It’s the end of the road for me. I didn’t make it any further than Pru Aescs NC-M d7-192. It’s still my wish to visit Beagle Point, but not now.

The expedition made it to Beagle Point without me, and most other commanders are already back home. There’s no point in me trying to continue this quest at the present time. I can get a proper shipyard to fix this ship back at Flade Enterprise.

Breaking out of game character, the reason for my lack of play-time on Elite has been a combination of real-life factors, and the change of my primary operating system from Windows to Linux – it’s got to the point where Elite: Dangerous is the only thing I used Windows for.

With the release of Valve’s Proton 4.2, I’ve now successfully managed to get E:D running on Linux, so jumping in-game for a bit of play-time doesn’t feel so disruptive to everything else. In addition, EDDiscovery also (sort-of) works under Mono, though you can’t edit your CMDR settings in EDDiscovery. I found that I could open the EDDUser databse file with DataGrip and set the settings directly in the file though.

If you’re interested, this is the document I followed to get E:D working on Proton.

Nothing much to report as I head out of the bubble.

I’m already playing catchup to the expedition – unfortunately the replacement ship I bought from Bakewell Point in Pallaeni (replacing the one destroyed by CMDR Rivertide) has been plagued with technical issues that I’ve had to spend far too long rectifying. I’m happy to report that I’ve managed to make a good number of jumps today, so hopefully I can play catchup and continue onwards to the rest of the expedition without further incident.

We departed!

I headed from Flade Enterprise out to the fleet departure point at Pallaeni to await the first mass jump to HR 5413 as the fleet departed

Unfortunately, as I was awaiting the departure, I was brutally murdered by CMDR Rivertide, a Dangerous-ranked commander in a Mamba. Thankfully, I’d docked at Bakewell Point in the Pallaeni system, so I didn’t have far to travel back to the departure point.

Due to issues with server lag, I didn’t continue the journey beyond the initial jump.

With the recent announcement of Distant Worlds II now being open for signup, I’ve quickly jumped on the chance to be involved in the second round of the amazing exploration trip. While I unfortunately missed the last one, I’m not going to make the same mistake again!

I’ll be using this post as an introduction to my intentions, but I expect to have a new post with the final plans on it later. Keep an eye on the tag for this expedition.

The approximate route of the expedition leaves from The Bubble, travels via the Sagittari Conflux, through the galactic core, across the Perseus Stem, Styx and Scutum-Centauris Arm, through The Abyss and up to Beagle Point, then back roughly following the route of the USS Voyager’s voyage home from the Delta Quadrant.

There are a lot of different Commanders taking part – at the time of writing I’m one of 1,728 who have signed up for this.

This expedition is planned to leave after the final chapter of Beyond is released, with the expected enhancements to the exploration functionality of the game. Therefore, the expedition is not expected to depart until Q4 2018 or even Q1 2019.

I’m planning to take Pathfinder, my Asp Explorer. The provisional outfitting that I have puts me at an approximate jump range of 46.02 ly, so this is what I expect to have pending any additional engineering I do. Pathfinder will be switching it’s ship ID from STW-05 to it’s new Distant Worlds 2 designation – 1M2-DW

Looking over signup list, I see both CMDR Obsidian Ant (#108, 18P-DW) of YouTube fame, CMDR Felix Macedonica (#455, 011-DW) of VonRictofen’s Rescue / Macedonica’s Leap fame and also CMDR Harry Potter (#2223, 0A1-DW) from SDC. While I’m excited to see Obsidian Ant and Felix Macedonica on this list, SDC’s presence, while unsurprising, I’m less enthusiastic about.

Anyway, for now, this is mostly just to say “I’ll be there!”, and as more details are released by the DW2 staff team, I’ll start planning a more detailed mission.

The DW2 logo and the DW2 route plan above are sourced from the DW2 signup thread – more information about the DW2 expedition (and if you want to sign up yourself) can be found at the relevant forum thread.