Month: June 2020

Books ! And a little bit of buggying around

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June 30, 2020

10:13 pm

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Hello everyone,

I feel tired ! Dunno why, haven’t exactly been doing that much. Perhaps it’s lack of sleep, or my body getting used to not doing very much. I’ll be out of the house soon though, for more than just stocking up the cupboards again.

Also been doing book … Not just one book as well but two ! Let’s see. It should be through the Google thing by now :

Actual paperback. Perhaps rare in this era of ebooks and Kindles … Signed by the author too :

Big nod. (Yes, that’s my thumb). This was a case of seeing a sequel to a book I’d already read and enjoyed and being content to pay a little more than e-book price in order to support that local bookshop and to get one with a little, superficial aye, extra.

What’s the book about ? It’s the sequel to Embers of War, which sets up this world by introducing the setting and characters which include the spaceship at the centre of this trilogy, the Trouble Dog. After being required to undertake an atrocity that ended a war, she retired from naval service and joined the House of Reclamation, an organisation dedicated to rescue and preservation of life. This middle book sees the Trouble Dog and crew embark on another rescue attempt, this time to jump into the unknown to rescue a ship of salvagers who came a cropper when they attempted to do a bit of illegal salvage on a wandering generation ship.

Oh and all hell is breaking loose in the galaxy while this is going on. I don’t want to say too much more about the plot cos it’ll spoil both this book and the previous book but …

I love the Trouble Dog, she’s a ship with attitude and an avatar that combines smart, tough, sassy and resourcefulness. The book swaps between various characters, with its 400 pages broken up in to 83 chapters which each focus on a central character. The Trouble Dog is the star of her own chapters.
As is Nod, an alien of the Druff race which are innately brilliant engineers. Every ship has a Druff engineer that keeps the ship going. They’re utterly alien, written expertly by the author and lend a welcome change of perspective to the books.
And I like the rest of the human characters too, who all have their own driving characteristics, mental flaws, issues and other quirks that make them and keep them interesting.

This one is very definitely a Middle Book and as such it moves the general plotline on considerably. It doesn’t give an end, Embers of War is definitely the beginning and … I got the last book in the queue to read. I’ll be looking forwards to that one as much as I am looking forward to reading Absolution Gap.

The second book was Artificial Condition, by Martha Wells and it’s book 2 of the Murderbot Diaries. The first comment that always comes out about these books is … HOW MUCH ? The price is a bit too inflated for my liking at £6 for essentially a novella. Still, this one and All Systems Red (book 1) were both captivating reads. The central character just goes by their self given name, Murderbot. They’re a former SecUnit (Security Unit) that’s gone rogue. Except all they want to do is have a chance to peacefully watch as many entertainment serials that they can.

It doesn’t work that way though, so Murderbot ends up on adventures that have gone from pure survival and a start in figuring out the events that made them go rogue. Cos they didn’t just go rogue originally, they were involved in the death of all of the humans in the place it happened.

I’ll be back for more of the Murderbot Diaries. They’re a fun read. Bit quick … but that also means that it’s tight writing that rattles the story along without any more padding than is necessary to tell you what’s going on in Murderbot’s head.

Recommended – both books.

Buggying around ? Internet Spaceships again ! Gotta admit, I’m having to be a little careful with play time because my hand and shoulders are bugging me again but it was good to get back to the populated bubble again and have a little explore. I left it last time at the Hawkins Gap Bases (the spelling is horribly inconsistent I know).

This was a good one to fly by … It’s a ringed planet lit by the local neutron star.

The end of this journey took me to Cortes Base, which has been adopted by a race circuit for intrepid fighter pilots and maybe by pilots of the little ships too. I may have to check that out. I took the buggy in there …

I found a couple of issues along the way, This is a dome on the outside of the base where the foundations don’t quite reach to the ground. I’m actually ok with this, although it reveals some of the magic around how these planetary bases are generated and built in the game. A couple of glitches are ok.

I never gave the birds eye view ! There we go, on approach.

This was the way in and … you may be able to detect another glitch. The ramp doesn’t reach quite all the way to the ground. That’s ok, I had jet boosters let me jump up there :-D. Little bit of creative use of a jump ramp maybe but it was still good to get in there.

And have a little look around. Click for bigger on these by the way.

One fun thing is that the scale is all good. The bases are massive … and in scale. Those windows up there genuinely look like a floor high each and the ground floor doors to that hangar building are scaled correctly for the rover.

Lots to explore too.

Bit quiet out there in the streets … I might have got there a bit late, their time.

Couldn’t get in to the actual base though.

Lots to see in there.

It was getting time for me to put the game to bed as well though …

Another peek from a safe distance and then it was time to be off and make a proper landing.

Outside of the internet spaceships, I’ve been working on a Dwagon Alphabet. I have most of the letters now, although it’ll take a fair bit of tweaking time before I’m happy with them all. People like them though. The first one was a Happy Birthday message for someone which I hope she enjoyed … and then more Dwagon Letters have sprung up from there as I produce them. I’m a fan of the Clip Studio application that I’ve been using, it makes the drawing and editing with the tablet happen very easily.

I think that’s it for tonight though. Stay safe, be well, steer clear of the internet if it’s causing you grief (lots has been coming out into the public eye lately, much of it unhealthy).

Dwagon Alphabet will come later but for now … out take from the excursion !

Landing Autopilot’s been sniffing the rocket fuel again.

Toasty !

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June 24, 2020

8:47 pm

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Summer’s arrived over here …

Yep. Check out the thermometer.

That’s one of my fridge magnets, in the kitchen which is on the sun facing side of my house at this time of day. It won’t be that hot in my main room but according to my graphics card, it’s still about 6 degrees C above normal.

Toasty indeed !

Lots going on in the world again, after a few stories erupted over the social medias this weekend. I’m not going to go into those though, the stories of the people who have taken steps forward on social media are their stories, it’s not for me to retell them.

But … believe and support, that’s what we must do.

Our virus situation over here in the UK seems to be easing and the lockdown is steadily lifting. Part of me thinks that’s about a fortnight too early though. Lots of people are still getting the virus and loved ones are still being lost.

It’ll be good to head out for shops, wanders, chats with friends and doing cinemas again but a lot of me thinks it’s still a bit soon. I have been seeing the sights in other ways though … but I’ll get to the internet spaceships later.

I’ve been enjoying a new toy/tool. It’s called Clip Studio, it was recommended by the lovely Tashnarr (see link in right hand column) and it’s another drawing package. I seemed to get on with it far better than I do with Gimp (this one feels like it wants to fight you) and Corel Painter Essentials (this one made it awkward to do revisions). Clip Studio made it super easy to produce a reasonably complicated message for someone’s birthday on Monday (happy birthday again!) and I’ve since embarked on a crusade to make a Dwagon Alphabet. More on that in a later post. It’s a bit toasty at the moment to make an L dwagon, which is the letter I need to make a Sleepy. (need a few more too)

Internet spaceships ?

The travels at the weekend took me to a black hole … (As always, click for bigger)

I’m a bit away from the Core now, so there aren’t quite as many spectacular stars around unless …

You find just the right angle … That”s the nebula seen through the black hole.

I did a bit more circling … until the galaxy ribbon was lined up.

And looking backwards towards the black hole. It wasn’t just black holes though …

Shiny planets !

More volcanoes.

Mysterious satellites …

Are we allowed here ?

I investigated a group of 4 abandoned planetary outposts …

With treasure ! I do like how the galactic ribbon is shooting out of that promontory in the background too. Like a Space Cannon.

It’ll be good to have a look around these places when the upcoming (next year) walk on planets expansion is released.

Time to move on though. I docked up at one of the fleet carriers overnight (and accidentally repaired the paint – oops !)

Today’s short session saw me checking out the Goliath moonlet …

And landing for the night on the David moonlet. This is a pair of moons with very tall mountains … I’ll have to see if I can get a pic closer to the horizon in my next session so that the gas giant comes out a bit more from behind the two mountains in the distance.

That’s it for this week though. Bit bad to leave it over a week between postings … I got back into the Idle Champions game which I think was having an effect on my mental condition. Brain was thinking more about strategies in that game instead of looking at the more fun creativity. I’ve put it away again now …

Stay safe everyone, be well. Support your friends when they need it.

Finding the Shiny Planets

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June 16, 2020

8:02 pm

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Hello everyone,

People have been saying very nice things about my internet spaceship screenshots lately so I had this idea that I’d say something about how I end up at the places where they happen … First up though, every journey has a start and this was how I logged in today :

I’m going to keep the pictures small today cos there are going to be quite a few … As always, click for bigger. It was nice to see the planet in the background there. The first thing to do is to have a destination in mind … and I’ve been using the Kamd site to give me ideas for places to go :

All those extra tabs again 😀 Here’s a link to Kamd. Pop in your start, drop in your intended destination (Ross 1047 has a planetary base with a buggy racing circuit apparently) and give it your ship’s jump range and how far you’re prepared to go off the straight course home. 20 jumps is a bit silly but I am taking a scenic route back. The button that says “EDSM Info” will tell you things about interesting places along the way. For this trip, I bypassed the Necropolis Chasm because it didn’t look interesting and set a route for the Smokehole.

As you go along the route, you’ll jump in at the stars along the way. A quick “honk” of the system discovery scanner and you get an idea of what’s there :

Have a peek in the top right. 2 objects is barely anything, so this system saw me looping around the sun for my next hop and not bothering to check out the system any further.

The top right display says that the next system has a G class star, which means it’s worth checking out. The game leans a lot on real space astronomy, with models for all of the stellar object types in our galaxy. Most of those will be Main Sequence Stars :

(Image attribution link – this came from the Wiki page)
The main sequence goes from O through to M class stars depending on their luminosity. The O end are the younger and more intense stars (My astronomy might be a bit dodgy here), the M end are stars that are nearing their old age. Saying that though, O will burn fast and bright, M burns slow and dimmer and usually outlast the more keen stars. The vertical scale there is Magnitude, big is higher up. (Best to look at the wiki page !)

What it means for planets is that stars around the middle have a greater chance of having the interesting potentially life bearing planets. Our own star is a class G2V star, which means it’s in the middle of the Main Sequence and average size for its luminosity. Our planet happens to be at just about the right distance from the Sun to make conditions on the surface compatible with our kind of life.

The game knows this science too and includes it in the Stellar Forge engine it uses to turn newly discovered star systems into something that makes sense in our universe. I’ll pay special attention to F, G and K type stars. Back to our G type star that we dropped in at ! What’s there ?

24 objects means that it’s worth checking out a bit more. To do this, you use the Full Spectrum Scanner. Think of this as a series of telescopes and sensors that take in the light coming from the objects in the system and from that, the systems can work out whether it’s rocky, got metal, made of ice or something more interesting like a gas giant or the much more valuable water and earth like worlds. This owes its inspiration from a real technique called spectroscopy that astronomers use to give a crude (it’s the best our instruments can do!) approximation of what planets around other stars are like.

That’s what the Full Spectrum Scanner gives you – the thing to look at is the scale near the bottom. It gives you a much better idea of what’s there. I have it tuned to Metal Rich bodies there, which are valuable planets to find. If there aren’t any Metal Rich, High Metal, Water Worlds, Earth Likes or Ammonia Worlds present, I’ll quickly move on. As it happened, this was a reasonable system to find.

One thing I’ll look for are moons around planets that I can land on (the planets with the blue half circle around them). It’s nice to have something in the sky in shot as well as interesting surface features. As it happened though, this was a series of junk planets (Icy moons aren’t worth much) and they were too far out to check out. (The Ls is Light Seconds or distance)

On to the next system, this one only had Icy worlds. I immediately jump on if I find these.

On the other hand, jumping in to see spectral traces around there means stopping is a great idea because water worlds are pretty and shiny (and give good exploration pay out !) …

… Especially as I was the first one there, which means I get my Commander’s name on it ! So far, Elite pilots have found a little over 53 million systems, or 0.0133% of the galaxy.

This would have been a great place to stop and take pictures too, as it’s close to where you come in and orbits the water world.

That’s what you see if someone else found a place first.

Sometimes “LOTS of objects on scanner” can turn out to be :

Junk. Oh dear. Just icy planets again … although icy planets can still have nice things to look at if you take the time to scan them all.

Moving swiftly on to another system … Something that will pop up during scans is that “Refining scan…” in the top right, this means there are interesting surface features to have a look at. The various geysers and volcano things are surface geological features that will get picked up here. Something else of interest there is “Rotational Period : (Tidally Locked)”. This means that the same side of the body faces its parent at all times, just like our Moon has a dark side that we can’t see directly from Earth.

This is me lining up to have a closer look at my intended destination. Notice how I have the moon targeted and I’m heading straight for it (not for long!). I have the parent body vertically upwards from it. The plan is to circle the moon until the parent body is visible from the surface, it’s easier to plan ahead and line up so you don’t have to think about finding the parent body again.

So I’ve done a part orbit around the moon and I’ve probably got a bit lucky there with how close to the horizon the parent planet is. I’m on final landing approach here, heading for one of those interesting geological surface features. Slightly unfortunate that it’s dark, so I turned the night vision feature on. it helps to pick out a good spot to land.

And here we are !

The side of a ship is better to look at than its back end or front end (depends on the ship), so I’ll rotate around for a good angle before setting down. Lighting is one to think about too. The ships and SRV buggy both have headlights … and I’ll use those headlights to illuminate ship and SRV.

I’ll also hunt for craters, canyons, mountains … anything that looks interesting as I’m coming in for a landing.

The science bit helps in narrowing down the candidates a bit … cos the Stellar Forge thing that procedurally generates what you find has the science bit as part of its rules. But sometimes it’s just luckily finding something Pretty.

Gas Giants are great places to search around, because they’ll often have multiple moons that you can get in to shot. A gas giant with rings is even better … although those same planetary science rules mean that the moons are all in the same plane as the rings (zero inclination). You don’t see a ring, you see a line unless you’re really lucky and find a moon on an inclined orbit. The Full Spectrum Scanner will give you a preview of how a planet will look and whether or not it has anything in an inclined orbit around it.

I think that’s it for me for this post. If you’re an Elite Dangerous pilot reading this, good luck finding the Shiny Pretty Places to take great pictures of ! I hope this post helps you out there.

In the meantime, I’m checking out those hot things there overnight with marshmallows and popcorn :-D.

Stay safe, fly safe, be well ! And keep your eyes open for the Shiny Pretty Things.

Shenanigans and Shiny Things

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June 13, 2020

9:21 pm

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There are shenanigans afoot in the computing world …

Also shiny things in the sky :

What’s the shenaniganning ?

Turns out that some of the manufacturers of motherboards have figured out a way to trick the system in order to allow more wigglyamps to be shoved into processors in order to make them go faster. Beware both the reporting and the conclusions from it … The theory is that if the software in the motherboard reports one number and that number is too low, the software that governs automatic overclocking goes : I can drive this processor harder !

For this exploit, it’s the numbers that do voltage and current. The processor should only be given up to a certain limit there, any higher will make it go too hot … causing its life to be shortened. I quite liked getting 8 years out of my last processor !

Here’s numbers from my machine from just now. The science sums are turned off, so the numbers are for low activity :

(You may need to click for bigger …)

The crudely drawn arrow points to the suspect line … Apparently my machine is reporting that the processor is taking about half the power that it is actually taking. (the electrical input power will turn into heat and the heat has to be taken away – too much heat = crash and boom).

I think the sum is coming from the “Core + SoC Power” and “Core PPT” (Package Power Tracking). However, when I read the HWInfo page saying what the Power Reporting Deviation meant, there wasn’t enough there to say where it was coming from. Which makes me question its value and relevance.

The other terms there are “Core” – this is the bit that carries out the instructions. There are 6 of these on my processor. “SoC” is System on Chip, it’s the bit that connects the cores to the rest of the system. Gotta get the data in to them and the data out of them. This allows the instructions to tell the rest of the system what to do (changing the picture in the graphics card) and allows it to tell the memory and drives to feed it more data.

What do I think this actually means ? Not actually very much unless you trust your system to automatically overclock itself, as processors will do these days. I don’t believe in doing that, the automatic overclocking measures are usually intended for when the system isn’t doing very much (i.e. marketing numbers) and are meaningless when you’re running tasks on all cores, like I do with the BOINC Science Sums.

The more important numbers are the ones for temperature … and whether the system crashes or not. The computer will crash when either the temperature goes too high and the electronics can’t work thermally or when the signals are coming at it too fast and the switching isn’t fast enough. Processors are filled with transistors, which are tiny little switches. You can make them switch faster if you brute force more electrons through them.

Oh – I may have almost broken something yesterday evening as well … I was seeing if I could get more information out of the AMD Ryzen Master program and pressed one too many buttons …

My processor usually runs at around 50 degrees C on idle. It’ll go up to between 70 and 80 degrees C when it’s doing science sums (depends on ambient conditions too). I should probably actually fit the aftermarket cooler I have at some point but I’m happy with what the stock Wraith Stealth cooler does.

After clicking a button last night, while it was doing sums, the chip overclocked itself to 1.4V, 4.2GHz … and the temperatures shot up to 95 degrees C. Oops. And it didn’t crash ! I think I may have a pretty good cpu there if it survived that without crashing or other ill effects. It’s back down to the normal speeds of 1.1V, 3.6GHz.

The thing that matters with the overclocking is the temperature and whether the machine crashes or not. I’m taking a very dim view of my motherboard maker (who I won’t be recommending any more) using this software fiddle but I don’t think it actually means very much, unless you trust the automatic overclocking features … which you should never, ever use. It’s not worth it for small, inconsistent gains that shorten the life of the machine.

To the Shiny Things !

Tried putting the kettle on these geysers. The temperature was good but the lack of atmosphere makes the water boil off before the tea brews. There’s probably a way around that.

And a higher shot. I made a little error here because in chasing the geological geyser formation, the nebula ended up a bit too high. (If you drive the camera drone thing below the surface, it blacks out the screen)

I did a bit more neutron star boosting along the way, this is the Tea and Medals about to dive in to that jet cone in order to get a boost.

More nebulae :-).

A planetary nebula poking out from behind a gas giant.

 

I did like this one, it’s where I stopped on Thursday evening. Good shadows, an eclipse on the gas giant and it looks like they’ve added in some fogging too over there in the distance.

The nest stop was the Perimeter Nebula.

Today”s travels included the Perimeter Nebula.

Before heading off to the Damselfly nebula. Pretty and blue. The picture at the start of the post was taken at the neutron star inside that nebula.

The last place to visit today was the Child of Time nebula inside the Cloomeia sector. This one is another planetary nebula with …

Black hole ! This one is a tiddler black hole at just 3 solar masses. The game lets you get right up close, with this one being taken at 25km away. I’ll have a natter about spaghettification some time …

There are benign black holes and rather more malicious black holes. It depends on high big the black hole is, with the smaller ones giving worse spaghettification effects than the big ones. What is spaghettification ? It’s a difference in the force between the end of an objects that close to the black hole and the force at the end. When we stand up, there is a tiny difference in the gravity exerts on our toes and our head but it’s so small that it doesn’t matter. But if you’re close enough to a black hole, there starts being a massive difference between the gravity exerted between close and far … and the object rips apart due to differences in its weight. (Weight = Mass x Gravity with weight being a force)

I’ll probably go into that more at a later date when my brain is up to doing the numbers on it. Brain is still not quite where it should be !

Oh and I’m still loving the effects of what happens when you fly away from the black holes. The minimum speed with the hyperdrive on is 30km/s, which lets the lensing effect unfold in a rather pretty way.

Stopping point for the night – nice bit of sun there.

Last one, looking back at the companion star and the black hole will be up in the sky there. Not sure where 🙂

That’s it for me for tonight !

Stay safe, be well.

Black Music Matters Too

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June 8, 2020

9:57 pm

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Hello everyone,

I’ve been thinking about doing another music post for a little while and the current events have given me a bit of a theme to work with ! But first … thumbnail pic …

The formerly unnamed Dwagon Rock Band has another member. Actually it’s had another member for almost two weeks now but I haven’t felt up to doing any more on that project just yet. The name is likely to be Chromatic Fever, cos you know … metal and dragons ! May need to draw more colours of dragons and not just the green ones.

Actually, that digression takes me to mention another fella who uses dragons for his avatars, Aavak of the lovely voice that owes a lot to Welsh heritage. Great voice, lovely fella. Here’s a link to his Youtube, which will take you to the rest of his accounts.

But this isn’t supposed to be about streaming people, it’s about the great music. One issue I’ve always had with my music posts is that they always go to the same groups and singers. Like The Cardigans, All About Eve, Bat For Lashes, Tori Amos. Let’s have some different people who are just as awesome.

First up is Seal, who’s song Future Love Paradise was essentially the catalyst for this post when it took its turn on my iTunes. Seal has an amazing voice and he’s an expert at using it. This song is one of his best.

Next up is Massive Attack, a local band to the Bristol area. When I first heard Teardrop as a song (I think I’d heard it on adverts), I thought it was amazing. Pure magic.

Morcheeba’s been a fun band to listen to as well. Sometimes it’s ballad type songs, sometimes it’s more like rap, sometimes it’s lyrics that are there for fun. It’s diverse, it’s interesting. Here’s The Sea, sung by a wonderful Skye Edwards.

You can’t discuss artists of colour without going back to the classics and the originals. Nina Simone’s music will be unforgettable, timeless and always guaranteed to draw on the emotions. And get you singing along to songs like Here Comes The Sun.

And then there’s Aretha Franklin with Respect.

(Are you chair dancing while listening yet ? I am)

Ella Fitzgerald with another classic, Lets Fall In Love.

We have Nat King Cole with more Unforgettable songs. The older singers had a wonderful way of standing there and letting that music flow out for them in just a wave of beauty.

You’re probably noticing that these are tending to be older songs instead of current artists – that’s just me and the style of songs I like. Am old and like the older styles :-D. Nicki Minaj has added a lot to some recent Madonna albums but her usual stuff is too fast, too attack, not calming. So while I have some Beyonce in the library, she’s not someone I listen to much.

Not forgetting those utter wizards with their instruments, Lenny Kravitz had a string of amazing songs on Are You Gonna Go My Way and then there’s the legend that is Jimi Hendrix with my favourite of his, Voodoo Child.

I’m a lucky owner of a Sammy Davis Jr collection as well, now there is an incredible voice and apparently an even better dancer. This legend’s song can only be Mr Bojangles. Oh and The Impossible Dream which I remember first from when it was adopted for a fantastic Honda advert.

You have to mention Michael Jackson here too for his innovative contributions to dance and dance music. Smooth Criminal is a classic.

Moving on to Prince, who was a brilliant singer and an even better songwriter. You’ll have heard his songs sung by other bands and singers including Sinead O’Connor, The Bangles, Kiss, Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, Kate Bush … Here’s When Doves Cry.

I love Roberta Flack’s voice as well, here is the original Killing Me Softly With His Song.

I’m gonna finish on Seal again because he’s just so good. Another topical one to end on, Don’t Cry.

Actually no – this is the perfect song to close on. It’s Louis Armstrong with What A Wonderful World. Because despite all the trouble and strife, this is a wonderful world to have you, yes you reading this, in it.

Stay safe, be well and I hope you enjoyed these wonderful songs as much as I have while collecting them together. There are so many more songs too … but only so much room in a post. Find them, enjoy them !

Wanderlust to the Core again

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June 7, 2020

3:05 pm

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Hello again,

I’m in a bit of a “not quite sure which game” at the moment. Sometimes that’s because I’m not getting on with how some of the games play, sometimes it’s due to the latent RSI injuries that have been with me for a while now.

And then other times it’s because I get mysterious sudden twinges in my upper body ! Some definite random ouchies happening lately. Need to get out and about when conditions are right again. I need a thumbnail pic …

There we go. I did a Space again. I’m figuring out ways and means to get the better screenshots again. Some of the EDSM waypoints will take you into the heart of nebulae like the one above … but in that case you’re surrounded by colour or the nebula is too big to take in on screen. So what I was doing yesterday was seeing how far off the nebula I should be to get it all in one shot. I think that one worked.

Before I go much further though, check out this video from Wanderbots : Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. The bundle itself is at Itch.io at this link. There are only 9 days to go on it so it’ll be gone around 16th June (for those reading this later wondering why the link doesn’t work!). It’s a bundle for 742 games at a minimum of $5 cost. And from a quick scan, there are some crackers on there like Oxenfree, heard lots about Night In The Woods, Overland, games that catch the eye like 2000:1 A Space Felony.

I’ll probably sign up for that bundle as well over the next week.

To the spaceships ! I mentioned setting up for another Core speed run earlier in the week and on Friday afternoon/evening, I thought I’d go for it. Probably a good thing too because I’ve had a weekend of not feeling great mentally. I dunno, a mixture of tired (which doesn’t feel like it makes sense) and a lak of focus with not feeling like I want to throw myself into doing Stuff like doing a little more in The Outer Worlds.

So … to the Core ! The competition rules say that they want a picture at the start with the system clock on it :

There we go. A start time of 14.48.00 GMT. The challenge was to try and get there in time for ordering pizza, so a target of under 4 hours to get me there before 7pm server, 8pm UK. Pizza didn’t happen though because I didn’t feel like ordering it after I finished ! (Quick addon – here’s a link to the Frontier Forum post with more details)

One thing I noticed quickly was that Tea and Medals was running not just cool but downright cold ! Apparently the Dolphin ships are a bit unbalanced there. It meant I could start the hyperspace charging extraordinarily quickly which chopped some time off the run.

A big difference this time around was that I was using the Neutron Star Highway and the jump plotter at Spansh (link). What that gives you is a set of waypoints to follow on your way there :

(click for more readability and oh look more tabs in my secondary browser window …)

You pop in your origin and your destination, give it your jump range and how far off a direct line you want to go and it’ll give you the list of waypoints. Sometimes going off the straight lets you take advantage of more neutron boosts, which is important because a boosted jump takes you 4x the distance of a normal jump and you’re not always jumping the full distance because you can only jump from star to star. So if there aren’t stars conveniently placed apart at your jump range, you have to take more hops.

A couple of stats :
80% in the Dolphin plotted to 167 jumps and the other ranges were 152 jumps at 50%, 163 jumps at 60%, 154 jumps at 70%, 184 jumps at 90% and 476 jumps without deviating from straight (100%).
I think Warp Factor Potato (aka Tea-89) was capable of 51ly jumps, which worked out to 229 jumps at 80%.
Tea and Medals did the run in 3 hours 19 minutes 36 seconds (including a game crash in the middle!) and 183 jumps at an average of (25,900ly / 183) 141.5 light years per jump. You have to add a few extra jumps and pauses in to fill up the tanks because you can’t refuel at the neutron stars as well as on the spot repairs.
Warp Factor Potato took 6 hours 7 minutes over 411 jumps at an average of 63 light years per jump.

Being able to take longer hops leads to less jumps than you’d expect, although the Potato’s run was using the in game jump plotter with barely any reference to the Spansh plotter.

Enough stats, back to the pictures !

I may have been taking a few more liberties as well … If you look in the bottom right, there are two lines under “Fuel 1.61/h”. The top one is a reserve fuel tank for in system travel, the bottom one is fuel for the hyperdrive. You really shouldn’t be getting that low … With that amount remaining, I probably wouldn’t have been able to jump to a different star. This just needs a little planning though … In this case, after jumping through a series of neutron boosts, I selected a star to jump to that I knew I could fuel at.

Another condition is that you do the run in Open Play, where you’re in with all of the other players. I’m normally sticking to Solo.

And there we go ! Dropping out of hyperspace at the entry to Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. You should be able to make out the edge of the photon sphere eye around the blackness. One of the other conditions for the race is that you take a picture of the galaxy map when you arrive. This has a system clock time on it :

There we go. And …

A little bit of posing that’s gone on my Inara page. I didn’t stick around though, I still had ponderings of pizza.

Stopped at Explorer’s Anchorage overnight, which is just a couple of lightyears out from Sagittarius A*. I could pick up a planetary rover here for the trip back. I didn’t have one for the trip there because it drops a whole light year off your jump range, which is a big hit.

First stop was a system only 0.79 light years away from the big black hole. It’s the white fuzzy dot above my ship’s nose. (Not that one, it’s just above the top of the ship). I had a call for more math … what’s the gravity there ?

From a previous post, acceleration per solar mass is 1.327 * 10 ^ 20 / distance in metres squared.
(the 10 ^ 20 is how many zeroes are added – in this case, 20)
Sagittarius A* is 4 million solar masses so that pops the number up to 5.308 * 10 ^ 26.
You pop in to the system at 61 light seconds, or about 1.8 * 10 ^ 10m.
That makes the gravitational attraction at that point equal to 160,000 g. (divide acceleration in m/s/s by 10 to get g)
0.79 light years is (0.79 * 9.46 * 10 ^ 15m) 7.47 * 10 ^ 15.
So the gravitational attraction at my landing spot is a fairly minute 7.1 * 10 ^ -5 m/s/s or 7.1 micro g. That’s just under 1000 times of the Moon’s gravity on the surface of the moon. But ! Depending how I read what I’m looking at now, it’s either double or 20% of the Moon’s gravitational influence on Earth. If that planet rotates and had water, it would have tides from Sagittarius A*.

Just wanted to work that one out :-D. Science is fun.

Finding Pretty Space Things is also fun. This is the Hypio Orb Nebula. I’ve started naming the screenshots immediately so I have a reminder of where they came from.

One of the ongoing memes with Kolo is the tendency for the surface scanner to stop at 89% (if it hits 90%, that counts the whole planetoid as being mapped).

And there we go, view from the surface.

That’s it for me for today. Not sure if I’ll be gaming (I’ll open up The Outer Worlds shortly I think) much or just enjoying more of Fleet of Knives in a series by Gareth L Powell.

Stay safe, be well.

Tea, Medals and Thrawn

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June 3, 2020

9:23 pm

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Hello everyone,

I am currently between book … I know. The horror ! I think it’s going to be another one I haven’t read yet, Fleet of Knives by Gareth L. Powell. It’s the sequel to Embers of War which I felt took time to get going … but was a worthy read.

I mentioned A Big Ship At The End Of The Universe in one of the discords the other day too, that one had a great combination of spaceships and magic within. I’ll be reading the next in line of that after it goes on sale again. (If you’re not in a rush to buy stuff, wait ’til it gets cheap … and then you can buy more for less !)

Oh ! Good news.

Bookbarn is opening up again in a few weeks. Hopefully that’s good news and not something happening too early, considering virus ! Their cafe won’t be opening up again just yet though.

(I should note at this point that I just spent a minute or two asking Google for “cute dragon reading a book” for the thumbnail before realising that I’d drawn a dwagon reading a book)

Book !

I finished reading Thrawn by Timothy Zahn last night. This is a prequel book, set in the Star Wars universe again. The timeline probably stretches around 20 years, between the Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope and it follows two Imperials Thrawn and Eli Vanto. A third recurring character pops up later.

An interesting book, especially in these times where racism and prejudice has become so visible again. Thrawn is an alien, of the blue skinned, red eyed Chiss race. He was first seen in Star Wars books for the 3x Heir To The Empire books, where Grand Admiral Thrawn is the main enemy protagonist. He’s a master tactician and strategic genius and this book sees him rise through several scenarios which steadily bring out that genius … and how the Empire around him reacts to it.

The Empire is not quite as bad with the racism as our world currently is but the prejudices shown by the human Core World citizens are a recurring theme through the book. It does this extremely well. You have Thrawn as the alien being subjected to the treatment, not totally understanding it at first … and you have Eli Vanto who knows exactly what’s going on, being an educator to both the reader and to Thrawn.

Oh and there are shenanigans going on throughout and because it’s Timothy Zahn, who has a fantastic grasp of what you can get away with in Star Wars, the situations are totally believable. (Unlike certain recent movies !)

If you’re interested in the expanded Star Wars universe books, I’d totally recommend this one. The Heir to the Empire trilogy (and later Spectre / Vision books) have been wiped away from Star Wars canon but this one remains, courtesy of Thrawn appearing in Star Wars Rebels. I’ll read the Heir to the Empire books again at some point, they are far superior to the new movies in terms of story.

Tea and Medals ?

After markedly increasing the credit balance with the internet spaceship known as Grabnarr, I was looking for something a little different again. The above ship is the Tea and Medals, a Dolphin class passenger carrier exploration ship. That picture was as she was being fitted out …

Before travelling over to Galileo Station in orbit of the Moon …

Poised and ready for another speed run to the galactic core. I’m hoping for a 4 hour time for this run and that’ll be aided by a 20% higher jump range and I’ll be using a different way of plotting the route. I.e. I’ll be making much more extensive use of the Spansh neutron star jump plotter (link). For the Cobra Mk3 run, I only made about 5 course updates, trusting to the in game jump plotter much more. This trip should be more like 180 jumps.

Spansh says 167 jumps with a bit of wiggliness (efficiency to 80%, 60.7ly jump range), that would be 476 with the direct route … Neutron star boosting helps a lot. I’ll be targeting 180 jumps for the trip, although it’ll be more than that. The neutron stars allow you to jump 4x the distance … but you need fuel which gets scooped from main sequence stars (like our Sun).

Tea-89 took 413 jumps with a decent amount of neutron boosting along the way. I did like Tea-89.

That might happen at the weekend. The speed run has to be done in one shot, so I really don’t want to attempt it after shutting the work laptop down for the evening. It also depends on how my hands and neck are doing too … they’re not really happy with me at the moment.

But I’ll survive there. Just means more excuses to read books instead of playing games !

Stay safe, be well.