Saturday Thoughts

Hello everyone,

It's still getting scary out there isn't it ... Here's a Happy Place :

Lego Shop - Cardiff. I was over there yesterday afternoon for various reasons.

Didn't actually pick up any Lego though ...

Let's see - what's been occurring since Wednesday ?

The big reason for heading over to Cardiff yesterday was to pick up more drugs. Yeah, I could have picked them up more locally but ... local Mall's got kinda boring now hasn't it ? Cardiff has more interesting places and better shops.

It's been curious watching the news over the last few days. I have to say our government needs their collective heads examined after the reckless Thursday announcement that they were going to be happy that more people acquire this virus that's going around. It's accelerating too. And it's been curious that so many event organisers have announced postponements pretty much immediately after the government announcement. It's almost like they were waiting for official word before deciding what to do. (Liabilities will have had something to do with that).

That's about as far as I want to go in to politics though. It was distressing to see one person's story appear on a discord yesterday where his girlfriend was in the hospital and slipped in to a coma. Hopefully they pull out of it.

For me - I'm still fine ... although I'm nervous about it. We have an away meeting coming up on Wednesday next week and I don't think that's a particularly good idea as something to travel to. Maybe that's me being overcautious. Our place is a bit of a melting pot of plague as well because even though we have valid work from home facilities, people probably don't switch to them quickly enough. We haven't had an official announcement yet. Or rather we have ... but it's been another head in the sand no decision keep calm and stay as you were announcement.

I think we may have to call off the Mother's Day visit weekend too, although I'll talk to SleepyMom before making that decision. I know a few other people have called off attendance at events because they have to look after older relatives. They're essentially self isolating already so that they can stay in their smaller group of contacts.

Internet hugs are still good - right ?

So - Cardiff yesterday. The catalyst for it was my body starting to tear itself apart again. I think my external woes over the last almost decade ran down my levels of various minerals to critical levels and one thing that's manifested as is brutal cramp. As in heavy cramp in my leg that led to hobbling until yesterday. Leg's ok again now. I must have slept awkwardly on Wednesday night too because my shoulder decided to freeze up. That's mostly ok again as well now but it's kept me out of the internet spaceship pilot seat for a while.

It's been minimal gaming today as well - there's a Caledorn Pathfinder video going on another stream and I'm looking forward to lurking in Tashnarr's stream later when she starts up. The Pathfinder game feels like one I might enjoy playing, eventually. I find it confusing to play games while watching a playlist of videos of them.

Hopefully internet spaceships tomorrow. I kinda want to get back to the bubble pretty soon so I can get into different ships again. The next one is likely to be a Krait Mk II for mining ... although I might actually do mining in a smaller ship. They changed one of the mechanics of the game such that if you do industrial scale mining of the most lucrative and flood markets, the markets give you less money.

I'm missing the sport. This weekend, that would have been Formula 1 and I think it was going to be IMSA and WEC's Sebring races. But that's understandable, especially as the McLaren mechanic's catching of the virus may well have coincided with the Barcelona test and there may well be more people out there unknowingly carrying it.

So - drugs ... when my Magnesium tablets ran out, I got the wrong ones. Instead of 3 a day for 80% RRA, they were 1 a day for 67%. I think the 1 a day, taken in the morning, meant I didn't have much left while attempting to sleep ... hence cramps over night. Today was ok on the new regime.

(Don't use Dr Google as gospel, if I'd still been getting cramps, I would have gone back to a proper doctor. I was just lucky right this time).

Yesterday also saw me heading around the sweet shop - I now have emergency sherbets and kola kube supplies. I also found myself in the book cave and picked up 2 by Alastair Reynolds - Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap. Hopefully I read those in the right order. I also picked up HG Wells War of the Worlds because although I've seen a few adaptations, I've never read the originals.

I almost did cinema too but that was a victim of bad timing - Vin Diesel's Bloodshot seems to be the only semi interesting film (except 1917 - that's very good but I saw it already) on at the moment and I'd have missed the start ... and then it would have been super awkward to escape Cardiff after.

I think that's it for now and this post ...

Be well, be safe, be wary of the risks out there at the moment.

Time for book I think ! Currently in Old Man's War by John Scalzi, although that's been put aside while I've been doing other things !

Addon ... OH ! One last thing. People have been posting the "Support your local merchants" and there's another for "Support self employed con people". Special mention here for one Scorch Lady - link's over to the right.

Before the event got moved, she posted that she wasn't going to Birmingham Comic Con. Artists and traders like Scorch must get a lot of their income from events like the comic cons and that bookmark there is a lovely bit of work.

Long time no post

Hello everyone,

(checks clock) 2 weeks since last post ! Haven't gone anywhere ... yet. Although I will have a week and a half away on business stuff. May post things while I'm out there .... depends on data. What's been happening since I've been quiet ?

Random stuff time !

Stellaris happened. I finished off the game where I was going for the Suffer Not The Alien achievement. (Murder everything as a fanatic xenophobe). Got the target ... but not the achievement. Bit annoyed about that but it's just a game. I started up another game, just to get the achievement yesterday. Hopefully it does, it'll have to wait though until I'm back from For'n Parts. The reason the achievement didn't happen was a bug ... a remnant of an event was left over and was blocking it.


Mass Effect Andromeda is also still happening ...

Pretty.

I've been having fun with this one since coming back to it. It's perhaps a bit too long, although that means there is tonnes to do in the game. There's also lots of interpersonal chat that goes on amongst the crew.

Windy here this weekend. I really should have acquired my fuzzy goodies yesterday but wasn't feeling it, so that happened today. I now have fuzzy things that will hopefully keep the cold off next week !

Still need to switch over my memory cards and move my pictures to the new card. One drawback of the Pixel phone is that it's very generous with what it does with data. So pictures taken with it get uploaded at the moment. I'm content with that because it makes it a lot easier to publish pictures from the phone on here. Instead of Bluetooth to laptop and then network share to desktop, it's a one step action. But it does mean that I have to be more careful of what I take pictures of. The proper camera can take better pictures too.

We'll see how it goes this week and next. I may actually be trading extreme weather here for extreme weather somewhere else.

It'll be good to travel again too.

Another couple of emotes got done - can't show those here though because they're modifications of someone else's art instead of being completely my own. I'm still at that point where I can do much better by modification than by pure creation. That said, the dragon drawings were getting chuckles still.

Politics - thought I'd mention those ... I try and keep this a completely politics free zone. But that doesn't mean I'm not affected by them as well or that I don't feel affected by the various issues. I just think that this should be a safe place where people don't have to think about the nasty stuff. You get that stuff pushed at you from all the other places, it's good to have a rest once in a while ?

That goes for the posts where people go "Repost so I know you'll listen". PLEASE ! Don't do that. It's a guilt trip for everyone involved. Both from the people like me who will eagerly lend a listening ear if someone needs to talk. And the people posting the Thing who then psychologically tot up who replied, who responded.

Just because I ignore all of the posts like that, doesn't mean I won't be replying to your Skype, Messenger or other message. I'll be eager to help anyone out best I can. Sometimes I help too much. That's just me. Sometimes hyperactivity makes me blind to how people are reacting to what I say. That's me too.

But at the centre - I like to help people. Whether that's answering problems, listening to things they need to discuss with someone or .... just bringing a smile or a chuckle.

Anything else occurring ? Easter is almost upon us ! Must tidy up the avatar pic from last post.

Someone read all my posts over the last week. I've been seeing the hits on the Google hit counter and I think it's been awesome to see someone so interested in what I've been writing. Don't worry about GDPR or similar from my end, all I see on the Google thing is Operating System (or phone), browser and country. I don't get any more than that. I have the Statcounter thing as well but I'd be very surprised to see that pick up anything. It rarely does these days, I suspect it gets trapped by adblockers. Which is ok. I run adblockers too.

But ! Person who's been checking me out ! You're awesome and all those hits make me happy. Thank you.

Elite - haven't played that for a while. I think there might be a connection to my wrists feeling better ... although that could be the Magnesium citrate tablets. Since starting those, I have had zero cramp. None.

Phone stuff - if you've got my numbers ... I'll be somewhere roaming doesn't apply for a while. So hold off on the texting or phoning. I'm hoping to have wifi access and data and have an alternate sim for while I'm out there.

I better get my dinner before it burns more ! Still need to replace that cooker. Still cooks things nicely though. See you hopefully sooner rather than later.

Sleeping for a week ...

... Arising to write a few words.

That's a wonderful sleeping dragon isn't it ? (Picture credit - Sticky Beak Boutique and here's the link to the Amazon page that Google pointed me at)

Ok, so I haven't been asleep since Friday but I have been enjoying my week off work so far. And it's just a rumour that I've been indulging in a 5 day Stellaris bender ... Maybe.

There's been lots of music listened to now. Even with a Portishead album, Evanescence's Synthesis and a Sophie Ellis Bextor orchestral album appearing, I've listened to everything in the library now ! Need more new music. Got a few things in mind but music has gone overpriced and I like my bargains.

It hasn't been all Stellaris. There's been a little bit of the internet spaceships too :

That's the Strength of Atlas on approach to one of the planetary bases. I do like the amount of detail that is added to these bases.

I'm pretty sure it's all programmed in as part of a toolkit approach where the designers have a box of bits that when stuck together, comprise all of the bases ... but it looks fresh whenever you visit a new place. And especially the planetary bases.

And there's a toolkit for the space stations too. In this one, you dock inside the ball and the rest of for your imagination. I think this one had a habitation ring aft, up above the top of the picture, wider than the docking bay ball. If you landed on one of these and only spin gravity were available, you'd be in low gravity in the docking bay which would handily suit docking operations and make cargo handling much easier. Same mass, less apparent weight. And then you'd be in zero g in the spine, transiting up to the higher gravity habitation ring.

I found this as well, an unexpected interchange zone in the middle of the station. Never seen one of those before. It's lovely to see all that unexpected detail.

But anyway - Stellaris ... the latest game in the hunt for the achievements saw me going for the Authoritarian run, where you need 500 population units with at least 200 as slaves. Done that ... although I've gone away from the slavery approach now and emancipated everyone because there were serious problems keeping everyone happy.

There must be a morality thing in there somewhere. Which I'll completely ignore when I close out the game fully because there's another achievement "Keep at least 5 different species as livestock in your empire." On one hand, emancipation of the slaves. The other hand is fetching the dinner plate. I sense it'll be easier to get that achievement in this playthrough instead of the more obvious approach of bringing out the Nomnivorian Swarm (devouring horde) again. The Swarm hungers ... and eats quickly.

I've had deliveries this week too ! Today actually. I don't like to order stuff online unless I can be around for when the delivery happens. So Meltdown's components got acquired when I was last on leave and today, these turn up :

Portable bluray drive - I didn't transfer over the bluray drive from my previous desktop because I thought it was bust. And ... proven correct. There were some jitters and issues when I first fired it up (sound plays but screen goes black) but those mostly went away with a reinstall of the software. Still not perfect though, there were still skips happening. Must test more.

But I did manage to watch and enjoy Rogue One again. It's a cracking movie. I may well work my way through Eps 4 to 8 again before Rise of Skywalker comes out. I'm expecting that one to be absolute junk for story, as per eps 7 and 8 but I think it'll be another stunning spectacle of a movie.

Why do I say that ?

There was an Expanded Universe of books and games that built upon the original trilogy of Star Wars. The X Wing game in particular was a prequel to the first movie, A New Hope, with the Tie Fighter game picking up afterwards. I came to X Wing late and struggled with it (a different era of games which went to insane difficult to gate your progress) but I hugely enjoyed Tie Fighter.

There were many important and incredible books too. I'm thinking of the Michael Stackpole and Aaron Allston X Wing books and the Timothy Zahn books in particular. They expanded upon the worlds and galaxy introduced with the movies and added rich storytelling. I also enjoyed the Knights of the Old Republic (aka KOTOR) game, set 4,000 years before the movies and should really finish Kotor 2 at some point.

Anyway, all that rich story material was swept aside with the new movies which were stunning spectacles ... but really bad for whether or not they make any sense. Star Wars doesn't really make sense anyway but you'd like them to make a bit of an effort for it to.

That said, they make for an incredibly good spectacle and I really enjoyed watching The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi.

And then there's Rogue One, which was a stunning movie. I suspect Rise of Skywalker will be a stunning conclusion to this epic series. Although .... George Lucas way back said there were going to be 14 episodes in the series. Hmm. At least I think he did.

What else appeared ?

Advent calendar is sorted :-D. I don't think the other packets will last until then somehow ...

PS Ever since I had my attention drawn to it, I can't not see the difference that makes the Star Destroyer in the picture above an old one ... On the tower between the two shield domes there is an additional bit of detail there. That makes it an Imperial class Mk1 Star Destroyer. The bit between the domes is different on the Mk2 Imperial Star Destroyer. And ... the latest trailer for Rise of Skywalker apparently is showing the older ships. Curious. Perhaps it's reuse of ancient models ? Probably a JJ Abrams special. But there might be something more to it.

Looking at those names again

Names of things have been popping into my head again ....

(picture credit - http://clipart-library.com/clipart/1334520.htm)

It's partly out of curiosity for what the next Royal Navy ships will be called. I'm really curious about that !

The Royal Navy tends to go for catchy, shorter names like Dragon (like that one), Warspite, Hood, Cattistock, Glasgow, Albion, Ocean (now Atlântico), Lyme Bay, Richmond, Mersey, Grimsby. Names that fit a theme too, like Queen Elizabeth or Ark Royal for the really big ships. Tideforce is one of the new fleet tankers.

The River class ships currently coming in are named after ... you guessed it, rivers and the City class Type 26 start with Glasgow.

Other countries sometimes follow that theme, sometimes they go for names that come from people. Like the USN aircraft carriers being named after Presidents. The current class of Arleigh Burke destroyers are named after an Admiral who served during WW2 and the Korean War. (Here's his wiki page) The USN also have the Oliver Hazard Perry frigates and the Spruance class destroyers.

They are really grand fantastic sounding names. Even the Nathan James, from the series called The Last Ship. Another excellent name.

And that got me wondering about the names I used for the Internet Spaceships ... Before I do that bit though, I've just finished enjoying watching a Rythian XCom playthrough where he went by the commander's role and used the names of his Yogscast for the troops. Other video people use Patreon name lists and apply those names to the characters in their series.

Names definitely add a little something. A tighter connection with what's happening. When Fuzzy does a Rimworld stream, if my name gets adopted for one of the characters I'll watch that particular character a little more closely.

I'd been thinking about that for the internet spaceships, I even did use some first names for ships owned by my previous character. I used first names for people in my last XCom 2 run. I must open that game up again sometimes. Some games won't have names adopted ... I'll use modded in name lists for games like Stellaris but because there are whole fleets of ships, there isn't that same connection to the individual ships. At best, with games like Moo2 it was a name for the class of ship although I'm not sure if Moo2 supported the naming of individual ships.

Names are also unique. You could use them as a mark of respect for people in a kind of "I like you as a person and I'm going to remember you by applying your name to this thing I really value".

I have had fun with the Elite ship names too ... here's the latest one :

She is an Alliance Challenger ship called the "Old Aged Ben Pup", following a theme started with the sCRUFFY nEIGHBOURHOOD and Goldie Runner. I haven't actually taken that one out of the hangar yet, there's been a couple of community goals going which have been pretty profitable and I've been using the Strength of Atlas for those :

There we go, on landing approach to pick up more Synthetic Reagents to help fight a crop blight.

But while I've had fun with the ship names chosen, lending a friend's name to the ships adds something a little special feeling. And something like the "Admiral LTK" (switch real name for codename!) has an amazing ring to it. The "Commander Fuzzy", "Captain of Elysium" and the forthcoming "Commodore Tuesday" and "Admiral Maggie" from my current Elite character's list of ships have a great ring to them.

This was a good little ship and the Queen Skye would have been followed by the Queen Karen and Queen Jenny. I liked the Ice Road Trucker name themed ships too : Lisa Kelly, Alex Dewey, Art Burke and I'm not sure if I got to the Darrell Ward. I loved the show and hugely enjoyed seeing the stories of each year told through those wonderful characters.

(Addon cos I forgot it) One thing though ... because the ship names get posted here and this is a mostly anonymous blog, no real names ! Oh well :-D

Yep. Naming things after the people hugely adds something special. But please. Not this. Definitely not this :

Cya !

[Insert Title Here]

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.

What's in a ship name

I saw a tweet earlier that sparked a thought or two ...

It was from Think Defence and it was asking "Any suggestions on the best names for the new RN mini frigates ?"

Not that one. That's a curious looking ship though, wonder if it's still available ?

There it is. New ship design, just announced. It's the Type 31e, following the Arrowhead 140 design which is based on the Dutch Iver Huitfeld design. So a similar shape and insides and then we'll tailor it to the equipment and systems of working that we want to put in it.

Looks tidy. But there's a difference to "it looks nice" and it being able to go anywhere, kick butt and get out again. We'll see what this one turns out like !

This post isn't one to be about naval ship design though. This one is for the names !

The last ship of mine that I posted on here was the Black Sheep :

Seen there investigating the treasure trove of Dav's Hope. The next one was "Strength of Atlas", a Type 9 freighter put together for taking lots of cargo to a trading community goal.

She'll be back out carrying more cargo for future community goal missions. The freighters aren't much fun to fly though. They don't turn, they orbit.

Effective for what they do though and they don't need to be unlocked like the Imperial Cutter or Federal Corvette. The next ship was for combat :

An Alliance Crusader, going by the name of Goldie Runner. I'm using dog names as the theme for the Alliance ship names, so the first one was "sCRUFFY nEIGHBOURHOOD". Yep. Forgot about caps lock and by then, the name was baked in and it's bad luck to change it. Goldie was an athlete who loved to run fast... and I'll think of something suitable for the Ben-ship at some point. The current ship is :

Searching for Biscuits. She's an Orca class passenger ship (no passengers allowed) who will be going on a couple of short range exploration expeditions and I'm hoping to acquire some amazing looking screenshots.

But how about these new Navy ships ? The various ship classes have their names arranged by themes so :

At the moment, Duke class frigates with names like Richmond, Northumberland, St Albans.
Minehunters named after seaside towns like Grimsby, Penzance.
Destroyers with names starting with D like Daring, Dragon (like that one), Diamond.
River class patrol vessels like Mersey and Tyne.
City class Type 26 ships coming with names like Glasgow and London.

One of the reasons for the new City class names was to try and encourage recruitment by connecting the ship to a place to recruit from. Something like : "I'm a Glaswegian serving on HMS Glasgow and my pop helped build the ship." That's powerful.

But .... where to go for the next ships ? You could go a bit boring and safe and traditional with something like towns. As in, smaller population areas to go along with the cities. There are 5 of these planned so 5 names for each category.
Let's see : Warwick, Chichester, Salisbury, Ramsgate, Bodmin. Safe, boring.
Battles : Britain, Normandy, Arnhem, Dunkirk, Tobruk.
Football clubs and stadia : Anfield, Stamford Bridge, Highbury, Old Trafford, Ashton Gate.

Pop culture is also incredibly powerful in the youth that the Navy want to recruit from. So let's see ...

Sci fi can be a goldmine of names. Enterprise is already taken (she's a survey ship), so Defiant from Deep Space 9, (Millennium) Falcon from Star Wars, Rocinante from The Expanse, Prometheus from Stargate and Galactica (or Pegasus) from the Battlestar show. Pegasus is a great name for a ship.

And then there's : Thundercat, Thunderbird, Dogtanian, Fireball, Stingray, Greyskull.

Not sure about those. And Emmerdale, Walford, Erinsborough, Benwell, Holby City.
Kent (got one already), Wayne, Oliver, Stark, Rogers, Xavier. (6 because Kent is taken already)

Some names are definitely better than others. AND WE HAVEN'T GOTTEN INTO GAME CULTURE YET !

From Warcraft : Proudmoore, Windrunner, Arthas, Thrall, Stormwind.
Halo : Spartan, Cortana, Keyes, Locke, Arbiter.
Not done with pop culture yet either : Anakin, Amidala, Ahsoka, Ackbar, Andor. (The A-class is already taken by submarines though).
There's more : Tracer, Bastion, Hanzo (ship namers wouldn't know the consequences), McCree, Winston.
Also : Wick, Breakpoint, Jaeger, Fyra, Revolt.

Addon - couple more :
Stokes, Archer, Cook, Atherton, Botham.
Lineker (perhaps no),  Beckham, Butcher, Pearce ... and that's all I got for footballers.
Wilkinson (would become the Sword), Warburton, Hastings, Johnson, O'Driscoll.

So many names. I'm probably disqualified from naming any ship though, after my current form. (Elite Fleet list is at the link). In my current save, I've gone through :
Starters : Money Spider, Undaunted, Dragonbug, Greater Dragonbug, Mini Magpew, Keela's Wings, Dauntless and Mighty Magpew.
Explorer ships : Day Tripper, Searching For Tea, Chrissa's New Potato and Searching for Biscuits.
Scavenger ships : Porpoise Prospector, sCRUFFY nEIGHBOURHOOD.
Fighty ships : Mostly Toothless, Commander Fuzzy, Captain of Elysium, Goldie Runner.
Tribute ships : Niki and Charlie, Kerr Avon Forever, Rage of Kashyyyk
Trading ships : Needs More Pewpew, Empire's Bounty, Tortoise Beats Hare, Black Sheep and Strength of Atlas.

Naming things is fun.

May need a "Searching for Lego".

Randomish Thoughts

I feel the need for a random thoughts post ...

Quite.

One random thought lately was about Advent and what I'll do this year. This one was triggered by waking up and seeing the collection of little Lego things from last year :

There is a lot of it and I'm not sure if I have the space for it all any more ! I do enjoy the Advent format though so I think I'll still do something adventy in December. Probably something like those calendars that have a suitable picture behind all of the doors. I did something similar a few years ago :

I definitely enjoyed that sequence (here's a link to the posts from that December). Something similar may happen this year.

And yes. I have no shame for talking about Xmassy stuff before it's even Autumn.

And I have been told off already for talking about Xmassy stuff this early in the year.

Currently watching a Rebel Galaxy Outlaw stream by the one and only FuzzyFreaks (who is lovely and I'd recommend her streams - adult levels of swearing though !). An interesting game. It's another space shooty combat game, pretty much all about the combat. Which is why I won't get it ... Fuzzy's having fun with it though. There's an absolute tonne of great music in it too. What I do want to go is go back into the original game, Rebel Galaxy which I drifted away from when I played it before.

Rebel Galaxy - you had battlewagons to fly around in;
Rebel Galaxy Outlaw - you're flying a combat fighter;
Different scale. Outlaw is more around the Elite scale, which is another reason I won't switch over to it. I'm too invested in the Elites. I'm attempting to be more careful with the games I acquire because I just don't play probably half of them. I could spend that on Lego ! That I have little space for. May need to spend money on storage and chucking out of boxes.

The latest leg of the long journey home (don't buy that game, it had a nice concept but shockingly bad execution) saw me find a planet mostly ice but with blue canyons.

Nice. I've had a couple of evenings off Elite though because that long exploration run is feeling grindy. Only about 180,000 light years to go which works out to a minimum of 3,000 jumps. I'm good with sessions of about 120 jumps on weekdays and push it longer on weekends. I'll be cheating though by taking shortcuts via the neutron star highway.

I enjoy watching the streams too and I only have so many screens to watch things on. (Telly, laptop, 1x desktop screen).

Fuzzy is currently drawing something crazy on screen - in Elite, you buy the paint jobs through the Frontier store. In Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, you can paint your own ships. And apparently, there may be an option to have them 3d printed for you.

Random shift - cricket didn't happen last week but it looks like Jofra Archer is going to be a more than ample stand in for Jimmy Anderson who turned out lame last week. Apparently he got runs too ... which is a complete surprise after seeing what he was like batting in the World Cup !

Hopefully that'll let England bounce back in the next game. I have Kia Super League women's T20 on at the moment and it's half time. No idea who's going to win yet, which just adds to why you'd want to watch it.

Oh dear Lord, Fuzzy just drew a half naked man to adorn her spaceship. Oh dear.

Any more random thoughts ? It's happily a little cooler now, not quite as oppressively hot as it did get over the last few weeks.

I think the rest of tonight's going to be more chill out. I'll see you on the other side ....

NOOOOO ! Need the cookies !

Mission Meltdown

Hmm. Where did I leave it last week ?

Quite.

It's got a little cooler this week. Bit more livable. It was a bit damp yesterday though but that's ok.

Meltdown is working pretty well now. It has its updated Windows licence (if your Windows isn't activated, it puts watermarks on all your screenshots. Couldn't have that) and I picked up the new cooler too. It's a bit of a monster ...

4D looks suitably impressed with the size of the box. The idea is that the bigger the cooler, the more fins and surface area it has and the heat dissipates away more quickly if there is more surface area. The fans are also a factor, with CFM being the unit of interest. Bigger 120mm fans like on there have more surface area again and more radial velocity at the outsides, so (Too Science Didn't Read) they can push more air through as well. And because they're more effective, the bigger fans can be run slower which means less noise.

So ... monster cooler means everything is cooler, everything is quieter. Win ! But I haven't fitted it yet mainly because ... effort. (It's a pretty big job to replace a cpu cooler) And also because the AMD Wraith Stealth cooler that comes with the processor is ultra quiet. As in silent ... I can barely hear it even when there are no other active noise sources and even there, I may well be hearing the case fan or the power supply fan.

Because I'm not running the machine hard yet, like it will be when it gets colder and I turn the Science Sums back on, it doesn't need that better cooling.

So far, I've been doing more internet spaceship piloting, more motorsport managing and I'm having another look at Battletech's massive Roguetech mod.

That little fella is my crazy pirate melee mech. A little fella but effective when he gets in close. Hasn't acquired a name yet, I'm naming the mechs when I reconfigure them. So far there is the Fires of Elysium and a Clint class mech got named Rise of Eastwood.

Battletech ran just about on the old machine, I had to run it off the SSD in order to get acceptable performance in the basic campaign. The bigger Roguetech mod was unplayable, probably because it was wanting to take up 10GB+ of memory and Pumpkin only had 8GB. It was apparently barely touching the processor load actually, which may be a sign of how poorly optimised it is. Great game, poor implementations.

Motorsport Manager doesn't feel any different ... but it shouldn't really, it's not a game that relies on or gets advantage of better PC performance past a certain point.

Elite feels smoother. I've reached the edge of the galaxy ...

That's an earlier shot and I've turned up the anti-aliasing a little since then. (Anti-aliasing attempts to make lines less jagged).

I may have found some tea down there ...

Time to enter The Abyss. There are differences in the density of stars in the galaxy. In the centre, the stars are so dense that before the route planner was substantially upgraded, the planner would crash the game client if you tried to plan beyond about 300 light years (too many options to check). Out in the Abyss, ships with lower jump ranges have to go around. Mine is very long range but even there, the path goes wiggly and shorter jumps need to be taken.

Here's the travel map so far :

It's quite a distance travelled there ! More to go. The plan is to head back in a semicircle. Soon.

I found another couple of close binary stars on the way in, always good for a screenshot. This one is definitely with the improved anti-aliasing but I'm not sure that'll be apparent there.

That's where I've parked up until I go back in. That's at Beagle Point, looking back at the Milky Way from the edge of the galaxy. There are stars on the map further out but because they're beyond the jump ranges, they're unreachable.

One thing you do notice when upgrading like this are the shortcomings of the other machines. I really notice that at work but it's not really the fault of the laptops we have. They're actually pretty solid machines and would make me consider getting HP laptops as well (business grade, as their domestic grade is rubbish). The big problem with the work machines is the infrastructure, especially the Microsoft side. Too many slowdowns seem to come from the laptops having to check elsewhere even for the simplest of operations like changing to bold. They'll pause when opening the dialogue for formatting a cell in Excel.

It's pretty sad that the Microsoft applications have got that bad. They really need to be better than that, or have a rethink on how much they're communicating with the servers.

But I'm not thinking about that at home.

Soon ... Deus Ex Mankind Divided or Prey ! Am knackered though and still a bit worn out mentally and those games need a bit more mental energy than I'm willing to put in at the moment.

Soon :-D