My Gut Instincts were Correct

After 4 jumps and coming across what can only be described as what at first seemed to be an ordinary system, I decided that after surveying all of it, that I may as well do a little more prospecting for this elusive Polonium. I wondered whether the fact that the main star was a G type star would make any difference. All of the bodies that orbited this star were "High Metallic Content" with over 30% of metal, so it had to be worth a look.

The first body, which was closest to the system was tough work as the surface was very lumpy, with many hills, potholes, and a conglomeration of speed bumps and small ridges. I persevered a little bit, but gave up when I found some Molybdenum in an Outcrop. To this day, I have never found both Polonium and Molybdenum on the same planet, so time to move on.

The second body appeared to be a good candidate as after dismissing my ship, and to my great surprise, there were lots of signals on the wave scanner, including what could have been a Metallic Meteorite. As usual I drove around removing all of those signals to try uncover the one I was after. Often you can get signals overlaying others which can make looking for one kind of signal more difficult. After clearing the area, I found what I was looking for, and hey presto... Polonium!

Woohoo!

This body really does have a lot of useful materials, and perhaps most diverse range so far. Hare are just a few. Some you would expect, yes.

Polonium
Tin
Arsenic
Germanium
Manganese
Cadium
Iron
Nickel
Phosperous

So a most useful planet to drive around.

Now I am in business

As you can see from the list above I have enough Yttrium and Polonium for 10 of the 100% boosted jumps. 10 is a good number in case I want to make the leap into the dark, but more importantly, get back again.

As I mentioned earlier, this seemed to be an ordinary system, but check these out below. Kinda normal in their own right but all together in the same system, and Polonium to boot, this is kinda special. These planetary bodies were orbiting a secondary star.

Many Water worlds and most of them different in some way.

So pretty...

This is a planet I would love to land on and explore.

From 2 jumps previous to this stop off, I just had to include the next three images, including my first Earth Like World on the trip so far:

First Earth like world on this trip.

A Mars type world with an atmosphere.

Another Water world.

Day 30 - has it really been that long ?

I feel as if I have been zapped into the future. From the restart, which seems like only a couple of days ago, I think I am now on day 30, which is pretty much a month taken on this crusade. But no worries, I have made some progress on this session.

This session started in the Swoiwns star field followed by the complete traversal of the Prooe Drye star field and I am now moving across the Prae Drye star field. Some weird names there and I am sure there will be more.

Description	Values
Distance covered	2,777 Ly
Number of jumps	102
Systems surveyed	83
Systems undiscovered	90

As you can see I haven't surveyed every system I have come across. Feeling the need to make progress along the spiral arm, I have skipped a few. Those systems were what I would consider to be way too spread out with only a few ice planets. Ice planets don't really help the credit gains that come from exploration, even though they are the "bread and butter" planets.

Even though these ice planets could be considered to be boring, some of them have some great surfaces. One of them, shown below, was in the one of the Swoiwns's systems and had it not had an atmosphere, I would have landed and got some shots of the mountainous regions.

Ice body found in the Swoiwns 

Still in the Swoiwns system, uncommon ring patterns.

This is another ice body, but has an unusual ring pattern with distinct gaps.

When I look at my screen dump directory I see that I have made just over 60. I clear this out after each post as I don't really have the disc space to clog up with images, so these are all new images from this session.

I have discovered, that I have this "thang" for Blue Gas Giants, as there are quite a few of them in there. I don't know why this is, but I find them relaxing to look at, and find that these make a good backdrop for my desktop background. I appear to have a small collection of these now and no doubt I will have many more before this long excursion ends.



This planet below is of the type that will gain you between 36 - 54k credits being one of these candidates for terraforming. This body has an atmosphere of Carbon Dioxide, and a make up of 66.8% rock and 33.2% metal with a gravity of 0.51G. It would make living there fun to say the least if it were to be used for habitation. If we did move there, I doubt the beautiful ice caps would last for long, as seem to have a habit of warming things up too much.

Candidate for terraforming.

This next picture is one I have saved for a desktop background. As you can see there is this blue gas giant in the background. Notice the lack of stars. The further I go out, the less dense the star field in some directions.

Rocky body in a close orbit with a gas giant.

Still in the Swoiwns system

I nearly landed on this planet, shown above, but around 90% rock, I knew there wouldn't be many materials that I am currently looking for. Shame really as the views might have been stunning.

Almost twins

There are quite a few binary bodies in many of the systems, and sometimes you are rewarded with a pair in close proximity of a gas giant, which are very common on most systems.



The shot above, is perhaps I think the best one of this session. The large ice rings looked different from a distance and getting closer was rewarded by this image of seemingly cloud like ice particles. The gas giant also has a fantastic texture with a typical storm in the upper atmosphere, with a lovely wake pattern.

Prooe Dyre Star Field

3 candidates for terraforming

A few jumps into the Prooe Dyre star field, I came across a system that had 3 candidates for terraforming, which was a great surprise. Normally there is just the one, but 3 at once was simply great. I doubt this is a record, but certainly noteworthy.

The further out I get, the more I find interesting systems. If this is the case for the future, then I cant wait to see what comes up next.

The image below shows the largest system I discovered so far. It took around 20 seconds for the system map to appear, and I thought I had lost connection to the servers, but was probably due to the amount of data that was transferred together with the rendering process. Yes... I did survey each and every body. Well worth the time taken and look... lots of blue gas giants for my collection!

With asteroid belts, 81 objects in this system.

One of these moons had Silicate Vapour Geysers, so it was worth landing on to see if I could locate any Polonium. Sadly I didn't find any, just the usual very common materials, and a little Molybdenum. I currently have enough materials for 6 of the largest jumps, but would like some more if possible.

This planet looks like it has mould growths.

Noticeable lack of craters. Perhaps there was not a lot of asteroid activity, or perhaps lucky?

A rather bruised Orange perhaps.

Prae Dyre Star Field

Moving into the Prae Dyre star field made a nice change as it defined another point in the expedition. This my 4th star field so far and I am sure there will be plenty more. Again there are some interesting bodies to be found.

"polo-hunting"

I discovered another system with Silicate Vapour Geysers so, it was time to have another gander for Polonuim. I was exceedingly lucky as I just happened to land 450m away from a Metallic Meteorite, but to my dismay this is what was produced:

Selenuim x 1
Molybdenum x 2
Yttrium x 3

It was an amazing haul from one meteorite, but I only have enough space left for a few Polonium, so I left it there. I managed to find quite a bit of Yttrium whilst preparing for this long trip, so I already have more than enough.


The planet next door, which was quite close, was worth a peek too, so I took some more time out for polo-hunting, (a new term for this blog).

What I did find, more luck than judgement, was a deep cliff, that spanned as far as they eye could see, It was great to see such a feature, but a real shame that the side of the cliff had not been textured at all and just followed the shades that were defined in the texture above.

      

No polonium of course. This really does seem to be most rare. Perhaps I may get lucky on another planet.

I am 18 jumps into the Prae Dyre star field, and I suspect there may be another 30 odd before I find myself in the next. As you know I have been keeping track of things using a spreadsheet, so I will be able to provide some basic statistics and analysis at some point in the near future. So watch this space.

Congrats if you have made it to the end of this post. I hope it hasnt been boring to you, and that some of the images you will find unusual or to your liking. As they say beauty is in the eye of the beholder...

And finally... A hires screenshot of my asp.

My Asp sporting the default colour scheme.

Preparation... Finally

Preparing for a really long trip to the other side of the galaxy really needs a little thought, as there wont be any stations out there to drop in do a quick repair or refuel. The bubble, as we call it is very tiny and in an ASP with a jumping distance of 30+ light years, it doesn't take long to get from one place to another.

Elite Dangerous makes the very valid boast of having over 100 million stars. Looking at this galaxy map it is quite believable. The blue circle is just a helper to show you where your effective cursor is located, and the bubble? well, its that little cluster of colours. So you can see there is a lot of exploration to be done and I have read somewhere, that only a couple of percent of the galaxy has been explored, despite the game having been out for quite a while now.

As mentioned earlier I will be using the ASP Scout for this trip. It is much larger than the Cobra and takes a little getting used to. One of its best assets is having large windows. When landing on a planet, the window which lies between your legs, although partially covered by the SRV interface, does allow you to peer down and look for a suitable area when hunting materials, especially when still in cruise mode before you drop into the glide. Hitting the right spot on a planet really does help the frustration factor when looking for certain materials.

My current load-out is not the best it could be, but combined with FSD injection, I feel the range is OK. The bi-weave shields are a little lighter than standard ones. Theoretically, I should remove them altogether, but I like to see the blue rings around the ship hologram, and gives me more confidence in the ship. I know it is psychological as there are no NPCs' outside the bubble, but its coming back to sell the data that I am little apprehensive about. If you loose your ship, you loose all your data and the whole trip would have been a waste of time. I could also remove the docking computer too, but I do like it and use it all the while. To be honest, the extra tenths of a light year increase when it is removed. makes no odds to me.

The screen shot below shows the load-out and available jump range. There are 2 slots not shown below. These are the docking computer and planetary suite. I am sure it can be improved upon. With regards to the hardpoints, there is just the slot being used, again to increase my confidence factor; an A 0 Shield Booster. I don't need any weapons as I wont be shooting anything; I can do that in the SRV if I really feel the urge.

Synthesis

Synthesis is the part that you can leave out altogether, or like me, you want to be prepared for some eventualities. You may have noticed the AFM in my load-out. I am not worried about speed, but the main concern was mass vs. repair capacity.

The question you need to ask yourself, what if things started going horribly wrong and you ran out of charges? This could be a nightmare situation, but thankfully synthesis comes into play here. You can create a number of charges if you have the materials. Surely a life saver!

But what else could we need to assist us in our trip? Well in my load-out I don't have any weapons increasing my mass un-necessarily so I dont need to think about ammunition. That is less to worry about. After much thought, I decided on the following:

• AFM Refill
• SRV Repair
• SRV Refuel
• SRV Ammo
• FSD Injection

These would all be of the basic variety, however I thought it would be rather nice to have all flavours of the FSD Injection. This is where the planning and preparation really comes into play.

I had been collecting various materials for a while so I had enough for a few of these, but not all. Time to make a spreadsheet and fiddle with some numbers. Now this spreadsheet is quick and dirty, and I only threw in a few colours to tart it up a little, so this could be improved upon a lot.

Exploration material shopping list

As you can see, it really is pretty basic, but what it allows me to do, is to tweak the amount charges for each synthesis and the spreadsheet updates all the material counts and how much space it will take up. Those of you that have actually read down to here will notice that I still have 3 Polonium to find. This is one material that seems to be rarer than the very rare, It can only be found on planets that support certain conditions, that are in certain terrain types, and only in metallic meteors. All the materials collected have so far been inside the bubble, but I think there is a much better chance of getting Polonium when further out into the galaxy core. I seem to remember that the most boring part was finding Vanadium; after all the list says I need 68, and it is not that common.

Playing a few hours a day, getting this shopping list together has taken about a week, but I now feel very confident that I can replace what I use, but having a nice buffer to play with in the first case.

Perhaps this can be considered as being a little OTT, but for me, this is part of the immersion and I enjoy getting things right to the best of my ability. If you want to do something similar, then I fully recommend checking this out:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LgMaX9n6Yp8DQKq-u-eF1HH2xQ-_aUgSfSJna6mTuLs/edit#gid=81831834

This spreadsheet generated by Erimus and his crew contains all you need to know about prospecting. The thread in the ED Forums is here: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=207098

So..... that is pretty much the preparation dealt with. All I need to do now is to start thinking about the route I want to take and planning some waypoints.

A very hot tiny rock!