Have names, need ships !

Hello everyone,

I’ve been meaning to post more often but time feels like it’s whooshing by again :-D. I did have one idea of a Thing to write about though. (And there’s a Lego Space Shuttle that I’ll get back to after finishing this). This is going to be an Internet Spaceship post. As per usual, they’re all Elite Dangerous again, which is something I’m obliged to mention due to their picture use terms.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Out pink diamond shaped ship is in the lower half. We're looking at the back end, with a row of 9 engines flaring away. In the top half is a round space station that we're heading towards. The backdrop is the black of space with occasional starry dots.
Pixels returning to hangar

There’s stuff been going on at work which I’m not going to mention too much here but it does mean new opportunities to look at different things. Should be a good move.

In the internet spaceship domain though, I took the ship home early after quite a decent trip out there. The sightseeing tool that I have wasn’t showing any promising things to look at and there was a community goal thing that looked interesting … (The goal got completed before I got there !)

Screen capture. We're looking at a map of our galaxy from the top down. Our path is mapped out by a white trace which roughly circles the galaxy.
Have spaceship will travel

That’s the travel map as of a stop at the centre of the galaxy on 3rd November. Since then, it’s pretty much a straight line back to our part of space at the bottom. I was following a set of expedition waypoints which I would usually finish … except that apart from someone who absolutely blitzed it (their flight log on EDSM is crazy!), it looks like I’m the only one running it. I did run across the organisers’ carrier along the way but it was pretty early on in the route. So I came back early. I could go back out again … probably not though.

Elite’s on borrowed time for me. The Odyssey disaster broke a lot of the appeal for me. It’s still a very pretty game … but the flaws are raw and exposed and there’s even new bugs coming in as well now. Like a thing where it takes about 5 seconds for the stations to appear when you drop out of FTL at their location. The game needs time to load in the textures so it can show us the station. Performance has improved though, although my system is not a fair test there because it’s gone from a fairly recent but struggling 1060 3GB card to a brand new 3060 Ti card with 8GB of memory. That’s going from a card with 1000ish parallel processing things to one with just under 5000 and far better memory infrastructure on it. (Without being geeky – it’s possibly 5-6 times as powerful and has other advantages).

Wait ! I had an idea for this post. I have a bunch of names for ships … and I don’t think I’ll be expanding the fleet any more past :

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're in an enclosed ship hangar with dim overhead lighting and adverts and struts to the sides. Our ship stands proud on the pad. It's a big green smooth sided ship that we're looking at from the front. It dwarfs our pilot, standing below the nose.
Waiting to rescue

That’s Thunderdwagon 2, callsign IR1965. People may recognise where that comes from :-D. The purpose of this ship was to run rescue missions to evacuate people from damaged space stations. But I didn’t last long with that because that particular gameplay loop is boring and doesn’t pay at all well. I may well reconfigure this one for spaceship rescues and press CAT404 back into service as a miner. That’s another tribute name :

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. A blue and white angular and blocky spaceship is pointing down and towards the right of shot. We're in a field of space rocks.
Prepare the mining lasers !

That’s the Towel of Space, aka CAT404. This is another tribute name for Katherine Of Sky, who is one of those lovely voices I enjoy listening to. Here’s a link to her youtube channel and the first of a few links for today. The problem with this ship is that because it’s bigger, mining sessions were taking too long and pushing my arms to the point of pain but different mining might mean shorter sessions.

I have all the ships now … and still have a bunch of names I want to use ! Which is conflicting with a wanting to say nice things about people. So I thought, do I need the ships to say the nice things ? Nope. Here goes. On the ship list is :

Searching For Pixels, callsign FUZZ3H. I do actually have the ship, this is the pink with white checkerboard one that I’ve been dashing round the galaxy in. The name was for the mission of the ship, to see how the Odyssey expansion affected exploration. (Lighting is terrible) The callsign is for Fuzzyfreaks, who is a delight to watch. Her eyes just got drawn to the game Kenshi again, so she’s been playing that.

The next one is the Bringer of Nuggets, callsign V4N-D1 and there is definitely some meme-age going on there. OMGVandi is one of those fiery passionate people who catches you up totally in what she’s doing. I first caught sight of this lovely Canadian lady from the Moonkissed and Sunkissed role play shows but she also has way too much fun playing Among Us with friends as well as Grand Theft Auto V role play. A definite force and one hell of a personality. She enjoys what she does so much and is very happy to bring viewers along for a wild and exciting ride. OH ! Check out her artwork too, there’s a collection here (Linky)

If I was to build a new ship for Drew Wagar’s farewell tour, it would be Acolyte of Wagar, callsign F3D0R4. Drew Wager (Twitch link) is one of the authors who wrote in the Elite universe as well as universes of his own creating. He does several streams with games like No Mans Sky or retro games, plus a writing stream. He’s a chilled out English gent who is another pleasure to listen to, although he’s usually on when there’s other people I’ll watch instead who are also streaming. And there’s only so many people you can watch at once. His youtube channel has the videos for his previous Lore tour, which I enjoyed catching up with. There’s another event coming up but I’ll bring out the old Cobra, Tea-89 for that as a nod back to the original Elite game.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at a spaceship within a hangar. This is a small ship with cockpit window in the centre. The outer wing sections are orange, the centre is white.
At rest, for now

Next up is the Searching For Dynamite, callsign SH4RK5. This is for the wonderful KatiePetersPlays, (Twitch link) who streams all sorts of games, appears on role playing shows and has a couple of podcasts too. She’s a lovely person, is the centre of an incredibly welcoming wholesome community and the anarchy around what she does is massive fun to be around. Her discord server is the Space Sharks, most of her twitch emotes are sharks, which will tell you where that comes from. And then there’s also a fun alert that she has where in totally serious mode says “And the dynamite goes boom”. It’s one of those things that makes me laugh and watching her stuff is great for the soul. On a bit late for UK viewers though :-D.

I had a little series of potential names for a ship named for Enter Elysium but didn’t settle on one I was happy with. The theme was generally around robbing banks, after this became a bit of a meme in his channel following the disappointing follow on to the original Evil Genius game. EE doesn’t make much content now but when he does, I try and tune in when he does, plus the old videos are still there on his youtube channel. He’s a fun one to watch and the old content is still good.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're in the in game paint job store, looking at a ship labelled "Cobra Mk III Festive Red". The ship is roughly half a hexagon, chopped in half and we're looking down on it from above. The ship is painted red, with some white snowflakes.
It’s almost that time folks …

This one would be Dances with Snowmen, callsign -K1R1-. I haven’t been watching 2dKiri for long and she starts a bit early for me too, with streams starting up at lunchtime. But I’ll tune in after closing up the work laptop. She’s another lovely chilled out person who is a pleasure to watch. You know, calming and enjoyable around that too with great chat interaction (she doesn’t miss much at all) and is very happy to join in with chat’s odd sense of humour. Youtube link this time because the highlight shows are on there plus links to Twitch. There’s also a snow meme that runs throughout her content and I especially love the dancing snowman emote, so 2dKiri’s ship would have to have something snow related. (And I got this one free!)

However, if I used this for Drew Wagar’s farewell tour, then it would be somewhat along the way to advertising another streamer in his stream, which is really bad etiquette. So it’ll be the Tea-89 Cobra instead.

Last one for today is the wonderful person I’m listening to at the moment … Tashnarr (Twitchy link). I missed out on so much of Tash’s content, mostly because Twitch is a thing where you can only really watch one person at a time. If I’m watching Tash, that means I’m not watching Shenryyr (great guy, another really chilled out fun one) or a different one. So it took a while before I started watching Tash as much as I do now. And she is definitely that person that I’ll switch over to as soon as she comes online, disappearing quietly from the person I was watching before. Definite character, cheeky, chirpy, sassy, lovely person on screen, very emotive, smart, great voice and I’m running out of adequate words … I think she has a lot of fun with what we come up with in chat too.

This is Tash’s latest tribute ship :

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. A blue gas giant can be seen in the background. A ring system of rocks is in the upper right half, starting diagonally across the picture. Our ship is a crimson and orange diamond shaped ship, with 2 clusters of 6 engines at the back.
Ready to mine

That’s the Manic Minarr and I’ll go back into that one at some point soon. Back to Tash’s stream now though ! Although I’m now wondering about what a tribute name for Becca Godsey, aka Caustic Phoenix would be. She’s another fun passionate lady to watch (on late again 😀 ) and is a fantastic host for the Pink Pixels weekly podcast on TheGameHers channel.

Stay safe, be well everyone.