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Hello everyone,

Things still seem to be continuing to rocket by at the moment. Time seems to be moving fast ! But before I get on to the inevitable pretty screenshot spam ...

Too late !

That one was illuminated by the light of a Neutron Star, shortly before :

Diving into the streamers to get a hyperdrive jump boost.

Back to the real world ? I should have a couple of days off this week ! Yey ! This is mostly due to getting close to busting the flexi time working hours credit limit though, with more of those long hours to come later. I don't mind that, because those super long days are due to getting out of the office and seeing Stuff. Stuff that I can't talk about here because of you know, it's work :-D And I try to keep the work stuff out of this blog.

Oh - click for bigger on the pictures as per usual. Apparently they aren't in the full 1440p source resolution but I hope they still look amazing.

Plan for the two days off involves chilling out (of course) and ... hopefully a trip into Wales again. I want to look at a castle, plus there's Cardiff and the book caves and the sweet shop and the occasional music store and ... (hushed voice) .... Lego shop. Yep.

Other game, big ship. I think it's from either X Wing, or it's an Imperial Assault Gunboat from Tie Fighter. Big ship now in Lego. I'm not fussed about the other new Lego stuff that's coming, it's either Meh or seen it before. But I do want that big one, if I can find a place to put it.

 Might melt in the sun though.

I'm almost getting to the end of the music library with what I've managed to listen to as well. Not long left, only about 350 tracks. That's taken over a year ! It's good to listen to it all again. I have a few things in mind actually for content to come :

Something about soundtracks. Some films are memorable for their story, some films are more memorable for the soundtrack. The best films match an incredible story and great soundtrack. I want to talk about those someday soon. This thought brought to you by listening to soundtracks from :

John Williams - incredible soundtracks for Star Wars, Raiders, Jurassic Park, ET, Jaws ... and so many more. The magic of this one is that, while you can recognise the style of the composer, the soundtracks are different and fit the film.
James Horner - wrote the memorable soundtrack of Wrath of Khan as well as Battle Beyond the Stars.
And a few more (Stu Phillips, Barry Gray, John Barry, Hans Zimmer, Bear McCreary) but that would be spoilers for the talking about movies post !

I'm wanting to do a few more Elite videos as well. The subjects in mind are :
Neutron Star Boosting
Exploration and the new Discovery Scanner system.
Both of these should do for some short and hopefully sweet videos with pretty stuff on screen. And apparently it's stuff people want to see.

Like nebula ! And a paint job apparently getting a bit tatty.

That looked amazing while jumping towards it. This was the Bubble Nebula. Quite little actually.

I think it looked better from the outside to be honest !

I caught this shot after jumping away one spot as well. A local star, with the bubble nebula behind.

This was the next nebula, Altera's Eye. There's actually a black hole in there. I thought there'd be a chance to land and take a nice screenie with black hole distortion but that wasn't to be. Next time ! To be honest, I was feeling a little burned out on the exploration run and wanting to complete the route before the time limit expired. The other routes that I have in mind have more generous times.

The second last stop was in the Gorgon Nebula. This was another one where the region of space appeared first as a small feature on the galactic ribbon, with those brighter stars all spread out there in a distinctive cluster. And then you get closer and the feature steadily resolves. This was the last jump before the destination :

The Gorgon Nebula research facility. Another asteroid base, in the rings of a gas giant. A good stopover before the last stop :

A station so posh looking on the inside, I thought I had to get the paint job sorted out before taking the screenshot.

It's a curious layout actually ... That's the docking bay on the inside of a rotating section. It's a bulbous cylinder pattern on the outside split up into distinct sides on the inside, with the docking landing pads taking up the whole of one of those sides. The centripetal gravity goes towards the floor, or rather it goes directly outwards. So where the sides join, gravity is not straight down.

That must blow the mind if you were to actually try and walk around in there. I suspect space legs would soon acclimatise to the irregular spin gravity though. The hab sections of the stations tend to be more like :

That's an old one, showing the docking bay in the centre and a habitation ring surrounding it. The farther out you go, the faster the linear velocity and the higher the spin gravity. So the hab ring will be at higher gravity than the cargo and docking area. (This is a good thing for healthiness). That's Pratchett's Disc and the screenshot is from my first Elite pilot ... That long ago !

It's good that stuff like this is in the game. It looks great and there's a nod to science and a proper physics way of doing things without cheating too much.

Because I do like my internet spaceships to not cheat too much :-). It's also good that they've added in various tribute locations, like Pratchett's Disc, as well. It's a lovely gesture.