Day 7 - Elite: Dangerous - My first journey to the core

Hello everyone! It's been a while. This album has actually been up on imgur for a week now, but I haven't gotten around to putting it together yet. But anyway, let's fire up our engines and get started!

Headlights do nothing in space~

Before we get started, I just wanted to say that I got my first HOTAS flight stick :D. It's going to take some getting used to, but I'm pretty excited to finally have a proper stick (I've been flying on the 360 controller up until now).

Our first stop is by a pair of small planets orbiting each other. One of them had a sweeping ring system

Jumping into the rings, I found that they were basically huge chunks of iron floating around in space. Pretty intimidating if you ask me!

The planets both orbited a bright blue star, which cast an alien blue-white glow on everything.

In the next system, I set down on the dark side of a small rocky planetoid. It was actually pretty creepy to fly around in almost complete darkness, only relying on my instruments to tell me what was happening. Thankfully, I landed safely.

SRVs use warmer temperature lamps than Asps, apparently :P

Above the pitch-black darkness of the planet I could see a gorgeous night sky, littered with the stars of our milky way, as well as distant galaxies

Time to call down our Asp from orbit and take off!

In our next system, we arrived at an interesting blue-white rocky planetoid. The blue-tinted rocks almost look like water on the surface of the planet. The planet orbited a rocky world that was almost earth-like in appearance.

Dropping down into orbital flight, the blue color turned to a dull gray-blue.

Flying over the planet, we can see the white scarring across the blue surface rock.

The Milky Way, the Magellanic Clouds, and our planet, all in one shot~

Finally found a landing place between two canyons.

Traversing the surface on my SRV, there wasn't much of interest. Just a few common elements. Enough to replenish the fuel I spent in my SRV zipping around and having fun.

Let's head back to our ship and take off for the next planet!

A few jumps away, I found this gorgeous water planet, with a rocky moon orbiting it. Looks pretty familiar (￣▽￣)

Getting closer to the moon, however, things get quite different. The surface had glowing red cracks, almost like magma flowing on the surface. Quite different from the relative whiteness of our own moon.

Refueling my Asp. This thing eats fuel like I eat donuts ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

A few system jumps later, I laid my eyes on this - someone had met their unfortunate end next to this unbearably hot planetoid. An imperial ship, from the looks of the hull.

I wonder what happened to the occupants...

Settling down into orbital flight, I could see deep red canyons running across the surface. Scary scary.

Going down to the surface, I was surprised to find the surface gravity was nearly 2Gs. You can see my thrusters firing at full to keep my altitude steady.

Easy. EASY. Let's not crash our ship! 2Gs may not sound like much, but when your ship weighs more than 280 tons, it's pretty substantial!

On the surface, things were pretty calm. There were a few goodies like previous metals, but nothing too noteworthy.... until...

...skimming across the surface, I found the remains of an old crash site...

...and escape pods. How eerie! I doubt the occupants survived, given the insane 1400K surface temperature & heavy surface gravity. I wonder if it had anything to do with that wreckage in orbit.... No environmental system could've kept anyone alive for more than a few hours... Plus I didn't have any space in my cargo hold, so I paid my respects and took off. RIP.

Many systems later, I arrived at this beautiful blue gas giant.

In contrast to the hot planets I visited last, this gas giant had gleaming rings made of ice.

Traveling to the far side of the planet to scan a few moons, I looked back and saw the light of the system's star refracting through the blue atmosphere of the planet, turning green at the edges.

In the gas giant's shadow, I found this rather creepy sight. A huge planetoid with deep valleys eclipsed completely in darkness. It looked quite sinister from this angle, although I'm sure when it's exposed to the sun.

Traveling back to the far side of the gas giant, I arrived at this icy moon.

Flying around, I found a shallow crater that seemed like the perfect landing spot.

Landed!

The view from the landing spot was pretty neat...

...but after climbing the crater...

... we can see the deep-blue ringed gas giant in all it's glory, looming over the horizon. This is like an image pulled straight from my dreams as a kid.

After roaming around for a bit, I called my ship down and prepared to leave.

On a refueling stop, I noticed that there were two water-worlds orbiting each other. Pretty cool!

They were like two pearls hanging in the cosmos.

A few jumps later I found myself in a trinary star system with this curious planetoid. It's supposedly an icy rock, but the only thing is that... well...

...It's pretty close to it's two stars. Ice, this close to a star? I don't believe it. You can see just how close it is to one star - the other two aren't too far away either.

The planetoid also had a pretty high surface gravity - about 2.5G. My thrusters are really having to work hard to keep me afloat!

It seems like other explorers were here before me, but it appears they met a bad fate. With a reminder that my life was just as fragile, I rolled away from the crash site and headed back into space.

Winding down for the night I jumped around for a while, trying to find a place to anchor my ship. On my way to a big gas giant, I passed this metal-rich world.

Finally, I arrived at my destination - a massive brown gas giant with gorgeous rings of ice.

I actually overshot the planet with my FSD and had to do the loop of shame. Thankfully, it allowed for some gorgeous shots of the dark side of the planet.

Settling into the ice fields around the planet, I found a small clearing around the asteroids and powered down my systems.

Until next time, space cowboys. Hope to see you soon!