![]() Plenty more joked about having to limp away with only a fraction of their hulls intact. Seasoned commanders were on hand to share advice and offer tips on negotiating high gravity landings. For a long time our communication channels were buzzing with reports of ships coming in too hot. ![]() As if the ships were made out of nothing more than paper and dreams. ![]() Not two days into the trip and we had our first casualties, as the planet’s 3.3gs of gravity plucked unsuspecting ships from the sky and tore them apart. So far nothing has taught this lesson better than the now-infamous system known as The View. Space will always be there to capitalise on your inattention, hiding behind the majesty of the cosmos with a knife, ready to drive the point home. As your oxygen depletes and you become part of a new binary system of corpses, you’ll know it was your fault. Your fuel scoop hanging limply in the solar winds, unable to gather the necessary materials from the dead stellar body. Oftentimes, the way space kills you will be very boring, like running out of fuel among a cluster of brown dwarf stars. As your hull melts and your brain presumably boils in the radioactive jetstream, you’ll wish you had kept your now-liquified eyes on the road. Sometimes how it kills you will be surprising, like putting a neutron star in an otherwise unexciting route. I’ve swam through a field of the impossibly bright, young stars that form the PW2010 Supercluster, while the sheer cliffs of Labirinto’s canyons somehow managed to induce vertigo.Īt this early stage, it’s important not to become distracted and remember that space will kill you. I’ve flown through the brilliant blast of purple of the Shapley 1 nebula, a single star bathed in a lilac haze. Even though we’ve not travelled very far from the Bubble (the galactic patch of around 20,000 systems that make up the bulk of human civilisation) some of the sights I’ve seen have been beyond what I could have imagined. The first leg of the journey seems to have gone smoothly, for the most part. It’s high maneuverability while in supercruise should see me through most tricky situations (“supercruise” is the faster-than-light travel we have thanks to a ship’s Frame Shift Drive, which means we can travel between planets in minutes rather than years). Now that I’m out here I couldn’t be happier with my Imperial Clipper, the Roisin Dubh. For a moment, madness took hold and I wondered: do I really need a shield? Visions of my ship shattering against the cold surface of a moon soon put a rest to such notions. I might come to regret sacrificing my durability in order to shed weight, but I went after anything that gave my jump range an edge. The heavy-duty armour from the ship’s pirating days has been replaced wholesale with a thinner (but lighter) hull. It’s bulkier than standard kit, so to compensate I’ve installed lightweight scanners, and my thrusters have been stripped of all extraneous parts. Let's see, I’m running a low-emissions power plant to keep my core temperature down, considering my only means of refuelling will be by skimming the surface of stars. In the days leading up to departure I was still agonising over what equipment to bring, swapping out modules of my ship in a bid to second-guess the kinds of situations I could find myself in. It’s a daunting task, one you never feel ready for until the moment you get going. The famous endpoint of the Distant Suns Expedition. From there the fleet will head out to the far edge of the galaxy in the hopes of making it to Beagle Point. The goal of the expedition is to build a research station at the very heart of our galaxy, near the supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A*. Right now I’m cradling a lukewarm mug of synti-caf in an asteroid’s makeshift cafeteria (a cup of bland Tesco Gold in my living room) equal parts excited and terrified at the journey ahead. ![]() But that’s 65,000 light years away from Earth, and I’m getting ahead of myself. They were all headed to the edge of galaxy. Two weeks ago, on the 13th January 3305, nearly 9700 commanders took off from the Pallaeni system as part of the Distant Worlds 2 expedition, according to traffic logs. Yet for myself and thousands of other commanders, the Omega Mining Operation is one of the last safe harbours we may see for a very long time. We’re sitting inside a hollowed-out rock, with a single entry gate separating our fragile, oxygen-dependent bodies from the cold vacuum of space. Our flyboy Corey Milne was among them.Īsteroid bases always make me feel uneasy. ![]() Two weeks ago, a fleet of over 13,000 players of Elite Dangerous set out on a long journey to cross the galaxy. ![]()
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