Day One Death

Day one of Elite Saturday the 22nd November 2014.

I failed in the race to Sol.

I was so eager was I to leave my starter area around COSI, that I ran out of fuel trying to find a hyperspace route out of the area and and let this happen.

Sob.  So I died only hours into the release cold alone and suffocating in the depths of space in this unexplored system.

But since then (posting this retrospectively on 7th March 2015 as I didn't even have this blog back then) I still have not died again and my insurance claims are still at Zero!

Of course, now I've said that it's going to be tempting fate and another CMDR's guns!

 

Sigma Bootis Pirate Scum

Ripped off by the Mierck station at Sigma Bootis.  I think its a scam.  They offer you 100K + missions to take cargo there then don't let you dock.  Its a pirate station as it has pirate logos and holograms hovering over it.

Maybe they only let their own factions or similarly dodgy f*****s dock.  Or maybe they don't have a pad for big ships (Lakon Type-6) - I did spot a destroyed wreck on one pad - maybe the mid-sized ship pad?  I don't know, but I know they had empty pads because in Private Group and Solo I tried docking multiple times and there were ships coming and going and leaving empty pads.

Well as they wouldn't let me hand in the jobs I jettisoned them at the station, earned 7500 in fines, but it was worth it :-)

Still had to pay off a 50k fine back at Aganpipe where I took on the mission.  Was tempted to leave it... as I said, what a bunch of scamming pirates.

Wasp-18

Definitely one for the list WASP-18 330 ly from Sol.

The closely orbiting gas giant of 10 Jovian masses is prematurely aging its stellar companion by interrupting the magnetic fields.

Chi Hercules

Chi (x) Hercules is a G type star 51.7 light years from Sol containing 5 planets and one moon.

It has a habitable world Apasam - which is orbited by the Gorbatko Reserve space station and its moon Kumay (pictured right).  Apasam's climate is pretty stormy as can be seen by this passing photo I took catching hurricane in progress over one of the oceans.

Like Chango - Apasam is a large exporter of fish.

Stars - a poem

Stars

I could look up at the stars forever,
So quiet and peaceful in their huge dark place!
So majestically they twinkle down at me,
Little stars floating far out in space!

Little stars from where I am looking,
But huge beyond anything I could possibly conceive!
Somehow us little men have fit them into our time-scale,
Now that's the hardest thing to believe!

All the lives that were spent looking and observing,
Thousands of lives in as many years!
But no matter how much we tell ourselves we know of them,
Our knowledge isn't going to somehow draw them near!

Why do we have to understand the Universe?
Why do we have to know how everything works?
Why do we have to seek out the beginning?
Why can't we see we're bringing ourselves to and end!

Long after we've managed to fuck this world up,
Long after our species is a long time extinct,
Long after all our clocks have stopped ticking,
Stars will still twinkle - twinkle far out in space!

Now I don't aim to knock the astronomers,
For their studies have taught me what I know!
And although I gave my Mother the star Sirius,
Sirius is a place we'll never get to go!

The Plough isn't going to work in my garden,
And not because the Plough is just a small part of the Big Bear!
The Plough is a silly name us destructive men gave to it,
But all those individual stars are just where they are!

I could look up at the stars forever,
And just absorb the feeling they feed to me!
As beautiful as my twinkling stars are to me,
Out in space is where I want them to be!

The stars they aren't looking down on us,
The stars don't care where they came from,
The stars don't give a flying fuck about Religion,
The stars don't try to keep up with time!

I could look up at the stars forever,
But forever I shall not be around!
So tonight I shall find time to glance at them,
As I look up, my feet are firmly on the ground!

44 Boötis

This is one of the 5 starting systems from the Elite Dangerous Alpha build, so has been in the game since the beginning.

The star system contains 3 G-type stars and a Brown Dwarf "Mayer" I Bootis D.  The system is 41.6 light years from Sol.

The primary G Type star is orbited by the planet Chango - an earth-like world with large oceans.  Chango's major export is Fish.  The oceans are populated by lots of transplanted earth species including whales and dolphins.  The human population live on floating islands which follow the migratory fish shoals.

I Boötis B & C are a contact binary, orbiting each other with a period of 6.43 hours.  It is a stunning sight to see the double suns.

One Elite Commander filmed the stars in a time lapse and this video clearly shows the orbital rotation.  This is how they appear in the Premium Beta release.

I hope that in future builds of the game will depict matter transference between the pair.

Finally we have I Boötis D, a brown dwarf star Maher with its large companion planet Dustball.  A brown dwarf is a large gas giant which didn't quite have enough mass to start the stellar fusion process and become a star in its own right, but still retains generates heat into the infra-red.  This is why Maher gives off such an eary red glow.

44 Bootis aka I Boötis - such an interesting star system!