#diamondback explorer

So I have been playing paragon on and off, and I am writing an essay about what we get from games and why I don’t get as much from Paragon as I used to; but mostly I have been playing Elite: Dangerous. It is a space simulator from an English developer based in Cambridge that are known for Planet Coaster as well as the original elite games. Frontier seem to be a small but good developer who are constantly adding content. So, although this game is a few years old now on PC, it is still evolving all the time. It is a kind of MMO like Eve Online, but you can also play it alone if you choose to. I always play on open but there don’t seem to be tons of player on ps4. Either way, I think it’s a great game. So here is a little photo-story of my travels around the galaxy.

Elite is as realistic a space-sim as you can get. Everything is difficult to control. Flying, landing, etc. They give you flight assist but it can even be turned off for a greater challenge. My first few months with the game were made up on learning to land properly (which took some weeks and I still fuck up pretty often) and making some easy money bounty hunting until I could get my first decent all-round ship, the Cobra MkIII. Most people get this ship and with it I involved myself in a Community Goal. These are weekly missions to bring trade items to a system or kill NPC pirates etc. and the efforts made by the community add into a global pot which gives big rewards at the end of the week. I managed to haul enough rare goods into a system with my little Cobra MkII, making 10-15 jumps per run, spending hours actually over the course of a week, until I got into the top75% and got about a 30 million or so pay out. I was rich! (Not really though, just relative to what I had been able to earn before). Rich enough to buy a Diamonback Explorer and go exploring!

So I set off into the stars, looking to visit a nearby nebula: the beautiful California Nebula.

Wow. It really is striking, and I took many photos from all around this nebula whilst scanning stars and planets which looked interesting. The most valuable planets are earth-likes and water worlds as well as ammonia worlds and a trained eye can tell at a glance on the system map. But I am pretty new to this, so I took my time; learning what to look for.

With the rest of the Milky Way in the background, the reverse side of the California Nebula is stunning. And I still love my little Diamondback Explorer.

I saw blue-white giants.

Endless rings.

And neutron stars.

But this was just a practice run. This was a short 1000 light year journey. Something you can do in around 10 hours, give or take. I found lots of beautiful systems, and got my exploring legs, saw how my DBX ran, and returned to the human inhabited bubble with some millions of exploration data. I had some decent money but not enough to upgrade to the next ship(s). I would have to take a longer journey. 

So I decided to take some famous explorers sightseeing. They wanted to go to Cat’s Eyes. I did not know what it was, but on the galaxy map it said black hole. Around 7000LY away from me. It’s a long way, but not as long as the journeys some people take. Some explorers go away for months or even over a year OF REAL LIFE TIME. That is how big the galaxy is. It’s a realistic simulation of our galaxy, many of the sights are there and you can visit it all. It’s quite miraculous. I will never be able to go to space in my life time, but in this game I really feel like I do.

So, I fitted my DBX with a passenger cabin. It would mean I could not make such long hyperspace jumps, but I would get a very nice 15million credit reward when I got back and it felt nice to have some company and a destination. 

We set off. And I did not realise how long the journey would be. It was around 10 days of heavy play that I was away. I did not stop to smell the roses as much as I could have. I had no planetary vehicle hanger, my jump range was quite standard though without engineering. So it took me a long time. I don’t know how many hundreds of jumps I made. I have to admit, everyone was right. You cannot keep doing the same thing for so long without some entertainment. I would watch a show while jumping. Stopping, scooping fuels from the star while I checked out the system, and if there was nothing interesting to surface scan, move on to the next.

But I found undiscovered water worlds.

Brown dwarf stars, dying slowly, surrounded by striped rings.

Many colours of stars.

And systems so hot I was glad I was in a Diamondback.

The journey was long and I had discovered many new worlds and systems. But we were about to reach our destination.

Closer to the galactic centre the sky is simply away with stars and nebulae. It becomes as bright as the star nearest to you.

Then I saw it. The black hole. I was scared. I dared not go near. I did not want to be pulled in. It was hard to see, hard to visualise the hole itself. In fact, what you see is just the light being bent around it. So the normal band of stars across the sky was the only way to see where the black hole was.

But, hold on, the visitor’s beacon is very far away, I had not fulfilled my mission objective. So I super cruise over to the visitor’s beacon and realise that there is not only one black hold in this system, but three!

The cat’s eyes stared back at me and I felt very far from home and very alone in my little ship. The explorers travelling with me were happy to have seen this too, so they were ready to go home. But that was another 7k LY back, and I would go a different route. In fact, I found a faster route home but I went though many unexplored systems and found plenty of terraformable and water-worlds. I mean to go back to certain regions as I believe them to be a rich gold-mine of earth-likes.

But I finally arrived home after a weekend of hard work, many hours or travel, and I was rich. Well, not really rich, but even relative to what I had before I left I had a very healthy credit balance. I made some 80 million credits from my passenger mission and the exploration data, and it was time to go shopping.

Asp Explorer. The explorer ship of choice. Enough space to fit an SRV, passenger cabins, whatever you could want, and still get a 40-50LY jump range. Not as far as the DBX can go, but more flexibility. So I’ve been scooting about the near galaxy seeing some sights.

The planetary vehicle is very much fun in low gravity.

Saw some barnacles but no Thargoids as yet.

Did see a destroyed prison ship that had been decimated by Thargoids. There were emergency vehicles around tending to the casualties.

Made a friend at the old INRA base. He was wanted but I did not hold it against him and it was fun.

I bought a vulture for bounty hunting. This thing destroys.

And a dolphin for passenger missions. This is my space bus.

Geysers.

A magestic class interdictor. Not a player controlled ship, the hugest ships in the game.

Would you look at that?