Elite: Picturesque II: Nebula Adventures

This time I'm diggin through some nice screenshots from just after I sold my Imperial Clipper and went back to a good old Asp Explorer. I then went on a short trip to some nearby black holes and followed up with visiting some nebulas on the way back. Enjoy!

Elite: Picturesque II: Nebula Adventures

The Purple Planet. Nice craters! For those of you who know: I made a short video of the black hole in this system, but it didn't turn out well.

 

 

This nice (and rather dusty) screenshot was made on another planet in the same system.

 

 

For some reason this planet also had a prominent giant crater. 

 

 

 

Though from up close the crater looks more like a dent. Whatever hit this planet either spiraled back into space or just burst and spread itself accross the surface.

Chances are, this little bugger nicked our dented planet at some point in the past.

I took some time out at this point to explore the crater/dent-region. Sadly I continued to be unlucky with finding synthesis materials. I have enough stuff to reload weapons I don't use dozens of times, but only enough strange metals for a single, low-level jump boost!

My favourite kind of hyperspace jump: Jumping from just a couple kilometers above the surface. (I wonder if we will get fined if we ever do this above a populated world like Earth?)

Random Earth-like planet! Also in case you're wondering why the formatting changes several times through this post, it's because this shitty blogging software gets unresponsive sometimes. Unreliable shit, I should really work more on my Wordpress-blog.

The same planet, but with my golden Asp in the foreground. In the background, you can see traces of the Horsehead-Nebula.

The Horsehead-Nebula in all it's glory!

The same nebula, but with my Asp in the foreground.

Messier 78 another and much smaller nebula close by. 

 

Messier 78 from another angle, with some other nebulas visible behind it.

This screenshot is from around the Orion Nebula. At least I think it is. (I really have to make better notes about stuff like this.)

 

 

 

 

Elite: Picturesque I: The Day of the Clipper

Today I'm all about sharing: Sharing pictures!

Elite: Dangerous - Horizons- 

The Day of the Clipper

1. Planetary Landing on some Random Dustball

 

What is says above, my Imperial Clipper trying to set down on some really dusty planet somewhere.

 

Aaaaaand landing succesful!

It's like being on the moon, just thousands of light years away!

 This is an Imperial Clipper, by the way. Not the best space explorer, but one of the fanciest. By now replaced again by an actual exploration ship, but for a while it was nice.

After setting down in this nice crater, I went out and explored this mountain at the center.

I tried my best to get up there, but my little space buggy couldn't make it to the top without tumbling down again.

So I went into total "FUCK YOU!!!"-mode and made this screenshot to prove my anger. (Don't worry, I didn't actually crash. It was a near thing, though.)

2. Visiting Space Aliens 

 

Space Aliens are real in Elite, and I will prove this.

Already, there are strange things visible in the distance.

 

Let's take a look!

And with that I of course mean let's shoot it to pieces! That's what you do with alien crap, right?

After grabbing some crafting materials and some strange alien meta-alloys, I head back to my (for this trip recolored) Imperial Clipper.

And that's it already for today! I have some more pictures, but putting them up all at once would be a little overwhelming.

-To Be Continued-

 

Mosaic Musings

So, Mosaic happened. Sadly, I was preoccupied with work and getting home in Elite: Dangerous from a month-long expedition into the galaxy, so I couldn't do much in EVE since the patch landed.

But what I'm hearing about the ongoing story seems neat, so I'm hoping I can put in some EVE-time next weekend.

At least I made some money in selling skin-licenses that got converted from my stash of skin-BPCs and skinned ship. Right now I'm thinking how to best sell the small pile of Confessor I've made before the patch. (The Confessor is one of the new T3-destroyers and in Mosaic, the material requirements for building them and the Svipul went up, so if you build them beforehand, you can get a few extra million ISK profit per unit sold.)

Should I wait, hoping for some slight increase in price when the ships over-build by industrials before the patch are churned through and production numbers are normal again? Or should I just dump it on the market now for an easy profit?

Decisions, decisions.

Be Elite In Deep Space

Today I thought "Why not?" to myself and decided to share some more pictures I made while exploring the galaxy in Elite: Dangerous:

A blue-white star seen through my ship's canopy. The canopy is a bit dinged up since I was travelling for some time already. Nowadays we have a nice debug-camera to make fancy shots without scratchy effects in the way, but back when I made this pic we could only make screenshots from inside our cockpits.

A brown dwarf with massive rings. I found this system quite a bit above the galactic ecliptic.

Here I am slowly sinking into the rings using my FSD (Frame Shift Drive) at the slowest supercruise-setting. (The FSD is a jump drive for direct jumps between different star systems, dropping you always near the largest mass. Supercruise is a fancy warp-drive mode you can use for fast travel inside a star system.)

Uh oh getting closer now...

And arrived!

After some bumbling around in the ring, I suddenly noticed the bulk of the brown dwarf star hiding over there. So I made this pic.

The FSD in action: My jump timer is counting down and when it hits zero, I'll get violently kicked to my target system through the spooky witch space.

Thanks to Frontier modelling the Milkyway as closely as possible, you'll get a lot of weird systems like this one here. If you take a good look, you'll see four suns in that screenshot. All part of the same star system. And now think about how the real world has even stranger star systems like that.

One of my more artistic pictures. But thank god I don't have to make screenshots through my canopy anymore, that got old really fast.

An ice planet. No heavy metals here, since ice planets in the real world don't tend to have a lot of heavy metals, regardless of what EVE may have taught you.

This rocky little stone would probably be labeled a "barren" planet in EVE. Here, it's just worth barely more than an ice planet. I think this thing had like 5% more metals in it's composition than the ice ball from above. Still not much.



So, this is it for today. Just a bunch of nice pics. I think next time I'll go back to EVE, so please don't run away one person reading this!

Elite: Let's Get Dangerous

Now for something completely different:

This little picture is something I made after starting a long-range expedition in Elite: Dangerous.

The game can be as beautiful as EVE Online, even though in other parts the games are as different as night and day. While EVE takes a more holistic approach to space gaming, Elite is a true simulation of space travel. You and your joystick control your ship directly and the map is a painstaking simulation of the 400+ billion star systems found in our Milkyway.

When I'm not playing EVE, I like to continue my lonely journey through the emptyness of space, taking pictures along the way.

Elite: Dangerous is a nice game, even though it is kind of barebones at the moment. On the other hand, if you hate people you can just play in Solo-mode and never get annoyed by someone ever again.

As an explorer, I normally could ignore this and play in the normal "Open"-mode, but 400 billion stars are a lot and outside of the small human-settled space you generally see no-one either way. Sadly, in Open-mode the function to make HighRes-shots is blocked, so a picture like the one above would suffer quite a bit.

Theoretically, it should not bother me as much, since I have to resize and compress my HighRes-shots anyway before uploading them to the mighty internet to share. But I feel like having at least some genuine HighRes-shots on my HDD and anyway, I like to downsize the pics myself, thank you very much.

If you want to try it out for yourself, here's a link to the shop. (You can also get the original 1984 Elite for zero money, if you want.)

Don't worry, by the way: Trading and shooting is also possible, you aren't forced to go out and see the universe!