ELITE DANGEROUS: Fantastic!

Are some of you out there in the Elite Dangerous Universe?
Bought it in december and really love it. Travelling around systems and the whole galaxy is fulfilling.
Look at the pictures I took (with outside camera): 
ED Images


Two little fighting scenes (well, not very very exciting, I know...): ED Vids

See you in Elite-verse

bought this a couple of weeks ago. not doing much, great time waster with exploration.

atm doing a tour of neutron stars and other exotic things en route to monoceros V616 (and eventually X-3 though i dont doubt others have been there before); sporting an exploration fitted viper MKIV (21ly jump range, ~150-200 ly fuel tank, adv scanner, etc).

point of interest - quite a few ideas mulled for the moonbreakers clone appear in this game. flight assist, boost, weapon hardpoint mechanics specifically. good to know they're considered good ideas by others too

but yes. this is definitely a decent game overall imo. it's kind of meant for VR and the controls reflect this, to a point where you're almost at a disadvantage with SI without actually being able to "look around" with your head (eg, you can't watch contacts like you could in EVE while still doing your thing, unless you snap your head there and back quickly). at the same time it's not a huge deal, talking really edge-grade differences in outcome.

lastly, only one complaint - landing on planets is DLC you have to pay for separately, even though theres more and more content added to the game that depends on surface-exclusive content (crafting, engineering). this is the 'horizons' expansion.

Glad you like ED!
I'm travelling to the veil nebula right now and scanning whatever I can. The views are amazing, the feeling of distance is unbeatable
I'll start fighting more when the exploring fever is over. Then it will probably make sense to upgrade to horizons with all the engineer-options (weapon and shield mods....).
About the landing: I simply prefer flying around and exploring. IMHO landing on planets, who are mostly stones, sand and dust eats up too much time and doesn't really give too much satisfaction.

If you only want to fight you can buy the elite dangerous arena option which is very low priced. But gameplay there I think is a bit more cumbersome than moonbreakers.
See some screenshots on my way to the veil nebula...

nice!

ill post some pics of where i've been here tonight - dont have much but i do have a few from a trip to antares' supergiant - even at 1400ls distance it still eats up the entire screen

neutron stars distort the background (was hoping they might) but i'm still waiting to see a BH up close. most recently i've exited the synuefe area, in the vicinity of a few neutron stars roughly 100-200ly above orion nebula, on my way to a BH in orion dark region.

finding a lot of unclaimed systems this close to 'home' along the way - atm around 1,000 ly from sol.

also. for exploration, since you're mostly in supercruise and don't need to maneuver (just steer really) i'm being lazy and made kb-only controls.

lastly i've had a quick look at some 3rd party galaxy maps - some show where the bulk of player exploration has been done, which if accurate says most people have fanned out about 1500 ly from home but otherwise have mostly gone either towards (and beyond / around) the galaxy center or exactly opposite and away from it. i'm also aware of the fact that if you just fly towards galaxy center, there are a couple of pockets with a lot of atypical astronomical objects.

going by that im scouting for new things elsewhere lol - to the sides, and as far out of the way as possible.

i'm aiming to explore 1,000 to 10,000 systems before heading back. i'm estimating that that many should, in theory, earn enough exploration monies to play around with combat a while (in a new ship ofc as this one is serving me well)

exploration does fetch a good price, if you're patient. a trip to synuefe / wregoe areas (while trying to reach that unreachable black hole in orion dark region), 3 pages worth of cartographics, earned around 3.4 mil. not too bad. black holes and neutron stars are where the money's at, if you want to cover as much ground as you can (of course scanning planets as you go) - these are giving me around 40-60k each depending on their size or other scanned properties.

and they make for some decent screenshots, below is eskimo nebula at a distance of ~130 km from the hole. funny though, that you can park next to one that close and not be sucked in

i've also found a systematic way of finding NS / BH's - look for B-type and O-type stars, they frequently (compared to other types) seem to have non-main-sequence companions. and then there's systems like HIP 63835 which are a clusterf*** of awesome.

i'm using that method to carve a path of bookmarks towards Sag-A*, taking a detour into statue of liberty nebula first. there's a cluster of heaps of NS & BH's about 3500 ly from sol in that direction, can't miss that opportunity... the whole trip i'm planning here is easily 2000+ jumps.



PS.

Cyg X-3 is not possible to reach i believe. looking at nearby stars and where it is on the map, you can get within 5000 ly of it probably but i can't find a clear path to it. the one method for reaching such a star that i know of would be a one-way trip assuming the game even allows this - supercruise as close as you can to make the distance smaller. but at best that'd shave off 10-20 ly because of limited fuel tanks... unless someone can prove me wrong on that?

PPS.

i found an area that's a gold mine for exploration. (can pm where this is if anyone wants, won't publish publicly). it's..... pant-ruiningly dense with neutron stars and black holes. it takes up at least 12 sectors, that i could see so far, and of what i saw of it it has enough systems like this to easily fetch 300 million in scans just passing through (well, if you stop at each one on the way, im sure plotting through it will still avoid most of them, probably, i havent checked what else is there).