Since my second grand expedition, this time to the top of the galaxy, I’ve done a lot in Elite: Dangerous. I did indeed reach the top of the galaxy, and it wasn’t as cool as I thought it would be. Perhaps a better vantage point would have yielded better shots, even though the one I did get is beautiful in its own right.

When I returned from my expedition to HIP 63081, I went back to Lugh to continue to fight against the Feds in that region, or whichever faction that didn’t have a lot of other commanders on the opposing side, haha. That was fun for a while, and quite profitable with the update that boosted payouts from conflict zones.

While fighting in Lugh I winged up with a couple fellow commanders, and got a nice shot where my canopy was busted open. Fun fact: When your canopy is compromised, the hud doesn’t display in the broken area. So that makes approaching stations in supercruise a challenge.

After fighting in Lugh, I went back to Noatiaca to continue my main profession: bounty hunting. While there, a friend of mine bought the game when it came out on Steam and I winged up with him and a couple of his buddies and we went bounty hunting in Noatiaca and Q1 Eridani. We got some nice shots together and a couple of interesting NPC names.

Soon after that, I left bounty hunting to fight again in Lugh, and this time a Federal capital ship appeared. Glad I was on the right side, this thing was tearing Anacondas apart like they were popcorn.

After that, I returned to Noatiaca and kept farming the local Resource Extraction Sites near Heisheng Orbital, and eventually got enough to buy and outfit a Vulture. This thing is a beast.

This is now my preferred bounty hunting and combat ship. Those two hardpoints are massive, and the medium pulse lasers I have on there right now really tear shit up in RESs. It’s very maneuverable, has great shields, and the speed isn’t great but it’s enough to get you where you need to be. I expect as I upgrade the thrusters more it will get a bit faster. I may experiment with dual Plasma Accelerators on it for shiggles, as per this reddit thread.

The Vulture is a pleasure to hunt in, but I got the itch to go through the arduous chore of trading, since I found some decent routes. I left my Vulture in Noatiaca and bought a Type 6 transport, and traded some commodities for 2k/ton in a one-jump route with stations that were fairly close to the sun. Makes about 200k credits per round trip.

I then discovered the Onionhead Express (OHE) by the East India Company, and I’m currently giving that a try. It’s a long route, because it’s about collecting rares and selling them far away from their source for maximum profit. It should net me about 1.3m-1.5m credits by my estimations, but I’ve spent almost 3 hours running the first leg collecting rares so I may not continue using this route. We’ll see.

I’ve already gotten to the end of the first leg, which is in Kappa Fornacis, whose Harvestpost station contains a rare commodity called Onionhead. There was a major war recently between the feds and the Kappas since Onionhead is illegal in the Federation, but I think that got settled out after I left that conflict a while ago.

Looking forward to selling all those rares. After that, I’ll figure out if I want to keep trading or not.

Meanwhile I also started /r/EliteTankers, in an attempt to create a new profession in the game with fuel drones coming in patch 1.3. My idea is that if someone runs out of fuel in space, and needs help, they can (at their own risk) request help there and someone will head out there to refuel them.

Say you’ve got a lot of exploration data to sell or some rares you really want to profit off of, but you ran out of gas. It’s a risk asking other players to help you, since they can turn on you and kill you anyway, but your only other alternative other than having your friends rescue you is to self-destruct, so it’s worth a try.

We’ll see how it goes.