Getting well into my second month of exploration along this route:
If you get fed up with bugs or mundane missions in the Bubble, it's well worth heading out into the black. Taking your time, doing a sesh whenever you feel like it, with no stress, no time constraints or targets - just cruise and do what you like. I'm out here with Commander Hazardous Matt and another companion, and so far my undiscovered system count is at 134. Yes, that's 134 systems that will have my commander name on them - and an awful lot top-up for the bank, and I'm nowhere near the end of the journey yet.
First, we met up at the "bottom" of the galaxy (or top, depends which way you look at it!) and then headed towards the Lagoon Colonia Highway stop. From there we headed out towards the NGC/War & Peace Nebula. There were quite a few undiscovered systems along the way - but not much that was spectacular or particularly noteworthy - just regular systems, 65 undiscovered in all. When we got to NGC, I found that all of the systems from 20LY out had been discovered.
Whilst we sat there, wondering what to do next, I came up with the route in the picture above, and Matt was keen - so off we set. Since leaving NGC, almost every system I have come across has been undiscovered and there has been lots of nice screenshot material. Planets of all kinds of colours, werid huge gas giants and silvery, mirror-like rings, not to mention very spectacular looking nebula clouds.
Here are some screens from along the way. I'm only at stage 2 - and there are another 11 to go yet! Seey sometime around Christmas.... maybe! 😉
See these clouds on the galaxy map?:
Well, they are there in the galaxy, too:
Planets are often coloured based on the clouds around them - like this one:
A typical system, ripe for scanning and imprinting with my name:
...and in many cases, they are just a few light years from each other, all in a nice, tight cluster:
You can see the nebulae we are heading for - it's almost like joining the dots:
these are a couple of the nicer ringed bodies - the second one is actually a shining Brown (Tauri) star and was very spectacular in-game:
This is where we are now - was a little reluctant to enter this aggressive looking cloud - but no worries, apart from cutting out some of the light and actually obscuring some of the neighbouring stars, it's quite harmless:
All of this, not even half as far away as Colonia - so you don't have to go that far to find it, and find 'fame' in the form of your name spread across astronomical bodies in the galaxy.
I bought Lakon type 9 trader ship and now i see missions that offer 5 milion a pop but require a smaller ship, where were these when i was in my smaller ship. lol
He-he... had a go at mining earlier, picked up a Void Opal or two, sold them for silly and bought a Krait MkII with the proceeds (and ship swap) then kitted it out and did a bit more, various minerals rather than just Opals, brilliant fun, was in pancake so had good headphones on, those booms are spectacular 🙂 Decided that core mining is fun but still doing it the 'old' way gets you spare mats in the meantime too.
Don't rely solely on the EDDB info - whichever site or app you use for it.
Today I made the mistake of running out of fuel in my SRV. I have never come across this situation before, so I gave myself a break from the self-castigating and went to look for the closest starport (I'm outside the Bubble). It came up as a system about 8 jumps away. Not great, but not that bad. The planet I was on did have about 8% of phospherous, which I would need to synthesise fuel, but I didn't know how long the SRV would last, and besides - the systems were all offline, so I couldn't blast any outcrops or the like.
I started the journey - had no choice - and decided to scan all the systems along the way with the FSS, just to make the financial reward offset the time 'wasted'. After 4 jumps, I came across a system that had, not only a large number of bodies, but a large number of high metal content planets - and then I came across something called "New Growth". I didn't recognise the symbol in the targeting panel, but I did see a few ships flying close to it. So off I went to investigate. Sure enough - it was an asteroid starport. Only about 8 docking bays - but it had a shipyard and outfitting, as well as all the contacts you could want.
Sick of their incompetence or unwillingness to provide the necessary server space and availability - most noticable at weekends. This is why there was such an uproar when the promised single player/offline mode was ditched.
FD you are hereby pronounced fucking useless incompetents.
...and we're back to same old. 5 attempts to play - twice unable to connect to a server and 3 times seemingly got in, but only lasted a few seconds - until entering supercruise, at which point it's Game Over.
FD just don't seem to care that their reputation is getting worse by the day and that the claims that they don't care if a large portion of players can't play - after all, they have your money, appear to have some truth to them.