Finding the Shiny Planets

Hello everyone,

People have been saying very nice things about my internet spaceship screenshots lately so I had this idea that I'd say something about how I end up at the places where they happen ... First up though, every journey has a start and this was how I logged in today :

I'm going to keep the pictures small today cos there are going to be quite a few ... As always, click for bigger. It was nice to see the planet in the background there. The first thing to do is to have a destination in mind ... and I've been using the Kamd site to give me ideas for places to go :

All those extra tabs again :-D Here's a link to Kamd. Pop in your start, drop in your intended destination (Ross 1047 has a planetary base with a buggy racing circuit apparently) and give it your ship's jump range and how far you're prepared to go off the straight course home. 20 jumps is a bit silly but I am taking a scenic route back. The button that says "EDSM Info" will tell you things about interesting places along the way. For this trip, I bypassed the Necropolis Chasm because it didn't look interesting and set a route for the Smokehole.

As you go along the route, you'll jump in at the stars along the way. A quick "honk" of the system discovery scanner and you get an idea of what's there :

Have a peek in the top right. 2 objects is barely anything, so this system saw me looping around the sun for my next hop and not bothering to check out the system any further.

The top right display says that the next system has a G class star, which means it's worth checking out. The game leans a lot on real space astronomy, with models for all of the stellar object types in our galaxy. Most of those will be Main Sequence Stars :

(Image attribution link - this came from the Wiki page)
The main sequence goes from O through to M class stars depending on their luminosity. The O end are the younger and more intense stars (My astronomy might be a bit dodgy here), the M end are stars that are nearing their old age. Saying that though, O will burn fast and bright, M burns slow and dimmer and usually outlast the more keen stars. The vertical scale there is Magnitude, big is higher up. (Best to look at the wiki page !)

What it means for planets is that stars around the middle have a greater chance of having the interesting potentially life bearing planets. Our own star is a class G2V star, which means it's in the middle of the Main Sequence and average size for its luminosity. Our planet happens to be at just about the right distance from the Sun to make conditions on the surface compatible with our kind of life.

The game knows this science too and includes it in the Stellar Forge engine it uses to turn newly discovered star systems into something that makes sense in our universe. I'll pay special attention to F, G and K type stars. Back to our G type star that we dropped in at ! What's there ?

24 objects means that it's worth checking out a bit more. To do this, you use the Full Spectrum Scanner. Think of this as a series of telescopes and sensors that take in the light coming from the objects in the system and from that, the systems can work out whether it's rocky, got metal, made of ice or something more interesting like a gas giant or the much more valuable water and earth like worlds. This owes its inspiration from a real technique called spectroscopy that astronomers use to give a crude (it's the best our instruments can do!) approximation of what planets around other stars are like.

That's what the Full Spectrum Scanner gives you - the thing to look at is the scale near the bottom. It gives you a much better idea of what's there. I have it tuned to Metal Rich bodies there, which are valuable planets to find. If there aren't any Metal Rich, High Metal, Water Worlds, Earth Likes or Ammonia Worlds present, I'll quickly move on. As it happened, this was a reasonable system to find.

One thing I'll look for are moons around planets that I can land on (the planets with the blue half circle around them). It's nice to have something in the sky in shot as well as interesting surface features. As it happened though, this was a series of junk planets (Icy moons aren't worth much) and they were too far out to check out. (The Ls is Light Seconds or distance)

On to the next system, this one only had Icy worlds. I immediately jump on if I find these.

On the other hand, jumping in to see spectral traces around there means stopping is a great idea because water worlds are pretty and shiny (and give good exploration pay out !) ...

... Especially as I was the first one there, which means I get my Commander's name on it ! So far, Elite pilots have found a little over 53 million systems, or 0.0133% of the galaxy.

This would have been a great place to stop and take pictures too, as it's close to where you come in and orbits the water world.

That's what you see if someone else found a place first.

Sometimes "LOTS of objects on scanner" can turn out to be :

Junk. Oh dear. Just icy planets again ... although icy planets can still have nice things to look at if you take the time to scan them all.

Moving swiftly on to another system ... Something that will pop up during scans is that "Refining scan..." in the top right, this means there are interesting surface features to have a look at. The various geysers and volcano things are surface geological features that will get picked up here. Something else of interest there is "Rotational Period : (Tidally Locked)". This means that the same side of the body faces its parent at all times, just like our Moon has a dark side that we can't see directly from Earth.

This is me lining up to have a closer look at my intended destination. Notice how I have the moon targeted and I'm heading straight for it (not for long!). I have the parent body vertically upwards from it. The plan is to circle the moon until the parent body is visible from the surface, it's easier to plan ahead and line up so you don't have to think about finding the parent body again.

So I've done a part orbit around the moon and I've probably got a bit lucky there with how close to the horizon the parent planet is. I'm on final landing approach here, heading for one of those interesting geological surface features. Slightly unfortunate that it's dark, so I turned the night vision feature on. it helps to pick out a good spot to land.

And here we are !

The side of a ship is better to look at than its back end or front end (depends on the ship), so I'll rotate around for a good angle before setting down. Lighting is one to think about too. The ships and SRV buggy both have headlights ... and I'll use those headlights to illuminate ship and SRV.

I'll also hunt for craters, canyons, mountains ... anything that looks interesting as I'm coming in for a landing.

The science bit helps in narrowing down the candidates a bit ... cos the Stellar Forge thing that procedurally generates what you find has the science bit as part of its rules. But sometimes it's just luckily finding something Pretty.

Gas Giants are great places to search around, because they'll often have multiple moons that you can get in to shot. A gas giant with rings is even better ... although those same planetary science rules mean that the moons are all in the same plane as the rings (zero inclination). You don't see a ring, you see a line unless you're really lucky and find a moon on an inclined orbit. The Full Spectrum Scanner will give you a preview of how a planet will look and whether or not it has anything in an inclined orbit around it.

I think that's it for me for this post. If you're an Elite Dangerous pilot reading this, good luck finding the Shiny Pretty Places to take great pictures of ! I hope this post helps you out there.

In the meantime, I'm checking out those hot things there overnight with marshmallows and popcorn :-D.

Stay safe, fly safe, be well ! And keep your eyes open for the Shiny Pretty Things.