Ahh break time. May include spaceships

Hurrah ! Week and a bit off starts here.

It does feel like I'm burning through the energy and the reserves especially quickly at the moment. Might mean that I'm more into what we're doing at work than I was in my previous post. Maybe. It is really good to get out there and see the kit that we have and do things like relate what I'm seeing on the screens to what's happening Out There.

Cue random screenshot for thumbnail and a Pink Planet. That's the Searching For Tea, after returning from a fairly short jaunt around the Elite galaxy.

There are plans for the next week, Comic Con at the weekend should be awesome and then there's the Lords day on Thursday. Looking forward to it, although I do want to regenerate a bit of energy before then.

Internet spaceships ? I have a loss of one to report ! Later. I left the story last week at one of the waystation planets and after that, it was a run through some more galactic beauty spots.

Another overnight halt saw me stop at the Conflux Abandoned Settlements above. Did they leave any tea behind ? I must return and investigate with a ship that has an exploration rover. (The Searching For Tea was a bit basic in that regard)

There were some really pretty sights along the way too, like this White Dwarf star with the faint rings and a nebula in the background. Elite is a very pretty game, especially when you see the X Ray streamers animate.

And another view, where you jump in next to two O class blue stars. O class stars are fairly young on the main sequence of stars, definitely younger than our G type. That's affected by the size of star though, if I remember right, big stars burn fast, burn bright and go through the sequence to nova or black hole quickly.

That's the effect from a neutron star with fairly slow rotation. When a star gets so old that it burns through its hydrogen, it will go through a giant phase and then explode with the remnants collapsing in on themselves. If the star is big enough (Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit and I am googling there), it will collapse into a black hole. Smaller stars collapse in on themselves up to the point where the protons, electrons and neutrons that make up elements are all squished together into neutrons and you get a gloopy solid mass of neutrons that's pretty much as bad as a black hole for how destructive it will be to things that get too close.

Except a neutron Pulsar tends to continually spray off those X Ray streamers which are melty microwave death for anything inside a few light years, if anything is unlucky enough to be in the beam. Black holes can make these X-ray beams too if they're eating something.

Neutron Stars make for very pretty images though.

And then there's those things ....

Black holes are scary. I think it's the very idea of them that sends my mind scurrying off to a dark corner. Where is this one ? If you look at the little neutron star over the Milky Way ribbon, the black hole is just to the left of it. You'll see its effect from how it has smudged up that galactic ribbon. You don't see the black hole, you see the effect it has on the light coming from behind it.

That's an older picture from last year of Sagittarius A*, the super massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. What's eerie in game is how it portrays the light of the stars behind the black hole dancing around as you move around the singularity.

And then there's this place, a White Dwarf, a normal sun and the gas giant making a super pretty sight as you jump in.

There was mild panic jumping in here between the two suns and ....

Brown Alert as the hyperspace jump here literally took the ship through the red dwarf behind the orange star.

Journey's end came at the Pink Planet before going to an engineer base (bad lighting, no suitable screenshot). And a couple of evenings away from the game before trying some combat tonight. That's the Mostly Toothless which was very good at exploding.

First ship loss ! May the Tortoise Beats Hare :

last a bit longer. That'll be tomorrow's fun after its engine arrives. You can soup up parts in the game, which is exactly what I'm doing ... to one of each part and then sharing it around the ships :-D.

But yeah ! Enjoying the game, looking forward to a week off and definitely managing the RSI and exhaustion issues. Probably need to switch my diet up to something healthier. Still repairing from when I last did that !