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I spent a few days getting the ship repainted to something business like at the Lunar city, and have been trolling around the local systems doing passenger missions. I had a class 4 hyperdive and 1 passenger cabin, but I traded it in for a class 3 drive, and more passenger room.

I found a planet I really like, Hopper's Grave[attachment=1521:viper010 high over Carver.jpg]

It's one of two worlds with starports in the Mifa system 3,5,-3. The other world is Chen's Misery and I havn't had a change to explore it yet.

Below is one of the few lake areas on Hopper's Grave

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And high above the planet's deserts

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This one seems strangely familiar

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Picking up passengers from Carver city and sightseeing, here are some shots from Vega b

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Great shots!! :O

Exploring one of the lakes on Hopper's Grave. Most of the planet is desert, but there are 10 or 12 large lakes that dot the landscape. The city of Tyson is located near one of the lakes.[attachment=1527:viper012.jpg]

flying over the lake, green and yellow vegetation next to cerulean water.

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Hopper's Grave is a nice 74 degrees, wait, i'm thinking fahrenheit, that's 74 C which is 160 F, Hopper's actually a pretty hot planet, like Gerogia with the heat turned up. [attachment=1531:viper016.jpg]

Here's Sung Village, also located near a couple lakes, [attachment=1533:viper018 Sungvillage.jpg]

and the city of Carver far to the south at noon, perhaps the gloomiest spot on this gloomy planet. [attachment=1532:viper017 Carveratnoon.jpg]

Great shots!! :O

 I know and I am watching! The new alpha is due out soon and I would love to include some of these screen shots for the ModDB page if you dont mind Derrick?

I dont mind at all, anything I post here, please consider up for grabs, free to use for Pioneer. (not that's I've done anything origional yet, I'm trying to, I just havn't been able to get any models I've made into Pioneer, yet. And repainting other people's maps is the easiest way I can get into modding at the moment)

so here's the texture map I'm using at the moment, you'd want to rename it, since it overwrites the origional. It's supposed to look like a luxury tour yacht. the windows are all one one side, as that's the side that gets pointed towards the scenic view (who is going to pay for a trip to Jupiter and get a room without a view of Jupiter?). My 6 year old kid named the ship "Sally" which is why Sally appears on the hull in screenshots. The glass dome at the top near the front is the dinning room, I think it's about 15-20 feet long, so not a huge dinning room.

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I'm trying to make an emit light map for it, like the Natrix has, but so far no success.

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and the city of Carver far to the south at noon, perhaps the gloomiest spot on this gloomy planet. viper017 Carveratnoon.jpg

Pio-noir!

I'm making a survey of the inner worlds of Mifa,

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Inner worlds only, because when I went to one of the outer worlds, too much fuel was used getting there, and I ended up getting pulled into the gas giants gravity well and couldn't get out.

Each of the inner worlds were fantastic and unique, especially Mifa A and F, as they showed obvious signs of a pre-human civilization.

On Mifa a we saw a seam, obviously constructed by aliens for some unknown reason, I speculate that Mifa A is an artificial world that once had seas. Mifa A is incredibly hot and small, so any water would have boiled off long ago.

Here we are approaching Mifa A, the seam is clearly visible, some sort of water pumping network  unquestionably.[attachment=1543:MifaA1.jpg]

We followed the seam, orbiting the planet it formed a perfect circle, covered at times by the landscaped terrain.

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The seam seemed to end and begin at what appears to be a ruin of a city or ancient hive spire.

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Here's a better view of the ruins, with Machu Pichu super-imposed for clarification.

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There are chasms behind the city, we fly down for a closer look, hoping to find some real evidence of pre-human habitation deep in the knife-like bowels of the ruin. we saw nothing but one of the crew took this grainey photo of the legendary star-beast of Mifa, which the crewman named "Nessie"

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There was an intersting spot we chose for a base camp, an area we called the beach.

[attachment=1548:MifaA8beach.jpg][attachment=1549:MifaA8.jpg]

We designated that area a "pumping station" and found a ready made landing field there.  A prefectly planed landing strip.

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On Mifa F we found this road, it stretched for a thousand miles, then disappeared under a mountain.

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I very much appreciate you imagining your way around our glitches 🙂

OH MY GOD, what if Erik von Danniken has been talking about glitches this whole time too and there are no ancient aliens?

oops, though I didn't mean to highlight any glitches, besides who is to say that it's a feature and not a bug?

After spending nearly a week exploring these inner worlds, I needed some color (not a critisism, most of my home solar system is that, alot of gray worlds) so I'm off to explore and try to find a nice green and blue planet. I enjoyed my time on Hopper's Grave, but not the planet I'm looking for. It's too hot, but here's a neat thing to show the new arrivals on Hopper's Grave; the outside temp is perfect for cooking hamburgers, just take some raw burgers, throw them onto a rock outside, come back 10 mins later, and they'd be cooked.  (we did that kind of thing in the Summer in Georgia, where you can literally fry an egg in an iron skillet on the side-walk.)

Here's the area around Mifa, blue systems belong to the Earth Federation Democracy and green systems belong to the Confederation of Independant Systems.

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here's a nice orange world I found, it's in a system located near Mifa in a binary system.

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The planet is extremely flat, except for these shield-wall like rocky continents.

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here's a close up of one of the shield-plateaus

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and closer

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and here, hovering over a massive mountain ontop of one these plateaus.

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and sunset on this most lovely of worlds

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Ok. I'm curious now. How do i play this game?

Wow great shots indeed, I have to get out of Sol soon.. 🙂

This is great stuff Derrick 🙂

theres a great nightly lightshow on Porter's Colony at the Terrel Starport, this gas giant eats up the local star and all it's moons. Night lasts about a week on porter's and the occlusion seemes to happen every night.

The system is Ethlave and is located at 6,5,2

[attachment=1574:ethlave.jpg]

On the planet Andwaze E seen here in high orbit is a very nice canyon, just like Begger's canyon back home.

[attachment=1575:beggerscanyon00.jpg][attachment=1576:beggerscanyon0.jpg]

and some shots of me trying to negotiate some of the canyon's turns

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Ouch. I got into my first combat, ever and I learned a few things. Like, maybe I should put weapons and shields on my ship, and have enough hydrogen for more than 1 jump.

I couldn't outfly the pirate who attacked me, and after getting heavily damaged, I decided to do an emergency jump to any system system in range. Unfortunatly i'd only been carrying 11 tons of fuel, and I'd used 6 tons getting to the system I got attacked in, so I couldn't return to my starting point.

So we jumped to a nearby system, using the last 5 tons of fuel, and there were two possible planets with an atmosphere at the new system, both of which were actually kinda barren and depressing. So we are kinda stranded, but just in time for this month's Pioneer alpha release. Why stranded instead of just loading up a new game? Well, I was full of passengers and that makes for a good story. I was going to include a joke, and list my passengers (all 5 of them) and crew using the PID numbers from Traveler, but I can't find my old old old Traveler rule books.  If I crash into a planet and die, then it's easy to reload, but if i escape certain death, and can land on a planet safely with only fumes in my fuel tank then it's easier to accept that fate (it's a good story) and move on to another ship.

On another note, my 6 year old has asked to have Pioneer installed on his computer and he's been flying from Brasilia to Clarkes Station about once a day. I'm kinda actually proud to see him navigate the game and fly all by himself (and the autopilot).