of being tired, no matter how often they had to rebuy their ships and re-align. Looking forward to the report on this very special weapon at Flintlock Engineering - if this is your kind of thing, make sure to subscribe to his channel. Even if you do not care about the content, he has a great radio voice.

Operation Ida: Helping Space Stations In Need

Elite:Dangerous is a game without a preset goal - but communities have evolved, setting their own goals. Some time ago many space stations have been attacked and massively damaged. The attack has been blamed on the alien race we share our galaxy with, the Thargoids, even though no one has seen it happen. But we are not here to investigate the crime.

These damaged stations need a lot of materials to be fixed - millions of tons. This is why players started the "Operation Ida". Concentrating on one station after the other, members of this community haul shiploads of Beryllium, Polymers, Semiconductors or whatever else is needed to the stations in repair to get them fixed. The margins from this trade are small in credits, but big in feelgood as you can actually see what you are hauling all the stuff for.

Many stations have already been fully repaired - many others still are in need.

With the upcoming christmas holiday hauliday Operation Ida also has some events going on: Starting on December 14th at 15:00UTC a damaged station will be announced, that gets a high speed repair. The goal is to completely repair this station within 24hrs. This requires a lot of help, so whoever can spare some time should join in.

Also you can join Operation Idas discord and help in day to day station repairs. Any help is appreciated. Find all the details on Operation Idas website: https://www.operationida.com/ - it is easy to participate and every ton of cargo shipped to the stations in distress helps.

The "Levitating Landfill" just delivered 664tons of Beryllium to Truman Hub to support the ongoing repair

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.

Pit Trip part 5: White dwarfs, Neutron Stars and Black Holes

After a short maintenance stop at my home base I continued the Grand Adventure the PitTrip is. First destination for this week was a star system named Charick drift. The central star of this system is a White Dwarf, a star at the end of its life that had not enough mass to turn into a Neutron Star or a Black Hole.

In orbit around this White Dwarf a generation ship can be found. This ship named "Atlas" can be scanned to learn some details about the people that once lived on it. The ship has been abandoned some time ago already and is now just an empty hull floating in space.

Generation Ship "Atlas" - hardly visible against the bright white dwarf, I have to admit.

On the way to the next waypoint I found a very trustworthy station to land on

The next stop was close to the Fine Ring Nebula. This is just a strange shape planetary nebula - as there was not much else to do with it, I took this as an educational stop and read up about what a planetary nebula actually is on Wikipedia.

What a fine ring?

And on I went to the Beta Hydrae system to find a black hole and a neutron star orbiting each other. It is a lesser known fact that photography works best, when there is light coming from whatever you try to catch in your picture. Something black holes are massively bad at, is letting light get out. Thats why pictures of black holes tend to suck.

You see a neutron star - you don't see a black hole. Fascinating, eh?

Our final destination for the week then was the GD 140 system. I first visited the station "Newton Hub" there to fuel up and maybe get a drink. Approaching the station I noticed it looked different then I am used to for this type of station: Yellow areas sprinkled across the surface were new to me.

Turns out: The yellow stuff is not just a strange design project

The station has been attacked by the Thargoids some time ago ... and now there is contruction going on everywhere. The station also has all kinds of technical problems.

I was wondering why automated landing did not work for the first time... The displays at the airlock of the station might have been a hint to the attentive reader.

A vessel transporting a thirsty Commander is by definition an "emergency vehicle", is it not?

As most services, including the bar, were not available at this station I left quickly again. To meet the rest of the Buurboons at planet A1A. That little planet looks like it has a hard time - scars all over the surface. Maybe orbiting a bigger planet with just about enough distance to put a sheet of paper in between, is not an easy life.

When the Galaxy is called for dinner after finishing two thirds of a planetary snowman.

So there is a planet with deep canyons, there is about a dozen spaceship pilots in small maneuverable ships, what could be done? We played a round of "Chasing Sanderling". Some of the braver commanders got out into their planetary vehicles on a high plateau only to become the ball in a game of unclear rules that somehow evolved around the idea of using fast spaceships ramming the buggy to push it off the plateau.

Also I made a very scientific discovery: When the "Indesctructible 4" is being hit head on by Lord Tyvins heavily shielded Sidewinder this has about the same effect like being hit by a high speed bullet. So all say hello to the "Indestructible 5".

As if there was not enough room for parking

I am eagerly awaiting the video footage some fellow commanders have taken at the high speed hoonery - this should look just fantastic.

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

All persons have thee right to be attracted to other objects in accordance with thee Laws ov Gravity

The title is a quote from the "Declaration ov thee Rights ov Human Beings" - and it seems to nicely fit this article.

Some background first: In Elite:Dangerous ships travelling in normal space have a top speed - which, according to physics as we know it, makes no sense.

Max speed relative to what one would have to ask? And, as long as my thrusters thrust, the ship should continue to accelarate. Thats how space travel works in the real world. From the viewpoint of game mechanics a maximum speed makes sense - relative to some defined reference: Without that any kind of space combat simulation would be extremely unsatisfying I guess. Ships just passing each other at extremely high speeds once and then most likely unable to catch up to each other ever again would not be the most rewarding gameplay.

So, we have a max-speed on our ship. That speed depends on the weight of the ship and the installed thrusters as far as I know. The maximum speed people seem to get out of an highly optimized ship is somewhere around 950m/s. Sure enough people start to challenge that limitation - and CMDR PrimetimeCasual found a way around it. With the help of a planet with high gravity and the right flight technique higher speeds can be reached.

And if something is capable of going really fast (as in hypersonic) it is only a small step to a racing event worked around that ability: Speedbowling was born. First I heard of that title I was hoping to see 10 other ships in a triangle and one pilot crashing into that group as hard as possible, but that's not what it is. Let me try to sum up the rules for the upcoming Speedbowl 3 event:

• Starting point is place of your choice that has to be 200km above the surface of the planet "61 Virgilis 2"
• Goal is to pass the groundstation "Margulis Depot" on that planet within 2000m distance
• It is not allowed to go above starting altitude while the race is on
• you must survive the flight not only to the finish line, but also until you have slowed down your ship to speed zero again. 
• Whoever is the fastest when passing the groundstation wins

The rules are in the announcement of the event, which can be found here.
A normal flight path for most participants looks somewhat like this (graphic by CMDR Alec Turner):

From other commanders, sending reports from their training runs, speeds up to something like 4100m/s seem to be doable in this setting. I have never tried this sport - so my goal should be to get as close to that as possible.

So first I checked out if I could rely on real world physics for optimizing my journey. Mgmt Summary: No.

Information about the planet from edsm.net

Free fall at 4.16g from 200km without any friction from an athmosphere - its easy to calculate the speed in which suddenly a lot of friction occurs due do hitting the ground.

So just free falling from that height we should reach 4040.3m/s ... remarkably close to what people reach in Speedbowling. Coincidence?

Turns out: The free fall model is also way off in regards to laws of physics applicable outside the game: I took my ship to 200km above the ground and turned all engines off. Ship accelerated quickly downwards, as one would expect on a >4g world... and at 500m/s just stopped accelerating. I just kept falling with constant speed. As there is no atmosphere on the planet, nothing should be stopping a continous acceleration, though.

When actually trying the "speedbowl technique" I also found out, that acceleration followed unusual patterns - it instantly goes from strongly accelerating to not at all when minimally changing the angle of the ship relative to the ground. Changing back also gives instant strong acceleration.

Also the direction of thrust and the direction of acceleration do not seem to fit - it should be the sum of the vectors of the thrust and the gravity, one would expect, but it does not seem to be that at all. I have no good means of measurement sadly, to prove this "feeling".

In summary it seems: Applying physics as we know it to the problem will not help much. This is sad, as I always liked the laws of physics somewhat. The simulation uses a different set of laws for calculating stuff. And these are not well researched yet.

So Speedbowling has to be done by feeling, not by thinking. I was hoping for a bit of advantage by understanding the mechanics behind the effect - to no success. I will have to train just like anybody else. Damn.

(after a few training flights I have actually managed to (a) survive (b) reach about 3200m/s and (c) miss the target by about 20km)

PitTrip Part 4: San Tu, Zeta Cassiopaiae and the California Nebular

Moving on on my trip, I would like to explain a bit about the actual means of travel. I will start with long distance travel. I would like to explain the problem in that with a quote from Douglas Adams:

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

Travelling to other stars is a bit problematic because of this detail in the real world. Luckily Elite: Dangerous engineers have solved this problem with the "Frame Shift Drive" that we can install in our spaceship. "Frame shift drive", by the way, is the written form - Everyone is pretty sure it is pronounced "Friendship drive". So, just make sure that there are no big objects nearby, charge the engine and jump on to a nearby star system. How much distance you can cover by one jump depends on the type of engine your ship has and its weight.

If you want to get somewhere fast, strip everyhting but the engine down to the absolute minimum and off you go. Problem is that you now basically fly a burning paperplane soaked in rocket fuel. If you want to get to your target alive some compromises regarding weight should be made.

The ships computer will calculate a save jump to the target system for you and drop you out of hyperspace at a safe distance from the main star. Some stars are binary systems and this edge case has not been taken much into account by the people developing the navigation software. So sometimes, while dropping out of hyperspace, you are still half in extradimensional travel but already see the real world - and fly at extreme speed directly through the secondary star in a binary system. It is the moment I actually am happy not to play in VR. I almost ruin my pants everytime this happens on a normal monitor already.

Also the definition of "safe spot to drop out" is a bit stretched in these systems.

This is fine!

This totally secure mode of travel brought me to the San Tu system first. This system has a huge installation orbiting planet 4C. Like last weeks visit at the Squirrels Nest Bar this installation wanted to be inspected in every detail and at high speeds. It has tunnels everywhere, even curved ones. So this is a great training site for the reckless pilot.

A city levitating in space. After my visit might have some scratches, though.

But I had to continue my travels. After a few jumps I was out of the human inhabitated bubble in space again - exploring dots of light in the vast darkness. Parking on strangely coloured planet surfaces - with pumpkins. Again.

my space camper for this trip

This picture of the "Indesctuctible 4" actually reminds me, that I have to anwer a question I have received after last weeks article. What happened to numbers one and two?

• The "Indesctructible" (it did not have a number then) got a little too close to a huge military Mega-Ship - and I have accidentaly touched the wrong button on my controller. This caused a short laser beam to be directed at the local military forces - suddenly my radar screen was full of fighters with deployed weapons heading in my direction. My ship lasted for around two more seconds.
• The "Indestructible 2" was on an exploration trip. I had just read, that filling your fuel tank from a white dwarf or a neutron star will supercharge your drive and give you extra range for one jump. So I flew very close to a white dwarf (just like I do for refueling at other stars coronae). Turns out that this supercharging has some details about it that I should have read up on beforehand. 

But back to the Trip: The meeting point for this week was in the system "California Sector BA-A e6". The sector is named after the California Nebular in this area.

The "California Nebular" got its name because its shape resembles the outlines of the state of California. Well. Ehmm. Yeah, right.

The sunday meetup this time was at the "Mic Turner Base" where we founded a new religion. Because all gods were already taken we have decided to dedicate our prayers to the local tourist beacon in that system.

All hail the mighty strange looking thingie

 After that the quality of my landing gear was checked by stacking as many other spaceships as possible onto my landed vessel. The landing gear held, so everyone took off with a boost. Note the lightup of shields during this maneuver - also multiple fines for "Reckless Flying close to a starport" needed to be paid afterwards.

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

PitTrip Part 3: To the Thargoids

This weeks excursion led us into Thargoid territory. The Thargoids are the only other lifeform capable of space flight so far discovered in the Elite: Dangerous Galaxy. I would not go so far as to call them intelligent lifeforms - but for that part I am not sure with humans either.

The well prepared route to them has sent us through some interesting systems again. First leg of the journey directed us to the Taygeta system which hosts a very special space station. The station named "Titans Daughter" is very close to the ring of a ringed planet.

A dangerous place to live

I do not hold a university degree in astro-architecture but I am relatively sure that is not a good place for a space station right there. Also insurance rates might be fairly high in this neighbourhood.

For those specializing in galactic history the route also passed the Merope system - where humans for the first time discovered thargoid ground installations. The system has some tourist beacons that, when scanned, explain some of the history of interaction between thargoids and humans. Also they try to explain the permit locked systems mentioned in last weeks article (older readers might remember).

A kind of inofficial meetup happened at the "Squirrels Nest Bar", a space installation in the Merope system that has an alarming combination of advertisements for (a) Lavian brandy (don't drink and fly) and (b) participation in spaceship racing events. It even has a racetrack on around the Bar. What could possibly go wrong? So we decided on a good meeting point for us law-abiding citizens.

A lot of ships from the local authorities were scanning us for unknown reasons.

After that I took the "Indesctructible 3" on to the track. The australian members of our community actually taught us the correct word for what we were doing there: Hooning. Very educational, this trip.

Public service announcement: Boosting your ship into a tunnel while someone else does the same thing from the other end of said tunnel can lead to explosions.

After minor issues with integral parts of my spaceship I boarded the "Indesctructible 4" and continued the trip to the next destination. The very compassionate other members of the trip were so nice to warn other commanders going into the tunnel afterwards - mostly with sentences like "Be careful, there are parts of CMDR Universallaie scattered all over the place".

The final destination for today includes a special event: We will do a thargoid activation - I have no idea what this is and I avoided researching it beforehand to not spoil the surprise for myself. We got some very detailled instructions beforehand. An important part, printed in bold letters, was: "do not shoot any of the Thargoid surface drones (the floating, fishy looking things) and try not to ram them with your SRV". If you have read last weeks article about our SRV driving madness as well as the general chaos this group tends to create, I imagine this to be a very difficult part. So I'll be making a proper tea now (for the lack of Lavian Brandy I will have to use rum) and am looking forward to the exciting event that is ahead of me... the writing will continue once it is done.

Fly responsibly - not like we do.

Okay, back I am: We went to a Thargoid installation - it looked very spooky from the outside, much like a strange kind of daisy in the middle of a rolled up dinosaur skeleton.

Thargoid site

There we collected some special devices that activated the central machine - making a spectacular lightshow after being braught online.

Nice lightshow, dear aliens. I guess showbiz is a thing with every species.

Just to make the experience complete we also fed the machine with leftovers of another extinct alien race. The machine was not too happy about this - the room got really hot and other thingies of the local alien race somehow did not like us anymore. So instead of taking pictures we got out as fast as we could while shooting little things that approached us in an inappropriate manner.

Many thanks to our tourguide CMDR Jon "Hicks" Tomasson, who did the research and collected necessary stuff in advance to give us all the rare opportunity to see a alien machine being powered up. Thanks also go to the guides of the three other groups for their work.

This is CMDR Universallaie, currently docked in the "Stargazer" Asteroid base signing off.