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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
The start of our Grand Adventure was planned for 1800UTC at Wilson Dock starport in the Tewanta system. Everybody was really excited and had no idea what to expect. Elite Dangerous is a game with multiple hundreds of billions of star systems, many of them home to multiple planets - so in normal gameplay it is quite unusual to actually meet another player.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Getting a tan - express edition.
After some driving mayhem I sadly could not see (but I heard the chaos in comm) we went on. To the Witch Head Nebular and further to the spirograph nebular. The destination for our first day out on the trip was a star system called BD-12 1172 (very astronomical name, that). This system has multiple fascinating sights.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Back in the late 80s there was that computer game I played a lot of hours in: Elite. It was a flight simulator for me mainly - but in space. You got to fly spaceships- SPACESHIPS!. Back then I hardly noticed the game actually has a lot more complex stuff in the background going on.
A few years later (30 or so) someone I read stuff from on the Internet for almost the same amount of time mentioned he is playing a game named "Elite: Dangerous". I had the feeling I need to take a look at that.
Elite: Dangerous is a space flight simulator. Many of the iconic elements of the original game are still there: The design of the "radar screen", the base design of the stations etc. But graphics have improved a bit. Actually graphics are really impressive now - as a non-gamer I was not aware of the fact just how much graphics had improved.
So I played that game for a bit - and mostly was just blown away by the beauty of space. It is awesome - just for the view, the game is worth it's money. Just two examples:
But the new version of that game offers something more: Multiplayer! There are communities doing all kinds of activities the game makes possible - trading, political powerplay, piracy, exploring (there are 100s of billions of starsystems in the game, most of them never visited by a player before) - and a lot more.
Through their Youtube channel I had noticed the existence of "The Buur Pit". And I noticed in the Elite Dangerous Starmap (also a community driven project, BTW) that they plan something. So I started researching how to participate in such a thing - ended up joining their discord (a chat tool) and I think these are great people. So I will be joining "The Pit Trip - A Grand Adventure" and go out to space with group of equally crazy people (I will elaborate on the crazy part in future posts). I am very excited about this... it will be pretty much be my first multiplayer experience in Elite.
And I thought, why not re-activate this blog for that? The posts will be in english, as the Buur Pit is an international community. And maybe some of the other participants also want to read my reports on the trip. Additionally I will place articles about general stuff in the game - very basic stuff mostly, as I am a beginner and maybe others also plan to start the game.. or don't want to start, but want to be able to understand what I am writing. So I will always try to explain stuff, that can not be considered "common ground" for anyone not playing this game.
This is Commander Universallaie, currently docked in the Tewanta system, signing off!
