Monday 31 August 2015

Day 29: Off to the Edge

While it would be a useful goal to visit all of the local Nebulae, this has already been done and the results published. What I have noticed when using the ED Discovery2 tool is that my travels have extended quite far, compared to most of the systems added. While there are a number of systems near the rim close to human space and to the centre of the Galaxy, there are no systems along the rim. My next quest is to start to map the rim.

My voyage to the rim will start by taking in a couple of nebulae, just for a change. Starting with the California nebula, as it is on the way to the edge.

Day 28: Return to Altair

The journey of 4,967 light years from the Crescent Nebular back to the Altair system went relatively quickly.

Upon docking, I sold the information on the systems that I visited for 4.75M credits. This brought my bank balance up to 10.4M credits and my explorers status up from Trailblazer (91%) to Pathfinder (34%). The Exploration ranks are reproduced below, taken from elite-dangerous.wikia.


Rank Profit Required
Aimless 0
Mostly Aimless 10,000
Scout 184,141
Surveyor 571,000
Trailblazer 2,225,000
Pathfinder 5,500,000
Ranger 18,100,000
Pioneer 55,500,000
Elite 160,500,000

Day 27 Arrival at the Crescent Nebula

Another day, another nebula.

While the crescent nebular is a lot larger than the bubble nebula, it is no where as interesting. After a brief tour and submitting a the coordinates of a few systems, it is time to start the journey back to Altair. A short trip of around 5000 ly

Day 26 Off to the crescent Nebula

As the crescent nebula is close to the bubble, nebula, I thought that I should visit it on my way home, though it is a few thousand light years out of my way.

The bubble nebula is around 7100 light years from my base on Altair. The cresent nebula is around 4300 ly from the bubble and around 7100ly from Altair.

As usual, I have been using my spreadsheet to determine the optimal steps for the journey. In the past I have been using steps of 1000ly, stopping to record the location of systems where I refuel. To ensure that there is a system at the end of each step which I can use to set the destination for the internal sat nav, I have reduced the step size to 900 ly.

Today I started my journey to the crescent nebula, I hope to finish it within the next few days.

Travel plans Spreadsheet

Thursday 6 August 2015

Day 25: Hubble, Bubble, toil and trouble.

OK, I know that the quote is off and that it should be "Double, double, toil and trouble", but that doesn't include the word "bubble", which is the key here.

I finally arrive at the Bubble nebula. My excitement has been building as I approach it, with incredible views here and here.

Inside, the nebula doesn't contain many stars. However, I took the time to record they location using the ed-systems tool.

Inside the nebula, the view is very blue.

After recording the stars inside, I view the results of my travels using the ED Discovery application. My travels can be seen as the (very small) red dots leading off to the top left.

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'Elite', the Elite logo, the Elite: Dangerous logo, 'Frontier' and the Frontier logo are registered trademarks of Frontier Developments Plc. 

Day 24: Off to the Bubble

Not much to report. The journey of 5 ½ k light years from the veil to the bubble takes a long time. While each 30ly jump is fairly quick at around 1 minute between jumps, I am now developing the habit of recording the location of stars where I refuel, using the ed-systems tool. This takes several minutes each time as the standard stars are usually within or close to human space and so require a lot of points before my current location can be fixed with suitable accuracy.

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'Elite', the Elite logo, the Elite: Dangerous logo, 'Frontier' and the Frontier logo are registered trademarks of Frontier Developments Plc.  

Tuesday 4 August 2015

Day 23: Through the Veil

Having successfully returned from the trip to the Heart and Soul nebulae, I started looking for the next choice destination.

Ultimately, I plan to join up and, hopefully assist with, The First Great Expedition. But before launching into that, I wish to build my skills at exploring as well as visiting some of the common sights.


After wandering the Galactic map, I caught sight of a wonderful blue Nebula; the Bubble Nebula. A beautiful picture of the real object can be seen here.

As it is around 7k ly away, I used the same technique as employed for my trip to the Heart and Soul nebulae, ie to use Excel to calculate 1000ly jumps so that these could be plotted out in detail by the in-build sat-nav system.

One main difference to my previous trip is that I had found the EDDiscovery tool. This reads my log files to capture the systems I have visited. It will also produce a nice 3D map of them.

As the coordinates for systems needs to be added, I have been using the ed-systems web site to calculate and record the location of new star systems.

I noticed that a nice way-station on the way to the Bubble Nebula is the Veil Nebula. At only 1.4kly it didn't take too long for my 30ly steps to make my way there, While I use my advanced discovery scanner on each system I visit, I only record the location within ed-systems when I stop to re-fuel.

My day ended up in the Veil nebula, enjoying some of the incredible views from my cockpit window: Veil nebula

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'Elite', the Elite logo, the Elite: Dangerous logo, 'Frontier' and the Frontier logo are registered trademarks of Frontier Developments Plc.