“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).