A little bit of tweaking to the site theme! It’s a free account so it’s limited in what I can do, but hey…it still looks decent.

I’ve made it a little over halfway to our final destination despite some issues with GPU drivers and some bugs that Frontier says they patched today. Then we can turn around and head back home.

Got em!

Professor Paillin is unlocked! That means I’ve traveled over 5,000 light-years away from where I started my career in Elite. I can’t remember the name of the system I started it…but it’s over 5,000 light-years away…

When I get back home, I’ll turn in this passenger mission and head on out there to see what’s what. After that, Trello tells me it’s on to get myself allied with some faction so I can get a system permit for the next Engineer.

All of this is so I can get access to engineered modules and, if I’m being honest, it’s just long overdue. Engineering is a big part of the game that I’ve just ignored for a way too long. So now I’m playing catch up. And that’s okay. Unlocking them has me doing things I wouldn’t do normally. Like exploration!

The new Full Spectrum Scanner (FSS) makes it super easy to check if a system you just honked has a planet in it that might be worth your attention. Water world and earth-like planets bring in more discovery money than others. So being able to pop into the FSS and check if there’s a signal on the band where one of those would be is quick. I can go find it, scan it (without having to be right next to it now!), and see if it’s close enough to bother with a Detailed Surface Scan (DSS).

If it’s not too far away, you can get a bit more money in completing a DSS which now involves a close fly by and launching probes to scan the surface

All in all, I think it makes exploration a ton more accessible, lucrative, and interesting.

Being able to do this while traveling out to my destination is going to tack on a nice little bonus.