Continuing those voyages

I've been enjoying my chilled out week at home and away from work so far.

There has been a lot of Elite played so far. Perhaps a little too much ! It has been an excellent accompaniment to some outstanding cricket on the telly too. The Test series between England and South Africa has turned out very one sided in the result but it's actually been far more even than that in the performances on the field.

A good series all round, with England coming out winners by taking more advantage of the skills they have and the conditions they played in. The South Africans summed it up pretty well by saying that the games were even, except for when an England player stepped up and took the game away from them. Like Moeen Ali through the series with runs and wickets. He's not the best player we've had for England ? But he's very lucky and sometimes one of our best talents is actually luck.

I think what I really mean to say there is that some players can rise above the skill and talent level they have and perform far beyond that. (I was probably the opposite, especially with the bat !) He's outbowled Liam Dawson and Adil Rashid consistently and they're both supposed to be main spinners.

Cricket is like that. Skill counts for a lot but if you have a certain amount of luck, then that helps a lot. And you can make your own luck in the game too.

Enough about cricket ! I will admit that I didn't notice yesterday's play going by too much due to having it as the backdrop to some mining ... One thing I'm trying to do with this character is to unlock everything. With the previous character, I played a more optimal style, which led to flying just three ships a lot : Asp Explorer for long range stuff, Python for trading and some combat and the Imperial Cutter for trading. That got boring fast. This time around, I'm looking to own and usefully fly every ship and unlock all of the engineers (people who improve your ships).

That's O'Brien Vision, an outpost that sits above the planet in the Sirius system where one of those engineers lives. This one took a bit of work ... But work that sees the character advance. I think what really broke me in the last play through were the weeks where I'd have the character sat in the station rolling through missions where you'd donate money in return for rank. (I was watching HeyChrissa streams at the same time).

The star off to the right that lights up the scene (and incidentally lowers the contrast level for the rest !) is Lucifer, a white dwarf star which is the companion to Sirius. (Actually modeled from the real stars, although the name Lucifer is an invention of the game). It makes you pay attention on the trip out there to hear "Warning - elevated radiation detected". The white dwarf and neutron stars throw off particle streamers that both damage the ship and hyper its hyperdrive. You can take advantage of that to go places quickly and I may try the Neutron Star Highway at some point to speed up a trip to the galactic core.

But not yet. This weekend's activities have been :

Starting off a scouting run in the Dorothy Drake :

That run incidentally went towards making one of those engineers like me. I'll do another, longer run later in the week to make another engineer like me.

Those trips do take a toll though. Could do with someone cleaning the windows.

The latest ship is the Art Burke, one of those space trucks. However, this time I figured the Keelback, which is a ship which is an unholy combination of space truck and fighter, could be put to good use as a mining ship. It got a few kills as well from pirates wanting to interrupt the mining. Mining is definitely not something I'd want to do too much of in Elite, although when I found a good place (Google shows you places that will tell you where !), I got what I wanted fairly painlessly and profitably. But never again - haha.

That's the Art Burke with a faithful collector limpet drone going off to fetch more bits of asteroid to turn into stuff to sell.

Definitely enjoying the time back in game again, living in that imaginary capacity as an independent starship captain, free to set his own course amongst the stars, seeing as many of them as possible. And the places to go look pretty too :

One thing I didn't do much of in the previous character was the planetary landing aspect of the game. By the time that came along, I was using docking computers pretty much all the time. I haven't quite got to that point yet ... (It takes up space which is far better spent taking cargo)

I've had a few more ideas for ships too. I have no idea what I'll use a Diamondback Scout for (it's a pretty rubbish ship) but I think instead of doing "It's a long way there", swapping to "It's a long way back", I'll build a Diamondback Explorer ship and call it "Stolen from Jms". That's an in joke in honour of the people in the gaming communities. That means his Viper will need a new name, that'll be the "Salty Cracker".

I suspect I'll be interested in the new Community Goals that will appear on Thursday, which will see a queue of 6 combat ships take turns ... And a 7th which will be the bigger freighter. But I have other scoot around the galaxy schemes to go through as well :

Rares and smuggling - to unlock another engineer;
More scouting along the Road to Riches - for a bunch more engineers (and the credits);
A big long rares route - which I developed before the reset and never actually did ...

And it helps distract away from the real life. (Except for the cricket, I want to pay attention to that).

My outsides have been fairly neutral so far this week, although that's mostly down to how much damage there is. It's taking time to repair but it is repairing given the chance.

There's what's happening in the world as well at the moment. Sometimes you do think to yourself : "Stop the world I wanna get off". And for that, there is the escape into the fantasy game which helps you ignore that real world for a little while.

Definitely some crazy stuff happening at the moment, which I won't bore you with here cos you're probably sick of it from the news already. I'd like to make the trip to Portsmouth over the next week or so to welcome our new aircraft carrier home though.

More chill out time before then though.

Commander Sleepy - signing off for now !