Author: Sleepypete

So I left yesterday’s post with a picture of the Searching For Biscuits, landed at a space port …

I had a chance to do a little more flying around yesterday, following a new expedition route.

This route has nebulae … lots of them. I’m hoping to find some amazing screenshots from this route. As always, click for bigger. Most of these are in 1440p from the game, although there’s a reduced hi-res one later.

About that one though, I’d been looking for a Voyager Surfs The Rings shot for a little while now. If you’ve watched Star Trek Voyager, you’ll know the shot I mean, it’s from the intro sequence. A rather fine intro sequence too, although flying through the rings like that is kinda vandalism. You can’t do the astronomic vandalism in Elite but you can acquire some very pretty screenshots. In this case, there’s an asteroid base tucked inside one of those inner rings. More later.

I did 3 stop offs on the route yesterday and found things more mysterious than nebulae …

What is this ? A crashed ship ? Looks like a Cobra Mk3, the ship of the first game. Investigating further, you find various logs from the pilot. Who could it be ?

It’s a little faint but the word Jameson emerges from the dark … (That’s the default name from the ancient BBC B game and there’s a fair bit of game lore built up around him).

Turns out there is various skullduggery going on. The story goes that our Commander Jameson was dispatched on a mission to protect human space by planting a virus that disables the hyperdrives of the Thargoids, preventing them from using faster than light travels. Except …. the virus doesn’t just target the equipment, it targets the life forms too. Skullduggery indeed. Our nameless, faceless skullduggers go even further, by planting a bomb on Commander Jameson’s Cobra Mk3, disabling all power systems and stranding him on this desolate, airless planet.

It’s great when lore like this finds its way into the game. You get the impression that there is an absolute tonne of stuff to find.

Also bases, carved out of rocks in the rings surrounding the gas giant, with a great view overlooking the Hind Nebula. I found another mystery out there too :

A quiet, dead looking ship going by the name of Alcatraz. A prison ship apparently … and crippled by an attack by unknown forces.

You may spy the words “Cell Block” around there. I wasn’t going to get too close. But. What’s this ! The computer announces “Frame Shift Surge Detected” and out pops a new object.

It’s small compared to Alcatraz megaship but you may be able to pick it out on the right hand side, just below the far end of the megaship. There was a scary moment as it pops out into real space, as the surge makes the ship computer drop offline. Totally immobile, drifting, powerless, lightless. A definite enigma, with capabilities we don’t fully understand.

A closer look at this mysterious octagonal object that seems to fly around through pure anger at the presence of humanity in this system. Perhaps it still remembered the anger at what Commander Jameson’s mysterious masters attempted to do to its Thargoid ancestors. It allowed me to close and follow and while missiles from the megaship were bouncing off it, it allowed me to follow along without incident.

Time to move on though.

I’ve actually been to this station before. It’s the Witch Head Nebula science station, in the rings of another gas giant. A quite beautiful sight with a very white looking gas giant and very bright rings. One thing I missed with the trading and combat interludes was how pretty this game can be when you’re getting out and about.

On to the next destination and we see the Orion Nebula, albeit somewhat occluded by the rings of another gas giant.

And another view, this time of the other side of the nebula emerging from above the ring.

That was it for Sunday’s investigations. Maybe more tomorrow. We shall see !

Last post for today … sometimes the screenshots don’t go quite as planned :

This was an attempt at a high res special screenshot of the Searching For Biscuits closing in on the central node of the Alcatraz in order to scan for communications logs. The high res screenshots work by rapidly capturing many images to build up a higher resolution whole. For my set up, the standard 1440p screenshots become 5760p, or 16 times the pixels. (4×4). Except sometimes it doesn’t quite work … I suspect being inside the gas cloud messed up the lighting and you should be able to see the resulting patchiness.

Still, it was a good interlude, hanging around while the Thargoid Medusa Interceptor had a good look around the megaship. And a fun session too.

I saw a tweet earlier that sparked a thought or two …

It was from Think Defence and it was asking “Any suggestions on the best names for the new RN mini frigates ?”

Not that one. That’s a curious looking ship though, wonder if it’s still available ?

There it is. New ship design, just announced. It’s the Type 31e, following the Arrowhead 140 design which is based on the Dutch Iver Huitfeld design. So a similar shape and insides and then we’ll tailor it to the equipment and systems of working that we want to put in it.

Looks tidy. But there’s a difference to “it looks nice” and it being able to go anywhere, kick butt and get out again. We’ll see what this one turns out like !

This post isn’t one to be about naval ship design though. This one is for the names !

The last ship of mine that I posted on here was the Black Sheep :

Seen there investigating the treasure trove of Dav’s Hope. The next one was “Strength of Atlas”, a Type 9 freighter put together for taking lots of cargo to a trading community goal.

She’ll be back out carrying more cargo for future community goal missions. The freighters aren’t much fun to fly though. They don’t turn, they orbit.

Effective for what they do though and they don’t need to be unlocked like the Imperial Cutter or Federal Corvette. The next ship was for combat :

An Alliance Crusader, going by the name of Goldie Runner. I’m using dog names as the theme for the Alliance ship names, so the first one was “sCRUFFY nEIGHBOURHOOD”. Yep. Forgot about caps lock and by then, the name was baked in and it’s bad luck to change it. Goldie was an athlete who loved to run fast… and I’ll think of something suitable for the Ben-ship at some point. The current ship is :

Searching for Biscuits. She’s an Orca class passenger ship (no passengers allowed) who will be going on a couple of short range exploration expeditions and I’m hoping to acquire some amazing looking screenshots.

But how about these new Navy ships ? The various ship classes have their names arranged by themes so :

At the moment, Duke class frigates with names like Richmond, Northumberland, St Albans.
Minehunters named after seaside towns like Grimsby, Penzance.
Destroyers with names starting with D like Daring, Dragon (like that one), Diamond.
River class patrol vessels like Mersey and Tyne.
City class Type 26 ships coming with names like Glasgow and London.

One of the reasons for the new City class names was to try and encourage recruitment by connecting the ship to a place to recruit from. Something like : “I’m a Glaswegian serving on HMS Glasgow and my pop helped build the ship.” That’s powerful.

But …. where to go for the next ships ? You could go a bit boring and safe and traditional with something like towns. As in, smaller population areas to go along with the cities. There are 5 of these planned so 5 names for each category.
Let’s see : Warwick, Chichester, Salisbury, Ramsgate, Bodmin. Safe, boring.
Battles : Britain, Normandy, Arnhem, Dunkirk, Tobruk.
Football clubs and stadia : Anfield, Stamford Bridge, Highbury, Old Trafford, Ashton Gate.

Pop culture is also incredibly powerful in the youth that the Navy want to recruit from. So let’s see …

Sci fi can be a goldmine of names. Enterprise is already taken (she’s a survey ship), so Defiant from Deep Space 9, (Millennium) Falcon from Star Wars, Rocinante from The Expanse, Prometheus from Stargate and Galactica (or Pegasus) from the Battlestar show. Pegasus is a great name for a ship.

And then there’s : Thundercat, Thunderbird, Dogtanian, Fireball, Stingray, Greyskull.

Not sure about those. And Emmerdale, Walford, Erinsborough, Benwell, Holby City.
Kent (got one already), Wayne, Oliver, Stark, Rogers, Xavier. (6 because Kent is taken already)

Some names are definitely better than others. AND WE HAVEN’T GOTTEN INTO GAME CULTURE YET !

From Warcraft : Proudmoore, Windrunner, Arthas, Thrall, Stormwind.
Halo : Spartan, Cortana, Keyes, Locke, Arbiter.
Not done with pop culture yet either : Anakin, Amidala, Ahsoka, Ackbar, Andor. (The A-class is already taken by submarines though).
There’s more : Tracer, Bastion, Hanzo (ship namers wouldn’t know the consequences), McCree, Winston.
Also : Wick, Breakpoint, Jaeger, Fyra, Revolt.

Addon – couple more :
Stokes, Archer, Cook, Atherton, Botham.
Lineker (perhaps no),  Beckham, Butcher, Pearce … and that’s all I got for footballers.
Wilkinson (would become the Sword), Warburton, Hastings, Johnson, O’Driscoll.

So many names. I’m probably disqualified from naming any ship though, after my current form. (Elite Fleet list is at the link). In my current save, I’ve gone through :
Starters : Money Spider, Undaunted, Dragonbug, Greater Dragonbug, Mini Magpew, Keela’s Wings, Dauntless and Mighty Magpew.
Explorer ships : Day Tripper, Searching For Tea, Chrissa’s New Potato and Searching for Biscuits.
Scavenger ships : Porpoise Prospector, sCRUFFY nEIGHBOURHOOD.
Fighty ships : Mostly Toothless, Commander Fuzzy, Captain of Elysium, Goldie Runner.
Tribute ships : Niki and Charlie, Kerr Avon Forever, Rage of Kashyyyk
Trading ships : Needs More Pewpew, Empire’s Bounty, Tortoise Beats Hare, Black Sheep and Strength of Atlas.

Naming things is fun.

May need a “Searching for Lego”.

This is going to be perhaps a bit of an indulgent post …

Last Test Match of the summer tomorrow ! Almost the last cricket … there’s this 5 day game at The Oval and then there’s T20 Finals day at Edgbaston, Birmingham the weekend after. Not sure where England are touring this year. (New Zealand and South Africa).

I have the Sky Sports cricket channel on at the moment, mostly because having the news channels on in the background gets too depressing. It’s muted though, music beats the sound of old cricket matches. I currently have a Kings of Leon track on and soon it’ll be the Sirius album by Clannad. (Fuzzy is also being happily addicted to a new game, GreedFall, on the laptop).

Anyway. The daft thought was …. what’s the best England side out of players that I’ve seen ? Let’s go.

These kinds of posts always have to have a restriction and this time it’s : This must be a player where I’ve watched a match they played in (on telly is ok), which puts the time region from around the mid 1980s.

Opening up the innings we have : Mike Atherton and Alastair Cook. You need resilience from the opening batsmen and that’s precisely what this pair are. The openers lay the foundation for the rest of the batting to pile on the runs. Atherton earned his nickname of “Iron Mike” and I think the Chef could have scored the most runs of anyone in Test cricket but there’s always a time that you have to call it a day. In Atherton’s case, he had a degenerative condition with his back, which forced him to stop. Cook had just had enough of it.

I missed a lot of Mike Atherton’s career though due to a) playing on the weekends … b) Sky taking the games off terrestrial and c) BBC having very little respect for the sport by showing pretty much anything instead of it. Of all the players, I wanted to bat like Atherton. (and bowl like Devon Malcolm but I was never as tall or quick !)

Number 3 needs a mix of that opening bat resilience and potential to turn that into attack. There’s always the chance that one or both of the openers just gets a really good ball so your No 3 needs to be able to stick around. Ricky Ponting did this expertly for a long time for Australia and did it exceptionally. But this isn’t about the Aussies. My number 3 would be Joe Root. Although don’t let him captain the side. He’s a bit off his game at the moment but when he’s on it, he’s exceptional.

Skipping ahead a little to number 7 and the wicket keeper … Apart from one I’ll come to in a minute, I have a pretty low opinion of pretty much all the England wicket keepers I’ve seen. Ben Foakes was excellent with the gloves but got found out with the bat. Prior was a nutter and his glovework could be very dodgy. Geraint Jones – no. Bairstow is an idiot who has poor glovework and has actually introduced flaws into his batting, he’s a worse player than before he started tinkering.

So who is the keeper ?

Sarah Taylor. She is an absolute legend. Her glovework has always been magical. You expect a wicket keeper to stop everything that gets past the batsman and get the occasional stumping and all of the catches. Taylor does that …. and then produces stumpings and catches that no one has a right to pull off. It’s amazing. And when she’s happy and on it, there’s an effervescent bubbly fun erupting from under the helmet that must be so infectious for the rest of the team. It’s better as a cricket team when you’re having fun, it means you’re doing well. Or it can lift the team into doing better. I used to be really noisy on the field, except when I went into injury survival mode or if I got put on the boundary where I’d get bored.

Sarah Taylor suffers from a quite crippling depression though, focused around perfectionism. I think she described it as “I got to number 1. I can only get worse from there.” That’s really, really tough to deal with as a player. I didn’t hit it like that but I had something different hit me with my bowling. When I could no longer bowl but saw really poor bowlers on my team, I would have very guilty thoughts of “I should be bowling, I am massively better than that and not bowling is making us lose the game.” I hated losing.

This is an amazing player. Even without the inspiration crazy amazing stuff she’ll pull off, she’s easily the best wicket keeper that I’ve ever seen. Saw Jack Russell too. She’s better. Bats really well too when on her game, classic form and crafty innovation.

1 – Mike Atherton, 2 – Alastair Cook, 3 – Joe Root, 7 – Sarah Taylor
(or Alec Stewart if I have to pick a bloke. Great keeper, a titan with the bat. I have huge respect for the attitude he had whenever I saw him play. He’s someone who you would instinctively rely on.)

My all rounder is Ben Stokes at number 6. He could get into any side as either batsman or bowler and regularly produces match winning performances in either role. A super dependable player, another one who hates not giving what he thinks he’s worth to the side. I rate him far ahead of Andrew Flintoff, who occasionally displayed his potential with the bat. Great bowler though. I only saw the last days of Ian Botham and he was struggling massively with back problems.

The spin bowler is Graeme Swann at 8. Another one with a winning attitude and that kind of attitude will carry along a cricket team. The kind of attitude that refuses to admit defeat until the scorebook says you lost. Anyway, Swann had a special technique where he bowled with overspin, which means the ball doesn’t just turn in to the right hander, it also hurries on a bit. Excellent for unsettling them and rushing the batsman into a mistake.

Opening bowlers have to include James Anderson. He’s England’s best bowler out of total merit, knowledge and craftiness. And you know what, Ian Botham, included as a bowler, also for skill and craftiness. When my action was having trouble as a result of basically forgetting my calibrations, watching Botham figure his action out helped me realign what I was doing and also to figure out new tricks.

I’m trying to think of an ultra fast assault with a deadly weapon fast bowler but I think Jofra Archer is the first 95+mph bowler I’ve seen for England. These guys make things happen when conditions are totally against the bowlers.

3rd seamer is Darren Gough. Not the tallest … but one of the most cunning. I suspect that with all of the new innovation that’s come into the game in the last 10 years, he’d have been even better now than when he played. That’s something important, the game has moved on since the days of Atherton and Botham. However, if you got talent, talent tells.

Who are the other batsmen ?

For those not in the list, there’s :

Kevin Pietersen. Never played for England, always played for himself. The best batsman this century before Steve Smith emerged but … fatal for pretty much any team he played for.
Devon Malcolm. A god among fast bowlers … but also erratic and often not really on the same planet.
Jofra Archer. Mentioned above but a bit too new. There is massive promise here though. I’ve only really had “This guy could be awesome” feelings about bowlers like James Anderson and Dale Steyn when they started … but Archer provokes that instinct too.
Steve Harmison. Bowled from a great height but without much accuracy or intelligence. I watched an incredibly frustrating session in the West Indies where England should have won but the batsmen could just leave 90% of everything being bowled. That’s not how you win games.
James Taylor in the batting. A very promising player when he came into the side (to be unforgivably written off by his hero KP) but was lost to the game due to a potentially fatal heart condition. Good to see that he got through that one.
Gooch and Gower – didn’t see them play, slightly before my time.
Nasser Hussain. Always gave everything for England but … other players are better !
Andrew Strauss. A very vulnerable opening batsman and his handling of KP was disastrous.

The others in the middle order would be Michael Vaughan and Alec Stewart, plus Paul Collingwood if I’m not allowed to have Sarah Taylor in the side. Vaughan had a style in his batting that just made it look so easy. The best players look as if they have so much more time than everyone else and Vaughan had more time than anyone. I’ve mentioned Alec Stewart above, he’s an absolute titan. Incredibly dependable, with an over my dead body attitude to whether he’d allow the opposition to get the upper hand.

Paul Collingwood got the nickname “Brigadier Block”, partly I think because he may have been starting to struggle physically with the batting. Also because he could defend incredibly if necessary. But that’s not his true strength in any side, he was on another level when in the field. Acrobatic and inspirational. You need players like that to pick off catches, to stop runs they have no excuse being anywhere near, to lift the side.

Cricket can be a really tough, grindy game and it can take an inspirational special moment to lift the side, wake them up and get them performing again. Sometimes it’s a quiet word to the bowler to reset their minds to On again. (Done that a couple of times!). Sometimes it’s a bit of Paul Collingwood magic in the field (Done that too, loved it). Or it can be an effervescent bubbly wicket keeper being involved, being daft, lifting the side through personality and pulling out something magical that’ll be on highlight reels for decades to come.

What’s the line up ? Here we are :

1 – Alastair Cook
2 – Michael Atherton (also captaining)
3 – Michael Vaughan
4 – Joe Root
5 – Alec Stewart
6 – Ben Stokes
7 – Ian Botham
8 – Sarah Taylor keeping wicket (or Paul Collingwood if I’m not allowed the legend)
9 – Graeme Swann
10 – Darren Gough (or Jofra Archer if he fulfils his potential)
11 – James Anderson

I think that side would be more than a match for any team.

This is hugely a matter of personal opinion though ! Every cricket fan reading this will have a different 11. Some will pick Jack Russell. Some will go back in time to Gower, Edrich, Gooch, Randall, Willis, Phil de Freitas and Gladstone Small. Phil Tufnell was a great bowler too. Didn’t see him play much. John Emburey ?

So many amazing players. Only enough room for 11 of them !

I’ve been keeping up with the techie stories more than usual lately.

Maybe I should have been doing that before making the leap and buying the bits but … there you go. It has been good to get a certain amount of confirmation bias coming in from what I’ve been reading though.

Before I go any further – disclosure note. I buy and fund all my own computer kit. I can’t recall being given anything computer related outside of a USB memory stick that was acquired and then wiped without looking at what’s on it. I think it’s still around somewhere. (Be very wary of geeks bearing free USB memory stick gifts)

Oh the thing about techie stories may have something to do with a new internet gateway being put in at work and me no longer being able to indulge in Rockpapershotgun reading at lunchtime. Mind you, that site has gone downhill a massive amount in the last month or so anyway. Tomshardware has replaced it for the lunchtime stuff.

One thing there though. Always be aware of the likely bias in what you’re reading. Make your own mind up as to what you want to believe. Statistics help there … but statistics can be twisted to suit the ends of the person presenting them.

In my case, the Asrock motherboard that I bought is apparently not as good as the Asus or Gigabyte competitors. The raw performance is nigh on identical, to within 1-2% but the power consumption figures were higher. I suspect out of date firmware or rogue settings were to blame there … but those results are still being presented. I acquired the Asrock board because, despite a blip with the sound hardware, it was very solid for the 8 years I had Pumpkin.

There’s a lot of partisanship amongst computer techies. I try to keep a clear head amongst all that, while keeping up my own prejudices brought on by experience with the kit.

But for every “I don’t use Corsair kit because it’s let me down a few times” (it has, I’ve had a couple of memory sticks be dead on arrival), there will be a small army come out of the woodwork and say they’ve never had a problem. I use Corsair power supplies and will continue to do so because, while their memory was dodgy, the power supplies are top notch. A good power supply will still go BANG. Quietly. A poor power supply will go BANG and take half of your computer with it.

A Corsair power supply went bang and was replaced in Pumpkin, no other issues. A Seasonic (I think) power supply went bang in one of my other machines and damaged a couple of other components as it went.

So yeah, remember prejudices. Act on them if you must … but update them often because stuff relevant to a manufacturer’s gear one year becomes completely irrelevant with the next round of gear.

But also look at other people’s prejudices too. Are they advising you to go in one particular direction because they’re blinkered towards the alternatives ? Or is that kit genuinely better. The statistics will tell you. There’s usually a middle ground where the statistics tell you what you need to know.

And then there are the ghosts in the machine.

The latest article to spark off the Deep Thoughts is one on the processor I bought for Meltdown and Intel scaremongering about how it might have a short life … Let’s look at that :

AMD and Intel are rival processor manufacturers. After years of little progress from Intel, AMD have come out with something that blows away the Intel rival. The market share is going up. It’s taking over. So Intel react by sowing doubt and uncertainty. It’s an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 by the way.

To be honest, the AMD chip has a lot to live up to. The i5-2500k Sandy Bridge processor in Pumpkin lasted trouble free for 8 years. However, I know one streamer I don’t watch any more had a Haswell iSomething-4000ish chip die after probably half that. I’m hoping for similar life out of the AMD chip. (To Pumpkin, not the failed Haswell chip).

The speed advantage is real too. There’s 3x the processing power available in the AMD chip compared to the i5-2500k in Pumpkin. That’s more than what I need (I’ll come back to this point in a bit). I haven’t done a comparative test on my laptop yet but its chip had a 50% advantage over Pumpkin. (Clock for clock, it’s actually 2x instead of 1.5x but it’s downrated for laptop battery life).

What I want is for a similar amount of life to what Pumpkin had.

HOWEVER ! I don’t think it would have managed even a year with the settings it had when first activated.

There’s been a few Tomshardware articles (I’m not linking it, they shove notifications at you if you let them, that’s Bad) that talk about the Boost clock performance of the chip and they cast doubt as to how likely it is for the chip to reach that boost performance.

This is irrelevant to most normal users of a computer.

Oi ! Who’s picking these pictures ! Erm.

Ok. Boost clock speeds. These will happen for a short time, the computer will overheat and then slow down. And that hot cold fast slow puts strain on the machine. I’ve actually disabled that Precision Boost Overclock and the computer is running at a constant 100% at a comfortable 67 degrees C at the moment. Here’s what it was doing before, at idle :

The 53 degrees was at the low point of the graph, it was spiking up to 75 degrees C. That’s really dangerous for electronics. When it was on load, it seemed stable (you’ll get processing errors or the dreaded Blue Screen of Death) but I think it was derating at 87 degrees C. This agrees with what Tomshardware put in today’s article. They had a machine under load and … turned the cooling off to see what would happen.

Sensible people don’t do that. Unless they have something they don’t care about breaking. That seems to be a common theme with the hardware review sites. They will run kit to destruction without much second thoughts, which makes other people attempt to do the same …

Anyway. Meltdown after 6 weeks now is utterly stable. Totally solid. And it actually has an easier time playing Elite than when it’s doing those SETI sums ! Elite maybe uses 30% of its capability. It feels a little smoother although when things were getting busy in the combat zone, it was getting jumpy. Odd.

That makes me think of an older laptop. It was an Acer Aspire running another AMD chip, an ancient Athlon X2 running at 2GHz. Except when you wanted that performance, like when watching streamed video, it would overheat, derate itself down to 0.8GHz and the video would go super choppy.

That brings me back to that “I’ll come back to this later.”. Just because someone says you need the top graphics card and the best processor, doesn’t mean that’s what you should buy. Always look at your own requirements. They won’t be the same as anyone else’s.

The AMD Ryzen 5 3600 was Just Right for what I want. Plenty of power, acceptable price at £190. I wasn’t convinced that the next one up (Ryzen 5 3600X at £256) gave sufficient extra to justify the price. By saving that money, I could go up to more memory, which definitely has a benefit. An 8GB machine struggled with Battletech and the Roguetech mod was unplayable. 16GB would have coped better. 32GB was strong and gives future proofing.

Someone who isn’t interested in gaming with great graphics (one who likes Stellaris and avoids Wolfenstein perhaps) could go for the cheaper processor with built in graphics. You can get one of those for £95 or £145. I think the £145 one is the one to go for there because it has 4 cores and 8 threads instead of 4 cores and 4 threads. That makes a difference apparently.

I don’t need a new graphics card. I have an 18 month old nVidia 1060 3GB card that cost £200 and could be replaced for the same amount now. A newer card would be a genuine improvement but … do I need to spend £320 on a shiny new 2060 with this ray tracing feature ?

Nope.

Not quite that nope.

To be honest, I’d rather save that money and buy a better flight stick. Who am I kidding. I’d rather spend the money and buy one of these :

You have to get your priorities right. That Lego Star Destroyer is very expensive though. (And I wouldn’t be able to get it on VIP release anyway because my Lego VIP account is fatally broken).

Expensive … but TOTALLY AWESOME and I want it.

That feels like a long wall of text today … here’s some key points :

Trust No One especially when they’re trying to spend your money. It’s your money. Spend it how you please. Don’t spend it to please others.
Make your own mind up.
Stick to your requirements. Anything extra is nice (especially if it involves cake) but … ask if there’s something nicer that the money could go on.
Sometimes it’s best to stay within design limits than try and push them too far.

Throw out prejudices that are no longer relevant. It’s good to do this in every aspect of your life occasionally, not just when it concerns things you are buying.

PS The only change I would have made to Meltdown’s spec in hindsight would have been to research the box more and get a better one.

The gaming world has been alive with the sound of music lately.

Yep.

(as always with the pictures, click for bigger)

The music and theme tunes of World of Warcraft Classic. That one will never catch on, it’s just a more cartoony Everquest clone. Right ? Haha, maybe.

One thing about WoW over the years, it’s had great music. Varied music. Music that makes you a little bit nuts sometimes. Quite possibly music by someone who’s been in the gaming news lately. We shall not speak his name due to what he’s been doing. Enough about him, back to WoW !

I’m not going back into WoW Classic. At least, I haven’t been pulled into the addiction just yet. I think if I did reinstall it, I’d actually go to the current version with all of the expansions.

That one’s from new WoW. Spot that telltale shift to 16:9 resolution … We’ll come back to new WoW. This one’s more about the old times and a bit of a journey.

I first started playing WoW in early 2005 and little did I know it … but it would be a significant part of my life for quite a while to come. It led to some mental issues. Aggro with friends. Aggro caused by people we were required to play with for various reasons. Other issues. You see, the relationship I had at the time broke up in mid 2005 with my partner moving out. I had seen that coming … but didn’t want to be the one to make the move. WoW ended up filling in the hole that the failed relationship left. And possibly worse than that, there was someone lovely in one of the other guilds who was instrumental in setting up the raiding guild alliance that we had going. At that particular time, I was rebounding on a bunch of people and getting very confused when it didn’t go anywhere. Cue more of those mental issues.

There were some good times. Some awesome times. But I’d found myself in a position where I was the head of a smaller guild that raided with others … and at this time, raids needed 40 people working together to a common goal. Lots. At least it wasn’t the brutal raiding that followed where the game became very punishing to small errors. Those issues steadily increased to the point where I absolutely required myself to take a break from the game for a few months and hand over the reins of the guild.

I was always seen as an experienced, high quality player … but never again took up a position of being an officer in a guild. Yeah, there’s prestige … but what’s that worth in the end in a game ? Not much, it’s definitely not worth the hassle, stress and occasional death threat that comes with it. Yes. I had a death threat from an individual that we kicked out of our guild for lying, cheating, stealing and generally being an obnoxious so and so. The guild officers had to act as enforcers to get people to behave and because I was the Guild Master and later ex-Guild Master, people looked at me to essentially be the executioner. You’d upset some, get the applause from others.

And there were other people like the one with the death threat. So it was a combination of the raid mechanics and the people we had to play with which led to me becoming really unsatisfied with the Warcraft endgame. Going into gaming addiction that far does some odd things to the mind as well, which may well look apparent if you go back to some of those 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009 and so on posts.

However … find a good guild with great people and, it’s an incredible game to chill out in.

And there’s a few of those great people down there. Guildlink and the Mercenaries were a great crowd while that lasted. I hopped sideways into a guild with a bunch of lovely Swedish people called Violence Reborn. Another group of awesome people and Krinza helped me out considerably with those mental issues just by being a fantastic friend.

The Violence Reborn people joined our little collective after an incident which saw a bit of a schism with another group leaving. Our little group of crazy mages had gotten used to one person looking after us and then … suddenly Sandra playing Krinza. That was a fun, healing raid after the other group left under a cloud. I think I was quite quickly sending whispers like “I like this one, can we keep her ?” to our raid leader lady. That’s a memory I’ll hopefully keep around while others have faded ! Lots of fun and craziness was had that day.

There were quite a few more fantastic friends along the way as well.

With great gear. This was an ongoing joke in the raiding. Some of us had some comedy gear which we brought out when we were … off duty ?

Yep. There were more than a few times when I’d sidle up to someone, say something daft and quickly grab that screenshot before they could leg it.

And there were shinies too. One of the best memories is when we staged a commando raid to smuggle our guild group of Dark Mercenaries into the Alliance (sworn enemies) capitals and into the tram tunnel that connects two of those cities. There was a rumour of a sea monster living under there :

Yep. That’s us, dressed in tuxedos and party dresses, infiltrating to the heart of the enemy, giggling like schoolkids all the way. The best of times.

It was really important to know where to stand when giant enemies fell around you.

Standing near things that gave you health was handy too.

There may have been some shameful behaviour along the way but. COOKIES !

I also chased other things later …

Chasing Rainbows is a guild that was set up by lovely youtuber and now streamer, Katherine of Sky (link’s over to the right). She has a lovely soothing voice, possibly one of the best voices in gaming. And a lovely lady too. She plays mostly Factorio but there was a little spell last year when the Chasing Rainbows guild was set up. I really enjoyed my (admittedly pretty short before I suddenly walked away from the game) time with them.

That panda was fierce.

Also had a sister mage with a Pointy Hat. Gear is important. Getting that gear stylish … critical.

I really enjoyed the time in old WoW but I don’t think I’ll be going back in. (Gaming Addiction can have its way with you when you least expect it). There were good times, bad times and along the way, a lot of very awesome people.

There’s a few old friends and fantastic people in that shot. But it did become time to sail off into the sunset after a while and I found a perfect escort …

Also random conga line.

It’s been fun looking through the screenshots again and remembering those good times again, with the Mercenaries, with Violence Reborn, with Guildlink, with Chasing Rainbows and the little group of local friends I was in a guild with too.

PS Addon – ancient high fives to the wonderful and let’s see how many of these I remember : Souleater, Zaphyr, Fubb, Charge, Sarai, Krinza, Cloudberry, all of Dad’s Army, Doomprayer, Sam & Aella, Tananka, Marracy, Tufflan, Alex, Laina, DT, Evi, Truthseeker’s family of alts …. and there are so, so many more.

I had a plan this weekend !

I had intended to go visit the Book Barn again as they were running another bank holiday sale. Nope. Leg had other plans.

(And I do hope that’s one of those occasions where dog wasn’t having to be super tolerant of small human).

What happened to the leg ? I don’t actually know. I have a vague recollection of a very heavy leg cramp on Thursday night / Friday morning but I thought that was lower leg. Apparently I had a heavy strain or tear in one of the muscles on my upper leg, on the inside. Couldn’t straighten the leg properly. Very tender, very sore. Couldn’t touch it for Pain. Was struggling to get around the house on Saturday and Sunday after it tightened up on the Friday afternoon / evening. Definitely wasn’t feeling like doing anything strenuous or stressful like gaming.

Oh and my back was joining in too, being its own wall of pain. Ouch.

I rarely resort to painkillers but it was very tempting over the weekend. Would have involved walking to the place where the painkillers are though and I wans’t too sure if I’d get that far.

So Bookbarn on Sunday or Monday was a case of “maybe next time”.

Cricket was awesome though this weekend. There hasn’t been a finish like that to a Test Match since …. Sri Lanka pulled off something similarly (but much less spectacular) last ditch earlier this year to I believe South Africa.

Definitely enjoyed catching that on the telly over the weekend. England is blessed at the moment with 2 players in the team who are among the best I’ve seen, plus a couple more who should be there. When Jofra Archer started in the England team, I wasn’t so sure. He was very stiff in his first game and through the World Cup and I didn’t see what the fuss was about. But he’s broken out of that into something that is a true challenge to face and if he stays fit, he will break all sorts of wicket records. Ben Stokes is the other one. People say he’s the best all rounder we’ve had since Ian Botham. I think he’s much better. (And then there’s Joe Root and Jos Buttler who need to sort themselves out)

Also spaceships …

The Black Sheep was on the prowl, running missions, blowing up pirates that she could take on and running very quickly away from the pirates that were a bit too big. She’s a very fast ship for Elite, one of the quicker ones. Here she is picking up salvage from one pirate who tried to bite off more than they could chew.

There’s the Black Sheep looking sleek against the stars while coming into land at Newholm Station. They tend to shoot at you if you try to enter the stations without asking permission ….

One of the stations I’ve been frequenting has a curious pair of co-orbiting moons outside. I called this shot “Moon and Moon” and there’s a wonderful Bat For Lashes song of that name. (Youtube link and there’s a little bit of intro before that)

It wasn’t all space stations though, a few of the missions involved heading into a planetary moon base with some curious canyons again there.

It was an odd couple of sessions on Sunday and Monday. The aim for me in game at the moment is mainly to get Federation ranking up high enough to unlock another end game ship with a secondary objective of collecting more engineering materials to make that ship better. It’s a bit of a grind to be honest, with lots of going from one place to another running cargo and data. It has made for some nice screenshots though.

Last one for today. This is a closer look at that planetary base and it sparked the engineer’s curiosity. This is an airless moon, so you’d be suiting up to go outside. The ring of objects on the outside are landing pads. So ships land, pilots and crew come off for shore leave, cargo goes in and out. I can see where the cargo goes in, at the doors at the base with roadways outside.

What I can’t see is how the people come and go. Does the base operate a taxi service ? I can’t see walkways going from outer landing pads to the central area where I’m assuming the fun is. Perhaps there’s a mass transit or tramway or train thing underground. Maybe. Underground would be a good way to do it.

I’m probably overthinking it. When Elite Dangerous was first released, this kind of base wasn’t available. It’s great to see things like this being added to the game, with more development occurring. The planetary bases and starbases may be made up of what I think is a toolkit of graphics modules to glue together but they look great and that toolkit gives lovely variation when you’re meandering through the game to different places, different star systems, different planets, different bases.

Good night, fly safe.

Not quite sure what I’ve been getting up to over the last week or so !

Wait. I know … Lots of cricket watching mixed with lots of internet spaceships. England narrowly drew today against the Aussies with a very scary fast bowler emerging on the scene.

There we go. Perfect pic for the thumbnail.

It’s been a while since I actually played the cricket but I still have a few of the memories. Perhaps mental scars even. I definitely didn’t enjoy seeing Steve Smith hit yesterday by what was nearly literally a death ball. Because he turned his head away*, the ball missed the area that the helmet protects and got him on the side of the neck probably close to the vital weak spot that caused the death of Phil Hughes a couple of years ago.

*This is most certainly NOT a criticism of Steve Smith, more a recognition of human behaviour. I suspect that we’ll all break from training and conditioning after being hit in the head by a cricket ball once and unconsciously attempt to avoid the blow by turning the head away when it’s actually better to look right at the ball and let the helmet or grill take the blow. But that rational thought definitely doesn’t come into play the second time you’re hit in the head by a cricket ball.

I’ve actually been hit in the noggin three times by a cricket ball. The first was the Nose Job, which was nasty (and scary in after thought) enough considering I wasn’t wearing a helmet. The second was a similar incident, where the ball hit the grill at the side of the helmet where it attaches. I can remember batting out the innings in dangerous conditions (with a dangerous fast bowler in the opposition who mangled the keeper’s fingers too), anchoring our side to a comfy win, watching the guys at the other end bash runs. And then I was nearly sick in the changing room after the game.

I rarely actually get that kind of sick, unless there’s alcohol involved … in which case watch out.

(My third hit on the head saw it hit me in the gob, doesn’t count though as an avoidance or not incident though because the circumstances meant that I barely saw it until OUCH).

But yeah, having that kind of injury and the aftermath of it does something to your mindset and I was relieved that after having Nose Job 2 to straighten my nose, I got the chance to bat again before the end of the season and put the potential psychological demons to bed.

One thing I’ll say though to conclude this part of the post though, if someone you know has had a head injury, keep an eye on them. They probably don’t know whether it’s affecting them more than they realise, I certainly didn’t realise how badly Nose Job 1 affected my memory until years later. And my memory is still affected 16 years later.

Spaceships time !

Last time saw my ship blasting off from an icy planet with blue canyons …

I’ve since been to some rather rugged locations;

Had some close encounters with spaceborne organisms. (As always, click for bigger with these).

Generally racing around the galaxy partly powered by the boosts off Neutron Stars like this one. There is a cost here though, the last 40,000 light years were blighted by having to periodically wait for “FSD Malfunction” to sort itself out.

There was an occasional stop to look back at the full glory of the galaxy. This was while nearing Magellan’s Star at the Eastern edge of our galaxy.

Another rugged planetary location. The screenshot is titled “Next stop Edge of Galaxy” (.jpg). Spoiler … I didn’t actually get there because there wasn’t a suitable route though. In Elite, the ships get around by making hyperspace hops from star to star but there is a limit to how far the hops can be. In Chrissa’s New Potato, I could go 62 light years in a hop. In my current ship, it’s more like 22 with cargo, or 28 without. More on the new ship later.

Ship was getting as tatty on the outside as the hyperdrive was getting on the inside, so it was well past time to head home. While peeking at the local nebulae of course.

Also nebula. And a little bit of far off civilisation. A quick stop off for repairs (and fresh paint) and we’re off again.

Finding spooky locations in space ….

And a crashed ship in the same system. But …

It became time for the Potato to be retired to a very special hangar. That’s Jameson Memorial in the background, which is only accessible in game to pilots who have gained an Elite ranking and I’m there for Exploration now.

That’s the Black Sheep, which is an Imperial Clipper ship which will be put to work in the service of the Federation. I have a weird sense of humour sometimes.

Last one for today. That’s the Black Sheep closing in on an engineer base to get some shield modifications in.

Other thing before I close … I mentioned a zombie hard disc in the last post ! It’s still going. Had to reboot Meltdown due to a Windows Update and the ancient zombie drive came back for more. Tough little beastie.

Happy travels, fly safe.

I had a daft idea today to do a little bit of FOR SCIENCE !

It’s not going to be that bad. Honest.

The daft thought came up when we were talking about hard discs on one of the Discords. NOOO ! DON’T GO ! Please stay. I shall add photos of cute animals at inappropriate places.

An old one but a good one. Nah, this question got me wondering how fast the various beasties are now. I have 4x hard discs in Meltdown now …

It boots off a Crucial M2 500GB SSD with 90 running hours on the clock now.
(Addon – that’s not right. This system has been up for a continuous 13 days or 312 hours and it’s had more time on than that since the build)
The last machine ran off a Crucial 250GB SSD which racked up 6258 hours.
Most of my data lives on a Western Digital 1.5TB conventional drive which has clocked up 61,626 hours.
The golden oldie is a Samsung 250GB conventional drive with … 91,482 running hours.
That’s a lot of hours. (3,811 days or 544 weeks or 10.5 years of running time).

Yep. I leave my machines on a lot but they’re usually doing more Science ! in that time with the BOINC grid computing applications that help out alien signal research, medical research, astronomy and climate research.

The video I was watching has finished, so I can check out how those drives do …
Samsung 250GB drive first – this one is ancient so it shouldn’t do so good.
Read and Write speeds are both about 70MB/sec. (B for bytes, b for bits, there are 8 bits in a byte)
Input Output Per Second (IOPS) tests gave around 0.7 to 0.4 MB/s on its meter.
(I neglected to take a screenshot at the appropriate time – oops!)

Poor thing probably shouldn’t be getting benchmarked these days.

Not quite dead yet though.

(Update – erm. It might be. Oops. Drive is no longer responding ! It’s done this before though and came back and I have all of the data that I want off it.)

The Western Digital drive is actually about the same !

A little bit quicker on Read and Write and whereas the Samsung didn’t register on the Write side, there we are. That’s not actually IOPS with that 0.886, apparently it did 216.3 IOPS on that last write test and 81.8 IOPS on the read test.

Why are the two conventional drives similar ? Firstly, the Samsung drive was a performance drive in its day and the Western Digital was more of an eco friendly green variant of their drives. So it’s understandable from that direction why they’re so close. They’re also similar technology and quite possibly, limited by the interface.

How do the SSDs do ? That’s a Solid State Device drive which instead of storing the 1s and 0s as different magnetic poles on glass platters laced with chemicals, they store the data in memory.

Erm. Quite. This is the 250GB SSD that’s wired up through a better type SATA cable (think it’s shielded better) but still goes through the same interface protocols as the conventional drives.

But it’s a whopping 6.5 times faster on raw read speed, 4.7 times faster on raw writes and 314 times faster on the Q8T8 and Q32T1 read test.

The IOPS for the last two tests were 7556.9 IOPS for the read test and 23,425.5 IOPS for the write test. The fastest was 54,041.6 IOPS for the 4KiB Q8T8 test. These are so much faster because instead of an arm physically traversing across the platter to find the data, the system just asks for the data to be read from the memory.

Can we go quicker ? Let’s see. I’m doing these tests blind by the way but I kinda knew what to expect.

Here’s the last one :

I thought there might be a bit more between the two SSDs to be honest there ? On the whole, a little bit quicker on top of SUPERSPEED. I’m not that bothered about it being quicker than that.

The detail numbers are 10,390.6 IOPS on the 42.56 Read and 23,504 IPS on the 96.26 Write. The fastest was 57,770.3 IOPS on the 236.6 test. It’s not going as quick as the spec says it should by quite a long way (1900MB/s read, 950MB/s write, 90,000 IOPS read, 220,000 IOPS write) so I might need to do a little investigating as to why there. (It’s probably set to use the wrong interface type). The drive was getting a little toasty though (63 degrees C according to one app) so I might not actually want it to go much quicker.

One thing I did notice through these tests is that the SSD read tests were pushing the processor. The Ryzen 5 3600 that I have has 6 cores capable of running 12 threads simultaneously. The read tests were maxing out one of those threads, so that might be affecting what the drive can do. It might be going beyond what the rest of the system can provide.

It’s nice having hard figures though to back up that “SSDs are so much better than older style hard discs” thing !

Why does it matter though ? What’s the significance of the numbers ? When it comes to raw MB/sec, not much in my opinion. We’re rarely copying massive amounts of data around the system.

What we do most often is pull in lots of little bits of data. Accessing a font. Accessing configuration files. Accessing all the little pictures that make up icons and buttons. Pulling up all of the other little bits and pieces that Windows seems to need. SSDs excel at doing that … older hard discs, not so much.

And I better leave it there !

Ok. One last cute animal pic :

Wait. Not cute animal. Still worth posting.

I have popcorn. Cya !

I feel the need for a random thoughts post …

Quite.

One random thought lately was about Advent and what I’ll do this year. This one was triggered by waking up and seeing the collection of little Lego things from last year :

There is a lot of it and I’m not sure if I have the space for it all any more ! I do enjoy the Advent format though so I think I’ll still do something adventy in December. Probably something like those calendars that have a suitable picture behind all of the doors. I did something similar a few years ago :

I definitely enjoyed that sequence (here’s a link to the posts from that December). Something similar may happen this year.

And yes. I have no shame for talking about Xmassy stuff before it’s even Autumn.

And I have been told off already for talking about Xmassy stuff this early in the year.

Currently watching a Rebel Galaxy Outlaw stream by the one and only FuzzyFreaks (who is lovely and I’d recommend her streams – adult levels of swearing though !). An interesting game. It’s another space shooty combat game, pretty much all about the combat. Which is why I won’t get it … Fuzzy’s having fun with it though. There’s an absolute tonne of great music in it too. What I do want to go is go back into the original game, Rebel Galaxy which I drifted away from when I played it before.

Rebel Galaxy – you had battlewagons to fly around in;
Rebel Galaxy Outlaw – you’re flying a combat fighter;
Different scale. Outlaw is more around the Elite scale, which is another reason I won’t switch over to it. I’m too invested in the Elites. I’m attempting to be more careful with the games I acquire because I just don’t play probably half of them. I could spend that on Lego ! That I have little space for. May need to spend money on storage and chucking out of boxes.

The latest leg of the long journey home (don’t buy that game, it had a nice concept but shockingly bad execution) saw me find a planet mostly ice but with blue canyons.

Nice. I’ve had a couple of evenings off Elite though because that long exploration run is feeling grindy. Only about 180,000 light years to go which works out to a minimum of 3,000 jumps. I’m good with sessions of about 120 jumps on weekdays and push it longer on weekends. I’ll be cheating though by taking shortcuts via the neutron star highway.

I enjoy watching the streams too and I only have so many screens to watch things on. (Telly, laptop, 1x desktop screen).

Fuzzy is currently drawing something crazy on screen – in Elite, you buy the paint jobs through the Frontier store. In Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, you can paint your own ships. And apparently, there may be an option to have them 3d printed for you.

Random shift – cricket didn’t happen last week but it looks like Jofra Archer is going to be a more than ample stand in for Jimmy Anderson who turned out lame last week. Apparently he got runs too … which is a complete surprise after seeing what he was like batting in the World Cup !

Hopefully that’ll let England bounce back in the next game. I have Kia Super League women’s T20 on at the moment and it’s half time. No idea who’s going to win yet, which just adds to why you’d want to watch it.

Oh dear Lord, Fuzzy just drew a half naked man to adorn her spaceship. Oh dear.

Any more random thoughts ? It’s happily a little cooler now, not quite as oppressively hot as it did get over the last few weeks.

I think the rest of tonight’s going to be more chill out. I’ll see you on the other side ….

NOOOOO ! Need the cookies !

Hmm. Where did I leave it last week ?

Quite.

It’s got a little cooler this week. Bit more livable. It was a bit damp yesterday though but that’s ok.

Meltdown is working pretty well now. It has its updated Windows licence (if your Windows isn’t activated, it puts watermarks on all your screenshots. Couldn’t have that) and I picked up the new cooler too. It’s a bit of a monster …

4D looks suitably impressed with the size of the box. The idea is that the bigger the cooler, the more fins and surface area it has and the heat dissipates away more quickly if there is more surface area. The fans are also a factor, with CFM being the unit of interest. Bigger 120mm fans like on there have more surface area again and more radial velocity at the outsides, so (Too Science Didn’t Read) they can push more air through as well. And because they’re more effective, the bigger fans can be run slower which means less noise.

So … monster cooler means everything is cooler, everything is quieter. Win ! But I haven’t fitted it yet mainly because … effort. (It’s a pretty big job to replace a cpu cooler) And also because the AMD Wraith Stealth cooler that comes with the processor is ultra quiet. As in silent … I can barely hear it even when there are no other active noise sources and even there, I may well be hearing the case fan or the power supply fan.

Because I’m not running the machine hard yet, like it will be when it gets colder and I turn the Science Sums back on, it doesn’t need that better cooling.

So far, I’ve been doing more internet spaceship piloting, more motorsport managing and I’m having another look at Battletech’s massive Roguetech mod.

That little fella is my crazy pirate melee mech. A little fella but effective when he gets in close. Hasn’t acquired a name yet, I’m naming the mechs when I reconfigure them. So far there is the Fires of Elysium and a Clint class mech got named Rise of Eastwood.

Battletech ran just about on the old machine, I had to run it off the SSD in order to get acceptable performance in the basic campaign. The bigger Roguetech mod was unplayable, probably because it was wanting to take up 10GB+ of memory and Pumpkin only had 8GB. It was apparently barely touching the processor load actually, which may be a sign of how poorly optimised it is. Great game, poor implementations.

Motorsport Manager doesn’t feel any different … but it shouldn’t really, it’s not a game that relies on or gets advantage of better PC performance past a certain point.

Elite feels smoother. I’ve reached the edge of the galaxy …

That’s an earlier shot and I’ve turned up the anti-aliasing a little since then. (Anti-aliasing attempts to make lines less jagged).

I may have found some tea down there …

Time to enter The Abyss. There are differences in the density of stars in the galaxy. In the centre, the stars are so dense that before the route planner was substantially upgraded, the planner would crash the game client if you tried to plan beyond about 300 light years (too many options to check). Out in the Abyss, ships with lower jump ranges have to go around. Mine is very long range but even there, the path goes wiggly and shorter jumps need to be taken.

Here’s the travel map so far :

It’s quite a distance travelled there ! More to go. The plan is to head back in a semicircle. Soon.

I found another couple of close binary stars on the way in, always good for a screenshot. This one is definitely with the improved anti-aliasing but I’m not sure that’ll be apparent there.

That’s where I’ve parked up until I go back in. That’s at Beagle Point, looking back at the Milky Way from the edge of the galaxy. There are stars on the map further out but because they’re beyond the jump ranges, they’re unreachable.

One thing you do notice when upgrading like this are the shortcomings of the other machines. I really notice that at work but it’s not really the fault of the laptops we have. They’re actually pretty solid machines and would make me consider getting HP laptops as well (business grade, as their domestic grade is rubbish). The big problem with the work machines is the infrastructure, especially the Microsoft side. Too many slowdowns seem to come from the laptops having to check elsewhere even for the simplest of operations like changing to bold. They’ll pause when opening the dialogue for formatting a cell in Excel.

It’s pretty sad that the Microsoft applications have got that bad. They really need to be better than that, or have a rethink on how much they’re communicating with the servers.

But I’m not thinking about that at home.

Soon … Deus Ex Mankind Divided or Prey ! Am knackered though and still a bit worn out mentally and those games need a bit more mental energy than I’m willing to put in at the moment.

Soon 😀