The Omega Mining Corporation has requested deliveries of raw materials for a new Orbis starport, to be built In the heart of the galaxy.The construction of the starport constitutes part of the ambitious Distant Worlds II expedition.
Project leader Erimus Kamzel told the media: “The Distant Worlds fleet is privileged to be at the forefront of this ambitious industrial and scientific initiative – humanity’s first starport in the Galactic Centre region.”
Independent miners are invited to deliver shipments of Indite, Gallite, Praseodymium and Cobalt to Omega Mining Operation in the Omega Sector VE-Q b5-15 system.

One of the “Big Deal” things about Elite: Dangerous is the way that the devs do tend to be pretty supportive of the player base.[1] In this case, although the expedition itself was a purely player driven initiative, they agreed to have a pair of community events, which would culminate in the building of a brand new starport right in the centre of the galaxy. Having arrived at Omega Mining station, the first stage of this was to take place. We were sent to mine vast quantities of ore.  This presented a minor problem, as all our ships were outfitted for exploration, but luckily the foreman at Omega Mining had ordered in plenty of mining modules so the fleet could refit and set off with collector limpets (the little blue things flying around the ships) and mining lasers to collect the required materials.

It was during this time that I learned how to do core mining. There is little more satisfying a thing than to see carefully laid charges detonate and explode an asteroid into smithereens. Especially as the more valuable minerals often lie inside such rocks. I’m not entirely sure it was, in fact, worth the trouble as finding the right kind of asteroid is a real pain in the arse and once you’ve found it, it’s quite easy to mess up the placing of the charges, either not enough or too much explosive and you end up with a pretty poor result. Still, those explosions are pretty.

Of course FDev entirely underestimated the amount the fleet would mine and had to extend the scope of the event in double quick short order to prevent the entire thing being completed in just a couple of hours. In the end, this event became pretty much the largest one in Elite history with so many dedicated Commanders funnelling goods into the mining station.

During this week, we also went on a little side trip to observe some of the life forms in the area. I could overuse the word strange in this paragraph, so shall limit myself to the one use here – strange anemones on planets and in the Lagrange Clouds clusters of microbes forming into huge (and I mean bigger than my ship) geometric shapes. Of them all, perhaps the most bizarre was this free flying jellyfish creature. It was hard to get a decent picture of it as it moved so fast across the screen, but pleasing as it’s really the only life form I’ve seen which moves apparently under its own power, rather than being planted stationary onto the surface of a planet or just floating in space.

I hope you’ll enjoy this gallery of highlights from the week.

[1] From the whining on the forums, you might think otherwise, but anyway

“Stage 1: Laying the foundations for Galactic Core scientific studies, revisiting mysteries of the
past, and trailblazing the new age of discovery.

This will take the fleet from the bubble, out to the near edge of the Conflux where our first
mining-based community goal will take place. Once complete, we’ll continue to explore the
mysteries of the Conflux and visit some of the locations of lore.

We’ll be relatively close to some outposts so those new to long distance events will have ample
opportunity to regularly cash in their exploration data, stop for repairs, and have a chance to
refit or rethink their ships and loadouts before the expedition turns coreward and leaves all
remnants of human infrastructure far behind.”This leg began the trip. We had spent some time prior to the departure date running around the inhabited bubble of space, an area which now seems tiny, insignificant and as I am now writing this less than 10000LY from Beagle Point, a very long way away indeed. We needed to outfit the ship with the right modules for the trip and having done that, visit various engineers to get the modules upgraded for our build.

This presented an interesting conundrum. In order to get the most range we could, we wanted the lightest possible (meaning smallest possible) modules. This put us on the edge of what some of the modules (such as engines!) could manage, and the ship couldn’t actually take off with the stock module. Thus we were in the catch 22 situation of needing to get the parts engineered, so we could operate the ship, but needing to operate the ship to take the parts to the engineers. In the end this meant purchasing a lighter weight hull and fitting the stock modules to that. This meant we could at least get to the engineers and have the parts uprated. We could then transfer the uprated parts from the small ship back onto the Dragon’s Quest, which now could operate as we needed.

Thus came January 13th, perhaps not the best choice of date for anyone with triskedephobia, the fleet assembled in various oversubscribed instances ready for a grand countdown to start the trip. A destination system for the fleet’s first jump was agreed upon and we all, several thousand of us counted down the seconds to the start, warming up the jump engines and chatting excitedly as we watched the clock.  3… 2… 1…. JUMP!!!

And the thousands of Commanders hit their jump drives as one and as one, Frontier’s servers hiccuped, grumped and crashed under the pressure. We had, with our efforts, killed the servers. It’s interesting to note that this was just the first launch, the European contingent. Later launches (per timezones) for the American and Antipodean fleet did not manage to kill the servers. Amateurs.

This stage was totally training wheels. A jaunt from one part of occupied space to another. Whilst there aren’t quite so many ports here on the edge of the bubble, there’s really no shortage of places to stop if you do get into any kind of trouble need repairs. This leg was simply an exercise in covering some distance, getting to the asteroid base at Omega Mining Operation to participate in the first community goal and it was simple enough.

The heavy gravity at “The View” caught a lot of inexperienced pilots by surprise and a few ships got written off causing Commanders to need to restart their trips. My own technique for heavy gravity landings got some tweaks here too. In the end it was a popular location for the Fleet Mechanics arm, by now going by the moniker “Hull Seals” (in homage to the ever ready “Fuel Rats”) to offer repair services to those, who landed heavily enough to cause damage, but not so badly as to explode on impact.

We enjoyed a number of sights both weird and wonderful on this stage, some of which can be seen in the slideshow below. Thor’s eye stands out, quite beautiful as massive O-class star and a black hole. Some cartographers, including myself, consider it to have been misnamed – the Norse God who lost an eye was Odin (not Thor). We also found bark mounds, our first alien life form of the journey. Although we had encountered the barnacles and bases of the Thargoids, along with the ancient ruins of the long dead Guardians (two known sentient alien races), we had not seen any other alien life before and were terribly excited. Unfortunately, our excitement at finding life signs in this part of the galaxy soon waned, as we quickly grew tired of finding more and more colonies of bark mounds, to the exclusion of all else.

Initially we were travelling (more or less) with CMDR Fox McCloud, piloting the Krait MKII “Dark Zen Drifting”. Sadly as time went on, real life caught up with Fox and he had to drop out. Hopefully we’ll be able to fly together again soon.

Click on the below slideshow for larger pictures (and open those in a new tab for the full size originals).

So what is this Distant Worlds nonsense. I’ve been flapping my lips about it to everyone, so a brief summary is required.

One of the things one can do in the game of Elite: Dangerous is explore. The galaxy as created in the game has some 400 billion stars and only a tiny proportion in a small area of the Inner Orion Spur (“the bubble”) is inhabited. The rest of the galaxy is unknown and largely uncharted, save for those brave individuals who head out into the black and bring back information about the stars, planets and other, stranger things, to be found way out there. (And making a good chunk of money from selling the data!).

In 3302 (game years correspond to real years, 3302 was 2016, 3305 is 2019) an expedition was organised where a large group of commanders would coordinate to explore some of the far reaches of the galaxy. Well, three years later with the advance of technology, longer jump ranges (and let’s be honest, some interesting additions FDEV made to exploration in a big patch) it was decided to repeat the exercise, but on an even grander scale. In the end, perhaps 15,000 individual Commanders (players) set off on an expedition to explore and map systems from the bubble to the farthest reaches of the opposite side of the galaxy. On the way, they would engage in mining operations, gathering materials so that a space station could be constructed just a couple of light years from the mega black hole at the very centre of the galaxy.

So here’s what I’m going to do, in order to do justice to a large chunk of time I spent doing a thing I really loved and indeed am still doing.

I was going to just write up the one post and summarise the whole business, but instead what I plan to do is to write up, a bit at a time the journey, perhaps in lumps that correspond to the different stages and waypoints of the journey.  I mean this is already a long long post and I’ve not even left yet!

I’ve installed a plugin especially for this so I can upload a lot of very pretty pictures and have them display in some (as yet undetermined) pretty gallery format as I have a LOT of screenshots and it will be nice to have them somewhere I can easily look over in posterity.

It’s actually quite amazing the amount of hours of my life over the past have gone into this project. Even before the departure date on January 13th, there was much preparation to do.

It was quite easy to decide what ship to use. My Anaconda, the Dragon’s Quest was the best choice, if a boringly predictable one. With the right engineering, the Anaconda can run a huge jump range or with a bit more compromise, a still large jump range, with a lot of extra modules installed. Not that I’ve used my fighter much, but it’s been nice to have when I did. Similarly, I was planning to have the capacity to repair and refuel the fleet if required and the necessary limpet controllers and such were required for that. No other ship could give the same combination of range and flexibility. Still, by far and away the largest single ship choice was the Anaconda, so yes it was the boring, if correct choice.

It would be appropriate at this point to mention Commander Cyrilynn (aka Trish) my partner in crime for this whole business. Without her encouragement, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t have embarked on this enterprise, but she was keen to see what we could find out there and committed to keeping me company throughout the boring empty spaces, as well as the exciting new finds. She may well not be flying the ship, but she has spent as much time as I have on this project, playing vicariously via streaming media, watching over my shoulder in a virtual way and acting as encouragement, company and secretary as required. She has not only been a vital part of my journey, but the story of the gaming grandma who can’t quite manage the controls, but wants to be part of the event has touched a few people in the fleet, with the result that she is considered a member of the event in her own right, a ship commander with her own entry on the roster of participants. 

All of which sums up a preamble to what will likely be a lot of words on this subject, in (I hope) smaller chunks from now on.