Space

Today’s Elite Dangerous update, I added a 4th ship to my collection, the Asp Explorer. I tried using it for transport runs at Robigo but its not as good as the Dolphin.

So I decided to use it for its name sake, exploring (and maybe transporting goods and combat).

The first thing I tried through was moving goods. The target was a ground base, which I had never trued before.

When I discovered my AspX did not include Landing assist. So I sloppily crashed into buildings but managed to land.

I am actually not sure I like the AspX. It FEELS kind of big and clunky, but I also have found that its pretty fast, at least compared to my previous ships. It doesn’t FEEL fast, but it is.

I don’t really have a next step yet, so I will likely keep using the AspX for a while. I am thinking maybe a Mamba as a pure attack ship, but I am also thinking maybe I should go larger, start doing some true bulk transport of people and goods. Or just start doing more exploring.

Today’s Elite Dangerous (catch up) post is brought to you by, Errors in Stellar Cartography and Route Plotting.

I mentioned previously making money ferrying people between Rodrigo and Sothis (Seen below, quite close). While picking up passengers, I plotted and checked a route for someone going elsewhere.

I opted not to take that job, it went WAY out.

But I forgot to re-plot my route. I had been talking to my song and distracted. Next thing you know, I am hundreds of light years off course.

This would be the equivalent of planning a trip to the next town over, but setting your GPS to a town across the country, then blindly following it for 2-3 states.

Thankfully, when I ran out of fuel, I was at a fuel scoop-able star.

Irritatingly, I had not upgraded my Fuel Scoop yet, so I had to let it sit and refuel for almost a half hour.

A tale of two ships, Elite Dangerous in parts…

Fairly recently, I added a Dolphin to my small like up of ships (Sidewinder -> Adder -> Dolphin).

I outfitted it for passenger transporting, then took it out to Robigo. Robigo is a farther out, small mining colony, that has only one, close, destination for passengers. So you can make runs very quickly for pretty good money.

My main hang up was the Luxury boxes I had installed didn’t hold enough passengers, so I had to downgrade them.

Some things I have found about the Dolphin. It’s component slots are well suited for passengers, with 2x size 4 slots and a size 5 slot.

It also is really great at head dissipation, maybe its something installed, but I never had it overhead and it could frame shift while fuel scooping.

My main gripe is I find the sleek design kind of ugly. I am just not a fan of that.

So I more recently also picked up an Asp Explorer (AspX) with my Robigo profits. From what I have read, this is a fairly robust “Goto” sort of ship. Especially for Robigo runs.

So far, frankly, I am not really impressed. The component slots are not ideal (one 5 slot, one 4 slot and some 3 slots) and it doesn’t handle heat anywhere near as well as the Dolphin.

I kind of wanted to trick the AspX out more for long range trips anyway, exploring, with some combat readiness.

So as a bit of wrap up.

I opted to pay to have my Dolphin brought out to Robigo. I’ll reconfigre it with the parts Instripped and put in my AspX, and just leave it there, for when I need to make quick easy money.

Then I can work on maximizing the AspX for scanning and jumping, and start just randomly system hopping around a bit.