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.

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.