More travels of Commander Sleepy

Hello everyone,

Been back in the pilot's seat again. Out in the stars, finding the lovely looking places.

And of course, landing by them and taking the screenshots (click for bigger as always). Before diving too deeply into those internet spaceships :

Work stuff - I don't talk about work stuff much here because ... work. There were a couple of away trips last week that were instructive plus a couple more away trips this week which we'll hopefully learn more from. And more to come ! Busy.

Outsides - I'm going to talk about these in more detail at some point. After perhaps 8 years of the long term condition, I'm actually almost better now. It's very, very close. It must have been a case where the damage increased so quickly and dramatically that my immune system just couldn't keep up and it took a while to stabilise the condition and get it under control before repairs could happen. Almost there now though.

Feeling old on the inside now though.

Film stuff - Ad Astra is worth a watch. It's a new film starring Brad Pitt as an astronaut who has to appeal to his astronaut dad to resurface from being holed up at the other end of the solar system. It's been described as a mix between 2001 and Apocalypse Now. I need to watch Apocalypse Now again at some point to see if that's a fair comparison but it feels about right. There are stunning visuals here, great action sequences and in between those, what felt like a fair bit of psychological nuance going on. It feels like the mix is a fair comment.

Worth watching. Leave your expectations at the door as usual, ignore the dodgy science (gravity simulation in films is tough) and see what it's got. As mentioned, there are a few bits of dodgy science in there but nothing on the scale of Interstellar's dodginess and I rate this and Interstellar pretty high on Intriguing Film, Worth Watching.

Talking of science, I know more about this one now. The crater to the right has a distinctive pimple in the middle. I've learned that this is a telltale for a particularly heavy impact, the type that makes craters a few kilometers wide.

Did I mention that the rover has a name now ? Searching For Biscuits is the mothership, the Crumb is the rover.

Found a Jellyfish Nebula on the way ...

And a Crab Nebula too, with the ribbon of the Milky Way running down its centre.

And more opportunities to take beauty shots of Biscuit and Crumb.

This is a nebula in the NGC 1491 region.

Before heading off to an encounter with a ghost ship, the Zurara. One thing I look for in games is how things are put together. So here, we have a space ship with a couple of partial spinning habitation rings. There is a command section up at the bow :

And an engineering section aft, with a pair of gargantuan engines coupled to it. One thought about those engines, there'd be massive torsional stress going through the pylons as the engines fire up and go forward with the pylons transmitting that thrust to the central body. The engines want to move, Newton's Laws say that the centre section doesn't want to. The pylons are what connect them up and transfer the force.

There we go. I do like my internet spaceships to make a certain amount of sense and it's great how much of stuff like that has been hidden in the game.

I attempted a landing on the engineering section but didn't get in. No keepsie salvage this time.

On to the next way point and this planetoid was close enough to that sun that the fuel scoop was happily collecting more hydrogen.

I never want to get too close to these, the distortion in the Galactic Ribbon is the lensing effect of a black hole.

I think I'm learning the trick of getting close to these though. That's a Neutron Star at the centre, a star that's gone boom in a nova but isn't quite massive enough to collapse completely into a black hole. They're also known as Pulsars, as the streamers you see there give off EM Radiation (X Ray radio waves) that our telescopes can pick up and we see them on Earth as pulses of signal as the neutron stars rotate. In game, if you fly into the streamer, you get bounced around a bit (dangerous) but you can jump 4x the distance you can normally. Handy for going long distance in less time.

You do miss the sights though, like this moon that is so close to the gas giant's rings that it's almost touching them. I had the happy sight of seeing this one in daylight today after landing there in darkness yesterday.

On to the last location, ominously named "Explorer's End". Ominous.

That's the sight as you drop out of hyperspace. The orange star is a super young Herbig AE/BE star. (More on Wiki). The star is 0.777 times the radius of our sun. Not big. The white one is another matter, it's a Class O giant star, 158 times the radius of our sun. Chunky.

Those are the same two stars, after backing away a bit. But that's not all for this system. There are also a couple of black holes. One was only 2.5 Light Seconds away when dropping out of hyperspace, the other was safely ages away. (2.5 Light Seconds is about twice the orbit distance of the Moon). The issue with this system is that you can drop out between the two stars, instead of to the side like I did there. Or ... you can drop out too close to the Black Hole. That's always a bit bad.

I'm actually finding Elite to be a little grindy at the moment though. It's like my mind wants to be playing other games (it does) and is resenting being on a bit of a timescale for the current exploration run. Not too far to go though before civilisation.

 That's the Jellyfish Nebula again and the faint lights of another asteroid base.

It is a very pretty game though.