Thursday, May 28, 2020

Hot Icey Starships

It's gone warm again here !

And by warm, we Brits usually mean that we're having to not wear very much (behind closed doors) in order to survive being way too hot. (It's only peaking at about 25 degrees C but our houses are designed to keep in heat for winter).

It's actually probably time to stop the computer doing sums ... I'd turned off the Rosetta work already because they've kept their daftly short deadlines and there are hardly any Covid related work units coming through now. If the houses are designed to trap heat, it's not a great idea to add heat in ...

Leafing through some of the older pictures posted here has prompted me for the latest project ... the Currently Unnamed Dwagon Rock Band. I dunno, this was another daft idea that's taken root and it has to happen now.
The first character to be drawn is partly inspired by that and the idea as a whole gets some inspiration from :
We'll see how it goes.
That's a free hand drawn egg circle for the centre drum there. It definitely seems easier to draw the lines and circles by hand than it is by non-cheaty ways on the graphics tablet. I'll go back to the graphics tablet at some point, probably to finish the job with the Band. That fella isn't quite finished either, forgot to colour the nose.
That's another of the old pictures ... Band's gonna have a couple of guitarists in there.

Gaming has seen me go back to an old one ...
Those are the crude (but highly functional) graphics of Creeper World 3, Arc Eternal. It's the tower defence game I mentioned on Tuesday and for this mission, you have two bases split on either side of the map and enemies in the middle. Creeper spews out of the dot thingys (top and bottom middle, plus there's a couple left and right middle) and the deeper blue it is, the more layers there are of it. Your towers can shoot it, you can have bombers bomb it and the turquoise around the top is your own anti-creeper.

Tower defense games tend to be either attritional crawls across the map where you gradually gain ground in the face of the unstoppable enemy or a race where you're trying to keep your towers ahead of ever increasingly strong enemies. It's a great concept when it works well. I've been tempted to go back into Defense Grid, which did work extremely well ... but not Defense Grid 2 which changed some of the mechanics and I don't think it was as good.
I've been doing the internet spaceships thing again ... This is a balance again because overdoing it can be really bad for my wrists. I'm actually going to have to change how I fly I think, because I'm yawing a lot (turn left/right instead of banking or climbing) and I think the twisting of my flightstick is aggravating the wrist.

A new ship has appeared in the fleet ...
She's Grabnarr, named after the cheeky, chuckly, lovely Tashnarr who is streaming doing jigsaws at the moment ... (twitch link)
Grabnarr is fitted for mining work, in particular the high value Low Temperature Diamonds which are commonplace at the location above ... the rings of Borann A planet 2.
She's a Krait Mk II, very similar to the Searching For Potatoes which saw me do my last major bit of exploration. The engines are different but you still have a great view from the pilot's seat.
It can be a tight fit in there ...
Peaceful though (when the pirates are distracted away !)
Hard at work - this was just after mining out the asteroid so the purple lasers aren't on. The occasional bright spots are collector limpets going off to fetch the bits mined off the asteroid.
Sale time ! Best deal available at the time. The plan is to operate Grabnarr until I mine the 500 tonnes required to open up one of the engineers and then Grabnarr will be retired. That's probably 2 sessions of Low Temperature Diamonds and then it's the slightly lower value Painite (350k/tonne) because the engineer wants 10 tonnes of that.

Almost the end of the tale ...
Going to the Dark Side as I call it led to another milestone ... Trading Elite ! I didn't have any elite ratings in my previous 2 characters ...
Double Elite ! Combat Elite will take a fair bit longer. Might do it this year ? Expert is the middle of the 9 ranks, with Master, Dangerous, Deadly and Elite to go. A lot of that will be done in the Admiral Luperza :
Got more exploring to do first though.

Oh ! Excession was good, currently enjoying Thrawn by Timothy Zahn.

Seeya ! Stay safe, be well.

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