I did not rest on my laurels over the new year break!

Well…I rested…but I played games. Mostly Elite. I need to start posting the playlist again cause I’m actually playing more than just Elite.

I’ve made a lot of forward momentum over the last couple of months. I have 4 more Engineers to unlock before all the planned modifications can be done on the Keranos. And Work has already started! Build the Keranos is in the In Progress column on Trello. I’ve been flying her for a few days now and I love her. She’s so damn fast.

Eagle eye Commanders will notice I finally went to Founder’s World! Yay being Elite in trade!

Inspiration for the Keranos comes from an online TTRPG I’m playing run by Valthonis of Hammer Gaming. He has a homebrew Fantasy Age campaign setting called Yewdar and it. is. amazing. Much like everything else Valthonis gets involved in, Yewdar is immersive, rich, and a hell of a lot of fun. In the game, my character inherited a ship called The Keranos from his father who was, at one point in time unbeknownst to my PC, a pirate. I wanted to have a ship in Elite represent my ship in Yewdar. I wanted it to be fast. And when I’m done, my Keranos will top out at over 800m/s.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxlZOVhSSdQ&w=560&h=315]

With the enhanced thrusters and drive modifications I’ve done so far, she’s already faster than anything else in my fleet.

A big part of Engineering is having all the materials you need for the engineer to work their magic. Some of those tasks are more fun than others (looking at you High Grade Emission signal sources…). I spent several hours on this planet running around, shooting outcroppings to scoop up raw materials like Arsenic, Iron, Copper, and Selenium. While that sounds boring…I assure you…it is not. Driving an SRV on a low grav planet is amazingly fun and relaxing. I’ve also discovered that controlling the SRV with an actual controller is 100 times nicer than using the HOTAS.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J88OriC-i84&w=560&h=315]

And you can run into some spooky cool stuff along the way.

After collecting more than I needed, I set about looking for some of the other materials required to upgrade my ship. One of them was Pharmaceutical Isolators. I’ve spent a couple of hours flying around a system in Outbreak and still haven’t run into any. I can get them from a Material Trader….but the cost is too high and they want something I’ll end up needing later down the road… so my search continues.

That’s about all I got for progress. I feel good about it. I’m in a swing where I’m accomplishing a lot and it feels good. Void Opal mining giving me a nearly billion dollar bank roll isn’t hurting things. If I get frustrated hunting down some of these materials, I might take a break and put that number up over a billion.

With some of my Christmas money I bought the ship kit for the Corvette and got the Iridescent Gleam paint job! I love the way the nose looks now.

How was your new year? Got any resolutions?